City Council - Regular Meeting

We're just waiting for the echo.

Okay.

Is it good? Okay. We'll call this special city council meeting and by the workshop. to order on June 24, 2026 at 6 p.m. We will rise for a moment of silence if you're available. All right, we'll move into the pledges. On the Texas flag, I pledge allegiance to the Texas, one state, under God, one and indivisible.

We'll do a roll call and establish the quorum.

I said, let's see if you just um, um, for the we don't have any proclamations or presentations this evening.

Um, we don't have

In-person public comments, but we do have one written one. It was submitted for the last meeting, but it was submitted out of the window. And they requested it be read on this meeting instead. um hello i will not be able to attend the council meeting but would like my comments right into the transcript as a concerned wood creek citizen i would like to ask the council to confer with the city attorney regarding widespread erroneous usage and billing by aqua texas the reason for this concern was minimal six months ago but continues to grow as i'm hearing more and more residents complain to me in person personal social media discussing other open forums how aqua has won noted by the resident of over the daily limit usage or high wire usage contradicting their website information Subresidents have admitted that they had a leak and these are of no consequence or concern here. The concern lies in the notices that are completely erroneous. Example, I recently was notified that I had over 20% of my normal daily usage. I immediately logged into my Aqua account, went to the usage tool and looked at my daily usage. Nothing was ever that ordinary, between 60 to 150 gallons daily and no large spikes of any kind. Number two, second, and I'm even more concerned, is getting a similar notice, a notice similar to the above by email or letters stating much the same. Upon accessing the usage tool on the AWQA website, in my case, it showed over 200 gallons of water used between 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. My wife and I usually sleep until 7, so that is not possible. Some people I spoke to about it suggested I had a leak. However, loops do not just stop leaking. They continue, but the spike was for two hours only in the morning. My bill is slightly higher due to this anomaly. Here are the big concerns and questions. Number one, just how widespread is this? We had new digital leaders installed one or two years ago, and this problem continues to uncover itself at larger and larger standards. Just how much of a systemic failure is this new system providing? Two, ACWA, a subsidiary of essential utilities, provides drinking water and wastewater services to more than 3 million people across eight U.S. states, according to their website. If they are advertising only 5%, 150,000 of their subscribers, an average of $10 per month, that equates to $1.5 billion. 18 million dollars annually the 5% is random and I believe conservative estimate of this issue we are facing, please force awkward to provide reliable accounting for. The number of notices sent monthly broken down by each city how overdue the. overuse was verified how much was billed monthly for the overuse by city what is being done to verify the integrity of this obviously broken system. After speaking to friends and neighbors and not firmly believe that all citizens of wood creek have been impacted by this and it's time to take action. Thank you for your consideration, Ms. Nutter. Best regards, Russell Scott. As a statement of fact, I had Russell Scott meet with ACWA personally and sat in on the meeting, and he did have quite a few of those concerns addressed. And while there's still some work to be done, I'm trying to have ACWA meet one-off anytime we're given these kind of notices. all right uh we don't have any uh reports really or consent agenda this evening we'll go straight into our regular agenda we'll enter a workshop at 605. um so before we have council discussion we're going to introduce a couple things to you all um sitting administrator burton and i will and i'll just kind of take it down the row um first The capital improvements from 2026, that's a typo, to 2027 fiscal year, that is in your budget packet. So if you guys want to turn two pages in and look at this page here. um it's titled city of wood creek 2026 27 proposed annual budget capital projects fund and what you're going to be looking at is the previous year portion all i wanted to point out here are the projects that we have had completed and how much has been checked off of that list and then just note the remaining things that have not been accomplished from this year we put into this agenda tonight to have council decide should we want to push this to the next year or is this a project we won't try to take up next year at this time. So that just includes the Deerfield East to West pedestrian bridge and warning siren. Everything else is in progress or we've taken action and anything that we don't expect to be completed before the end of this fiscal year is also mentioned in your packet at a later time. Did everyone, were y'all able to find it? So in your paper budget, City Administrator Burton, after this agenda was published, we learned some new information about our online website, which we'll talk about later. So you all have a new updated budget to address those new needs. You have it in paper and you were emailed it today. So the capital improvement, proposal and the summary of this past year is on the back of the second page okay did y'all have any questions about the previous year's capital improvement item um I was going to introduce this later but on the revenue expense report it shows under packing projects

that we have spent 633,000. Okay.

Can we stick to this item here, Ray, that we're talking about? Just the recap from last year is what we're discussing, right?

But this is about 150,000.

Well, that's because he put in some numbers for items that were completed. Some things we should, we'll update all of the actual numbers for the next meeting and essentially for the final budget. These were just things that we had on hand at the time so it's not like it's not done and i have a note here for myself add actuals on accounts we'll also update and have actual account members as we have that i thought we deleted that call to be honest it's all right this one just for this meeting and then we were going to put it back in unless we had all the anyway so any other questions about the recap from last fiscal year um my question is actually my day period okay do you want to save it for when he's on it yeah okay so we'll move on to the council report and citizen input i'm not going to read that to y'all hopefully i'll read it I sent out inquiries to have individuals give us interest for next year, and that was what's there. So hopefully you all take that into consideration and use it to advise your decisions. The next thing we have on here is a report from the Community Relations Committee draft. This is not their final budget request. We need to talk about one of the things we addressed with CRC. The City Administrator and I asked them to reduce their budget for next year to cap that $10,000. And this is due to primarily two things. One, our bond fund will be essentially closed out and primarily all spent. in the next year. So we will lose a dramatic amount of interest income. Additionally, we have planned to use a substantial amount of our drainage fund and likely if we are able to execute those projects that we have taken a vote on already and any additional ones we add next year, we will have depleted that other drainage fund as well. which again, another pretty large hit to our interest income. So with that in mind, we had to get a little creative about where we would adapt for next year. And so non-essentials, are kind of the easiest thing to take a chunk out of. And while we all very much love events, we can still do events. We don't have to do as many or we don't have to have as much in an event. And we've left that up to CRC to kind of adjust and address for us. Since they just learned about it in their last meeting when they were doing their budget, they weren't able to get all the way there. and they do anticipate being able to finish up that effort in their next meeting. So what you have here is a draft, a final come before us again in the future, and you'll notice that it's not quite down to $10,000 just yet.

Please, would it be helpful at all for CRFC to have some kind of advice if the direction? Because some of the things I saw on the budget, I'm not telling you, like throwing trinkets out during the 4th of July parade, it doesn't sound reasonable um hand fans for that price the you know handing those out sure the people on the float sure but i think there's a lot of little things at these events that i think maybe could be scaled up like we don't have to have face painting every single event right i think we'll address some of that when we talk about the the upstream

expenses in my proposal on that, which will help with some of what you discussed. Thank you. And then if not, we'll go from there.

If council wishes to take up an item to give a community relations direct input, that's something you all can do in the body. So if there is an interest in that, you can definitely make a motion outside of workshop. for that I think it would be relevant in this case as it relates to the budget in particular maybe not in the concept of like telling them how to do their events if it's budget related specifically I feel like it's on this agenda but That would be outside of workshop promotions. And remember, I kind of glazed past this earlier, but we are in a special meeting. So all decisions tonight will take four to I vote because you have to have a super majority in a special meeting. So we can't just pass things with three guesses. They'll have to have four today. Okay. In regards to item D, that's you.

oh that's the changes in cycle okay okay um just to preface this one's been a little more challenging than the last couple um i got a much better hand loan than i've had the last two years but as you said we're going to start losing some of our interest income um we're also um we Also making an effort to get things out of contractors' hands and get it into staff hands, which will help, I think, with part of what you mentioned earlier. So my proposal in talking with staff, they're willing to take on more load. That's going to come with a cost. So all three of my staff is willing to take on substantial amount of workload and definitely take her extra hours, you know, get her up to a full 40 hour work week. Um, like the other, and then even Sean gets taken on when we, uh, get into the audio visual part of running these things with all the stuff in the back, it's hard. We need somebody back there. So everybody's willing and jumping on board and, uh, gonna carry a bigger weight. So. with that comes some other things but on the positive side of that it's it's not I'm not adding to the overall expenses I'm reallocating from the biggest one is the newsletter that will go on staff uh the other is there's some other things we don't I don't think we need anymore with the the temporary regular signs the local radar signs we're paying uh three thousand dollars a year for the the data collection of that I think now that we have actually 10 permanent radar signs and they don't collect data we don't need to to make that payment anymore so that's just one of the examples of how we've shifted and we could sell those yes we've kind of been talking to a couple people and then if we don't get a bite then we'll have figure out this time for money yeah yeah whatever the surplus see I'm kind of looking but But I'm talking to another city very close to here about potentially buying them. So they may be interested. So anyways, but that gets us, those things, we can just put them in reserves.

So are you just reducing the number or eliminating?

Well, for example, we spoke to Ted Gardner. and let him know that we would potentially not be continuing the contract in their fiscal year because it's rather expensive. And the staff, now that we have our new website and they've been really comfortable with it, and we're trying to figure out the features, we may still need MailChimp. We haven't figured that out yet, but they feel they can do the newsletter now moving forward. And then, as he said, the radar, the traffic solutions thing, we don't necessarily need that data policy or like that membership anymore. So that's one, two main ones. And one of the other things. things that you'll see later in the actual budget when we go through it that we've had to account for as our street maintenance so not only are we having some reduction of income we actually have to produce another line item and allocate money to that moving forward

now we have to take on our maintenance romance policy and then we adopted so gotta account for that so that's you know thirty thousand dollars a year based on that that uh program so I have some challenges in trying to make everything balance and um with the reduction of of uh interest and then some of these other things um so that's kind kind of where we got to with this. Do you want to go?

To summarize, essentially the city office admin would be taking on parks and events coordination. So that's helping us manage the parks with our increased park build out and more infrastructure. We haven't really addressed the increase in labor. Shawn has taken on some of the maintenance aspects, but as far as having somebody regularly reviewing the parks, what do they need, contacting the land management teams, scheduling that, coordinating that, getting them paid out, all of that has been kind of an increase on staff without a commiserate pay increase to address the amount of time it's taking. And then we're adding another management company. Um, and then with that, they would start working on, um, the liaison goal as my does it need to get more things that should be staff jobs back into staff hands. Um, so it's happy would be attending meetings and coordinating with the boards and council and sort of managing that city business. The goal being to make things more efficient in house and to take off. you know homework from volunteers since none of us are really paid right and let us focus on you know let me in particular focus on some of the other goals that i'm supposed to be doing um the city secretary would take on permit and newsletter coordination so that addresses ted garner thing and then um just you know the the permit process um takes a lot of like tiny steps and somebody tracking it and so um that would be more managed by the city secretary which has been the protocol here in the past actually so we're kind of returning to the way what we used to do business we already talked about the codeman doing the AV coordination um along with the AV coordinator he's would be available to be at events set up chair down they can take some additional hours for that

we're talking about Sean Sean yeah so um and going back to the trees and parks and and the events the my kind of my vision is I don't want to say she's in charge of those committees you know they're still codified but she would be my staff person that's like no that we need to scale that back I'm not gonna take that proposed budgets for this agenda or this this event she's going to bring it back to me you know for approval and she would have some and you're saying to counsel if that's what we still choose but you know kind of my thought is we're taking it out of volunteers hands you know they make the recommendation to taffy and then taffy kind of would make the decision like no we're not going to do that we'll do this because this is being a staff rather than a volunteer that should negate some of the need to come to staff or council with every little event, every little expenditure. So if we have a broad, and I'm proposing $10,000 this year, that's $7,000 this year, and that's where they have the opportunity, they want to scale back the number of events or scale back the events where it comes into what you're saying, all the little trinkets, because I agree with you that some of these things like That's just, yes, it's not that expensive, but it all adds up and you can get all the benefits.

They're wants, not needs. Yeah, they're just wants, not needs. And to kind of maybe give a very clear example, with the Music in the Park series, we had a volunteer negotiating with the musicians and then we had to cancel for rain and so then it was sort of like well what was promised to this musician what is the city liable for and we want to get more of that back into staff hands just because um specifically volunteers on advisory bodies don't really have authority to spend money or negotiate contracts or engage in contracts so staff does so you know some of these tasks that is the goal of having taffy be a more kind of concreted liaison for them and help manage that. And so, you know, then we would have, we've worked on a contract now, and so that will happen again in the future, but we've never done amusement parks, so we were learning. But it did highlight some of the liabilities the city is allowed in letting volunteers manage some of this. Same with, you know, our volunteers aren't necessarily covered under city insurance, so when they make decisions about canceling events or having events or the setup of events and where certain things are located by having those things kind of run more directly through staff we reduce any possible liability because staff's covered with our city insurance so um you know it's the advisory bodies will still be advising and giving input and you know creating but um you know If they would be, that effort would be managed by staff. Council Member Garner, I see your hands. I understand what you're saying. Council, you all will still receive a proposed budget with events and the outline, but once you all approve that, we don't come back for every little one because it is approved already so that process won't change from this year we'll still have their final budget with their outlined expenditures and once you guys approve that then it goes to staff management but my question would be if that changed say we approve face painting and for this event and then it changes you'd still have to go back because only if it was an increase in expenditures I understand you disagree. If instead of a face painter, they booked a balloon person, then we'll bring it up to you. But frankly, we don't need to manage to that level.

So I'm just saying maybe the point is when they do present their budget, make the little categories broader, like signage, entertainment, and then under entertainment, they can all work it out what that $500 goes to us. Does that make sense? It's just that when they got really specific based on what we've done before, which is council approving everything specifically, if CRC makes it or Chiefs of Parks makes their proposal a little broader so that council's giving

I think you and I are on the exact same page. This is the overall budget for these events.

Yeah, I just don't want to step on council's toes by having a really specific proposal.

They were creating specific proposals at council's request, and the goal with getting it into staff management is that there is not that need for that sort of intense oversight, just like we don't review and approve all of the minor expenditures and day-to-day maintenance and operations?

I think we're all in agreement. I'm just trying to set the path forward of how that would look.

And this year may be learning, growing. This is kind of the first phase and the next year we've kind of got a different idea.

So I want to lean into this thank you this is a really wonderful fluid way of dealing with the budget which is you look at every little detail and go okay it's working it's not working it's working it's awkward how do I readjust it and it was a really smart kind of being efficient and using the same amount of money but possibly getting more out of it right so I really appreciate that thank you we'll take in adding these

these duties to three different people when most of it was for one contractor you know it's better spread out and more we get more efficient yeah so we're we're asking staff to take on some more responsibilities and yes more hours more pay um this may be are they excited about this but scared about it I mean no no it's um and to be honest full transparency I was looking at maybe adding another employee to handle this and but couldn't quite make it work and they're like no we can do that let us they're ready to do more and therefore make more so

yeah she can answer some of this with that they can definitely inspire them so the goal is to honor staff retention and dress interest in earning more income that had been expressed so rather than take on another staff member there was like we would actually like to get paid more you know and working more we would like more money they also understand there's maybe a Saturday maybe there's that so

They're hard. They're hard. They're hard. It may be setting up, making the decision to be made, and then if they need to go, then Sean's there to break it down, get everything back. Taffy is getting a 15% raise, more. higher than most everybody else is she taking you on that much she's increasing her hours where well Sean will be increasing increasing hours being hourly Carrie's just taking on more workload in the same 40 hours and then in the taffy's taking on as much maybe a little more and then plus the additional hours so that's why it's skewed a little bit so and then also the the starting point

also includes the three and a half percent of both of you traditionally give so that's okay that's the first part and then the additional um so if I split down the three and a half percent um it comes to eleven thousand dollars well compared to last year perhaps

well there are two different two salary increases one we have two policies on the books one is our retention pay increase that we approved by resolution and the other is the one that is addressing uh cost of uh living increases that was standard we've been doing that for years so those are a portion of it and then you have the remainder it is related to taking on more roles, more work, and then in Tappy's case, more physical hours present in addition to more work.

Okay. So can I answer that? I did calculate that it's 11,000 hours. Okay.

Can we table the admin tab until we get back to it? I just would not like, unless there's any other questions.

specific question i'd like to just go over the first page the revenue page and highlight some different changes let me speak about staff if we could use their titles please instead of targeting individuals yeah that would be preferred so doc we're just introducing the concept obviously you all have the final vote on these, the total, and they're taking on, not necessarily their duties because that actually falls under the city administrator outside of the city secretary, but the pay, right, as part of the budget discussion. So we'll take that up individually. If you guys are okay with it, city administrator is gonna lead us through the budget line by line. We are going to skip the capital improvement portion for those items later in the meeting and we're just going to go through revenue expenses line by line that we have traditionally and he's going to be editing live on the screen if the side part goes away does that help

Yeah, pretty much everything on the revenue is pretty straightforward.

the biggest well we've talked about the interest fall down one thing you notice on the water through franchise fee we've been putting in

The last two years, not having full grasp of our franchise fees, we were putting in $50,000. For the last several years, they've been running at $120,000. And we're all paying for that now. We're at $104,000 right now. With the increase of the rates, I'd logically moderate. That amount's going to go up. I think I'm pretty conservative in pushing it up to $125,000. So that's the biggest difference, and that's why that big green $75,000 over there is why it's so different. So we're going to use it for salaries and wages? No, I'm on the revenue side of that.

Oh, sorry. They're not that expensive. I don't know.

I'll just try to fit both in. You only said that like four times, too.

I did. I did. Let me ask you. Oh, here we go. It's on the back of it, not the head.

Did you catch up to the Avalon tax report? Yes. So that seems to be decreasing over time. It has a little bit. When the property values have gone up and there's, it's just surprising that it's going down.

Homestead exemptions.

Homestead exemptions would do it. But I was just thinking it was offset by property value increases.

The property value has gone down a little bit. It has gone down a little bit. a little bit that's what I was wondering if that was the and then that that proposed is if you don't have the numbers back from the county yet they're doing July 21 so that could change took a little bit and come then but that's just basically I wasn't flexing the number I was the same thing right and that report from the county it'll tell you it'll show you if the home city mentions increase increase and we did you know have the some of those other

The other thing you guys have to remember is that we've done no new revenue rate. And so that actually kind of ticks it down each year. That's why the bond council, our financial advisors, Mike Bays, they've all asked us to consider in the future like a flat rate. Not only does it allow us a buffer for borrowing as we need it, but it also kind of prevents that sort of like downward takeover time.

I'm trying to be as conservative as possible. I don't want to be too low and I don't want to be on the revenue side. Being as conservative as I can. Just scrolling down, like I said, these are pretty straightforward. The other ones had interest income. We were at budget in 105 and you we've been spending some money so right now we're today and that's through May it's not uh doesn't include Jane obviously but um I'm looking at trying to be conservative and with those going away that will be at 87 000 versus the 105 we had budgeted this year I think we'll get close to because we still have one more full quarter

of everybody um you know of all the accounts let me know yeah okay the projected actual of 57 000 is that through the end of the year that's what it's intended to be it seems like payday is where we're at today today but it's not okay It's usually projected that way through the whole grid.

That column isn't in here at all?

We haven't had that column in the past. This is just the same format we've used the last three years.

Well, one thing I didn't look up, under Texas local government code, small cities repair management budget must provide an itemized comparison between proposed expenditures and actual estimated expenditures in the preceding year. So we are required to have a projection actual, and that's what we compare to.

I don't hear that when you, I don't hear the same thing that you're saying when you just read that statement. It's a great question for Mr. Bays when he comes on. And if you'll remember, he actually created this document for us. And I very much trust his judgment on that. I hear you. A long time ago, we're talking five years ago, we did have the projected. And all it was was we took where we were at by the third quarter, which would be hard to even get right now because we're not finished with it. And then we took a third of that and put it in the projected. So that math is pretty straightforward. It's something that if it's something you really value, we can add because it's literally just a mathematical equation.

And it is on the expense side. We haven't predicted that. I understand.

All right any questions on the revenue I mean it's pretty pretty simple okay quick why the liquor license because the state said we can't do anything oh okay yeah that gives liquor sales tax but we can't for the permit yeah we can issue a permit but we can't charge for more so we just did away with the local okay any other questions about the revenues any concerns tweaks all right so on the next tab the general expenses fund all of the sub tabs on the back pages these are all kind of in this page so um as we highlighted as we talked a little bit about the time the wages that you know that 19 000 is the addition that's the full um for everybody um you know you notice we've got the longevity pay in there now um I think that the rest of that's pretty straightforward it's all calculated off off of the individual salaries

So one of the things we need, I mean, we can go, if y'all, you know, we can list it out or if you guys are done with the administrative expenses, we can go to operational. There is a discussion to be had there. If you want to change anything, you know, we have to take it line by line for that.

If it helps, we can go over the individual tabs. I call them on if you'd rather. but I'm just starting to get the operation.

Okay.

So one of the concepts that has influenced some of these decisions and adjustments specifically related to labor, but also how this is all broken down is over the past couple of weeks, we learned that we, first off, the state set a deadline for full ADA compliance on websites. and so we have to meet that deadline and ada compliance is its own field of studying and training and degree essentially. Our staff do not have those skill sets already and it is incredibly time intensive. So even the professionals, it takes a very long amount of time because they have to comb every single PDF, every image, the alt text on the image, the contrast in the website, all of that. So Civics Plus has adapted to meet that state requirement and is now offering two modules for cities and those modules auto do this for us, meaning they will review every PDF that we upload and help make adjustments. They will review, auto review every page. If we ever create a new page or ever change anything on a page, these modules auto run and address ADA compliance issues. We ran, or not, I mean, Civics Plus helped us run like a small ADA audit. And I got to be honest, even just looking at that, it was like, I told them I had a lot in the world. because it's a lot of like very industry specific jargon, but also in talking to civics plus that, you know, the professional who's trained in this, she said, oh, well, you don't have to worry about that one. And we'll investigate this and see if you need to worry about it. And it was like, well, how do we know? And she's like, oh, well, because, you know, if the image, touches a white box and there's white sky touching that it's going to trigger a contrast problem but that's not out of compliance actually and so we were just like pulling well like this is a lot and um so we're recommending and requesting Council approve us setting up those modules in this next fiscal year so we can meet our compliance requirements by 2028 correct And so you'll see that price increase in the, specifically under website, 10, 10, 50, 60, second up above FundView. There's $19,000 in there. And so that includes both of those ADA compliant modules and our ongoing subscription for the Civics Plus Agenda Center that we signed up for last year. um to prevent people from hacking into our meetings and then it will allow us to have that live link backup so people don't have to request anymore that 19 000 covers all three of those names added on plus our members our existing subscri website subscription i think i'll make sure um i don't actually have a question about that that all sounds really smart and wonderful um i was actually going to go up to um

printing costs for the newspaper we initially has what we actually spent was 950. yeah right no no yeah yeah we're currently at 950 projected 1200 Alaska why 2000. yeah so I was like are we expecting well newspaper I combined two accounts awesome ah okay

They also added a $25 affidavit fee for every... They started doing a process through the new website. It's called Call On. And where you don't, like, email the newspaper, you kind of go through this little website. And there's a $25 affidavit fee for every tear sheet and all of that.

Yeah. I questioned it. They said that it's... Everybody's getting it.

So... Yep. That's the explanation. Yeah. And just in touch on the newspaper, if you were bought off of... Times, local whatever. And their customer service has been very lucky. So when it comes time to name it, they know they're naming the paper. We may have some issues. Yeah, I'm just curious. Because of these things.

I've been asking for territory that I've named since March, and I've not gotten them. And they list about two ads in the paper also. So I've been fighting with them for the last two or three months.

the other one here that increased and this is um kind of from a past Council decision being carried over into this year is um finalizing the AU compliance of City Hall will require door work so um these doors can be adjusted to to meet so there's still a little left in the orbit for that but

I've had numerous complaints about those being metal doors and how hot they get in the summer. And then the window, the glare at certain times during meetings is probably people. So my proposal is you want to update these two doors with new doors and then also replace the gutters on City Hall because they leak and they're terrible. And the $3,500 extra over last year, that includes the two doors and new gutters.

any other questions or comments about operational expenses all right we'll move into professional service expenses do you have any questions about these are we going to change auditors no um my if you asked me a week ago i was a kiss

But after meeting with Mr. Banks, I think he's online, and Charles, our bookkeeper, it was almost immediately like we need to keep them one more year to have a nice, cool, non-problematic. Awesome. Okay. So that's – and I personally like that one. It's more fun for you, literate, but based on Mike's and Charles' recommendation. it'd be best to stick it out one more year and have that last. If it's the last, we would invite them to submit again, but have one, the last one be nice and clean and give it again. Right.

Did you have your hand up?

No.

Okay. Any other questions under professional services and incentives?

Okay. In addition to Clearview, what's covered in the 50,000 contract services? These questions, these are the tabs. Well, they have them. Well, I don't see them. The operational. You said we have tabs? I have tabs on my spreadsheet.

Which is another page.

Yeah. We have it.

Yes. They're in your... They're in the gray. Yeah, thank you. So student intern, the photographer, which that's on a positive basis. And the other, it says other miscellaneous, their career.

There's some other just miscellaneous contractors that aren't necessarily under our, say, our land maintenance guy. I don't think that's the kind of thing I'm going to be able to help with. Does that take me to Cheria to come in there? Cheria, that's in other expenses.

Well, for example, the individual that is upgrading all of this technology for us, is that under?

uh that's coming out of a different way that's coming out of account um for this year what's up man yeah that's the matter this year this year so it would be the next year was ted gardner under here uh no that was under another tab and there's another good well there are a lot of ideas as well um you could look at what's quoted i guess

Okay. Why don't we try to answer that question for you at a different time, because we'll have to look up everything that's quoted under it.

My question about that, you know, the tab door, but I noticed on the, um, this goes back to performance orders under law enforcement. I mean, so, yeah, that went up a little bit, no, but you often talk about the precinct patrols?

Yes, you often have that, but you don't often read it. We've got basically the same base for the year for our normal patrols, but we're also adding New Year's Eve and 4th of July patrols. So we'll be working next Friday, one of the longer days, patrolling our area for catching fireworks and any shenanigans. And then also for the Hallow Road closure. That's for...

a couple of a couple of but the 17 brand that we've got in there for just the weekly patrol that's basically flat from this year I don't think it's really increased very much the increase is primarily those things that we've added on yeah we've time and time again have asked for additional patrols It's really limited.

I just noticed that it came up in citizen comments, which is kind of what we're told.

Yeah. But you also, you know, the off duty officers have to go to work more.

I know we've had weeks where we just didn't get an officer.

Yeah. And we have Deputy Morgan and he works pretty, like he has a good phone with us now and he's coming pretty frequently. I mean, he's here regularly. know and then one of the other things why we haven't pushed really guard and i see you councilmember richardson you'll be nice i don't have to keep standing like that sorry um is that we we have talked to these officials so much now and they have reassured us that they also patrol our area and that even though it's large and hayes county's huge that they do support us on that front as well so for a long time it sort of felt like we weren't getting that. And so we've been reassured that yes, they're also doing that for us. Part of their duties. Yeah. So we are having an increase in service in general. Does that answer your question?

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. If you want, if you all want to like, you know, make a motion outside of workshop to increase that as a body and once again, solicit more, that would be relevant, but.

um all right any other questions under professional services and expenses i know councilmember bailey you didn't get a full response we will work on that um and pull the accounting for it thank you

you'll notice on the next area care and maintenance expenses we have that um 30 000 not allocated for regular street maintenance so we'll be working on as a body identifying what that will be in the next year what project we'd like to take on and that will be brought forward to y'all councilmember garden um parks and playground maintenance um

the wood chips under the playground they're to be topped off right like a year to a year and a half like every year a year and a half is that in that budget no Well, it depends on how expensive it is. Is that something to bring back to us before we get down to the budget?

Yes. Just if I don't pay what is that going to cost? Because I know part of what Shawn does is go and fluffs them back up. And having not been here when they were installed, I don't know what the life expectancy of that is.

From what I was reading, you just keep adding on top and it just keeps compacting.

I will find that out for the next one.

Thank you.

The lady didn't measure them for the 88, didn't she?

Yeah. They were in the plant last year when she came out. That was one of her, just make sure we keep it fluffed.

Yeah. So initially we had 12 inches. Right. And you can't get down to nine inches. The requirement is nine and above. Yeah.

I'll get that figured out yes okay um green building initiative I know another 5 000 was transferred in uh to that item from the sign allocation but now it's 10 000 how many projects does that cover it covers our rainwater collection rebate program

and that's primarily it we did this year do an amendment to bump it up to 10. so last year of five they got bumped to 10. okay that's part of that so i'll just carry it out the same amount i guess what what is the what is the unit of rebate it's given it's dependent upon the application

there's the full covers and then there's the the rebate for the systems and so on let's do it to size and then up and it's kind of like the the oak wilt whenever it's used up it's used up so from my point of view also it allows council to have um ideas such as like i know that some people some cities have gone to the point of hey we'll give you a percentage of if you use low water toilet like if you get a new low water toilet and so that amount could also be used for those kind of initiatives that council would ever do let's check your formula on um 5205 that 19.5 dead net up with the stuff at the top there no it's missing you're sure no okay no i looked at all this today snap and looked at all right

How many times have we done that?

When there's mountains on, that's... What are you doing together, y'all? That's a $25 draft. $24,000. Because there was $3,500.

Yeah. I'll also do a pastor. Just to have a second set of eyes. I've not done that yet. So before the final... We went through them yesterday.

We went through them today. They're just up there.

no we're very grateful I mean this is very tedious work um you don't always get it right on the first one so that's why we have multiple sessions that's true um any other items for area care and maintenance expenses I will just note the landscape maintenance we carried that over from the last couple years that may be an area we can scale back and Target if

on that note is we have a professional services now yes is it that line or is it a different one um well our land management guy also provides our landscape maintenance and our which includes our mowing so but it wouldn't be like oh

this section applies to die because of the drought we want to replace them no it's just for that would be this line well we have yeah we have eight thousand dollars allocated for those services right now and so what they do is they they it's part of the invoice for it if they purchase the plants and it's part of the bid um has been my experience now if they want to do it differently my understanding from council's motion right like is the goal is that eight thousand dollars in our trees and parks goes to that effort so if their bid doesn't include the plant stuff we would say hey we need you to include the planet's stuff i'm just give it so it's under yeah it's real this line item is for not those items the special the ring arden and things in the photography it's for the other flower beds that need some new mulch or weedy or standard standard stuff outside of that rfp that makes sense well i think i think that's an area i'm concerned it's definitely an area where you have discretion and meaning if we're going close to you know we need the money in a different way we can slow down on that kind of stuff that also goes back to

the administrative part of it. Some of that, the mowing, the landscape maintenance, the parks, maintenance, that all fall under the new duties of our office admin. The director of the parks. It's like, hey, this is looking ragged. Get out there and take care of it. Or you missed this spot. Or, hey, it's been raining every day, and now we've got to meet you in another time. That kind of thing. So she would be in charge of overseeing that also so it gives us a better control more or less yeah anything else on this to verify before we

approve the final budget if council says hey yeah we'd like this whole increase in what we have we have to approve that part as well right separately increasingly well if you approve the budget as it is that's part of it so it happens um okay he's in charge of their their duties the only one that you could potentially argue would be the city secretary since it's so outlined by state however since he manages the city office we've basically said

You know he can assign work to people in person staff.

He has an authority, yes, so all we would be doing is approving that budget increase for those additional hours and pay. And if it's not something y'all agree with, then, after we come out of workshop I would prefer from formal motion about on any. significant changes away from this proposal?

I was just asking what the process would be. I assumed because Council approved positions, like when Sean said this many hours. So I was wondering, well, does that have to come back to Council then? Just because we put it in a budget, don't we have to actually change the job description per se?

This description is an hour because it's an hourly. We don't have a, we don't say 30 hours. It's based off of 30. So they're based off of 30. So now it'll be, I mean, I haven't put a number to it.

I guess that would be the wording is, if it just is based on 30 and we had a number, then council didn't set the parameters of 30 hours.

My understanding at this time, and as a body, if y'all don't like this, you can make a motion to change it. But my understanding at this time is that we have delegated this kind of work to the city administrator. And since we're not really creating a new staff position that we're assigning additional duties to existing ones, that this would fall under him at this time. If that's not something y'all agree with. then when we come out of workshop we can make a motion to bring back new updated job roles for each individual and have uh votes on on that in the future that's totally okay um it's just the way we were planning to handle this and got it right falls under the city administrator's role as the office manager and assigning delegating work got it I'm in support of this I just want to make sure that we got all our teams and I have to stop

Yes. Just moving down if you can. So we're going to do an additional limb pickup?

That's my proposal. In the last two years, we needed it and had to pull in it. That's where the contract labor, contract services came from.

So it wasn't a limelight. So on 15216, 1010-5216, the tree limb pickup, that's part of the waste connections contract. is to do one Olympic, one a year. And so we're saying we want to do a second one, which does make sense. I mean, I don't like the budget for it.

So for the last three years, we have needed it and residents have called for it. So this would be in support of that ongoing that we need.

No, I was just, I'm not questioning anything, saying that's what this is. In other words, Waste Connection didn't say, no, no, we're not going to do it anymore. It's an additional. It has to be additional.

Hey, look at that. We were actually just this week even talking about inquiring about an additional bulk trash pickup because there seems to be an interest in that. And then I was asking him to look into hazard with his pickup. Because one of the things we often have with coal violations is construction materials, paint cans, refrigerators. People don't necessarily have a way to deal with this stuff physically and it's an additional cost. Then you've got to check it places. So we're not sure Waste Connections will offer that, but we are going to like inquire about it anyway.

And where would we put that? Which I think is a great concept.

We would bring it back if we needed or, you know, one of the things that's under a category there's some discretion for how money is spent, but because it would be an increase in expenditures, we would repay back, at least in a report.

I know you have a question, just real quick. We'll touch on, we're on the biannual canopy grazing of the trees, so this year we're not, next year we'll be, so that's... Yeah, I was just going to comment.

The bulk pickup and tree lift pickup are really big ones. Ricky calls.

What's the next one?

Did we just change the item 1516 from treeland pickup to additional trash or special trash pickups?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just change it to additional pickups instead of cloud city or treeland. Just rename that. Yes, I deactivated for this year, but then it's like, well, I want to reactivate.

I mean, I could change that. But if we decided, if they come back with a reasonable bid and we say, yeah, that's worth it, we're going to try to put that in.

Ideally, in the future, it's negotiated into our contract. Whenever our contract comes back up, we'll try to negotiate additional services.

We'll just touch on that. I don't know if it's coming up in a couple of years, but there's a lot of people talking to me about it. um that's that area care and maintenance town jeff the one you picked up is on the next town is there any other questions on the area care and maintenance all right so we're just laying suspensions we've talked about that uh this is where we have crc and then the trees and parks it includes the 8000 for the rfp that we just sent out and then any other things that they want that i have a boot on there just because of where it's sitting right now um but uh i don't think they haven't had a chance to talk changing parts not out of

I think you know we're chairperson asking if they have you know with like everyone else we know the board about their requests they at that time had none and right now they're going to be focused on the parks master plan update primarily I don't anticipate any new kind of efforts with revamping parks right now because they're going to be pretty occupied with that for a little bit of course we can always do budget amendment should Something come forward that council wants to support.

Don't have them. Other municipal expenses. These are just straightforward. There's not anything. Other than the public notices, we made a line item last year. That's all I'm going through the newspaper. So I just pumped that up into the new paper. That's why. Another reason that line item is a little bit on it.

i wanted to point out so part of the money we're saving or transferring from contract and putting in-house is public relations right and that's why yeah zero yes newsletter reallocated the staff um so training and development professional development um

why didn't so previous year we went from nine thousand granted it what only two thousand is used this year to do it in the previous year previously we had our retreat in there uh we didn't have it so i just cut it place it cut and then tried to scale back a little bit of it but it's covering well i hate staff for council member that does training nothing

As I like my school stuff, I got in the program where it all gets reimbursed. So everything that we did pay for is good.

The third scholarship to save us a lot there. So if every time, like they're going to have on board of possibly new council members. And they went to training and some of us went to re. Our new chairs together.

yeah all of us going to TML and not when is October yeah all of us yeah and then this year how much is it and hotels yeah isn't it Antonio this year well it passes about yeah yeah so it's I don't need to yeah so we're not traveling if we go

Last year's in Fort Worth, this year's in San Antonio. One other thing, I opted not to go to the TCMA training this year, so to save us money. It was more in celebration of being 100 years old, and there wasn't a lot of learning, so I stayed back there.

So you all can go to hog wild training for free?

Hog wild is good training, and that's in August, with August money.

Did you have a question?

No, I was just kind of asking the question because I thought it was a bit dropped.

It's not being utilized.

We're talking about next year, so I just want to be thoughtful of future councils.

Well, she'll still have some for next year, but like I said, most of it has been paid for. There's some other Some of the seminars she's had to go to covers that.

So TML happens before new council members are elected regularly. So it would actually, if new council members wanted to attend TML, if you have the next fiscal year, our training is not free. I guess we buy food for people, but it's not, you know, and then the online required trainings are free. So any newly elected council members in November won't, be initially spending money unless they go you know in that October a year later so which would be another sense but I'm not going down soon anyway that number's just kind of based on where we're at now and and if anybody has any other training that they come full capacity we'll look it up um

um going on that i guess the next one would be the other operating expenses that's where we um fourth of july fireworks um emergency fair emergency preparedness fair the library and then the miscellaneous you know staff appreciation lunch or christmas thing the you know meetings we have luncheons and different things so

It's not very much at all, but my guess is that the emergency federal budget could be trimmed pretty much because I don't know what we actually spend. Is there any there's no registration fee it's done for swag you know we've handed out the mylar blanket i think madeline went through a tote and she found a full lunch yeah there's she didn't have an offer

yeah and we bought the radar yeah so that was out of this year's budget so that's that's in the box there's swag in-house that we could be giving up more often well if you try to take it we've been at a lot of the lunch boxes and then we have we have some kind of really kind of minor planned expenditures just to always have stuff like that on hand whether it be pens chip clips whatever but it's not substantial it's like less than 500 bucks yeah but yeah we can trim that I'm sure

Anything else on utilities? Pretty straightforward. That's just what it is.

Yes. Outdoor electric. Is that for City Hall, or does that include the city entirely?

That's the parks, the playground, because now we've got a meter playground. Every night. The water park and the triangle. So it's the whole city? Yeah, it's the whole thing. Thank you.

Do you have any other questions about our general fund expenditures as outlined today?

I'm going to touch on it because it doesn't have its own tab. Back on the general expense tab where it's all broken down, we've got $8,000 for municipal court and prosecutor fees that we put in there last year. So that's there. I saw that. and with some let me see where we're at with our formula directions we need to cut off 12 bucks so i had a i had a buffer but it got ate up by two yeah you had like three thousand in there yeah yeah just under four grand with our our two uh formula errors so 1200 bucks for taking out of the municipal court prosecutor have it used and yeah I want that to be a zero I thought it was registered as a zero to the court it's over here that's an expense oh it's no it's listed as a yeah thank you yeah it doesn't have its own tab okay so it's just one the loan line item on this

that sheet so are you reducing that by 1200 in the remainder here just to zero down yeah well we have to have a balanced budget and we're not going to transfer 1200 out of reserves to balance this budget do you want to do that or just knock it down three and have a positive buffer towards you would still it has to get to zero eventually for that so let's just do the exact for now if that's the okay if council maybe six seven nine zero because y'all will just show hands if you support that we'll put an informal vote okay everyone's okay with that because it was 1220 yeah we're at zero yes ma'am i just gotta quit going back on

I think it's such a great idea on the additional law pickup, but you mentioned hazardous waste. Are you going to be looking at that included? Yes.

This is a fairly new idea that I literally had this week because we were talking about this additional. So we have to contact Waste Connection, see if they provide that service or not, and then we can try to bring that back in this budget season. If not, then you'll get a report either way. Thank you.

but it wasn't my understanding jeff's suggestion of changing that one line item from true and pick up to just kind of kick up yeah but we would have to increase i thought it was just a change to well get that well no yeah if we go there are ways to connections the other ways connections are going to be that number of dollars but we can't put it into this contract you'd have to do it separately then we change that line item to additional Trash removal or specialized trash removal, tree limbs, bulk, having this. And put budget items in there. Sounds good.

Am I here?

I just want to change the name.

Bulk. Bulk is different. Additional trash and bulk pickup. Citywide pickup. Yeah, I'm gonna make it clear that it's not a pickup truck. Waste. Yeah, waste.

What I said is something like specialized waste, because that covers uh before we answer workshop um since my base is on now i'm coming to the ground you had a question for him he has to he has to click out for mike to work no i just asked him to unmute yeah when how's your glitch after this

No, please don't promise anyone not like or say that we decided to do any catheters. We can talk now.

Hey, Mike, how's it going? Good. Glad you're here with us.

Yeah, sorry. I was running a little bit late.

No, no worries. I have a question regarding the capital improvement section of the budget. when I it's kind of confirmation or give me clarity because I did some research on it and it says capital improvements in the city budget or in the capital budget card are for projects that already have officially been approved by Council and the funds are already actively approved and appropriated for that fiscal year is that correct

Well, it sort of depends on what you guys have set up in your policy. I can't remember if you guys are fully funded on capital improvements or whether you're not. But if you're trying to fund those fully, then you would just count those as encumbered funds when you're figuring your tax rate out. Or if you're not fully funded, then you would need to count that as unencumbered back in your pooled cash.

I guess. I didn't ask my question very well um what I'm asking is from my research we can't put items in under capital projects on the city budget unless Council's already approved them and they've approved the funding for them rather than some of the items presented

are kind of more wishless like we will get there eventually or the council haven't actually approved them can i answer your question because mike is not as familiar with our policies so the previous work of the city has been not to follow that policy we've put things on the capital improvements that were not directly officially approved, the digital message board being a clear example. The work tonight of items two and three, the reason why these items are on here on this agenda like this is to directly address that need, Councilmember Bremmer, so that council does take direct votes on items and allocate a specific amount to it to authorize them being placed in the capital improvement portion of the budget.

Yeah, and it's sort of a wish with them fast.

Yeah.

And it was kind of weird.

That is the plan for items two and three tonight.

That's why I asked my opinion on that.

Yeah, I mean, I think this is the budget workshop, so I don't know that you guys are actually approving the budget tonight. I think for discussion purposes, it's fine to have them in the budget kind of discussion and depending on what council votes. And depending on what policy you want to want to follow, it matters. You know, if those if those items that are approved tonight go into your official budget and then that is what council passes, then then they won't have to be reappropriated at a later time.

We've started a capital fund now. We've never had an individual capital fund in our account. So now that money, what he's talking about will become encumbered for the year. It'll be transferred into that capital fund and you'll see direct expenditures out of it. And then our reserves will stay separate. We've just been spending out of reserves in the past and our capital improvement portion of our budget was often just things we were interested in taking up in the future. On items 2 and 3 tonight. When we walk through them, we will be taking more direct votes and I would explain that more once we get to those items to help address that issue and that concept of the capital fund. Portion of the budget should be things that council has unanimously approved considering for the year and will authorize staff to take initial actions, whether that be spend city resources to research, right? Because. that costs our residents money and if we don't fully support an item we shouldn't be costing money on does that answer your question thank you does it answer the question do you have additional questions additional questions oh i was just going to say on the on this budget uh we're

two-thirds of the way through the year, and the $516,000 we've spent is exactly 67% of our budget. So that's exactly how we want to be.

Yeah, he's doing a great job.

Yeah.

All right, any more discussion in workshop before we exit? We're going to exit workshop at 17.2. is there any specific motion related to the two items that were of concern during your workshop that council would like to issue tonight hearing that we'll move into item two like an entertainment motion uh we're on number two yes okay i move that we authorized ongoing work

for the 25-26 fiscal year and related expenditure for the following projects and allocate for such in the 26-27 fiscal year capital improvements that have been the western creek westwood repeller drainage and villa road improvements a second all right if i may introduce this item do you mind sir okay

so to honor that concept of ensuring that we have a majority vote to proceed with things these three items have been voted on by council this past year we have already gone to bid on western wood creek but we anticipate possible expenditures from the capital funds in the next year on that just depending on how the work falls out item b westwood and brook hollow drainage work we have authorized um seeking permission and obtaining the easements needs so far. And then we also authorize you to afford with the work if that is secured. So, we would need to follow through with that plan possibly in the next fiscal year and allocate those funds again. The amount of road improvements is a little bit more up for discussion because we just voted on that license agreement in our last meeting. And so council would need to basically go ahead and say, yes, we want to do those road improvements this next year and allocate for that in the capital improvements. um funds or strike item c if y'all don't want to improve that road in this next year um i tried to provide in working with a city administrator burton we tried to provide as accurate as numbers as possible based on the freelance work on that and um you know there won't really be remaining bond funds for that so notice we said utilizing capital funds so we would be transferring 140 000 from our reserves into the capital fund for that purpose for this year and we don't already have that allocated somewhere and when you if you vote on the motion made tonight you're approving all three of those items going into our budget you're also improving staff to continue work on anything we're in progress on or in the case of via Meadow Road improvements, you would be authorizing staff to reach out to Friendly Turk to engage in that scope of work first step.

Yes, ma'am. A question on Western Moon Creek. The $600,000, according to Texas Flask, we only have $541,000. Right. And then

according to our revenue and expense we've already spent another 37 000 out of the go bonds so we really only have 500 past right so we will provide and so remember earlier I was sort of like our numbers on this page aren't finished because as we get closer to the closeout at the end of this fiscal year and we bring our final budget we'll have those broken out um for you in a more clear fashion So in our last meeting, we did talk about how or it might have been May 13th, sorry. We did talk about how reserves would have to supplement possibly for the Western Wood Creek. But remember, they also talked about how they overestimated on their bid and there was a contingency built in. And we also talked about how we often are getting bids well under their estimates. So we don't have all of those data points yet. To give a more concrete example, this is basically just sort of the broad picture as we have it right now.

To touch on Western North Perico, we have a meeting today, the pre-construction meeting, pre-bid meeting. And so those bids are due the end of July, July 29th, I believe. So that would be the day that Freeland-Kirk takes them all in and makes a recommendation. So we'll have hard numbers done by the end of July, ready for the August workshop.

But if we vote on this, we know we don't have 600,000.

Well, it will go into the capital improvement page. I absolutely hear you. And as I just explained, I am aware that that number is not a concrete, accurate number at this time. As I explained earlier in the meeting, this page is not finalized. We will put, you know, if you remember, we usually have Our revenue up here, so we will put that back in with the actual accounts listed, but because it was going to be so much guesswork for tonight. And because people tend to latch on to numbers once they're published, we didn't want to mislead. For example, you were kind of questioning why some of these numbers aren't there is because they weren't finished. These projects were still in process. So we didn't want to publish a number and then it changes and people are like, you know, that's not what was there. So we're trying to be as transparent as possible without misleading people. So this is utilizing bond funds as after it. And we estimate at this point in time, about 600,000. We know reserves might be needed to supplement it. We know that the actual bid might come in under, which we will have before the final budget as well. So some of that information will come in and will be adjusted. Does anyone else have any questions about this item, item number two? Do we have any concerns about the three items as projected? Okay, well, hearing none, I will go ahead and call the vote. All in favor of authorizing ongoing work from the 2025-2026 fiscal year and related expenditures to the following projects and allocate for such in the 2026-2027 fiscal year under capital improvements as listed in A, B, and C in the agenda, please raise your hand and say aye. Aye. All aye passes. On item three, if I could request that in your motion you do not list the letters and that if we choose to add them after discussions, we will make one amendment to add any letters you all wish to take on, just to keep it a little bit more clean.

Okay. I'm going to place the following items on the 2026-27 capital improvements portion of the budget. this authorizing staff to act on these items during the fiscal year through planning and possible expenditure related to each items and deciding what's below.

Second.

All right. We have a motion and a second, so I'll introduce this item. So many of these items are literally just put on this list because we did not get to them this year. There is really only two Alice. Okay. So I'll take them line by line. A, Deerfield east to west. We do not have any projected costs on that because Freelancer did not end up taking it up for us. Other projects took precedence with them. Additionally, we did not have any of that grant money from Deerfield left over. At one time, we thought there was going to be money left over, and then there wasn't to allocate to this project. That's not to say the needs over there have gone away, but right now we don't. really have a plan over there. And then additionally that PDD saw some movement over there and we were kind of waiting to see what their final plans were because they'll have to tie into the road at the end there. And so this work was originally to address the end of the cul-de-sac because it does not meet our standards. Some drainage issues over there with the culvert needing to be possibly enlarged or reconstructed. And then we talked about wrapping the curbing all the way around that road. We have not had an evaluation whether or not that would actually help the drainage there. That's what we would have sent to for winter. On letter B, purchase an installation of a warning siren. We have actually authorized this already. And in theory, it should be up under number two. However, we have kind of wavered on this and we might be working on a partnership with the fire station there was an express interest there um so i really wanted to get clear direction from council whether or not y'all wanted to go ahead and allocate another 50 000 again for next year we do have a standing motion already that we are supposed to purchase and install this but we've kind of

wanted to either get a grant through the fire station or get a partnership and we don't have those things in place yet so and that can be a budget amendment in the future or you guys can go ahead and recommit tonight if you're interested see no touch on that yeah I'm not with Chief Robbins on this and he was I brought a big partner on the siren since we put the farm station on Gulf Street he was super excited about it and more than willing so but we just had we got to get there and it would be tied in with the the fire station which it's going to be a little bit it won't even be interesting it probably won't be done this this was weird but he was very open to uh targeting all right imc uh council had freeland jerk

carry this out uh i apologize that the link wasn't working that's happened to us twice now we're not really here what the break is because it's the same process for all the documents i did email it to you all and then if you all ever wonder about stuff like that you actually have access to our shared drive and you can find things on your own in the engineering projects um so that one is in there um essentially that was finished up it had not been brought brought to council so my goal tonight was just to let you guys have those plans and then recommit whether or not you wanted to take that up next year please know though that we do not have additional bond funds uh because we've already gone to bid for western wood creek and approved that so that took precedence we had that discussion as a body So if you do want to approve the pedestrian bridge over Hog Creek, and I apologize for the typo there, that would be coming out of reserves unless we were able to secure a grant of some kind for it. We do not have anybody working on a subcommittee yet for that grant, so that would be a possible future item that would need to come to council. Next, safety enhancement program phase three. If you guys would go ahead and open up that attachment for me so I can explain it a little bit. So council has, by direct vote, added some items to a safety enhancement phase three consideration. Those votes did not say we were installing these items. They said we would put them in a phase three for later discussion. So tonight is about whether or not we want to take up a phase three next year. It is not even agreeing to this plan. It's just showing you what has been brought to us so far. Some of these items are actually directly from residents alone and not council motions. All of that is explained at the top of this. And so this program, if you guys are interested in it and you say, yes, get in the capital improvements plan. We would allocate, you know, some money to it. This is just an estimate, or we don't even have the estimate here. We have to bring that back to the final one because we don't, you know, there's not enough information here yet. So we would provide an estimate if y'all are interested in it. So the items that council added to this ourselves were specifically were the Wood Creek drag ones. Petition submitted for Eastern Wood Creek. So that resulted in that council vote. The Brook Meadow has been mentioned by residents for limited safety enhancement. Oh, sorry. Brook Meadow has not been addressed at all. So that would be something to consider in this plan in the future. And then citizens requested an additional speed cushion at the end of Brook Hollow Drive. And they also requested an additional stop sign. However, when the engineers looked at that, they weren't very supportive due to the concerns of the stops already around it. You're supposed to have set distances, and that one doesn't really comply. So they weren't super supportive of it. Do you have any questions about this?

Just a question or comment, I guess, is that, especially for Brook Mill, you know, limited safety enhancement improvements, we are looking at striping and some other

um enhancements there that we're getting some bids on so that might help with that be part of this plan right we have that community council motion we also installed some radar signs over there so that's why I said when we did we've never taken a direct um kind of install more stop signs or install speed cushions like we have in some other places um so anyway that's that item are there any other questions on this hand okay the the red mark on the column

That seems to be right on top of the existing one. Did the engineers look at it?

No, the engineers haven't looked at any of this. This is like literally just based on citizen requests. They mentioned one at that end. The engineers would have to place it. This is just a graphic visual for understanding of what's been proposed. And again, you have to take in other stops, other speed cushions, all of that. They would review it. The only thing that the engineers actually reviewed on this are the wood-free drive lengths, because we took a direct council vote on them. And the engineers said, yeah, you could do those speed cushions. They would meet standards.

I did discuss with them the stops on there. It worked very kind. They did look at it.

this plan would definitely need more flushing out and it would not be an approval to move forward with it it's just whether or not we want to take up a safety enhancement phase three you know and so then we would need a future agenda item on that we'd have to bring a plan we'd have to have some engineer work so we need council to be sure they want that so we don't make some money on engineering and staff without really council being on board it doesn't mean you can't change your vote later it just means that like we need initial support for things like this All right, any other questions on that item? The last item came out of Freeland Turk's presentation with the driving champion circle drainage work here at the entrance. We asked Freeland Turk to break out the cost for us away from the things that involve the county and just address city property. I added this one on because it is the number one site that Freeland Turk recommended work for. And because with the remaining drainage funds estimated from Westwood and Bercolo Drive, we got very close to being able to accomplish this one. And so it's just a project we could add on our check done list if we were interested in it with very little money coming from reserves.

Like 20 grand is that?

Well, you know, again, you know, there are estimates. Right, right. Yeah, so.

But based on this estimate, 125, another 104 left. Yeah.

And so.

That's the other one. Exactly. Assuming that that does work well.

Right. So essentially, you know, Freelancer broke out just enlarging the culvert under Champion Circle and grading the culvert out down so it stops backflowing up into the street and also actually drains where it's supposed to instead of flooding that entire lot.

Sir. Thank you. This was some of the questions I have on this. I personally don't support this section. um this item because i think we should ask council as well as the future council be able to walk through the entire process for each item and have the full discussion have a full discovery and because the wording of this is to place the following items on the capital improvements portion of the budget, thus authorizing staff to act on these items. And I think that's the disconnect. I think we should actually, as council, take them up, have the discussion, have the citizens know about them, have the citizens come in, provide their ideas, talk about funding, where is it going to go? Are we going to get grants? Are we going to do this? Are we going to do that? Before we come to decisions, rather than putting it into the budget already.

So all of that would still have to happen because as I stated, none of these are ready to engage. However, what you would be authorizing is staff to start working on preparing that instead of staff spending citizen money to prepare things that you are not interested in supporting or even discussing right because we spend a lot of resources contacting our engineers and our legal counsel and a lot of resources having our staff work on preparing agenda items and then if y'all never intended to take it up for consideration then that was a waste of resources and that's what I was addressing if I may take my time back um is the idea that

There's going to be three new council members next year, and this is the budget they're going to be working with. I think you should allow them the ability to have a discussion on each of these items that council hasn't approved yet or hasn't even formulated yet. There's a lot of work that yet needs to be done, and I think that should be allowed for council and as well as the future council to explore and have those discussions because I don't like the idea of us dictating to a future council of next year of these are the items that you are now committed to because we're going to go and through all this work. And I also want to say staff's time and allow them each to individually come before us as well as the next council and let them fully discuss it.

that's why I opposed to this particular I mean I I don't see it that way um yeah my understanding of this I mean what we said was okay we're looking at this and we specifically did not list the the items so that we could say you know I the only I'm really fond of at all is the pedestrian bridge because we've already dealt with that, right? So that's the only one I'm really interested in having on the list as a potential future project and maybe doing a little additional work so when the new council comes on, they've got information they need to carry to the next step. This is not a proving project. This is a proving that it takes the next step and is just open for discussion. So like I've been knowing that SIREN, you know, probably isn't going to happen even next fiscal year. know we're not going to put it on a potential capital improvement list now um i mean it'll be on that sort of wish list for the future but what i how i see this is that like these are things that between now and we have a new council sworn in in november or december um these are things that council has talked about in the past um that we think still have merit Yeah. And that, you know, staff continue to do the whatever background that needs to be done on it so that when a new council comes in, when we say, yeah, we can get the money for the grant or something else, we go forward with it. So I don't think this is an approval of the project, and maybe I'm reading it wrong.

If I may, we could easily amend it to say, take limited action to prepare these items for future consideration, right? Just so the motion is very hard. I would like to just recap on the concept of our budget. So every year we set our budget and we set it for the future council. That happens every single year. with the capital improvements in particular transparency is very important to me and I think it would be wildly inappropriate to not put things that we're actively worked on spent engineering funds plan had Council votes on it for them budget amendments in the future to get them back on an agenda because that's not very transparent for the public right so these are projects that we have been working on I've discussed have taken votes on none of it is new none of it is gotcha well I I would particularly prefer Council asked for cdne specifically and with the understanding that these items aren't ready for staff to go out and procure bids. We don't have designs. We know that we need all of those processes still. But this would authorize, for example, let's take E, Wood Creek Drive-In Champion's drainage, right? So this would, if you guys put that into capital improvements, then the next time Mr. Bergen talks to Freeland Turk, he could say, hey, council's interested in this item. Would you guys go ahead and take the next steps to prepare the next step on the engineer because we don't have that, right? We couldn't go to bid with what we have. So he could be preparing the bid, right? wouldn't htr work on that too no that's not one of theirs no um safety enhancement phase three if you guys just let me finish explaining this because i don't want there to be confusion about the intention of this item on safety enhancement phase three if you were to place this in a capital improvement and the final you know in the next budget workshop we would have spent city resources to prepare the plan and that in the future if it's approved we will have then told Freeland Turk, we need you to spend city resources to review this and come forward with an actual plan. On C, we are a lot closer on that one than anything, right? But it would need to come back to council to go to bid, right? So there would still be a future action there. So I apologize if the motion wasn't clear enough. Again, I would request an amendment to say to take limited action to prepare these items for future consideration.

Um, I cannot make it, but I'm just, I'm just, um, sorry.

Okay. Um, I think this is an example of items that should be presented to the citizens. before we start work on it. At least two of these will be fiercely uphold.

These have all come to the citizens. These have all been on agendas. They've all been out there. There's nothing on here new to our citizens.

The safety enhancement phase three has not

we've had a council vote on it already we created a safety enhancement phase three we took a council vote on at least two of the items we've already said four speed bump under a phone no it Councilmember Bailey I am sorry if I'm a little short right now but that is what's playing in the packet um attachment it says Petitions were submitted through the Eastern Wood Creek and Champion Circle speed cushions. Council voted to add them to this plan for consideration. Western Wood Creek speed cushion added by council vote for this plan for consideration. Each set of the speed cushions is $9,000. Citizens request in writing additional speed cushion Brook Hollow and three-way sock on speed cushion on Augusta Drive and Augusta Lane. Those are citizen requests. So if we're going to take up a safety enhancement phase three and we're looking at petitions and things like this, Part of that process would be putting in all of these things to consider. Like, for example, do you all want to do anything more in Brook Meadow? We would have to have an additional meeting on that item to discuss it. And I firmly reject the concept that these things have not been put in front of the public as this agenda was posted well over two weeks ago, where these things are very clearly listed and our proposed budget is also posted on the public website.

we are definitely letting the citizens know about things council member grover you had your hand up thank you i'm sorry were you still um well just to finish on that they were in the posted agenda but how how do citizens come forward with their their disapproval of this there's certainly a general thing like the message board

And when it comes up on a vision board.

Are they here? There's no public comment. There's no one in the audience. We received no written public comments. But wouldn't that help citizens communicate to this board? I also, as the mayor, sought citizen input for this specific work. And it's posted in this packet.

We received three comments.

You know, I don't disagree about getting the citizens to be able to speak on these things. And that's why you put this on future agendas to discuss. So we said that we might want to move forward on this item, whatever it is. And so we said that, you know, we want to consider it for capitalism. because they have been requested it hasn't been discussed with the council and it's got to come back and can get you know all the input from all over so what we're trying to do now is to say hey is this worth discussing as a budget item in the future you know right that's the obviously you know yeah okay thank you i amend the language to state take limited action

for staff um it says authorizing staff too so i would suggest you say take limited action for future council consideration because that's the concern is that these wouldn't come back on an agenda so asking by the mayor and to only address item c and item b

Is there a second?

Second. Okay. So the amendment changes on the full motion against and we are on the same page. To place the following items, items C and E as stated in the agenda on the 2026-2027 capital improvement portion of the budget, thus authorizing staff to take limited action for future council consideration

on these items during the fiscal year through planning and possible expenditures related to chitin um removing d i mean your concerns are about citizen end quote involvement you know item d is one area where we've had citizen petitions and citizens coming to us and saying we would like these things if we cut this out and now and said no we're not going to discuss it we're not going to discuss a safety enhancement phase three, then you just shut them up entirely. They've lost their voice entirely. And I know how important it is for you or citizens to have a voice. So that's what you're doing to cut it out.

Would you like to offer an amendment to add D?

Yes, I'd like to move that we amend the motion to include D in consideration.

I second.

That's two amendments on this. We would have, sorry, we would have to start voting to act before we can add additional amendments. Okay. What was Sam?

The one comment would just be, I don't like moving E just because, I mean, I haven't been present for the talks with the fire chief. So I don't know the exact likelihood of that partnership happening. But if it doesn't happen, I feel like that was still a very time sensitive safety issue. And I think it should not be locked off because If it doesn't happen, then we're just kind of screwing ourselves for next year. Then we'll wait a whole other year. So I would like to see B still included so it's a possibility.

Okay. So let's, if you have, okay, we're going to pause on that. I'm going to come back to it. And what we'll do is we'll just have a little bit more discussion on the existing two amendments if it's needed. We'll take votes on those. And then if we need, we can do a new motion to amend to add B. Okay? Yes, sir.

I'm going to address the last amendment, which is regarding IME-D. Council has considered the safety enhancement program, and we support it, but I also hear Council has been discussing the idea of not rushing into Phase 3. Let's let Phase 1 and 2 kind of sit with the world and sit with the citizens and see if we do need a Phase 3. because that was the discussion we were having. And that's why it got postponed. A lot of the items that were came to council in phase two were put in phase three with the idea of let's give it some time. So I think, I don't know that a year is the amount of time council was considering. It wasn't the time frame that I was thinking.

Would it ease y'all's minds if I brought forward If this were to pass tonight, I brought forward an item in July or August, possibly July, because we didn't post today, but we will be posting the week, that isolated out the items that were just citizen requests and not petitions. And we just focused on the three petitioned items. Like we would remove, because we're hollowed drive additional speed cushion the stop sign and um Brook Meadow from the discussion and it would just be the three that had petitions and direct Council booked and that helped yes so all right well uh you can also you know just vote and it falls out pulse did you have additional discussion on this and just

um I did run across this petition just to install speed bumps on champion Circle and that looks like there's a lot of people in favor but I know that there are so many speed bumps on the problem that it will not get very many people in faith when we take I'm sorry when we take up

know a vote on the enhancements you know you say no we want this one but not that one we don't want that but we want that you know so that's going to come to a few council if we if we have a enhancement phase three the the west west end i mean i'm sorry the east end of wood creek um that came up during phase one i think You know, and we said, well, we can't get up, but we'll definitely consider place three. I mean, I, I think that you owe or that we owe the citizens that have seen it working elsewhere and still have problems to at least be able to think that we're, we're looking seriously at it. If this goes off, if this goes off of this agenda item, and we just say, no, it's not really that important. I mean, I think when this happens i mean it's still given the time it'll be two years before it happens and if all the traffic i mean i guess it'd be interesting to have a conversation with our our sheriff but we still seem to get about the same number of you know citations if not more you know i don't know if they're not places i think they're still a problem and wood creek drag will be improved completely too so whereas that reality is that that factor will become more viable yes sir but

Oh, yeah, with the Western Booking. That's true. Placing it onto the capital improvements portion of the budget does not change the fact that this can still come to- It has to come back.

It is not- That's the difference.

The difference is it has to come back versus council can bring it back.

Well, it has to come back, but it doesn't have to be accrued in its entirety.

The distinction is it has to come back. This council has dictated that. or councils left it off specifically, but still allows it to come back.

No, because we would not have allocated funds, and then we would have to issue a budget amendment, which is not very transparent. So if there's interest in talking about this in the next year, the transparent thing to do would to go ahead and be putting this on the budget, so it's notified to the public well in advance. They can comment and add input, you know, because we're telling them, hey, y'all, we're thinking about spending your money. Can Those are the things we're thinking about.

To me, what it seems like we're doing is what we've always done, which is say, okay, here's sort of some things that are on the wish list that we just sort of threw out there, threw down there, or maybe not. This is a way of making it more transparent and codifying what we think. you know, we might want to move forward with it at some level, right? So that's what I argue.

And by taking these votes, and if they pass, we would be better honoring the use of citizen taxpayer dollars, city resources, because, you know, and I don't want to rehash an open wound, but the digital message board to me was the catalyst for this change up in procedure because it got on the capital improvement plan. And there was no discussion during the budget about the value of it for the entire board, aside from approving it in the budget, which led to large expenditures and staff resources in time to prepare it for council. And then it came to council because the capital improvement plan is something that he is charged with taking care of and bringing to you all. And so when it got to council, then there was fallout. So I'm hoping to avoid some of those waste and resource and taxpayer funds, because we will have collectively voted that these items specifically are things we authorize staff to take next steps on and bring back to us. We support them. Is there any other discussion?

Can we remove Berkala?

I'm not hearing a lot of support for the speed cushion on Verkalo or the stop sign. The stop sign is not well advised by the engineers. We don't have petitions about either. We just had citizen input. This was me trying to honor citizens who have taken the time to write the city and ask for things. So that's what I found here. We even debated not putting a blocker because there was no direct council vote about it. But I felt that because citizens took the time to write us, it was worthy of it being on here. I'm happy to admit those two. and whenever it comes back. So we don't have to have a formal motion on that. These are called minute motions. I hear you. It will be honored unless there's objection. Any other discussion on these two amendments to have C, D, and E? We'll be voting on the second amendment first of adding D. All in favor of adding D as an amendment, please raise your hand and say aye. Aye. We have to have a supermajority yes to do so, and we only have three. All nays, please raise your hand.

Nay.

Two nay, motion fails. Sorry, I'm taking notes. I'm not... Okay um the amendment to add item C and E in the additional language to take limited action for future council consideration all in favor please raise your hands and say aye.

Aye.

Unanimous.

Yeah I meant to add um B. Give me a second. Can you say again? Oh, I wanted to amend to add B.

No, sorry.

Mayor Patumarasko, seconded. Do we need to have additional discussion on B? Hearing none, we'll go ahead and hold the vote. All in favor of adding B as an amendment, please raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Four ayes, take six. Nay.

One nay.

Okay. We disclose this item. We have to do the full main motion as amended. So I'll recap. Essentially, we add that additional language to take limited action for future council consideration. We have added letter B as stated in the packet, C and E. All in favor, raise your hand and say aye.

Aye.

unanimous thank y'all um this last item well all it says is essentially we're going to compile all of these things that y'all changed tonight requested did and bring forth in a future budget workshop again sir i know the council approves a draft for 2026 2027 budget for the city of livery with council amendments to be brought back for a second review in august 2026. second All right. Any discussion on this? Any last-minute concerns? All right. All in favor, please raise your hand and say aye.

Aye.

Unanimous process. We had a request for announcements, even though they're not on this agenda. Future business was not added to this because this was a special meeting with a very specific purpose. Councilmember Grammar.

Thank you. I will be bringing an item for the local option of creating a City of Luke Creek general homestead exemption.

Sir, this is not a future business section. Did you have an actual amount?

Right after the plan I'm bringing.

Okay, so you would have to announce it in a future agenda and give a second during that portion of the meeting.

That is when I did the research on it. Council is allowed to.

go through this process right and Council has an approval process that states differently that we've all agreed upon in passing unanimously so I'm just reminding you of the rules so actual announcements since we added them I went ahead and added please join us for the Waverly period on July 3rd Wood Creek has a float not as a float but you are welcome to walk in the float all of you all and join us and don't forget they're running on fireworks on July 4th please join us our next City Council meeting will be July 8th

Thank you. Thank you. It's still.