City Council Budget Workshop 2-25-26

[0:00:00] Let's go ahead and get started. It is actually a little bit after 30. Just a little bit of housekeeping. If you look at the agenda, I sent that out to all of y'all at the itinerary. We have a couple of places for breaks in the working lunch. The first morning break will be at 10 o'clock, from 10 to 10 15. Working lunch will be from 12, 10 to 1 o'clock. Again, it is a working lunch. We're going to continue the staff with the presentations. And then the final break will be in the afternoon. unless City Council would like another break. That's gonna be from three o'clock to three 15. I'm gonna start off by thanking Brian and Lorelai for the setup and getting everything ready. And of course, Michelle, for all the work she did to make sure that we had a system that's back there. So Michelle, thank you for that. Just so I started off, I just wanna make sure that everybody understands this kind of an informal meeting. As you come up to present Council, I mean not the staff member, as you come up to present, you have a place up here. If you bring in one of your assistant directors with you, again, there's more than enough space up there, so as you come up, make sure you turn on your microphones. Kicking it off, I wanted to talk about this meeting being an initial meeting for the City Council members as far as a workshop. In the past, we've been kind of limited as far as a number of workshops we've done. We've done really just one which was the strategic planning and workshop, which normally would come around May or June. This one actually, I'd like to start off early to really address some of the needs that the city has. And I will ask the city council to entertain the opportunity for the city to have a couple more workshops before we actually start talking strategic and even budget. This one is occurring of course here at the end of February. I would like to see one in March and April as well at the end of the month to kind of go over some of the things that we'll discuss today. Today is kind of like that initial meeting to kind of introduce to council members some of the areas that my directors, myself,

[0:02:00] assistant city managers will like you to review as far as potential for revenues, the reduction of expenditures, and even some of the efficiencies. With that, I'll kick it off on the first bullet. The city does face many challenges when it comes to paying for the services that we currently have. Property tax revenue caps and the state limits, the state a couple years back, limit the city now to three and a half percent on the property revenues we collect. Actually, they even went into session last this past time to talk about even lowering that to about 1%. The challenge with that 1% means that if we want to go above the 3.5% or the 1% that they actually drop it, it means we'd have to take that to the voters for a vote to decide if they like to fund at whatever level we're requesting. And that in itself would be a challenge. We do live in a community that's conservative. Nobody wants their property taxes increased. So again, that's something that quite frankly in the next couple of years I expect that the state legislators will revisit that again and may be looking at that one percent. And so I just want to make sure that we're prepared for not just budgeting for the years this year, but even anticipating for the next couple of years what we may see. We have a dependence on property value growth. And that's something that Economic Development City Council has prioritized, one of the areas we want to key in on. We have an opportunity this year that's been presented and that's in the forum. One of the areas that economic development is working on is in the forum of a data center or maybe multiple data centers that in fact does bring in growth as far as value growth that does bring in additional revenues for the city. And not just that, I know the economic development is constantly on the lookout to bring industry into our community, to bring businesses into our community, to bring jobs that will do everything

[0:04:03] we can to increase that tax base as well, the values of our properties. The next one is we're serving the growing community, and in serving this growing community in the 14 years that I've been here or going on 14 years, we've really limited the number of staffing that we actually have. We've increased in the past for CSIs when we had the water contamination issue and we increased three there. We've increased the fire and PD through the safer grants that we've received. Other than that the city has not grown in FTEs. We've really maintained a lower level of as far as the FTEs employees and still the city continues to grow and we continue providing a service at the level of staffing that we currently have, we're pretty efficient. I will compare this to any city that we compare ourselves to, and you'll see that we actually offer probably more services than other cities, too, but we do it with list F. And I'm quite proud of that fact, but still, that's very daunting to be able to keep up with that level of service without addressing staffing, whether it's increasing staffing or reducing staffing reducing services as well. We have a cost increases growing incrementally faster than CPI. So you look at inflation for the country as a whole, typically you'll see anywhere between two to three and a half percent on the CPI. We go up by municipal cost index. Our inflation rate is actually higher than a CPI or standard inflation, normally around a four and a half percent range. So we're being limited by the state to three and a half percent when it comes to the revenues we can bring in property revenues, but yet our inflation is growing at one percent higher than that. So every year we're further and further behind, and so that's something that's a major challenge for us. So those are just some of the ones that I wanted to bring up that are some of the major challenges.

[0:06:04] I did put other on there, Tina and Shane, I'm not sure if there's anything else you'd like to add to that, but these were the major ones that I wanted to talk about. Okay. With that, just kind of an overview, so the department presentations will have each department come up here and do a presentation. Their time up here will be limited to 30 minutes if it's a bigger department, 20 minutes for a little bit smaller departments, but that includes the Q&A portion of it also. So they're going to do the presentation. City Council, you'll have an opportunity to ask any questions for clarification. Again, I already talked about the working lunch and the breaks. The city, the staff has been directed to look at the revenue growth. What can we do as a city to increase our revenues? And so we're looking, of course, at cost recovery. Oh, we're really getting back as far as the services we're providing. We want to make sure that we recover our costs to provide that service. So that's going to be really key for the city, Expanding through grants, partnerships, and leases, that's something that we take a close look at. I know, for example, operations, impactor fabric, and they're really great about having a long list of grants that they can apply for that will help supplement some of the needs that we have as a community. And other departments do the same thing constantly looking for grants that we can apply for that can help supplement and assist us with the revenues as well. We'll talk a little bit more about leases later on with it. Some of our staff comes up there so I'm We're going to skip that for now. Revenue, potential, not being realized. Is there anything that we're providing service-wise for whatever reason, we're not collecting a cost recovery for that? Some of the directors will talk about that as well. And then are there underutilized city assets that we need to take a look at? Are there certain assets that quite frankly we don't need? Do we need to sell those? We're going to keep them. Is there a way that we can benefit off that asset? Can we lease that space? There's always phone towers. There's all, I mean, there's different things that we can do

[0:08:05] to bring in additional revenue as well. So then when we look at expense reduction, looking at service levels and delivery of cost, we'll look at contracting now at certain services, quite frankly, that some other entity could do at a lower cost and the city can actually do it at elimination of services. That is gonna be a deeper discussion, more than likely not gonna be had today, but at the next workshop, because that truly is a deeper discussion. We do have a list of the services that the city currently provides with probably the most important on top and all the way to the bottom is kind of the low-hanging fruit that we can talk about. Could we eliminate those services? With that, the city staff will also be focusing on efficiencies within the departments. What can they do to become more efficient? City staff was directed, they didn't meet with our staff as well, to develop these ideas. They also were encouraged to use AI to look at other areas that perhaps we hadn't looked at. They were encouraged to, of course, as always, encourage to look at other cities for best practices to see what we can adopt, actually adopt and adapt for our community. So with that, I'm quite excited to see to hear from the directors, I'm looking forward to city council members hearing from directors. Some of the thoughts and ideas are just thoughts and ideas. We want to see if you would entertain some of what's being presented by staff. Some of it could be controversial. Some of it, I think, is pretty darn straightforward. Why aren't we considered it right now? So again, as the staff comes up here and does their presentation, keep in mind some of those questions you may want to ask them. We're also gauging to looking for support from Council as well, a little bit of direction from Council to see if in fact something that's presented if the City Council would like to really entertain that and move forward within the future. We'd like to hear from you all about that as well. With that, I am done on my part and we will move on to HR and Veronica and I jumped ahead

[0:10:15] of myself. They have a timer. Do you have watches? No, actually Heather didn't I don't think they get this group gets 40 minutes because they have an additional item to be presenting the forces with our Tommy we do have a timer system right now, so Kimberly's got her a I timer that's what I'm here to do. Well thank you so much Council. Good morning everyone. We do not have a new employee. Actually this is Sam with PSPC. He is our consultant for the class and comp study. They put me here first I guess because I don't I don't generate revenue. I just ask for money. So that's what I'm here to do. That's what I'm here to do. Within these 40 minutes, I do have the task of presenting both the results of the class and comp study and the HR piece. I anticipate that we'll be talking mostly about the class and comp study, which is fine. Hopefully anything that I don't get to present in terms of the HR department, I'll get an opportunity to do that at the next meeting. So with that, we will go ahead and get started with the class and comp study. and same is gonna go through the majority of this information with you. Okay, good morning, hi, I'm Sam Hines with Public Sector Personnel Consultants. So today, just kind of wanting to give you guys an overview of the studies that we've been working on

[0:12:15] for the city over the past six months, and then kind of giving you an idea of where we're at in terms of cost estimates for adopting any sort of new salary plan. So this all kind of started off in August. we came out and met with your employees. We had, I think, eight informational meetings where we introduced the study to your employees kind of set some expectations. During that meeting, we also introduced position analysis questionnaires, which is a tool that we used to learn about the job. So we had the employees tell us directly what they do on a day-to-day basis so that we could learn about each role. Kind of in September, we finished up our PAQ review, and we made classification recommendations, so titling recommendations for each role in the city. Kind of running right at the end of that, we started our salary survey. So confirming the comparator agencies with the city, we ended up going with the historical lists that you guys have used in the past that kind of captures all of the different services that is provided here. And then other cities that are similar, you know, in kind of nature to y'all's. And then kind of wrapped up the survey in December, but I began with some initial cost estimates. Kind of running concurrently, we have a job description writer updating all of your job descriptions with content from the PAQs. And then we're here today just to kind of introduce initial findings and recommendations and then to gather some of your feedback, hopefully some direction that will help us to move towards something more final. So again, the classification review process, we'll go quickly through this because I want to get to the cost elements. But classification, again, all employees were invited to complete either a group or an individual PAQ. Again, reviewing those to identify the distinct number and level of occupations at the city. Management participation, the proposed classifications were reviewed by HR with their feedback incorporated into the final schematic.

[0:14:17] Again, the PAQs are just important because we use it for the identification of distinct occupations, job families, job series. So being sensitive to knowing how an employee might progress through either a department or a job family, and then ensuring that there's kind of a logical consistency between job groups. So classification, it's a foundation for sound pay practices. It's a good item to do before a salary survey because it helps the city to understand, hey, what occupations do we have? What type of labor do we employ here? And, you know, kind of what's going great for these types of jobs. So, finding some of the classification process, you guys have approximately 900 employees working in 328 distinct position classifications. So, that's 328 distinct job services that you guys have employees employed here at the city. Again, with the job descriptions, we're going to be updating job descriptions with the content from the P.A.Q.s. There's a little bit of a lag time on that three to four months to complete, but we have somebody started on that So at the end of this you'll have new job descriptions that all have the same template and that are reflective of the duties and responsibilities assigned to each position at the current moment So kind of following up on the classification study We began the salary survey the market survey and analysis of external competitiveness We talk about market competitors, those are employers that the city competes with to obtain and retain qualified employees. Those could be maybe more local in nature, so some of those cities that are in your more immediate geographic area, perhaps the county, Angelo State University, other local competitors. And then we talk about competitors, which are cities that offer similar services or have similar types of characteristics or demographics. When we do the survey, it's important to remember that we're comparing jobs and not the employers, so you will see some cities that are a little bit larger than St. Angelo, perhaps some that are smaller, but really looking to ensure that we're comparing job to job. From

[0:16:21] these groups, we solicited pay plans, organizational charts, job descriptions, to aid in the process of job matching, and then for positions that have portability in the private sector, we've also included private sector data, and that's weighted at 50%. So here you can see the market model. These are 20 public sector agencies that are either local to the region or around the state of Texas that have similar characteristics as the city of San Angelo. So you guys do offer some unique services that we wanted to make sure that we captured in the market model such as your airport. Not every city is going to have like a water plant so we wanted to make sure that we captured that as well. So again, from these 20 cities, we solicited pay plans or charge job descriptions just to help us in the process of job matching. So after the classification study, when we had identified those 328 distinct jobs, we began with the selection of benchmark positions. Benchmark positions are those that are commonly found at most of the competitor employers. So thinking like code enforcement officer, police officer, accounting technician, jobs that are going to be common across all of these different agencies. There's no such thing as a perfect match, but we do look for similarity in knowledge, skills and abilities. So we dig in at the job description level to ensure that we're not just matching job title to job title, but matching job duty to job duty. So out of those 328 positions, we identified 230 that we would call salary survey benchmarks. For those positions that don't have a salary survey worksheet, we refer to internal alignment and general salary administration principles to kind of guide its range assignment on your salary schedule, which we'll talk about here in a minute. So for your general service employees, the application of the survey data, we did midpoint to midpoint analysis. Each position in the city currently has them into max range. The midpoint is kind of like the middle part of that structure.

[0:18:22] The reason that we use the midpoint as our point of comparison is because other organizations may have really wide ranges or really narrow ranges and so the midpoints kind of a one consistent aspect of a pay range that we can compare across agencies. So for keeping in mind that we're looking at the midpoint, I just have an example here of a benchmark survey worksheet. This is from a survey that we did for the city of Irving, but for this, you know, it's the same format or whatever. So here in the left-hand column, you can see the position title that we're comparing to As you move to the right, you can see the positions that are matched, and then continuing to the right, you see the survey organization, and then their midpoint for that position. So, you know, we produce 230 of these types of worksheets for the different occupations within the city. Kind of in that top line there, you can see the Irving midpoint in relation to the market average midpoint. For positions that just have a public sector equivalent, so like police officer, public safety. We would just be referencing the public sector average for those that have that private sector equivalent. We're incorporating data from the Economic Research Institute for the San Angelo region. Those are both weighted at 50% to come up with the prevailing market rate. So set. You don't mind? Sure. Go back to slide. One more. Oh, I don't know if I know the back button. Yeah, you know what, don't worry. As you pick your midpoints, do you pick your midpoint from the cities, that individual city's midpoint? Or do you take an average of all of them and decide a general midpoint? So an example, for example, on this worksheet, this would be the midpoint of that city's range. Okay, I'll take a midpoint of that specific city because it's not excused. So you took the average of the city. Yes, yep. So like all of the public sector averages would be all of the municipal organizations added up and divided by the number of matches.

[0:20:25] So here are the salary survey findings. Sorry, this is a little hard to read behind market. So out of those 230 benchmark positions, around 39% of those were what weird characterizes being behind market. We say anything is behind market if the midpoint is less than 5% behind the market average midpoint. So minus 10%, minus 15%. So on the whole around 40% of your jobs are surveying behind the market at the midpoint. 44% are within a competitive range, which we define as with plus or minus 5%. And then 17% of the positions were ahead of the market. So the relationship to the market midpoint for those positions was greater than 5%. Here on this work sheet, you can just kind of see some summary statistics about those 230 benchmark jobs, you know, it tends to be common in a salary survey that you have some positions that are behind the market and some that are at or ahead of the market. Really what a salary survey is intended to do is to help the city identify where are we falling behind in our salary administration practices. It's to kind of help you triage your limited budget dollars and get those positions that are behind the market up to a competitive rate of pay. So a lot of times what happens in cities is they'll apply universal cost of living adjustment to each position a year over year. What kind of tends to happen is that you might be overdoing it for some jobs and underdoing it for others knowing that the labor market moves differently for each one of those classifications. And so a salary survey like this just kind of helps you to capture like hey where is this approach kind of maybe faltering or not adequate and how do we get those folks up to an competitive rate of pay. So after doing those survey worksheets, kind of looking to see what the survey average midpoints were,

[0:22:27] our next job was to assign each position to a range on your salary schedule. The city currently maintains a salary schedule with the following components. It's been in use for multiple years. You guys have 39 ranges. As you go from one range to the next, it increases by 5.4%. The range width from Mint to Max is 50%. This is a really good type of salary schedule for applying survey data. It also allows the city to create logical relationships between sequential job series, you know, that every increase in a range is equal to 5.4%. And so we did discuss pay plan design with the city, but your current salary schedule is really well-suited for applying survey results like this. So the way that we would go about doing the range assignments, positions are assigned to the range whose midpoint is closest to the market average midpoint. Here in this example, for the administrative assistant benchmark, you know, if it came back at 4, 6, 8, 9, 9, we would have a formula running in the background which ranges midpoint is this closest to on the salary schedule. In this particular example, it's closest to the midpoint of range six, and so we would assign it to range six on the salary schedule. And so that's really kind of the first draft of how we go about doing our range assignments. We hand really closely to the survey data. But following that, we do a review of internal equity and internal alignment. So using the survey data as our primary guide for range placement, we also want to consider how positions relate to one another within the department within the larger organization. We also want to ensure that there's kind of like a logical sequence as we move through a job series or a job family. So usually at this stage, it might be like an adjustment of up one range or down one range, just to ensure that there's adequate separation between maybe

[0:24:27] like a line level employee and a supervisor or a supervisor and a manager, that sort of a thing. So we did that internal equity internal alignment review with the city, not a ton of changes were made as a result of that, but just kind of a fine-tuning element that we incorporate as we apply some of the survey results. So given that, we've modeled, you know, range assignments for each position. We have some different implementation options, and thanks for you guys to begin to consider over the next few budget workshops, or as you guys are talking about, you know, maybe adopting this new pay plan. options for your general service employees would be to adopt the proposed ranges for each position, then at the discretion of the City Council apply a cost of living adjustment. So we haven't factored any of that into our estimates yet, but if you do apply a cost of living adjustment first, it typically brings the cost to adopt the ranges down because it helps to move some people into the proposed range. But option one, kind of like the entry level option, it would be to bring any employee whose current salary is below the proposed range minimum up to the range minimum. So if you have some folks that are currently paid at a new rate and their range changes and their current salaries below that range minimum, we're modeling out bringing those folks up to the minimum of their new pay range. This option may create pay compression and classifications with multiple incumbents, so if you guys have a ton of people that are behind the pay grade, that all of a sudden move up to the same rate, that could be a potential thing that happens as a result of this first option, but really that's the primary cost that we're going to have to deal with no matter what is getting every employee into the range. Option two that we've modeled for the city is to maintain comp or ratio in the proposed

[0:26:28] range. This is more costly, but it would ensure that existing salary relationships are maintained. So, comparatia is kind of like where you fall within the pay grade. It might be that your salary is at the first quartile and maybe you're paid at the midpoint. But this option ensures that whatever existing salary relationships there are amongst people within a certain position classification that those are being maintained. That we're not putting a 10-year employee in a one-year employee at the same pay rate. So if I could just note on that piece that that is definitely something that we want to focus on. We would do so anytime somebody promotes anyway. That's how we typically look at employee salary, whatever we're looking at the pay plan. If we don't go, or if we don't take that into consideration when we're applying this, we will create some issues in terms of salary and taking into account somebody's time with the city or experience. So that would definitely be what we would recommend. Great. So here are the initial estimates. Again, this is without a cost of living adjustment. If the city does intend to provide one, we can factor that into the model. typically the best way to proceed, not that the coal is related necessarily to the market survey, but it's often in the interest of the city to apply the cost of living adjustment first and then adopt the proposed ranges. So again, this is without any cost of living adjustment. Option one, that's getting folks who are behind their proposed range minimum into the range. That comes out to around $1.5 million or 4.75% of current payroll. It would affect about half of your general service employees

[0:28:29] with the average increase being around $5,000. Option two, again, it's a little bit more costly because you're honoring kind of like the range penetration that they currently have in their current range. This comes out to around 2.1 million or 6.8% of current payroll. This affects more employees out of that group with the average increase being reduced to around $3,800. One question for consideration that we'll kind of discuss here at the end of the presentation is, does the city want to include additional and certification pays as part of the employee-based salary? You guys do have some really rich certification pay policies that contribute quite substantially in certain cases to total employee compensation. The average additional pay per employee is around $2,700. It's typically tied to a certification or a license that they may hold within their department. I believe some departments have like a flat dollar rate per certification, while others have like a percentage based and that's why we see some really high additional pays. But if we were to consider those as part of the base salary, that would reduce some of those implementation costs. So that's something that I would like to get a little bit of feedback or direction on not something that we have to answer here today But something to consider as we move forward Again, just also want to reiterate City Council retains the discretion to select the implementation options We're here to model available scenarios or model additional scenarios as desired But this is kind of where we're at right now I'm showing you what it might cost to adopt the proposed ranges and then to adopt the proposed ranges and while also honoring the as well as current comp or ratio or range penetration in their current range. So a couple of things to note here. This is considering that all of the state

[0:30:29] is modeled to 100% of market. In the past, when we have talked about studies, we've considered 98, 95% of market. So that would still be an option that they could model. The only, I guess, caution I would have is if you try to model something, anything less than 95% of market, we really aren't doing much good. So we're still behind in terms of being competitive. Another thing on the ad pay consideration, I know Shane and I have had this discussion since I got back for about a year now. We do have some work to do on our ad pay structure. We were waiting for us to see if we could do a class in comp study in order for us to focus on that. So, in addition to potentially adding that ad pay to somebody's base salary, that will come with a structuring a more solid ad pay structure for those positions that require certifications or licenses and things like that. So for your public safety positions, kind of transitioning from your general service employees into public safety, those positions exist on a gradient step and flat rate system. So it's a little bit different from the salary schedule that you guys maintain for the rest of your employees. The city requested that we evaluate the entry and minimum rates for each rank in lieu of the midpoint to midpoint as most strengths are paid at a flat rate. So the difference in this, the survey worksheets for these roles is that instead of comparing the midpoint, we're looking at that average entry rate, because you guys don't really maintain a range for most of your public safety roles. They're typically paid at a flat rate or an abbreviated grade and step schedule. We did benchmark all sworn positions.

[0:32:29] I believe it was around 14. So thinking of like police recruit all the way up to police captain, fire recruit all the way up to your fire marshal assistant fire chief. If I could just have been a note on the civil service, the reason why we requested to compare to minimum rates is because through civil service, we are required to pay every rank, start them at the same salary. So this does not include, however, any of their ad pays, whether it's required through civil service or something that we pay aside from that. So it is just for base salary. So as we move through this, just one question to consider, when we did the survey, it was kind of identified that the DFW comparators were consistently high outliers, it's a really competitive market for public safety just because there's such a density of cities in the region. So we have modeled two different options, one with the full market model and then one with those high outliers removed. So here are the survey findings, when we look at the full market model, so that's those full 20 public sector agencies, you know, 12 of 13 of your public safety position survey behind the market at entry, again, with the behind being characterized as anything less than minus 5%, so like minus 10%, minus 15%. So the full market model, the DFW averages really drive some of those numbers that is just a hyper-competitive marketplace right now. Some of the policies of the cities that were included in the comparator market model are to, you know, survey the top four cities within the DFW Metroplex and add five percent. So I think that's the city of Denton strategy. So some of those DFW numbers really are kind of eye-popping or different from some of the comparators and the rest of the group. when we remove those DFW outliers you guys are tend to be more competitive so

[0:34:34] 7 of 13 are behind the market at entry but you're a lot closer to market. Kind of looking at some of the cities that are maybe more in your regional area you guys tend to be closer to those types of pay than the ones in the DFW marketplace. So for implementation options we currently have modeled three different options for the city's consideration and again were open to modeling additional based on your feedback. The first option was to align the entry rates for every rank to 100% of the market average entry. That would be for the full market model. One kind of downfall of this is that it doesn't ensure consistency as you increase through the rank structure. It's really just pegged tightly to the market. Some organizations prefer to have a structure where as you move perhaps from officer to corporal, corporal to sergeant, there's like a 10% increase or a 15% increase, something fixed so that you know as you promote through the rank structure that hey I'm going to get an in additional pay bump of X amount. When we tie it just to the market, the market shifts and moves and so in some of these models that we've modeled out, the increase as you go through the rank structure isn't always consistent. It might be you get 10% as you go from officer to sergeant but then you get 30% as you go from sergeant to lieutenant. So the first two options are pegged again tightly to the market and then we've introduced a third option where we kind of reference the survey data but try and create some consistency and increases from one rank to the next. For that third model down there we're just looking to to get the entry for every rank within plus or minus 5% of the market average entry. So it gives us a little bit of wiggle room to introduce a little bit more consistency in the total structure. The second option for implementation that is the same as the first,

[0:36:35] but it's with the DFW comparators removed from the market model. So just really quick, in terms of the separation between rank, that is something that both Fire and PD would like to focus on as part of this study. I know that you're both available if there's some feedback that they would like to add, but I have presented this information to both chiefs and both have indicated that obviously that's important. When you're looking at promoting, you wanna make sure that you obviously are compensated and see a difference between your current responsibility and what you're promoting too, so. Yeah, so kind of like encouraging that career progression like, hey, if I'm gonna take on these additional responsibilities, knowing that you're compensated by an additional percentage or whatever. So for option one, this is referencing the full market model. If we were to align the entry rates to 100% of the market average entry for police, that would come out to around $2.2 million to 15% of current payroll, it would affect every employee within that department with the average increase being around $13,000. For fire, the cost is around $1.7 million or $12.59% of your current payroll. That would affect every employee in the department with the average increase being around $10,000. So again, referencing the full market model, some of those costs are fairly high, would affect every employee in the organization. For option 2, aligning the entry rates for all ranks to 100% of the market average entry. With DFW removed from the market model, this brings the cost down quite a bit. As you recall, when we looked at the survey averages for the adjusted market model, 7 out of 13 were behind.

[0:38:37] So that means the remainder were either at or ahead of market. For police, this cost would come to about $1.5 million or 10.74% of current payroll. It would affect every employee with an average increase of $9,000. For fire, when we look at the adjusted market model, your firefighters, that line level, entry level position, comes back almost spot on the nose at market. So for this implementation option, those employees wouldn't see an increase because they're already at market. So that's why it affects only 96 out of 175 employees, those 79 firefighters. For that rank, you guys, your entry rate is already like almost spot on the nose to what the market is paying when we remove the FW. The average increase for this option would be around $4,700. And then for option three, again, aligning entry rates, This one is the one that's different from the other two. It's where we would align the entry rates to within plus or minus 5% of the market average entry. So giving us a little bit of wiggle room on either end to create some consistency as you move from one rank to the next. We can either do this referencing the full market model or the adjusted market model. We've done one cost estimate for fire. We haven't done one for police using this methodology yet. But for fire when we looked at the adjusted market models that were moving DFW from the data set, modeling out a fixed increase as you move through the rank structure, that cost came out to around $425,000 or $3% of current payroll. So you can kind of see that because we had just kind of met with them and we're getting some of their feedback about how they might want to move forward.

[0:40:38] So this has kind of been a dynamic conversation over the last week or two. So we have the ability to do it, and we can do that certainly for the organization, but I just didn't have time before the meeting today. So with that being said, let me go back here. Just some questions for council discussion. You know, not that we have to have these answered today, but just for your consideration moving forward, that will affect kind of I guess the ordering timing of things. Does the city want to provide a cost of living adjustment before adopting the proposed ranges? Again, not every employee is slated to receive a market adjustment. The market adjustment is really targeted towards those positions that are behind market. By providing a cost of living adjustment, every employee would see at least some sort of movement or wage growth, maybe tied to inflation or something like that. It would also reduce the cost to adopt the proposed ranges if you provide the cost of living adjustment first that might get some people into the minimum of their new range. So typically by doing the COLA first it reduces the cost to adopt the market adjustments. They're really two separate things but in terms of the way that you might want to time things it would be in the interest of the city to do the COLA first. So if you guys do intend to provide a cost of living adjustment we can bake that into our assumptions and in our models and show you what the cost might be for either option one or option two for your general service employees. I also just kind of want to make sure that the city has a conversation about do we want to include those certification and additional pays as part of employee base salary and then for public safety, do we want to include DFW knowing that those are very high outliers or do we want to hem strictly to the full market model? And then lastly, for public safety, do we just want to have

[0:42:41] to the survey data or do we want to incorporate a fixed increase as we move through the rank structure? So again, Council retains discretion to select the implementation options where available to model additional scenarios based on your feedback, based on your budgetary constraints or council goals. But this is kind of just where we're at at this current juncture in the study and wanted to give you guys kind of a ballpark figure of what to expect. as you begin to think about adopting a new pay plan for the upcoming fiscal year. So with that being said, we'll take any questions and the comments that you guys may have. Yeah, so just, you know, quick summary based on the model that's presented today, anywhere between $4 to $5 million is what would be needed to fund that. This takes into consideration that PD and Fire are a little bit further behind market than I expected. Our non-civil service employees and positions are relatively in market, so I believe 60% are within market, so the other 40% is who we would have to focus on. And one of the things that I hope to present at the next meeting as we get your feedback are also some additional benefits that maybe are not so costly that we can provide it for some reason. We have to take a different approach because of the funding, or maybe an extended approach because of funding. Dr. Julian.

[0:44:41] On the total compensation, is it salary only benefits considered. So this cost doesn't incorporate like your benefits load rate. So the additional that you would contribute to TMRS is not incorporated into the cost estimate. I'm not sure if we could run that on on the alls end. It's typically runs around like 18 or 20 additional when you consider the additional contributions to the retirement systems. I mean do we think if those were added in it would not change the percentages in. It would not change the percentage in cost, it would change the percentage. And percentage of baseline everybody else. So we're comparing just salaries, but it's total compensation. Going to be right in line with that, or could that vary different quite a bit between these cities? Yeah, that could vary a little bit based on the types of benefits that are offered or what the city's charged their employees for healthcare coverage. So for this survey, we're just kind of looking at base pay to base pay. We did do a certification pay study to CA like our other cities baking these certifications into their base payer or not. So we did a certification pay study for police fire and then your water, water plant operators. But for the survey, we're just looking at the base pay rates. Yes, I'm sorry, I missed your question. We didn't, yeah, we didn't survey medical dental vision any of that, it's not included. The biggest, to expand a little bit on that, biggest difference most cities in Texas do participate in TMS so the retirement probably wouldn't fluctuate that much but perhaps the health vision and dental would. That could be a big difference especially with health insurance. I'd be interested to see if any of that could be incorporated especially the health insurance part to see how much we contribute towards other cities and then is cost of living equated in any of this? Are we just looking at salaries? Just looking at the salaries I think that could pass a difference and so I'm I'm for

[0:46:46] taking out all the DFW because I think that's probably the biggest detractor on your you were talking about the market models so as a hundred percent is that all the cities and in it is that we're listed in that one so what we consider a hundred percent those 20 that you listed those 20 yeah those are the 20 so for your general service positions we wouldn't recommend necessarily removing DFW because some of those cities capture those services that you guys are unique in offering such as your air for some of the water plant rolls. When we talk about a hundred percent of the market for public safety that would be the full 20 list and the adjusted market model would be the 16 agencies. So there's 40 of W cities kind of in the mextenten Plano that we would remove from the survey sample. And then Veronica, you mentioned something earlier about the 95 to 98% on the market model. So is that like taking out just more or two of those? What were you kind of alluding to there? So that means when he talks about matching a 100% of market that's compared to those 20 cities, if we go 95 or 98%, it would be 95 to 98% of the market the market value. So if it was 100,000, it would be 95,000, so we get to do that what we're talking about. Okay. Yeah, more or less like the way that we're modeling things like out of those 20 comparator organizations, if we model it at 100% of the market, like 10 will pay less of the midpoint than you and 10 will pay more at the midpoint than you. If we do it at 95% of the market average, that might position you to wear like 12 or paying more than you at the midpoint and eight are paying less. So when we talk about like 100% of the market average midpoint, it's kind of like the out of those 20 cities, when we reduce it down to 95, it makes you less competitive in relation.

[0:48:54] Is any actual earnings compared? And what I mean by that is especially like with the civil service, sometimes we have a lot of opportunities for overtime, to if money, things like that, is any of that considered or is it just a straight basic salary based on their hours that they're supposed to work if everything was done? Just based salary, that's correct. Thank you. Tom, are we? Two minutes. We have two minutes to present, but I think you can. Well, no, this is very important. That's my whole point. This is a lot of information to digest, at least for me. I'm gonna stay as big pictures, I can, without getting down in the weeds, I would like to see us try to adopt something that is consistent, that is as fair as humanly possible to all employees, but keeps them, keeps all of our employees in a competitive pay position so that we, five years from now, we don't start looking and say, oh my gosh, we're behind here, but something that keeps up with the market. And my ignorance, I know you probably told us which of those it was, I'm not sure which one it was, but I'd like to see us try to adopt something like that. I'm going to have to reserve a whole lot of input until I have time to look through this and come back next month, but just from a big picture standpoint, those are my remarks. I had a lot of the same questions that Patrick brought up, whether the health insurance was in there and cost the living expenses is compared because that is a big deal. So I'd kind of like with Hebrew, I'd like to look into a little bit more, also taking those things into consideration. Well, first of all, let me say thanks to Veronica and the group.

[0:51:03] We've been looking for this kind of information for four or five years or longer. I do think it's a little unusual that we're presenting it this morning when later today we're going to be talking about the possibility of cutting benefits. $45 million is a chunk of money. Now, we have been behind the curve for a long period of time in this community, not only in public safety, but also salaries of most of the workers here. So I'm going to have to agree with Mr. Hebert and what's been said so far. We have to find a way that will allow us to get to some level and then continue to keep that level. So the next council is not behind the curve. I've been on the council almost 10 years and we talk about salaries every year because we're behind the curve. So however we get there, we need to see about that. But we do need to know the citizens know that it's going to be tough to get there at four or five million dollars when there's a possibility that we're going to be discussing reduction in services in other areas. So thanks. Mr. Perry. I just want to make sure that I'm reading this right at the graph that shows the salary survey findings the colored part I had to get my phone out to find that little number in the yes sorry about that that didn't pop up super looks like we're 39% of behind what the median is but above and even where it's 61% correct now that is a much better improvement that it has been over the

[0:53:04] over a few years ago. We just gave the citizens just gave a 5% raise to everyone last year. I'd like to see what impact that 5% raise, how that impacts this graph, if you could do like a before and after. And I'd also like to see a listing of the longevity of employees, but I'd like to see a breakdown of a hundred thousand and more versus those under 100,000. And I'd like to have that as soon as possible, Veronica. I'm sorry, just for clarity purposes, you want a listing of population of 100,000 or salary of 100,000? The salaries of 100,000 and 100,000 above, and then those that are under 100,000. That is more of a, that's how my mind works. I'm not taking it by per department or classification or police or fire or admin or anything like that. I just like to see where those breaks are and where those breaks fall into any of this graph. Yeah, so that's just a mental-marry thing. Sure. Just a note about the 5% salary increase from last year that probably didn't impact the survey findings if it wasn't applied to the structure. It was probably applied to the individual employee salaries but I don't imagine you moved employees up a pay grade as a result of that, correct? That's correct. Okay, so the survey findings would hold true for that. It would be more about like their placement within the range. So that, I guess what you're saying is the 5% doesn't it really did influence any salary enough to put it in a different level yeah

[0:55:05] because when we look at the survey we're just kind of looking at the the paper part right like the min to max range that you guys use for the roles and not necessarily the individual salaries of each person in the role we do apply it during the cost estimate like if the salaries below the proposed range minimum and if we want to honor their current range penetration and the new range but typically like the reason that we do a survey like this is because you guys might be applying those COLAs year over year that 5% last year might have been overdoing it for some jobs and underdoing it for others and so the survey helps to identify which positions are we... Yeah I guess the bottom line of that question is how did that raise impact this study? Yeah I guess in thinking about about like how that 5% was applied. Like that probably helped some folks be within the new range. So like if they're, if they're, if you had a lot of folks that were clustered like at the minimum rate of their current range and then that range moved up, you know, two ranges 10.8%, like you're gonna see a large increase. But if you have people that are stratified throughout the range because you provided a COLA last year, like the distance for them to get into the new range will be reduced. So it does pay to do the COLA year over year because the individual employee salaries might be more competitive than the formal range that's on paper, if that makes sense. OK, good deal. Thank you. You bet. Yes, sir. Thank you. All right, we've got a couple of minutes here to wrap it up. So on the cost of your implementation range, does that reflect vacancies? Like Keith, there was a number up there. Does that reflect in vacancy? No, so if you guys had budgeted additional FTE for the year, we could plug in like the minimum rate,

[0:57:07] but for right now, this is just based on yours. Those are field positions. Field positions. So we're not, because there was a point in time where we could have done raises just out of vacancies, and we have repaired a lot of those holes. On the ad pay benefits, I typically think those are privileges, or those are things that hit the higher ranked people, and maybe some of the lower people that are just starting out primary aren't eligible for some of those. I don't know if that's right or wrong, Veronica. Yeah, no, not necessarily. Honestly, we see that more within the skilled positions, and those usually fall within the middle part of the range. So if they're having to operate equipment, then they need a certain license. Those are the ad pays that we're talking about, or certifications. want to make the availability of those as fair and consistent with everybody from top to bottom. I think DFW, while we do have to compete with them, looking this part right here, it's hard to compare as to what they make in DFW. So I would agree with some here that some we have to look at, but throwing it in here, that skews it a lot. I mean, we just saw that number in there. And I have a question and we'll ask this a PD and fire when I get over it. Some people are behind on pay because they didn't earn the merit increases. All right, would that be fair to say that? Some people get a raise by hitting certain benchmarks and attaining certain levels. Some people are at their pay just because they haven't performed in certain areas. I mean, if you look at merit pay compensation, performance based pay, and if you look at doing a COLA, you know, it's gonna affect that a little bit different And some of those people are paid that because, I mean, that's kind of the floor of where that part is. They can earn their way and perform their way up, which we'd love to see, but some of those people don't. And I imagine there's some of those people that if you talk to have a department that they would like to see, you know, transition out and find a different job somewhere else.

[0:59:08] So to me, there's always some concerns when you're giving a COLA to somebody. I get, you know, a cost of living adjustment is just a cost of living adjustment. I get that. But to me, those have always been heavily skewed for the benefit is the higher paid people, three and a half percent on the people that make over that, and I'll go back through it. I would want to see how this affects that middle floor group. I mean, are we average weighted correctly for the middle or the lower income people here? So you are correct. The coal is very different from a pay for performance type increase. But the study found was that we're pretty competitive on the top end of the pay range, and this is all for non-civil service, by the way. And the bottom of the pay range, it's the middle part where we seem to fall behind in terms of the market. Yeah, I would say just kind of like one overarching, just to paint in broad brush strokes, it was kind of like your middle management positions, where you're fairly competitive at entry, you're fairly competitive at like the director level, but for those middle management roles might be needs to be a little bit more separation as you go from maybe like a line level employee to a supervisor or a crew leader or superintendent or manager that sort of a thing and that's again that's in broad brush strokes but it tended to be like some of those middle classifications middle management sort of well in essence of keeping this on track number one thank you all for putting this together we've asked for it for a long time and I think we all knew he was going to be a surprise when it came where there's going to be a lot of adjustments. Tell me did you have one more? No, one more I guess. I would like to see Veronica if possible you to make us a recommendation as to what would work best for your department as time moves forward. No pressure there. No pressure. No pressure.

[1:01:08] But if we had more time I'm ready to give you a recommendation. I understand. You know, I think we can all talk in to visit with you. But that's, we're not going to have to, I'm looking at the council when I say this, we're not going to have to administer this. This is going to fall to our HR people. They need something they can work with that is consistent, that's fair, and that takes care of our employees and keeps us up to speed with respect to where the salaries need to be. So I'm going to be looking to you for a recommendation. You know, I'm an idiot, so. Daniel, are you going to close the comments? You want to come up with something real quick? He can put it in here. Yeah, he'll be put in here a little bit. No, the only thing is, I think that's a great recommendation from Tom. He absolutely from HR as the recommendations come through. Again, we'll have another meeting at the end of next month. And again, the following month, so this will be a little bit more clarity, a little bit more as far as recommendation come from HR. I think that this is perfect though. Again, I'm glad that the commitment sounds like some be there for next month, but I don't have anything else to add other than this good presentation. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Finance, come on down. Do you want? We're going to have to do this one twice. What's their allotment, 20? We have a good 30 minutes, actually. Does that get 30? Yeah, also. We'll give them the pink one, right? Patrick, you keep me straight.

[1:03:17] Good morning, mayor council. We have some options and some items we'd like to present to you guys this morning. A lot of these are brainstorming at Tina I and even Ryan have had over the last couple months and so we've divided these up into revenues and expenditures and each one of these we just kind of want to present to you at a high level. We kind of got a lot we'd like to get through and leave time for your questions as well. The first item on this list is levying a cemetery tax. was looking through the TML revenue manual there's a little known provision that allows us to add on to our property tax that is outside of the normal T&T calculation so this is on top of what the three and a half percent would be and this is because we are a trustee of the Fairmount Cemetery we're allowed to charge up to five additional cents on the property tax. Now we wouldn't ever need those additional five cents. Right now the general funds contributing about $95,000 annually to the cemetery, which is nowhere close to a cent on the property tax. This is an additional option. We will have to research this. This is kind of a new concept for us. We'd have to vet this legally and make sure it's going to interact correctly with the 3.5% cap. So, this is kind of an early look, yeah, early idea. Now, I'll just add all of these ideas are really just throwing them out there for council consideration. Right now, we'd just like to get your feedback on whether you'd like them research further, and if so, then we'll come back with, you know, a better proposal and how what the actual cost impact would be or savings the next time on this list is the ability to charge a credit card processing fee or convenience fee I'm sure you guys are well aware

[1:05:20] seeing these at different places at different venues I know the county charges a convenience fee I think it's flat $2 kind of on all their credit card transactions and just to give you an idea of what our credit card costs are or annually, we currently spend about $166,000 annually on credit card transactions, credit card processing fees. So that's something we'd like to take a look at in the next budget cycle and as we're looking at fees coming up in the next couple of months as well. And that's just the general fund portion? And that's just the general fund. Yeah, most of the numbers I'm gonna present today are general fund portions. But I think in the water fund, It would probably be well over 300,000, and that was several years ago, so. Yes, ma'am. And a lot of these concepts, again, I'm gonna focus on the general fund for the most part, but a lot of these concepts can be applied to the different enterprise funds as well, so minus, of course, the taxing pieces. The next item is ensure general fund services are appropriately charged to enterprise funds. We have two main ways that we do this. Currently, right now, we have an indirect cost plan that goes through and does a study on the indirect cost charge to enterprise funds. This is basically charging out water's portion for legal services, for finance services, for city clerk. It charges it out to the water to the sewer funds. And then we have a couple other areas that we consider more direct charges. One of the big ones that we have is a lake patrol. The water fund contributes to the police department in order to fund a lake patrol out at the lake to be kind of staffed out there. Right now we're looking at increasing that contribution 100,000 in the next fiscal year to kind of bring that contribution up to what it actually costs

[1:07:22] to provide that service out at the lake for the police department to be patrolling. Some of the other areas that we think could use that same approach is engineering. A lot of engineering services are obviously, they're used in the water and sewer departments. Code compliance is one that we think can be spread out to other enterprise funds as well. And we're willing to look at other areas and other departments that are directly using general fund services. The next piece is examining fees for service. The most of you are aware we examine our fees every two years. This year we've kind of taken it upon ourselves to kind of review every single fee that we charge that's currently in the fee schedule. One of the goals that I think would be awesome for us to have is to be able to get up to cost the services on as many fees as possible. That basically just takes the, it funds the departments that are service based. So when you go get a permit, the cost of that permit should cover the cost to provide that permit to the citizen or the home builder. This takes off some of the burden from the tax funds themselves. We don't have to subsidize with sales tax or property tax. So that's one of the goals we'd like to have on our revenues. recovery service. We were approached by a third party of vendor that came to us and said that they are willing to look at to be on retainer and look at crashes and wrecks and accidents around the city and kind of look and see if there is an opportunity for them to recover some of the damages of those wrecks to our city property damages to our city property this example would be like if a vehicle hits one of our traffic signals and

[1:09:22] we didn't we didn't recoup the entire cost of that damage they go out and try to find that through our insurance claims and you know things like that and I think did you have a number that they gave us for yeah one of one of the examples they gave us was that in the city of McKinney over three years they They had, they were able to get $737,000 in claims, recovered claims, and they had filed over a million dollars of claims over that three year period as well. So I do think it's not as stable. It's not an ongoing, right? It's not a, you know, sustainable source, but it is a one time source that we could recoup. And I think Chief Brody's actually doing some of this with the fire department. I think he'll speak a little bit to that later or if you have questions of that, but this is really no cost, no risk to the city, so I think it's probably something that we'll move forward with, as long as Council is good with that. They're paid based on a percentage. Correct. Yeah, so, I mean, we don't have anything to lose by going out and looking to see what's there, so. Thank you. We actually currently do have a recovery for accidents when our staff has to go out and clean up the glass in anything that's on the ground oil. So at this point, we implement that probably a couple years back, and we're collecting that right now. But this is actually an extension of that. So it has been working well for us, too. The next item on here are impact fees, levying some kind of impact fee whenever new development comes. That would just allow us to pay for the additional infrastructure needed to serve new developments in the city. Another item that we thought about was paid downtown parking. And this can really take two, I think this can take two forms. One form is, of course, the parking meter that you park that you have on the side of the road kind of thing, which kind of used to see in maybe some bigger cities.

[1:11:24] The other option that we have in this is expanding downtown parking, either building a parking garage and adding some gates there so you can come in and pay. And that would kind of help offset not only the construction, but also the future maintenance of that parking garage, expanding parking downtown. The next item is taking public safety expenditures to a vote. As you know, we're capped at three and a half percent, and in order to go above that three and a half percent, we would have to take a vote to the voters, to the citizens. And so we think that some public safety expenditures, if they rise to the level of not only importance, but also dollar amount, dollar value, that we could, if needed, take those expenditures to the voters, if needed. The next piece is in over 65, we currently have an over 65 freeze on property taxes. We kind of want to investigate maybe the ability to remove it and or roll it back a little bit and or smooth out the effects of those, Right now, we lose about $4.4 million property taxes just due to the freeze itself, and so we'd like to look at maybe some of the strategies and if it's even possible to get out of that freeze as well. And one of the reasons that we bring this up in particular is that most Texas cities do not offer this. They offer maybe an exemption for over 65, but I think we're only, as far as I know, one of two Texas cities that offer this benefit for our over 65 population and this came into place probably about 15 years ago when the state implemented the over 65 property tax freeze for the school districts and we had some citizens come to city council and city council did vote to implement a freeze on on the city's tax as well. Yeah we just for some background right yeah we've seen

[1:13:25] we've seen a majority of the freezes that I've been I'm aware of kind of in the Metroplex area where they're high growth, where this really hasn't impacted them. They're always hitting that three and a half percent cap every single year. They're always have high growth to kind of offset their ability and sales tax to offset their freeze as well. The next item is increasing tournaments at the Texas bank sports complex. Again, this is an area that I think is ripe for growth. The sports are a big thing. And right now, currently, the general fund contributes around $662,000 annually, and then the Texas Bank Sport Complex also receives $200,000 of hot funds. And so the goal here would kind of would be to offset that subsidy from both the general fund and from the hot funds, so that those funds can be used for other purposes, other services, other uses. And then the next one is also along the same lines increase the use of civic events venues. Right now currently again, the civic events is primarily funded by hot tax at 1.19 million. So a million dollars goes to subsidizing our civic events funds. about 68% of their total revenue, and so maybe increasing the use of some of those civic events so that they can kind of function without additional hot tax funds. Those are our revenue suggestions, or some of the ideas that we've come up with at this council. Anybody have any questions on these before I move to expenditures? Yeah, your last two, I'm big on, because it's force complexes across Texas are popping up

[1:15:26] multi-million dollar facilities and being funded by the tournaments and not from the cities. Or at least they're getting it in the hot tax or whatever it is. On the impact fees, I did have a question on that. Do you have a rough estimate of how much our tax base increases on new development currently? Do you remember what new properties were last year? New properties we added 110,000, 110 million to the property tax role last year. And it's around there every single year, 90,000, 110,000 last couple of years, million, million. On all these things like that, that's if they're already one of our largest ways that we make more taxes, I hate to put another fee on them. I understand where y'all are coming from, but I think we also need to look at the other side of things and figure out more heads and beds, more sales tax, more development. That brings in that money instead of the impact fees. So if we can figure out a way to help build more houses, then I think that's going to pay off way better than just impact fees would. Okay, and I think the impact fees are meant to pay for the cost of infrastructure as new development comes in. Is that right? but they have to pay that he put on them but yeah don't they already pay for most of their infrastructure that's a question for shame yes current currently they do pay for the majority of their infrastructure we do have places in our nets where we do we assist with some oversized piping things like that where the city does help and of course had visited with council prior to Christmas about you know creating a more formalized policy to help developers with oversized infrastructure moving forward and so we're currently working through that working with Brandon right now to work on the language to make sure that we're we're not not stepping over our authority or our bounds to be able

[1:17:31] to assist but we're working through that now and and again you're right impact fees in the long run can be burdensome to builders. There's mixed feelings out there in the communities that actually do implement impact fees. And on the last little thing, on the credit card processing fees, community fees, I'm all for collecting that. That's something that most businesses have started doing now. I just want to make sure that we also offer a way that they don't have to pay that as long as it's not causing too much burden on us to have to collect it. Yes sir. Yeah we offer multiple payment methods that don't ACH, bank deposits, cash so. Yeah as long as we have those other options I'm I'm all for that because I think if you talk to most businesses that's probably one of their largest checks they write every month is to their credit card processing places so thanks y'all. I'll try to go fast because I took lots of minutes. I, several of us seated here have long wanted to see operating and maintenance costs per, by department in greater detail so that that will help us make informed decisions about CIP prioritization going forward. So thank you for that. Let's keep going on that. I appreciate it. Also good to hear that you agree that fees must cover cost of services. We need to keep driving toward achieving that and there are populations, communities, business communities that have been given a lot of latitude and that needs to be corrected in my opinion. So Tina answered the question about the over 65 freeze on property taxes city to city. I don't think we can know what that means or what your exemption means without knowing how the exemption is defined so I would like to hear about that.

[1:19:31] And then regarding the Texas bank sports complex, families with kids that are active in sports have shared with most of us a lot of concerns about the usability of that facility. And their concerns are typically related to drainage, distance to services, and the lack of onsite amenities. It's sort of an island out there, it's beautiful, if you haven't seen it, go see it. So I feel like those issues need to be addressed before we start asking for elevation in commitment from tournaments or whatever. And I would also hope and would ask you to clarify for us if we succeed in achieving what you're talking about, increasing tournaments at Texas Sports being complex, whatever that means that that should spread out to all incoming sports related activities who've got an indoor facility coming to town if you are making an effort to build there I think we should build across that entire what would you call that that entire well just that entire use of city facilities not just one we have we have more we have more expensive we we're gonna go over expenses and also some efficiencies if we want to continue through those and then maybe circle through on the rest of the questions and we're 100% good with that we're just throwing out and we want your direction on what you'd like to see more more about just a comment I'm

[1:21:32] council member has dismissed that I have long been an advocate to recover what our cost of providing any given service is so I would say for my one part I keep pushing forward on let's let's where it costs us to provide a service let's recoup our cost well I kind of reiterate but councilman hebert said since we've served together for 70 years on this we get pushed back from a lot of citizens sometimes when we try to adjust our costs so that we, the services that we're providing is paid for fully. But as we see right now, we're gonna have to look for different avenues or revenue, places to cut, expenses, possibly cut services. There's a lot of stuff that's gonna have to happen. and so I appreciate city manager saying hey we got to get an already start on this so Get whole on any service we provide Let's make sure that we're covering all those costs So the next set of items here It says revenues at the top of these are really expenditures that we'd like the ideas for reducing expenditures One of these is vacancy control We do have some positions throughout the city that are hard to fill the year in and year out and so can we look at maybe pausing filling these for a year or two? Can we create a committee that reviews these vacancies before the jobs are posted to see if they're actually needed? Those kinds of things. I think right now just through January we had saved $200,000 in just vacant positions. So that's $200,000

[1:23:35] a budget save throughout the city just in unfilled positions, general fund positions. The next item here is office and janitorial supplies. This is a little bit more of a low impact. I think if we were to cut 5% of office and janitorial supplies, it would save us about $10,000, but it's a small step and I think a prudent step in us looking towards cutting down either the over expenditure of some office supplies or what kind of paper are we buying? Can we look at the kind of paper, the janitorial supplies, or are we being wise with what supplies we're actually buying and cost effective? No, and I think the idea would be, it would be asinine if we're not doing that already. And we are. It's a special toilet paper versus everybody else. We're gonna cut it right there. For sure. And I think the finance director cut tissue from our budget. Yeah, a lot of these things just seem like everyday, ordinary, common sense decisions. For sure. And you should be making anyway. And the fact that they make a slide just kind of gets me. And this would be more aimed at, like can we set a goal of cutting those accounts by 5% and actually try to find a way to get to that. We can reduce usage of paper, for example, when we can, where we can go paperless, let's go paperless, that kind of thing. We're all saying late now, all right. The next piece is a smaller temporary across the board budget cuts. We've seen this done kind of a couple different cities where they prepare at the beginning of their budget cycle what it would look like if the entire general fund, minus public safety is how we've seen it applied. The entire general fund cut 1% of their budget. And if we were to do that in our general fund, again, minus public safety, that would save us about $391,000 that we could then apply to other council priorities

[1:25:36] or other things that we could use in the budget, other budget requests, those kinds of things. That could be special mayoral toilet paper. Yeah. The other item here is a reorganization looking at opportunities through attrition of some positions, if there's an ability to reorganize departments more efficiently through transitionary periods. The other item, next item is divesting and subsidized enterprises. We currently offer support to the golf course down at Santa Fe. The senior center also receives some general fund support. The pool obviously is being funded through some general funds on top of the fees that are collected at the pool. So are some of those enterprises still worth us pursuing? Are those things that, or are some of those things we can kind of scale back on? And not only providing those services, but where are we competing with others that are providing the same service, but yet our taxpayers are subsidizing some of that activity. The next item is vehicle maintenance and idling best practices. Just kind of putting in a formal review of those best practices to kind of help us cut down on fuel consumption and maintenance costs for our vehicle, our fleet. Close down neighborhood rec centers. We have a couple rec centers that are just kind of in opportune areas that are built in bad spots. And then we have some other rec centers that are built next to almost competing uses, similar uses. uses. So can we look at closing some of those rec centers? Forgive general fund expenses for utilities. So this would look like either the water fund, the water sewer funds, those utilities for giving expenses to the general fund for their use of water and or negotiating

[1:27:38] some kind of rate, some reduced rate for those uses of those utilities. Utilizing unpaid or paid interns you know this gives us the ability to bring in people who can contribute to the day-to-day operations of a certain department and also kind of open themselves through the opportunity of working at city government which I think is I mean is a great opportunity for I didn't really know what it was like to work for a city government until I came to work here kind of thing and so I think this provides those opportunities to students. Eliminate nursing and provide vouchers for low-income residents. This is probably more of a transition. We would transition services from providing actual immunizations and actual testing and instead provide vouchers for low-income residents to receive those services. Again, this is possibly a service that we provide that is also provided elsewhere in the community even for low-income residents. We're not certainly suggesting eliminating a program immediately. This would be again through attrition or through whatever means you know makes sense but again just throwing out ideas. Let's jump back to the office and janitorial supplies how do we procure that? Just curious is it black through by board or co-op? Yes sir. Is it three competitive bids? So some of the some of the services are are procured if they're on a grander scale if they reach those purchasing limits some of them are quoted but I think a majority of office supplies that our purchase are kind of purchase through pea cards and departments current operating budget. Okay. Thank you. I'm going to go ahead and move on to efficiencies and then we can circle around to questions. These are efficiencies. These aren't necessarily cost savings or additional revenues but ways that we can maybe push costs from here or there and or in some cases maybe even reduce costs in general. So the first

[1:29:40] This one is implement a rolling debt program. We currently contribute $2.2 million into our equipment replacement and equipment replacement needs every single year. This would allow us to shift those costs from the M&O side of the tax rate to the debt side of the tax rate, freeing up some of that money for maintenance and operating expenditures. Prioritize tears funding, this is something that I think Aaron's already done and is going to talk about in the future, just kind of prioritizing how we want to spend that tears funding going forward. Can we do some more public projects, those kinds of things? Chef's general fund cost to tears, coast of DC, and haunt. There are some, there's some opportunity for us to move some administrative costs to the tears fund, to the hotel occupancy tax fund for collecting those taxes, for administering the tears program, and is there an opportunity for us to leverage some coast DC money to do some public projects that are needed for us. And as far as general fund costs to the development corporation we are actually through the indirect cost plan we do fund general fund services to the development corporation I just want to clarify that but and then the hot fund we are still contributing to the Texas bank exports complex and Fort Concho, civic events, you know, just things like that looking at how we can kind of leverage those funds in a way that assists the general fund going forward. The next item on here is just turning off lights and equipment at the end of the day. Are there some, do we have to leave lights on everywhere? There's certain areas where they have to be left on. Can we try to figure out some ways to conserve energy? Does it make sense to put light sensors on our lights, you know, that kind of saying, is it worth the, is there a cost benefit, you know, that makes sense with that? Four-day work week, you know, this would allow us to potentially close down offices one day week, allow us to save on utilities and maybe even potentially personnel costs depending on

[1:31:43] how it's implemented. And then, merge budget and finance operations, this one's kind of more aimed at efficiencies. Right now we have some budget and finance analysts kind of throughout the departments. We're reorganizing those positions to kind of where they report to budget and finance. That would allow us the ability to kind of... Or that would allow us the ability to communicate a little bit more effectively. That a lot of these positions would stay inside the department. They'd be working with the department day to day, but there'd be a little bit more open communication between us and them. And our goals would be shared, which I think would provide alignment that would make us a little bit more efficient as a budget and finance. We had the same suggestion as a bullet point for IT as well because they have kind of the same situation throughout the city, but Bucky did already have that on his list of things to discuss. So he'll talk about that a little bit later. Johnson did skip over eliminate unnecessary boards and committees. That's really more of an efficiency. Do we need every board and every committee? How much staff time does that take for that board committee liaison to create the agenda to create the minutes to do all of that work that's involved with those boards and committees and that's really something maybe we could get with Heather and kind of look at what makes sense what doesn't what's required by Lina she has a list of that kind of a thing as well so just again yeah looking at efficiencies and what makes sense I was I was excited to talk about turning off the lights yeah you are you got over excited so any questions, feedback, direction on any of that or do we want to talk about that at a later time? I'll just make comment. First of all I appreciate this list. Certainly we're not going to do everything that you've shown here, but the opportunity to look at where we can save money, where we can move people together to do similar

[1:33:49] things I think is what we want to be unfortunately I'd say this I'm 10 years into this where we want to be probably for future consoles as you go through all this stuff so certainly this is a an excellent starting point with finance and I hope to see something very similar as we'll go through the rest of this I certainly appreciate Jonathan. I mean, you did a good job of listing a number of items, efficiencies, money savings, whatever the case may be. So, thank you. Thank you very much. Ron, Tina, I couldn't get my buttons today. You mentioned this about maybe combining some bridges, you know, finance, budget, IT. have y'all have you kind of put a pencil to that or what are you thinking that we might could take any FTE savings and spread that out to different different departments yeah I think our plan would be to kind of review those positions with the departments as well as with some team that's organized to look at those efficiencies we haven't put pen to paper quite yet but it is something that we're looking at I like that I like that mentality though of of trying to save those. And if it saves an additional apartment meeting or committees, something like that, I'm all for streamlining that kind of thing. Yeah, and the consolidating finance or IT or whatever there may be, and it may not even be eliminating an FTE. It may be that we could use that FTE more purposefully in a way that provides better service for our students. Exactly. No, I like that. Thank you very much for doing this. And I just want to close out by saying

[1:35:49] I realize some of these are unpopular ideas, and we're just trying to brainstorm and think of everything that we can. So. Yeah. Yeah. So y'all just let us know your direction, and we'll get back with you. Thank you. Mayor, we're on a morning break. It's a little bit after 10 o'clock, but we're going to get 15. 10, 15. Hey, Patrick, do your shows, sir. Go ahead. What's up? Do your show. Go ahead. Let's get off this boring, finance stuff and get to operations. So, you know, when Daniel asked us to do this exercise and go through and look at our revenues, our expenses, and our efficiencies, we really put our heads together and actually we came up with about 15 pages of stuff. Sitting down with Daniel and talking through it though, there's a lot of things that are more staff-centric or a little, that we can take care of internally, that we don't really need council's authority to do, if you will, and that's what you're looking at up here. These are things that I feel like are like what I would call low-hanging fruit that we can kind of take care of ourselves, but I wanted you all to be aware of them because some of them will need your help eventually. The GIS enhancement and support eventually, you'll see that come up. It's a program that we've been looking at. We did a gap analysis on it and found some deficiencies on that that will make a huge impact across the organization, but we need to put that together and we need to find the right time to come to you guys and really discuss that. But some of these other things are things that we can really look at. We've already had conversations about some of them, but this is kind of some low-anging fruit that we're going to be

[1:37:51] looking at and taking care of that will either increase efficiencies across the organization that'll get some revenue generation going on and or reduce expenses there so but there's two major ones that I really wanted to focus all with you guys on today since I've got your got your attention here that really is a decision point that you that you all need to make in a consideration for for the council. The first one is being a street UC for some of you this is the first time you're seeing it on council for others you'll see this brought up before the first time we really looked at a street you see was in 2019 we looked at it again in 2021 and now we're going to bring it back to you because the dynamics that we're dealing with are changing a little bit with our state legislature and so wanted to put this in front of you guys again because I feel like this is an opportunity that will quite frankly can have a huge impact on the general fund as we're looking at at the struggles that it's that it's dealing with today. Basically what a street use fee is, it's a fee assessed to all properties, whether it's residential, commercial, non-profit, all the way across the board, based on the type of structure they are, the type of use that that property experiences, right? So whether it's a hospital, whether it's a gas station, whether it's a church, whether it's a restaurant, All of that has a factor that is used or a use that is used to calculate a monthly fee assessed to that particular property basically for the use of their street and use of their right away for their patrons or for their customers or just personally. What I would propose to you guys is essentially taking that street use fee, implementing it, and what that would do is essentially create an enterprise fund for street and bridge and

[1:39:54] for our traffic operations department. Right now, storm water isn't enterprise fun, solid waste isn't enterprise fun, and you can see the success that those two divisions have. They earn their own revenue, they live within their means, they have a sustainable and programmable operation and expenditure level. And this street you see would essentially do that for our two biggest user street and bridge, which is the responsible party for all of our street maintenance, including all of our seal code and our street preservation methods, as well as traffic operations who oversees our traffic signals, striping, and those operations. So essentially what I would need. So if we're going to consider this, I want to consider it in a comprehensive approach, though. I don't want to just pay for the funds, the budget that they have today that they're budgeted. There's other needs in those divisions that, again, could help alleviate some of the burden on the general fund. So equipment replacement is one. Equipment replacement is shared. Those two departments share the equipment replacement across the rest of the general fund, fire PD, everybody else. You've heard, it's not the first time you've heard that there is a struggle in the equipment replacement fund as well. So I'd want to encompass their needs for equipment replacement in the street use fee. So again, being comprehensive in this approach. Seal coding and preservation, again, that $4 million that we spend annually on that, get that rolled into there so that we can maintain that street preservation program that we have and keep that investment that we're making in our roadways sound and solidify that. Allie maintenance is a program that, frankly, we always get asked about, and the answer, unfortunately, is we don't have enough money to maintain streets properly how I can't justify maintaining an alley besides just the

[1:41:55] basic go fix a pothole go level it up type of thing right there's a lot of paved alleys in our in our city that are public right away essentially and but I don't perform any type of preservation method I don't seal code on my own HA 501 I don't know any of that so I would like to if we're going to do this go ahead and let's let's get that service to our citizens as well that have those those pay valleys and get that program started. And then a pay go project. Pay go is simply that pay as you go. It's an annual allocation for annual projects. So you all know that y'all give us that $16 million every year of the year for major street rehabilitation projects. What pay go is it's those smaller projects that we can do. We can engineer a house that would be done on an annual basis. So like Rick's drive, for instance, would be a Pago project. We don't have to bond money to go out and do that. It's not necessarily on a list, but it absolutely needs help. Main Street going up to 19th Street. That's another one. It needs help. Avenue L, Avenue J, there's several of these little roadways Bowie Street going up north that need assistance. But unfortunately, they're never going to compete with a major roadway project that I'm going to bond out. So this five and a half million dollars would give me an opportunity to go get those smaller roads that serve a huge purpose, but when I start competing, when they start competing with larger projects, they just, they don't have the traffic loading, they don't have the same impact that a major roadway project would have. So what does that mean? I would need about six and a half million dollars generated annually to do that program. But what does it do for us? If you take the Street and Bridge operating account, the traffic operations, seal coding, all of that, it'll free up eight to nine million dollars out of the general fund that thing can be

[1:43:59] reallocated to other priorities for council. So again, I'm taking two of my biggest divisions, Street and Bridge and traffic, and I'm freeing up that money. I'm getting it out of the general fund, so now that the general fund is not having to deal with those two departments and we're handling it ourselves. but it also takes it ensures that we have a sustainable street maintenance program. Obviously that's been a big priority for us over the past several years, notwithstanding what the state does, it protects us from outside entities affecting how San Angelo takes care of its roadways. As state legislator knocks that down, obviously you'll have a decision to make of where you're going to put the money. I'm protected from that our street priority is protected from that now with this program. Again, frees up about a million dollars in equipment replacement. That's typically what we spend on these divisions when you start talking about dump trucks and excavators and yellow iron. It's a lot, right? So that's another million dollars that can then be distributed back to whether it's ambulance, chassis, police vehicles, code enforcement vehicles, all the other general fund departments that are competing for that same money. The equipment replacement fund has not had an increase in funding of any substance in I don't know since I've been in operations you know hundred thousand here hundred thousand there but those are one-time monies. Again we're funding smaller rehabilitation projects as a street comes up if something needs to be done I can handle it I can go take care of it without impacting other things. Matching funds for grants I am tapped out on matching funds for our grant proposal. So I'm really having to be cognizant now of which grants we are going to apply for because I don't have the matching funds just identified to go take care of that. So if I need $3 million to match, I'm going to have to give up, you know, a $6, $7, $8, $9 million grant because I don't have something to match it with. So this would allow us that opportunity to still seek that if you want

[1:46:02] to call it free money out there to help sustain our infrastructures. Allie maintenance program like we talked about, and then a biggie for this one is it's equitable across all properties. So your non-profits, your Shannon's, they do not pay property taxes as it is right now. But we all know how much of an impact, how much of a traffic load Shannon puts on our roadways. This would spread that cost across all entities throughout the city. Again, equitably based on their traffic generation, based on an established manual, that's a national Institute of Traffic Engineers manual across there. So it's a, again, a nationally set standard for traffic generation based on what your business type is. So that's the street you see in a nutshell. Again, this is one that we brought up several times, but it just for whatever reason, right temperature wasn't there to really send staff out there and start implementing it but I feel like with the environment that's happening today like Daniel discussed this may be a good opportunity to really take some heart consideration for it so I wanted to bring it up today with you all. I'll start with office and basic questions we've seen this before. A lot of this there's no exclusions to this regardless of whether it's personal property, commercial property, nonprofit property, city property, county, state, federal, there's not an exemption to this fee, which is I like, because that makes our tax base a little bit broader and a lot thinner. I get that. Are you thinking it will generate, how much do you think it would generate a year? Because initial times we looked at this, it was not very much. It was lower, but it was a lot lower. It was like 60 million lower. But at that time, we were only talking about trying to find money for PEGO projects. Yes sir. We've been challenged now with a little bit different terms of that and so now that's why you see the 16 and a half versus

[1:48:02] six million dollars that was presented earlier. So that would be based upon frequency and population. It's the type of business use, the number of trips that that type of business use generates to that particular. So a convenience store would pay a different rate than hospital would pay a different rate than a little mom and pop grocery store than a it's it's a variable we have 50 47 categories I think right now identified whenever we went through this originally with the consultants so we have those categorized out based on what's in our town today we just again have to go back and kind of refresh what we did back in 20, 19, 20, 21. Okay, that's a very strategic move for the city. And there were, we hit COVID, there were some other things that held this up for us, if I remember. But I think you would find the consensus of the board, the council, to move forward with that. But we'd really have to make sure people understand who it affects, how much residence is very, very little. I mean, I'm worried about the over 65, I'm worried about a church that maybe has, you know, 30 people that come to it every Sunday, they aren't allowed to get that. But based upon the frequency, there's a lot of revenue that can put a cost, the people that typically don't, let me put it this way, the first person to call us on the streets down. Yeah. And we have to generate our own revenue. We all share in that cost, not just some. Mayor, I do want to point out to the council members as well that this isn't an introduction to the street fee that's never been done before, this is becoming more and more common with cities using this approach to make sure they can address their infrastructure concerns. Close the city to us is Abilene actually that put this in play several years back. So again on our part, we want to do everything we can to protect our investment and infrastructure. And so this is really key when you look up how much it frees up for the general fund.

[1:50:02] If it's about eight to nine million dollars, that's significant for the needs that we have going on at this point. So again, nothing new, but we do want to make sure that we brought this up again. I definitely would love to see the introductory rates as what this has compared to what we discussed every year. Yes, sir. All right. Thank you, Patrick. Good job. And two, just to note, every year we've come with a target increase request for our silco program of about $800,000 and that has not been, that budget has not been adjusted since 2015 whenever Council was generous enough to give us this program handed to us. So that has not been adjusted in over 11 years. Our eight-year cycle that we accomplished is now pushing 11, 12-year cycles. So we're getting back to our preservation program, that proactive preservation program that we have is starting to feel an impact to that. And I want to emphasize, we're going 10 to 11 years now, that's not sufficient enough to really maintain those rows and keep the water out of the base, which causes the pothos in the roads really all parts that's correct which is very important for those roadways that were not going to have the capital funds to rehab it's very very important that we seal up those cracks that we keep the water out of that base material so that those roadways can stay as sound as they are for as long as possible because again they just those local roads just don't compete with the big roadways when you're making that investment decision mayor Patrick is Is there a means by which that this increases over time so that you can keep up with the ongoing and increasing needs on the roads? Does this fee have a sliding component that allows it to increase over time? I would absolutely request that Council consider an annual increase to this program. We did it with Solid Waste and it was a success there. We did not do it with stormwater and now we're struggling in stormwater. So I have both scenarios that I'm dealing with and solid waste is by far proven to be

[1:52:05] successful to have just that small incremental annual increase. Every year it's worked into the program. It's not a decision that council has to burden themselves with every year it's already set and done and it establishes itself to be sustainable. As just as one member of the council having had the benefit of seeing this before, Patrick, I support that as having the component increase year over year as well as just the program you've got my support to move forward with this. Okay. If there's no other questions on that, I'll go to my number two, my biggie. This is an item that has more of an impact on efficiency across the organization than anything else. The environmental division is something that we've been talking about for a little over a year now. it's it's a crew that does the things that nobody sees that they do it's a crew that helps multiple divisions across the city and I'll get into that here in just a little bit but but what is going to be required to make an environmental department and then that you'll have a standard of what I need and then you can see what it does need about 15 people in this proposal which sounds like a lot but when you start looking at what we're going to do, I think that number starts making a lot more sense. We need an operating budget, we need some equipment. The beauty that we have about putting in environmental division underneath operations is we have a lot of equipment already, especially your high dollar equipment, your excavators, your wheel loaders, your skid stairs, that we can share and we can reassign and we can schedule those pieces of equipment. So we're not having to go make that capital investment on that. I'll need some pickups, I'll need some trailers, I'll need some smaller stuff, but the big stuff that's hard to find, we can coordinate with our other divisions dump trucks and get that stuff done. Total budget needed for this is about $1.8 million. We've identified

[1:54:10] about $700,000 that we can pull via solid waste and some of the other departments or some of the other funds that we could knock that down. I've got a margin there of about $1.1 I would need to cover again for that I would be coming to you guys for an ask for. Now let's talk about what it does. Here's a list of 13 things that are departments. I want to make sure that we understand that all of this gets done today. But it gets done at the expense or at the cost of what our core operations are. don't get repaired, stormwater drains don't get cleaned out, mowing doesn't get done. Our BMPs are not met that are federally required for us to follow. We just get it done. It's what operations does, right? We just do what needs to be done and these are the things that are need to be done throughout the city. Some of them are not getting done when you talk about fire marshal and their dangerous building demolitions. They come to us with a request, we push them off, push them off push them off as far as we can finally we get a list of 10 or 12 of them that they're like begging you know all but walking in on their hands and he's asking for help and we go and we we take off two weeks and we go knock them out our full crew is dedicated that so nothing else gets done for that two weeks except for demolitions but it's not just a demolition right it's it's also a prevention for the fire department the fire department responds to fires in these vacant buildings so that is a potential efficiency there. Makes safe and secures we have to go board up buildings fire the fire marshals office because transients homeless or whatever are getting in them constantly creating a hazard so we need to go clean those buildings out board them up our guys do that for them too. Homeless abatements I don't think any of you are unaware that

[1:56:12] our homeless issue is starting to expand a little bit out there, frankly, we don't have enough time to chase the homeless anymore and clean up those camps. It's a committed dedicated service that's very hazardous, it's very unfun and we need to stick with our core services so we don't get in trouble. We just don't have the capacity to do this anymore on the homeless abatements. Fire Department on call assistance, when the fire department has a fire in the middle the night and a lot of times they'll call operations, not just in the middle of the night, but they'll call operations because they need heavy equipment. They need an excavator to come in there, punch a hole in the roof so that they can get in there and fight that fire efficiently, move stuff around so that they can share the fires out. Pull the building down if it's an unsafe structure after the fire. Right now the way it works is Brody picks up the phone or one of his captains picks up the phone and he hopes somebody answers on the other side of the line and hope somebody answers on it, because that group that has that equipment, we don't have an on-call group for them. It's not part of their setup. This group would be on call. Brody would know exactly who to call, and we'd be able to respond. We'd be able to respond with efficiency. You know, when a fire's burning, minutes count, right? And so we don't have time to spend playing telephone for 15, 20 minutes trying to get hold of somebody. I want to make that a solid call that Brody can make in the middle of the night. Environmental cleanup with spills, code abatement. So again, when we start talking about this group, it's not just doing that thing, but code enforcement right now, they not only hand out tickets for code, but they also go most city properties, they mow abated properties that they got a judge's order on. Let's let code do what code is trained and certified to do, and let me go mow those properties. let me go handle the stuff that we're geared up to handle that we're good at and let CO go do what they're good at. They don't need to be spending, in my opinion,

[1:58:13] they don't need to be spending a day of their week, their four day work week, but a full day doing abatements and mowings and stuff like that. Let them go enforce our code that nobody else in the city can, has the authority to go do that actual service. Code abatement, tax property mowing, we own a lot of lots in the city that the city has. We're trying to, you know, work through Pervial's direction on getting rid of some of those, but in the meantime, they have to be able to maintain. Right now, code is maintaining most of those. Again, let's give them the capacity. I'll go take care of that, I'll make sure it's down so that Sarah doesn't have to spend her time constantly calling us saying, hey, can y'all go mow this or trying to coordinate that service? Data animal pickup for animal services? I can go pick up a data animal, I've got the equipment to go do it. You know picking up a cat is one thing picking up a horse's or a cow is a completely different service, right? They call us any way for that and we have to stop what we're doing and go help them help them do that thing. Let me do it Let us handle that with this division It takes a burden off of animal control puts it into our lap It gets done more efficiently more timely and it keeps our city looking looking nice Mosquito spring is something that Street and Bridge does vector control we would take that pull that over into this environmental crew make that just a function of them so we're not spending that again taking that time away from our street maintenance illegal dumping happens all over the city we'd have somebody who could respond to illegal dumping as it goes right now code enforcement sends it to us says hey there's a legal dumping here we give them a thumbs up duly noted we'll get there when we can sometimes that's weak sometimes that's a month sometimes that's on the afternoon on the way back depending on what it is. Sometimes it's whole dump truck loads of stuff. We don't want that sitting there because as it sits there now people start getting ideas that this is a good place to dump and they continue doing that. So if we can keep all that stuff cleaned up it'll help keep keep our city from looking looking blighted. Clearing

[2:00:18] property for sale we just had a conversation about a property up on on on Red Bluff Circle, we said that's $200,000 clean up. Who's gonna do it? Is it Stormwater Street and Bridge? I didn't have the time to do that. This crew could schedule that in, go clean those properties up. I think you just saw our last real estate bid, some properties that were had houses on them, were selling for 5,000 properties that weren't, didn't have any houses on them, were selling for $25,000 and $30,000. That's an expense that the city can invest in would be already paid for. It would be a sunk cost in this division already, but would have a substantial increase in the availability of those particular properties. Body recovery, we get asked a lot of times to go help recover bodies out of the river, out of the lake. So again, the screw would be doing that. They'd be trained for that. They would be inoculated for that. It's not a pleasant experience. They need to have special considerations for that. same thing with the homeless abatements, you know, we need to be, we need to be trained, it's dangerous. I mean, we're dealing with fentanyl, we're dealing with Narcan, we're dealing with theses, these groups need to be protected against that, and to do that across multiple divisions, this division would be geared up, they'd be trained, and they would know what to do in those situations. Then general task and activities, I kind of call this the honey-do list. The things that need to be done that it's not anybody's job, but they need to be done, right? City Hall needs to move in office, they need furniture moved, whatever the case may be. We can show up, we can go move that desk, we can go move this, we can, you know, help clean up around here. If we have a site violation for weeds, they can go knock it down real quick. Just those little honey dews throughout the city that need to be done, need to be picked up, but it's nobody's responsibility. but it still needs to be done to keep San Angelo beautiful

[2:02:19] and keep it the city that we love. So that's what this environmental crew does. And I think it'd be hard to argue that $1.8 million is an asinine amount of cost when you start considering everything that we can do in every other department that this thing affects. Mayor Valka, you touched barely on the dangerous buildings. That's a major concern right now. We have quite a few dangerous buildings, hundred and with that number now do you have a number of I should actually have it's in the hundred now but again the number of dangerous buildings that we have at this point they need to be I think we have a little over 200 on the list is what I heard at some point yeah keeps it keeps going on with every time that we don't address and and bring those down it keeps adding up every year and it's not just that sorry Daniel for interrupting but it's not just that it's fire marshal spends their time to build the case go to the board get a demolition order those things expire and in most cases they're expiring before we get over there to demo them so they got to go through the entire process again so they're duplicating triplicating work on a property this lets me I get an order next week I schedule and it's down and that's that's the end of it again those are my those are the two biggies that are really I feel like needs council consideration and council direction on do we pursue this at all do we drop it do we change it in some way what is what is the temperature in the the preference of the council so was some of your straight and bitch street and bridge feet in part of this what I would propose is just 1.8 by itself let's just look at it as 1.8 yes okay and you've got some money sitting there but for you to pull this off, you're looking at 1.8, yes or yes? Council questions?

[2:04:19] Mary? Thank you, Patrick. Back on the alley, just hammer that a little bit. Do we charge, or what is our fee to Republic services? Because I do live, have a paved alley, and it seems like most of the heavy traffic and stuff that goes through there is Republic. And I'm not talking about Republic charging an extra fee to the people, but is there any recourse that we could to get back from Republic? We have a special contract fee in that collections contract that is held back. So of all the trash service fees that we collect, we withhold 5% of that and turn the rest of it back over to 95% of it back over to Republic for that operational cost, expense, right? So yes, we do. It's 5% of all of the revenues that are collected based on solid waste collections. Okay, so we couldn't necessarily go up on that little incremental, like what seems to be happening to us all the time. On Street and Bridge and all with the disaster money that we received, has any of that considered in this update that you have here? No, no ma'am. But I mean, that's a good point to make because again, through the buyout program, I am anticipating acquiring properties, which is going to add to our maintenance operation. What I'm hoping to do is as I acquire those and as I make those improvements, I'm making those improvements in a way that are very little maintenance. So for use of coastal Bermuda type of right away, you know, it doesn't get more than 12 inches tall. It's, we don't have to sit there and mow and maintain it. Maybe a little bit of herbicide application just to keep Johnson grass out of it. But other than that, it still looks good, it stays low. So that's, I'm trying to get those low impact improvements made, but it is going to take a little bit of extra time. But again, I have, with this, we'll have a more flexible crew

[2:06:23] to go take care of some of that stuff as well. I'm not sure if this would be something that you would do yourself or if it would require the entire staff. But what you're showing here are some efficiencies that affect almost every department across the city. Is there a way without wasting everybody's time hammering numbers to see what that impact could actually be to some of these other departments? I mean, it may not be the sum or the whole may be greater than the sum of the parts as far as how positively this would affect the other deals. And it's not just taking one salary from here and putting it over there, but I'm just curious if this study that we've just done or with human resources, how this plan could be plugged into that and see what are really what are net efficiency and net services, what that could do to it. Just my gut feeling from I used to analyze stuff like that, the play the what ifs forever, it shows up pretty quickly how those savings and say these other departments how I can greatly to force multiplier in a lot of cases. But I'd like to see if anybody could combine those just so that we do see the net effect of what your savings and all could possibly do for us. What I want to be cautious of is very cautious about the use of the word savings in our departments. I don't think it's any, Daniel alluded to it earlier, our expectation has increased, but our staffing and resource level has not. When we talk about creating capacity, I'm not going to propose reducing people. I'm gonna propose using those people to go do other things that need to be done, that's not getting done today.

[2:08:23] So it's enhanced services more than it is a savings opportunity for us. But I won't have to hire the six, seven, eight people to do those other things because of this opportunity. Well, and I understand, I'm glad you pointed that out. You know, a lot of times savings, I'll use that word a lot, it's just a better use of what we currently have. And nobody wants to get rid of any body or any services, but efficiency is number one up there with any kind of dollar savings. So, but I appreciate everything that you put into this. Thank you, Patrick. Yes, ma'am. If I may, Mayor, I know that we're a little bit of a crunch right now. If you have any questions on anything that's been presented by any of our directors, by all means, please send clarification questions so that way when we come back at the end of next month, we'll have those answers for you and we'll be better prepared to kind of really address how we move forward with that. So if you could do that, that'd be great. When you send an email to them and ask them, please copy me so I know what they're working on, that way I can actually look, I mean, work with them also to make sure everything's being done and I'm helping out how I can, so. But with that, I know we're running a little bit short. Patrick, great presentation, guys. Thank you all so much. And up next, we have water. Thank you. Daniel, that's exactly what we're saying, efficiency in action. Thank you. John, Danielle, you're on. Yes, it is. So just press the forward button.

[2:10:24] Yes, sir. Yeah. Well, good morning. And thank you for allowing us to talk about water this morning. I'm John Cobb, I'm Director of Water Utilities, and this is Daniel Rich, who's Assistant Director, and we're gonna split our time here in our discussion with you. I think, let me just briefly outline what we're gonna talk about very quickly. We're gonna start with what we do. I think it would be helpful for you all to understand what our utilities are. We're involved in a lot of things. And then we're gonna finish up with a brief discussion about some anticipated large capital projects, but this is just the basic outline of what we're gonna talk about. So here's briefly what we do at Water Utilities. Oh sure, absolutely. So we've got a number of skilled dedicated staff working with us, and what we do greatly affects the health and welfare of the community. As you can see, we're involved in a lot of different things here. We're governed by the Safe Drinking Water Act, Clean Water Act, Texas Water Code, and America's Water Infrastructure Act. We're regulated by EPA, Texas Commission of Environmental Quality, Texas Water Development Board, and Homeland Security. We are an enterprise, which means we're publicly on, and we act much like a private company. But we are subject to the Texas Water Code, especially Chapter 13, which pertains to the establishment of utility rates and fees. It means our rates and fees should be largely based on the cost of service,

[2:12:32] and there must be fair sufficient to cover the expenses, debt service and anticipated future expenses, and the rates and fees must be nondiscriminatory and ensure financial and operational sustainability. Please note that our rates and fees have not been adjusted since 2018, except for a minor adjustment for water rates in 2023 in response to COVID. Raph Tillis, a nationally recognized rate utility rate consulting firm, has been working on a rate study for us and we anticipate that their findings and recommendations will be presented to the city in the future. I can tell you that we've been looking at our rates very closely for some of our fixed fee things, like tap fees, for example, and we're not even covering the cost of our meters and what we're doing. So we anticipate some increases there, but that's coming in hopefully in the near future. But I know that they're nearly completed with their work. A little bit about our rates and fees. This is the list of the types of rates and fees that we do charge our customers. Please note that the fees that we include in our water bills for stormwater and solid waste are not included in the water utility enterprise fund. They're included in the respective funds for solid waste and stormwater. And the go-to manual that we use for setting rates in fees and that Raph Taylor's is using also. It's called the M1 manual, you see a picture of it there. And this is the M1 manual. It's pretty thick, it's pretty comprehensive. I took a five-day course on how to use this thing, so I actually know how to do it. So it's very intense. Just briefly, our income last year, fiscal year,

[2:14:35] you see before you're here, and this comes from our month report from September 3, 2025. Our water enterprise fund and our reclamation fund for wastewater. And then here's our expenses for the year. And we had a net revenue of not quite $6.3 million. I'll stop there and see if you have any quick questions at all just on that. Okay. Okay, I'm going to turn it over to Danielle. She's going to cover some work for you. All right, good morning. So as John mentioned, being an enterprise, we actually cover the cost of most things. But one area we see that we could potentially bill for services that we provide are the backflow and the grease trap registration and inspections that we do and maybe some of the test registration fees. fees. So other cities do that. It's just a potential that we could look into. We're actually developing ordinances for both of those and so we'll bring those with recommended associated fees. And expense saving opportunity that we have come up with as these orange cards that we provide saying, hey, you're not paying your bill, please pay so or we're going to have to terminate service. Sadly, we had about 3,000 a month, so that cost of not only printing these, but hand-delivering each one, a lot of labor time, time that we could be using more efficiently elsewhere. We estimated about $150,000 to $200,000 a month for this. We're looking into other software technologies that we can mass send out notifications via email, text, phone call, all three, however we think those need to be sent out. And just as a note, other utilities don't hand out

[2:16:38] these notices. That number that you can have in the go-out and it's really personal cost is costing and more than anything else at this point. Yes, exactly. So onto some efficiencies that we can improve our processes, looking at customer service, and talking those new softwares and technologies we're looking at, ones that would provide mobile applications, self-service portals, so customers can go in and not only look at their bill and their payment history, but what's my usage? Why is my bill a little higher? And looking at maybe, uh-oh, this looks higher, is there a leak, is there? And then some actually provide leak detections and notifications, also outage notifications, if we have a main break, you know, hey, it's affecting your area, those notifications can be automatically sent out. So that would reduce a lot of the calls that we get, you know, we get hundreds of calls every day. So making our customer service team a little more efficient and then getting some specific AWWA training, feedback loops, that sort of thing. Next, we have in-situ line replacement or trenchless line replacement. The city has a lot of old cast iron water mains that are failing need to be replaced, old-clay sewer as well. And so this in-situ line replacement, like directional drilling or pipe bursting, can save 40% to 60% over typical open-cut trench. And it actually requires less, so it requires less pavement removal and replacement and less time. So we think bringing in these services, like bringing in the engineering and the planning and construction wise to our crews, our engineering team, and save a lot of money on these projects that we need to do.

[2:18:41] Another one is looking at communicating water use efficiency to our customers. So just some potential ideas that we have doing a water budget rate schedule that's based on each property's irrigated area. We are implementing smart meters that help us see usage better and hopefully to help the customer see their usage better, targeted assistance or incentives, such as rebates for turf removal or drip irrigation conversion or installing smart irrigation controllers and sensors, and then just increasing those educational activities at events or schools just to get the word out. In terms of water budget, there was a discussion earlier about forgiving some of the expenses from the Parks Department for water usage. We've been looking at some of their water usage and we think they've been way over watering. We would like to help them out with that and put them on a water budget and we know how to do that. I have a lot of experience with water budgets. It's based on the consumptive use of lawn grass and time of year and that sort of thing. So if we're going to forgive their expenses then we need to be able to control how much water they use use and still achieve the goal of nice green grass for the parks and ball fields and so forth. So we're working towards that end. It's going to take some time, but we think we can get that accomplished. Let's talk about some additional opportunities. One of the biggest expenses aside from labor and water treatment, wastewater operations is electrical and chemical expenses. They're huge. Here's a couple of examples we may be able to save some money for electrical costs in the long run. One involves the use of high efficiency pumps

[2:20:46] and variable frequency drives, and other involves supervisory control data acquisitioners, otherwise called SCADA, integration with the VFDs to improve efficiency. In the long run we might be able to even use AI that has yet to come. So we think the potential cost savings here, as you see, are very significant. We might be able to incorporate some of this technology and some anticipated plan upgrades we're looking at in the future. Next, chemical optimization. There's also potential opportunity to save money by optimizing our use of chemicals that are used in the treatment of disinfection processes. I've already had these discussions with our water treatment guys, and they fully admit that there's opportunity here to have some savings if we have the right instrumentation and so forth to help them out. One involves lap testing and real time monitoring and chemical usage to reduce overall usage. Another involves the use of sensors and data analytics, perhaps AI to avoid costly breakdowns. We think this would be beneficial in the long run in terms of cost savings. Let's talk about coral reefs. We live in a desert. Our discussion of water often includes drought, available supply, long-term needs, water quality changes and costs. Is our water supply sustainable? Are our treatment facilities resilient and able to adequately handle anything nature throws at us? Our current average demand right now ranges from about 16,000 to 17,000 acre feet. Our current firm yield has estimated this past December by Danielle.

[2:22:50] A firm yield of surface water out of our reservoirs is about 40 months or about 55,000 acre feet. Our current firm yield out of our groundwater supplies, about 8 million gallons a day or about 8,900 acre feet. Our surface water supply, which comes out of Lake Ivy and, to some degree, the Conchow River, is variable in quantity and quality, which affects taste, odor, and disinfection by-product formation. We do have a portable reuse plan that was put into the Region F plan, which is this document right here, and it was recently approved by the Texas Water Development Board. We have a bed and banks permit application before a TCEQ. They've given us their tentative draft approval of it, and we're waiting for confirmation that we will be able to do our bed and banks permit without a contested case hearing. I haven't heard any updates recently as to what the status of that is. That would assist us with our reuse program. So our surface water supply, like I said, is quite variable, and that plan and the region that plans is extremely important in terms of getting funding from the state to the reuse project of the future. Let's talk about some advantages of wind use. For reuse is a viable project, we think, and we believe it is because the water is wet, we have dominion and control over it, which means we own it and we can control it. It's up to us whether or not we want to use it. It's very, very valuable, and like I said, TCEQ is already approved, our reuse plan

[2:25:00] as an indirect power reuse program in this document here and as part of this overall program we would like to see us take a one-water approach to the whole program and what I mean by that is that everything that goes into the surface water probe into the surface water in the city affects our water quality storm want to run off. I think there's opportunity for our department to work closely with operations on perhaps demonstration projects on stormwater to improve on stormwater quality that goes into the river. All septic effluent from people that have septic systems ends up in the river. The most of the septic system will provide its primary treatment. It doesn't remove nutrients. That's why the river looks green. That's why like Nazworthy looks green, in large part. It means that runoff or return flow, if you will, of septic effluent gets into the river and ends up at our take point at lone wolf dam right there at the water plant. It means we're already reusing effluent when we discharge out of our wastewater plant. And it goes, it's used for irrigation downstream. Those irrigation return flows end up in the river. It's a gaining stream. It goes right into Lake Ivy. It has pumped back to us. We're already reusing our treated wastewater. What we would like to be able to do is do a better job of it and clean it up better.

[2:27:00] It helps us be drought-proof. It's a reliable supply. It helps with conservation. We think it helps with terms of cost savings compared to other long-range projects, pumping water from a long distance away, doing desalination and so forth. It's got great benefits in terms of environmental protection. It supports growth of the community. And the technology is well proven. We can use advanced treatment technology to improve our overall water quality, including reducing salinity, it'll improve our taste and odor problems that we've had, we can eliminate our disinfection byproduct problems, and color issues that we've had recently in the past, we can get rid of some emerging contaminants, make sure we don't have any PFAS, microplastics, pharmaceuticals, personal hair cop products, and so forth. Does anybody ever wonder what happens to all the particles from your tires, when you wear it, your tires, you buy new tires every year, and it's up in the rivers, in the lakes. That's called microplastics. That's what ends up in our water supply. But putting in a reuse system with this great technology, we can greatly improve our water quality and our taste and our order, and help our community out of it. It's not cheap, it's going to be expensive. So here's some of our plan projects. We're looking at a couple of elevated storage tanks for the city to anticipate future growth to the south and to the north. We've got a lot of aging infrastructure. We need to replace it. Danielle's already talked about some neat technology that we can use to make that happen. I have personally a lot of experience horizontal directional drilling, pipe bursting as well as slip

[2:29:00] lining and so forth, manholes and so forth. Red Bluff Lift Station consolidation, we're looking at doing that to reduce the number of lift stations we have in the city and that part of the city. We're looking at a new gravity sewer line, other lift station improvements. We desperately need skated improvements of the water reclamation plant that could be incorporated in the overall program for upgrading the plants. We've got some necessary dam repairs at NAS wording. We need to install some pizometers to look at secrets to the dam. It's been inspected by TCEQ and ARP and solar freeze and nickels, and they've identified a number of problems we've got to tackle those. We've got some work we're trying to get accomplished right now on the north of Conch not just remember wastewater system improvements, those are extremely important, and then direct portable reuse. I think this is going to take some time to develop. We need a great communications program. We have to convince the citizens that, A, we need the water, we need the reuse program, and the technology is there to make it happen, and we have to know how to make it happen. I personally have a lot of experience with reuse, most of it in direct portable reuse. So this program, the project, I find challenging and I feel very comfortable with it. I just feel it will take some time. It's a big cost figure. Those are present dollars. But that's kind of where we're at at the moment. And with that, I would entertain any questions that you might have, where are we at on time? About three minutes, but there's no questions we can go on. I just have one real quick question. I think the water reuse system is a very interesting,

[2:31:02] good idea. What other cities implement this that are around here? In Texas? Yeah. Are there any others curious? Oh, absolutely. Well, there's direct potable reus is being done by big spring. And El Paso is a direct plant into the transmission line in the distribution system. Wichita Falls. And for those of you might not know, City of Dallas uses water up the Trinity River and they discharge all their wastewater down the Trinity River and then Houston picks it up and reuses it. Okay. All right, I'm just curious. Yeah, and then but there's reuse projects all over the country. I worked on them in Florida. I worked on them in Colorado where I came from. I've drunk a lot of reuse water it's great water I have great confidence in it it hasn't affected you at all has it John I'm sorry I can tell it hasn't affected you at all so you're it's why I have great hair John yeah for the sake of time we got a minute left so thank you all wait I have a quick question oh yeah sure first of all I to Joe's point I agree I'm fascinated by the potable reuse and I'm glad we're talking about it the value of your last slide and dollars is a little over $119 million. So it's a lot. I'm curious if your list is just a list or if your list is prioritized. Because again, that will help us know kind of where to focus our efforts going forward. It's just it's just a list. There's no priority in it. You could spend 400 million if you had. You could. I guess, sir. Yeah, that's it. I mean, your slide. It tells up 400 million. I don't care what's like. You are by far in the worst handy cap position. I'm nearly in the department here. And we understand that.

[2:33:04] That's okay. But I think it's critically important. We have council support on a reuse program. But I can't under-emphasize the need for a comprehensive, well-planned, and executed communications plan. It's just as important as the technology that we're talking about. I'm sorry. I agree. And I think the imminent comprehensive plan may help us help you prioritize that list. Thank you. Yes, sir. John, Danielle, thank you so much. Up next is Engineering. Zeph. There you go. Hello. Hello, good day, Mayor and Council, my name is Efreno Mendeza, I'm the Assistant City Engineer with the Engineering Department. Just a quick overview, the Engineering Department is pretty vital to the city itself. We service a lot of stakeholders, including our own departments, public works, water utilities, local residents from the daily calls, especially assisting with the flood events that just happened, developers and, of course, Angelo State, which we were working on a partnership with them, having interns and, of course, assisting with a lot of their coursework project. We kind of found that they are basically our supply chain for new engineers that want to stay and grow within the city or in the area. So that's been a very fruitful partnership. We provide a lot of technical expertise to all the individual departments and we just want to ensure that we have a successful and sustainable community with a lot of the projects

[2:35:05] that go on. We assist with essentially permits plan reviews, project management on capital improvements, inspections for such. We have oversight of subdivision commercial developments, the expertise and guidance and and floodplain management and additional engineering support as needed. Just had a quick conversation with Justin about some concrete issues that had out at the airport. We assist with that when we came. We primarily work in a cost recovery basis rather than generating revenue. At present, our efforts are recovered primarily through the administrative and permitting fees, working with planning department. And those fees are kind of accounted within those fees. There are opportunities to kind of look at those fees reassess based off of those and have a few that we're reviewing subdivision plan reviews inspections and of course in correspondence with Patrick's Street use fee traffic impact studies so we can start assessing if that is something approved by council in the future we can add the traffic impact studies so we cannot start looking at finer analysis on those fees and rates as we move forward. With that there are some opportunities that we kind of seen right now for recovering on some of those fees. One we don't currently charge a fee for floodplain development permits. Another one we do not charge for is start grading and fill and we kind of look at those as residential and commercial. We do have smaller developers that develop smaller lots and then we have larger developers and then of course an anticipation for other things like large commercial developments, data centers and things like that. These These permits can kind of be used as something to, we don't have the plans yet, but we'd like to clear the property off so we can access and survey. It's something that we can leverage to have them start and kind of good faith and gesture, but also it's an opportunity in conjunction with the floodplain. We have a lot of areas too that we're identifying that people own and they're filling the floodplain

[2:37:07] without knowing that they're filling the floodplain. So that ends up being a compliance issue and then trying to get somebody to haul off hundreds to keep yards of dirt after they put it on there, it's kind of one of those things you have to fight. We did look at adjacent cities, primarily Abilene and Lubbock. They charge anywhere from $150 for residential fee up to larger commercial ones being $500. And of course, Lubbock charges more based off the development for commercial, depending on how large the acreage is of development itself. So we started looking at our efficiencies and improvements. Primarily it's designed for roadway water wastewater and stormwater. We tip right now we're on a cycle where we are finishing up the rest of our bond funds and we have primarily hired out to consultants. On average we typically manage anywhere for 10 plus capital improvements projects. Very few are in construction because a lot of them are in design and we're waiting for funds for those to be initiated to move forward with those, but as in looking for those efficiencies and process improvements, the department does possess the capabilities to conduct a lot of those services that consultants provide. We have the ability to survey. We actually have two drones, so we can actually start doing lighter for areas in keeping improvements and obtaining inventory of data and assets, so forth. We do have in-house design software using AutoCADO Civil 3D, and of course, to supplement with Patrick's mention of the GIS in that gap assessment, that's actually being a vital, vital and critical tool to a lot of municipalities where we do our design, and it's essentially from design, from survey to design to GIS and implementation, and it's just having that information at the ready for all departments to make assessments.

[2:39:07] So we could go ahead and assist with fire in certain areas with the environmental division that Patrick's seeking, identifying those areas having updated maps, updated utilities, if there's a need for rehabilitation in those areas. So that's what we've kind of identified moving forward in these items. Oh, sorry, my slides get turned around. Our cost savings that we're looking at when comparing the The in-house design versus consultants, we're looking at the past bond cycle, a consultant fee on average was anywhere between $1.4 to $2 million per fee. When looking at the abilities for the staff to do this in-house, we are looking at a yield savings to 40 to 60 percent. There are limitations. There are select services we'll still have to go out for, traffic signal design, geotechnical services that just is a limitation on equipment and that extra personnel but including those services in that kind of cost analysis we still yield a significant amount of savings to bring in house design for us and what that does for us future-wise for bonds and of course moving forward with some of these items with you know pay-go future bond projects the water utilities in situ pipe placement, it gives us the ability to maximize those funds that are available for those and to create more projects and push, extend that dollar, so to speak. There is something that we're looking at too, as part of that is the additional investment in software to help us further those decisions to make more accurate decisions on what needs to be replaced if we need to go from an 8-inch pipe to a 12-inch pipe because there's larger scale development coming down the line, then we can go ahead and anticipate those costs and assist in those in a capital improvements project, or with the pay go, we can turn around and identify

[2:41:09] and kind of line out our street improvements for five to 10 to 15 years down the road and make adjustments as we need to. So the emphasis for engineering department was more so in saving efficiencies on the internal design and bringing that back in house moving forward with this presentation. And it was pretty quick, I got, we were just more about the efficiency aspect of the department. You bought us some time. Zeth, can you bring up about doing a lot of things internally? Yes, sir. We're talking about something that's going to be in place for years, decades. Does your department contain the skill set to go in and make some of those designs and standards plans do you think within yourself? I mean within your group or where are you saying I know you want to do some things in-house? Yes we do currently right now there's there just going to be a requirement is training and bringing up the skills. We have done it in the past and this actually slide right there that pictured right there is us starting on some of these items here that we have internally and bringing some of our newer staff up to those standards to say hey, these are what we're trying to produce in house. So yes, we do. We're just gonna have to redefine our operating procedure. And the reason why a consultant charges that much is the amount and the volume they have. I mean, you have one office that comes from Lubbock, and you have maybe five guys that come in, but they have maybe 40 guys over in Dallas or Austin that are handling those things. But as far as some of these other projects, we can handle them internally. We are changing our roadway standards with the pay go. We do a lot of our seal-coding plans in-house. We are starting to pick up a lot of the more efficient

[2:43:09] paving options like Chadburn a couple of years ago when we finished that roadway in between Stock Show and Rodeo. That was a full-depth reclamation process that were not adopted in-house. If we didn't have the Luke 306 Emergency Project, the Glenna Edmund 29th Project would have been done before the holidays. So and that's kind of an option that we're using in there because it provides some efficiencies in the work it produces cost savings versus a traditional you know large-scale roadway infrastructure project similar to college hills there's a quicker faster items that we're identifying as technology increases and methods increase we're adopting those and inventing those out here in the city of San Angelo to apply those so yes we can do a lot of this stuff in-house and we do have the staff to do that. I can't do John's 400 million dollar reuse project that's that's specialties beyond us but more so you know the pay go the rehabilitation for water wastewater and the sewers that that's stuff that we can handle in-house. Well thank you for that answer I think that was just a yes sorry no there's fine but there's levels you can go and leverage you you can't will depend on you to tell us when you can't go that way. Yes or we will realize when it's better in somebody else's hands than with ours. Those are things we just don't want to make a bad step trying to make an initial step. That's completely understood. With the past few roadway projects we felt that we've could have done them more so in-house versus the smaller scale things and there were items to traffic signal design. There's updating those things and that's something that we would hire a sub-consultant for and the same thing with geotechnical that's just seeing what's underneath the roadway and what we're going to anticipate and we do that for utilities and that's something that any municipality doesn't have in-house that's just more of a specialty thing but a lot of the stuff paving utility-wise and even access to some of the software we could start assessing even straight stormwater issues in the area and how we

[2:45:11] can fix those items as well. Council does any of you want to have any other questions? I don't really have a question. Go ahead, Karen. Really interesting presentation. Thank you again pointing at the comp plan. You should be showing us some things as we move along. My questions are really small and probably not even relevant today. They'll become more relevant as we see as we work through the process of developing that comprehensive plan for the city. city but for example GIS is it updated every day? It can be a delay can mean problems that then in turn creates costs for planning and development services for example. How do we make build that bridge between the two departments that should be talking and working closely on something like GIS to make sure or their efficiencies that don't have negative financial impact. That would just be one example. And then if you've only got one person doing that, what happens when that person leaves? Are you getting ready to fill that otherwise? I mean, great, do it in-house if you can do it. I mean, do it without a bond if you can do it. That would be outstanding. And that's what we're looking for if a lot of these street youth fees, and then of course, anything that stems from the Water Utilities Department is bringing that more so in-house and working on those items internally. Because most of the time too, a lot of our staff is just gathering data and information for the consultants where we already have that, we just bring our down time to us knowing where we can access that information, putting it together, creating a design and a project and putting that out in a timely manner. Thank you, Cara. Appreciate that. Do you have a question? going to kind of piggyback off of both of them. Use your discretion on things you feel comfortable on.

[2:47:13] Because I do understand there are large costs with hiring people out of our department. And as well as you lose some of the on hand stuff and the cross office communication that can eliminate a lot of the run around. So that's very good. I'm glad you're looking at that. And that's a good deal. Thank you, sir. Anyone else? Yes, thank you, sir. Appreciate your presentation. Up next is Ryan with Costa DC. Good morning, Mayor, Council, Mr. Valenzuela. Ryan Gaddy, Economic Development Director, day 46. It's been a quite fast 46 days, and I appreciate the opportunity to present to you kind of where we are with regard to generating revenues and and managing our expenses. This is kind of a slight detour from what you've heard from the other departments. Our mission is to generate revenues and that benefit the city through property and sales tax. But at the same time, our funding is from a different source. Our funding is from the type B, half cent sales tax. So we don't, the development corporation receives no funding from the city, so there's really very limited opportunity there to mitigate cost and we operate very efficiently. So I'd like to give a little background on how the COSA DC and the development corporation operates in a little history on the top B, the top four B sales tax, I'm sorry.

[2:49:21] So the Development Corporation Act of 1979 was enacted to provide a statutory framework for the establishment of development corporations in Texas. So that goes back many years. And the purpose of that was to promote and create the expansion of industry and manufacturing throughout cities in Texas. In 1991, the Act was amended to allow for top four B sales tax, a half cent sales tax to fund these kind of efforts throughout communities. And in 1999, the City of St. Angelo Development Corporation was created by a vote of the citizens. Now, the corporation is owned by the city of St. Angelo. It is operated independently and governed by a board of directors that's appointed by the council. So that's kind of a little background on that. The focus on economic development is, of course, based on the statutory definition of economic development by businesses and creation of primary jobs that bring money from outside the community into the community. And it's restrictive in the types of industries that we're able to fund, you know, they're called NICS codes, NAICS, and we are restricted to assisting agricultural manufacturing, manufacturing, wholesale trade, call centers, transportation and warehousing and financial services. Now, there's a whole sub list for each one of those categories that we're able to assist. And, you know, our efforts don't stop there. If a business comes to us or an individual comes

[2:51:23] to us and they need assistance and they don't fall within these next codes, we have the luxury of sharing a building with the ASU, South Small Business Development Center. So we're able to, if we're not able to assist, then we walk them over there and they are able to assist them. And it works both ways. If somebody goes to them and they are eligible for some assistance through this program, then we, then they bring them to us. So, for the type 4B projects, the incentives are available for those projects that are eligible. They do require approval by the development corporation board and the city council. And like we've discussed recently, incentive payments are made only after the conditions of the agreement are met and the expenses are incurred. So, we don't pre-fund any activities. funds that we don't pre-fund and there's performance and there's benchmarks they have to hit. How many of those probably don't claim at the end? I would say based on my experience over supporting the DC efforts over the past eight years, probably somewhere 20-25 percent and in terms of dollar amounts it's even less than that because typically the larger ones obviously do take advantage of those incentives, and it's a smaller ones, you know, the $75,000 that they'd never come to an agreement to deliver either the investment or the number of jobs. So it's small, dollar-wise is smaller than number-wise. All right, thank you.

[2:53:23] Okay, so let's take a quick look at what the revenue efforts are that we are focused on at the at the present time. Now you are aware that we partner with the Chamber of Commerce and they are our economic development partner as in recruiting and retaining businesses and jobs. And the figures that I'm presenting are based on what their current agreement is what our current agreement is with the chamber and part of that agreement includes KPIs and deliverables and they have and of course we have because we partner with them a new deals target of $100 million in investment and 90 jobs both recruit new jobs or retain jobs. So if you convert that to what the property tax and the sales tax impact is, it's $1 billion one time and that's primarily from the sales tax boost that you get during the construction of these different facilities and the permit fees and so forth. And then you have $100 million translates to approximately $1 million in ongoing property taxes, property and sales tax. That seems like a large number and you know to me it's a very large number but if I look at the pipeline that we're currently operating we have about 14 projects that are in that pipeline and of course some of that is data center. So I'm optimistic that we're gonna achieve that now whether we do that this year or next year you know it's always it's the process takes time. I mean the sales cycle is long and the so that's you know

[2:55:25] that's kind of where we were targeting at the present. We do have one project that's in progress to a hundred and sixty million dollar project and we expect it that's going to launch sometime this year. It was presented to council previously for an abatement and 85% abatement for the first three years and then that abatement goes away. So those projections, 160,000 in property tax for years 1 through 3 and 600,000 in property tax for years 4 beyond our estimates that we are currently working with. We also are We're involved in infrastructure and real estate development, particularly at the rail port. We have an expansion, we've just recently had that property rezoned to the city-owned, and the development corporation is going to purchase that property from the city. It's going to be a one-time purchase, $1.4 million, and that should happen fairly quickly, so that those funds will be available to support city activity. And then ongoing, we'll have a property tax approximately $11,000 for the improvements that they're doing at the rail port. Now at the economic summit that was last Monday, they did announce that hopefully that bridge and Presidio will be open in June. And so we're looking at ways that we can capitalize on that particular import and export of goods and services from Mexico and up into the north and northeast through that rail port. Another area that we support is the airport. Currently we have an incentive agreement with

[2:57:25] Skyline as they expanded and part of that agreement is that they will build a hangar, 3.5 million dollar hanger in 2027 and that will yield about 30,000 one-time revenue and about 30,000 ongoing property tax. So another another thing I failed to include on the slide is is what we're doing at the industrial park and and there we currently have We have many really long-term tenants there, and we have four that are considering purchasing tracks out there, so we're excited about what we offer at the industrial park, and Bob Sneeman on our staff does a great job of promoting that property and developing it and so forth. So that's kind of a snapshot of our revenue. Do we wanna take questions now or just continue on. Anybody have anything? Give you a little ride. Okay. On the expense side, you know, the half cent sales tax funds, about 12 to, well, it's about about $14 million a year, 72% of that goes to what was referred to as ballot restricted projects, primarily those for water and affordable housing. And then 28% goes, is available for economic development. And you can see on this listing of the different budgeted costs, on the ballot side, it's the services, the debt that was established whenever the original ballot was approved, and those projects were completed like the sports complex, the river trail, some projects at Fort Concho,

[2:59:27] at Fort Conchow and things, and then there's the water projects and the debt service that we funded through the ballot, the long-term water supply, and so that's about 3.7 million, and then there is an amount that was established in the ballot for affordable housing that's 335,000, and then we have the city administrative services. So whatever is funded there that is not used goes into future projects that is available to fund projects down the road. And then 28% is available for our economic development activities. And the large part of that is used to pay for incentives. Currently we have budgeted about $2.3 million for incentives. And then the other, the large expenditure there is for business recruitment and retention. And that's primarily the contract that we have with the chamber and some marketing and advertising. The development corporation staff, there's a staff of three, and that's about 400,000. And then we fund the city administrative services for like legal, which provides a significant amount of support, finance, which does all of our financial reporting. And then we have purchasing the city, the department or legal that does a lot of our land and facilities contracts. And then the rest of it is associated with we maintain the business resource center over on Chadburn and then some administrative costs. If we continue on at the at the efficiencies, you know, there is very limited opportunity for expense under efficiency

[3:01:29] reductions in the economic development department and to the extent we do create any they they fall to projects or amounts available to fund incentives, so it is somewhat restricted in terms of what those funds can be used for and you know each year during the budget process we we go through and we and we We plan for expenditures very prudently to ensure that we maximize the amounts that are available for projects and for incentives. So that's all I have. I'm happy to try to answer the questions. Any questions from Council? What are my apologies if I missed it, but on the Baller Street Department, what are the future projects? What are some of those in there? I'm sorry. on your ballot-restricted category of future projects, 4.2 million, what are some of those future projects? Well, you know, most of that is reserved for water supply, so I think just without knowing specifics, the Fort Stockton Water Right Project that we're working with, and we are paying water rights for, that's one down the road that would qualify for assistance and that's the primary one. You know we'd like to work with the city to produce some infrastructure type projects particularly those that support the airport and the rail port and so those are projects that we're considering as well. And can I just clarify real quick that amount is the current year budget of the amount that's available for future projects so that amount is available each year at you know whatever's left over after the ballot designated projects have been funded and so if we don't use that four point three million dollars in the current year it'll go to fund balance and be available in future years for whatever projects City

[3:03:32] Council directs so and so we have you know we have a fun balance that has accumulated based on the lack of spending some of those future projects but you know you the the hickory development was nearly 200 million so you know you think about the scope of those types of projects are very significant so any other questions okay thank you Ross appreciate that presentation we are now at the working lunch break by all means lunches in the back Michelle has it we can actually settle in start eating and then we'll have I think it's Aaron coming up here present thank you so next we have Aaron go ahead man all right thank you City Manager City Council for this opportunity I'm Aaron Van Roy planning Development Services Director just gonna give you the quick background you guys know that we have three divisions within our department development services planning permits and inspections and as we've talked a lot this morning And I want to definitely say that we are one of those essential departments that puts development on the map. We go through private and public development through land use, subdivision, permits, all those types of things and go through things to keep development moving within our community. One of the things that a lot of our citizens as well as you guys always check in is our review times. residential times are less than three days and that's for all of 2025 our commercial times are less than 21 days that's all of 2025 and development which means plats site plans and so forth is less than 10 days you'll see some stuff out there in the media that Fort Worth has the best times in the country that's actually not accurate they they do have the best times through one company they pay for and submit only select data but we look we compare ourselves to the our

[3:05:35] 10 sister cities and we believe we have the best timelines in the state and we'll put it against anybody. All of that takes people and all of that takes competent applicants to apply correctly and we're going to talk quite a bit about that today. So revenue, it is a recommendation from our department that all of our fees that are charged should be reviewed annually and that's really an emphasis from our developers out in the community. They want to know that annually, not every three or five years. They'd rather have a small increase annually instead of a big increase in a three or five year jump. We should be doing 100% cost of service fee recovery for our permit or planning process issued. And as you heard from other departments, we do have folks that come into that development world from engineering, fire marshal, health, and a few others. What we must do is consider all the overhead for these processes. You know, if we don't have good data of what our costs are, it's hard to come up with a good 100% cost recovery. It must include all those accessory plan reviewers' time. And the challenge we have is we're not filling a soccer team that you know you have 10 players in your filling a soccer team. We have Project A that might be valued at $150,000. You've got Project B that's at $82,000, and we're on a value-based permit fee for commercial permits, bigger the permit cost or the valuation, obviously there's more inspections involved. But I really just want you to know that not all projects are the same. So we can't just, it's hard to put a, just an average, I mean we have to put an average in there. The other thing I want to explain is that 100% cost of recovered does not cover the cost of the whole development team and it's simply the development process for that permit or that plat or whatever it may be. It doesn't cover pre-development meetings, it doesn't cover the conversations with the customer back and forth at the window over the phone, it doesn't cover those costs.

[3:07:40] So when we talk about 100% cost of service recovery, that's not a 100% cost of our department or the associated members that may come and have to work in the development world for a while. So just to be clear on that. you there are times you will see it through the budget process. In fact, probably this fiscal year, you'll see that our permit fees will be higher than what we budgeted. And that's because we have some really major projects coming through, but then our expenses are probably going to be more than what we budgeted to because of those inspections going back out and inspection facilities and sites and things like that. One of the revenue things that we talked about some things with some other departments is a fee for non-digital submission. We've had digital capability since 2018. We have very low usage in our community and it's primary, our local folks. Our regional, if state, and national folks do digital all the time and submit a lot. But we have a very low usage of our digital process through our local contractors. And so what that means is that, that costs a lot more for our development services team to do that process. We're not capturing that in our every permit right now, because we have to charge everybody for it in our permit process, or we create a separate fee for these folks that say, okay, I don't want to do that. You become the applicant for me. And so you think about just the applicant process. They're applying for the applicant saying, I am going to build structure A. And then when comments come back, they go back to the staff, which then have to get relayed back to the contractor somehow, and then the contractor has to re-respond, which means they got to come back to the staff, then the staff has to upload their stuff, and it takes a long time to do all of those things. And then the staff doesn't know the details, the specifics of how they're building a thing.

[3:09:41] Their staff is just, all right, we got this document, we're going to put it in, and the review staff says that's not what we need, so now we have another cycle and another cycle. So we've got to find a solution for our community to start saying we got to go digital, we got to help the efficiencies, which is going to help the cost in our department. And so while timelines are fast, incomplete and unreadable and inaccurate documents and plans, slow the whole process for the planning, approval or permit, anytime we get the napkin off the bar top and we get those, you kind of chuckle in your mind, but we get those every day. Here's my hand-drawn plan that doesn't have dimensions, It doesn't have anything that's a struggle for our department. You check with Abilene Midland, Odessa, Lubbock, they don't allow that at all, but we continue to allow it. Now I understand if you're a home owner and you're trying to fix your garage or fix your bathroom, I get that. If you're a contractor, that's different. If you're, as I know some of my friends in the HBA say if you're a big C, you should be doing that. If you're a little C, that means you're writing stuff down on notes and turn it in. So we have to get applicants to become their applicant on their own project and city staff be the actual experts on plan reviewers and information-giving, not the applicants on processes. Revenue, this one's a little challenging, but part of it is we know we're a low-compliance community on people coming and getting permits or processes for anything. If we had stronger enforcement of violations, particularly those focused on not pulling permits and things like that, that would go down. We would start bringing in more revenue to the department in that way. Now, yes, I think there should be some initial upfront cost because you're asking for those enforcement agencies to go out and hit the ground running, go and do things.

[3:11:41] But because it's very challenging. Not only do we see a permit issues, but we see land use violations, occupancy issues. We don't have a business license process. We're the only major city that's over 30,000 people in the state of Texas that does not require a business license to go into a new property to make sure that that property comes up to compliance. And so we have a lot of land use issues because they just go and move in. We were able to do enforcement. We would be able to solve some of those problems. It would, right now it's kind of a burden to the citizens to be the enforcement agents to say, hey, I've got to call in on my neighbor, and that does increase the cost to the development overall. So we do think that that over time will assist in revenue generation through permit fees, not through fines and hitting people over the head. It's really, we want you to be safe. We want you to go and build your structure correctly, and this is the way to do it, instead of going and build it and then the property sells to somebody else, they come in, they want to pull a permit, well now you've got to go pull a permit for the old one. That's challenging. Expenses, currently the day-to-day expenses are not sufficient to support our staff training or if we don't get certification pay in our department, so all of our inspectors that hold certifications to go and do specific certifications, they do not get an additional pay as in other departments. Currently our field inspectors double up to the vehicle currently. Planning and Development Services shares a vehicle with all of City Hall and so in the morning that vehicles reserve for some other departments and then we get to go and do our stuff in the afternoon which may be okay but I'm just letting everybody know that that's an expense that when that vehicle goes down, that's a big problem because there's only one. Same thing with our inspectors. We had three vehicles go down a few weeks ago and fortunately we were able to do some flexing and some doubling up but it makes it challenging to meet those things out in the field. Our

[3:13:48] technology upgrades and fixes are not a regular budgeted item and so that's not really an expense we get to cut out and so that's a challenge over time. And I do think we as a community and I would urge, and maybe IT even talks about this, but you heard some other departments talk about software. If we don't start seeing that as an essential internal infrastructure that has to be updated on a regular basis, we get so far behind on how to actually manage development projects that a decision may have been made in one department. It doesn't get into the right system to get over to maybe the permitting staff And the permitting staff just has the information in front of them and they make the right decision on the information in front of them And then we find out a month later Oh, well they needed to do something else and that causes friction with the community the developers the contractors And it increased cost overall. So I just encourage y'all to look at that Efficiency I've been saying this for at least the two years that I've become the director is that we need to become what we say we are we say we're a one-stop shop for all private public development and yet we are splintered and have different groups in different buildings and so if you're a customer you might get a little bit of it here when you walk in but we may have to send you across a couple of blocks or may have to send you another building we think we found some ways to hey if there's even just periods of time during the week that those partner groups could come in we've got the office space office here for four hours we you know if somebody comes in we say well hey please come back at two o'clock on Tuesday, we're going to have, maybe it's engineering services will be in the building to help service them on whatever development questions they may have. Again, that's kind of the incorporating the engineering hell and fire prevention into the day-to-day. It increases the information share, it helps in internal communication about projects, you're not having to run an email or a phone call, you can get up and actually walk over to another a cue will go and talk to a person and that as I've seen as much as I love

[3:15:51] technology and shooting an email that face-to-face makes a huge difference in comprehension and urgency and everything and if when you're splintered that's challenging. It provides for a space for private public teams to discuss all the projects and compliance of all the development parts not midway in so that We're started out from the, and it provides a unified voice from the city to assist contractors understand the requirements by ordinances and codes. And it's really that unified voice that while we can do some pre-minions inside and say how is this group going to look at a certain situation or another group look at it, we want to make sure that we work those things out together before we're talking to that contractor. So that we don't have a miscommunication of well, they're going to require this, but I heard that they said they could waive it. Let's talk about that first. Some other efficiencies is we actually need to set outcomes as goals instead of outputs. We've done a great job of telling you how many permits we've issued, or how many plats we've looked at, or how many acres we've done. That's good information. It's not bad information. But what does it indicate? And when we come to our comprehensive plan, what does it indicate? When we're making decisions on do we We fund more infrastructure for development for brand new development on the edge of town or infill development. What does our, what is happening indicates what we should do, data-based decision making. What is our inventory of housing and what type. What's our business outlook, new expansion, demos, where are we going to do all these things at? What's the impact on our infrastructure, the water series, storm monitoring, again, I'm just saying efficiencies, we got to get the comprehensive plan, we have to get everybody putting, pointing together, even with the CIP plan of where we can spend money because it's clear that all, all of you all are seeing today, we have a lot of needs, but we also have limited dollars. And we may have some hopes out there that more dollars come in, but we still have to budget very conservatively and be unified as a direction. So again, data

[3:17:56] forward processes which have a fiscal mindset for both the customer and the organization representing the citizens. One thing that we think that is very important is trying to continue to cross train and combine efforts across development related department, internal planning development, cross training with planning and permits so that both sides know more of each other, so when they're talking to customer A and they're thinking about Project A and it may trigger something in their mind, oh, I really need to pull a permit staff over here to talk about that, or I need to pull planning staff over here. I think over time, we would look at creating tiers of customer assistance from our front line being the development tax that would be trained in certain things. Then you have your plan reviewer layer. Then you have your planners, almost like a case management type style. Very similar to, all right, if we're going to do districts, we need to have a case management that knows what's going on, residential, commercial, all the way through the whole flow of the process. Other cross-training efficiencies is looking external to plan development services or planning and development services is how can we utilize code enforcement officers? Could they be utilized to be cross-trained to do other certain inspections? Could our inspectors be cross-trained because they're going to the same neighborhoods, you know, to go out and look at these things? So if they're going to a call and three blocks away is a high weed violation, why can they not go by and use the same tablet, take the photograph, get the case started, send it into the office, have the office people do the thing in the back end and send that out. Maybe that's a way to do that. Same with the CSI and the back flow prevention. Normally, those hold some type of plumbing license. Well, can they be cross-trained when people are short that we've got to go get building inspections plumbing and they're trained on what's supposed to be looked at can they go do that and same with fire prevention things like that are there

[3:19:56] certain levels of certifications that can be obtained by others that can go and do those things to become more efficiency to be more efficient I do think that our community at some point we'll get back to doing community sweeps community education and leverage those team members to go and do a unified response instead of sending four people to the same property for issues, how do we send one person that can solve the issues and at least get the information back? And that's one of our challenges that we've had. And we think that's an efficiency we can work towards in the future. So that's planning and development services for the most part. Tears is part of that. I've got one slide on tears. Do y'all have any questions on any of those before I go to the the tiers program? Yes, ma'am. Why do you think that we have such a low usage of the contractors owning their own plans? Have we just been hand-holding them all this time? We have been providing a service that is not a core service. We have been doing things for them, and they've gotten very accustomed to that service being done for them. And it's become an expectation instead of a one-off here there. And on that, Mary, I think when we made the shift over to where you could do it online, we kind of at that point said we would do this for a period of time, sort of a grace period to give people a little time to that, but then they get one, two, and we never said, okay, sorry, time's up. And so, you know, that may be, it may be time to do that. And I will, I will say, it will take the support from each one of you, and as well as administration to say, OK, we're sorry, you have to do this, because you will get the phone calls. So why do I have to do this? Right. On your, the best enforcement on these code compliance deals is that I guess you're going to get further into that.

[3:21:56] But so I'll let you finish what you were talking about on this. But I just want to make this statement really city-wide with AI and technology and everything is getting so much better, faster and all. I think it's just almost inexcusable to not have the most up-to-date programs or that GIS system, not having the same in one department, then you're looking for something else and the same asset that's still, I mean, that's just, we're defeating ourselves, so I'm 100% behind you on, we've got to have those updates. Yeah. That's just. The challenges. They're smarter. They're not harder. They're very costly. Yeah. As any of the department heads and the assistant city managers can, they've seen those costs come through of what it takes and it's challenging to fit that in. Anyway, well, thank you, Aaron. Continue, please. Real quick, I like the idea of cross-training and the efficiency. That's a very good idea, but the communication is also key to that because again, you may have a person going to look at something but if they don't know to look at a lot too lots away, that's the communication deal. And I think that's also some of the challenge with the online process. There's that person-to-person communication where a problem couldn't be solved just by a conversation. So, again, the Heather gives and takes. I, personally, I think it'd be good if an idea, if maybe planning development were close to the other departments, like the Fire Marshal's Office, the utilities, because then, okay, we have this one issue, let's all meet real quick and get it resolved, versus tagging back and forth here and there, and it's just an idea.

[3:23:56] So, it's just efficient. I do agree that would be efficient, it does come down to a matter of kind of staffing and moving people around and putting people in that location. And then removing a person that could have been helpful in the other location, it's just a bit of a war that goes into that. And that's something that I'm looking at, Shane, because that's something that we'll have to find a way to make that happen though. So, because it's that had been brought up several times, it's something that needs to be addressed. I do understand the staffing part of it, but we need to get that addressed though. So Aaron before we move off of that Thought I don't know that we'll get this done before I leave council, but it's a thought Why don't we change? The cost for those particular developers planners that they come in there that don't use the electronic system We already know that it costs the city cost the citizens more to do this process If we get somebody's pocketbook, maybe this will help them go that way thought I would pick I would pick a date Aaron and say here's the day That is everything's gonna be submitted digitally or to Harry's point here Here's gonna be the call. I just pick a date and just say here's the date I am gonna look at my fellow council members here. I think every council member here would support that We're gonna get calls absolutely we're gonna get calls. We're gonna get some less than pleasant calls, absolutely we're going to get some pleasant calls, but we're hearing from the folks that deal with this on a day in and day out basis of something that we can do that doesn't cost us one thing, except maybe getting chewed on a little bit. So I'd say just pick a day. And when you pick the day, make sure you email the council member. So I picked the day. I picked the day. So one thing, rules are made for a population, not for an individual person.

[3:26:01] There will be people that have difficulty running project docs. I hear that from people, if you don't use project docs a lot, there's some difficulties. There will be people in there that are, you know, yes, English is the second language. Those people are going to need help. I sometimes wonder if we don't need to penalize somebody for not being computer literate if they want to come in and they want to build something simple on their property. We should be able to help them with that assistance. But for somebody, we don't need to let those things get chronic. And when those things get chronic, then I certainly see moving forward. But there are certainly people that I know that probably will never be able to function through project docs. But I just keep that in the back of your mind as you move forward with the penalty phase. Yes, I believe that is very true as well. And we would be very sensitive to that. So we would to bring that forward with any kind of fee increase so that y'all could review that. So tiers, I talked a little bit about tiers, but this, basically this last late summer, early fall, y'all heard about a program over the last 10 years of our current tier zone, which encompasses the north and south. If there's additional revenues, because we did budget relatively flat for that for the next 10 years, we believe that there's additional revenues that should focus on those infrastructure projects within the tier zone. And that infrastructure project is all the way from sidewalks, water, sewer lines, drainage, all those types of things in those areas. If we have additional expenses and we can continue to invest in local businesses within the zone, let's maximize those however we can. And really we need to maximize those to gain occupancy because once you get a structure occupied, then that property value goes up. And that's really what the tiers is about, trying to raise that property value in that area. If we look to in probably many years, whether that's after this 10 years or something like that and creating a new tier zone, just

[3:28:04] want to say there are current state laws that kind of regulate where that zone can be and one of the biggest things is it talks about a blighted area. And I believe if we did create one, wherever that is, is that it shouldn't, instead of doing this 50-50 split between private and public, it should really be very heavy on improving the infrastructure so that private investment can come back in. And that could be all the way from infrastructure and land acquisition, so that if we need to redevelop the land, you've got bad buildings on there that need to come down and maybe raised and start again. I think that's where if we were to do a tier zone in the future, we would be looking at those areas that are blighted that need significant infrastructure repairs and or land acquisition to do something different for our community. With that, I think I'm just about done or I am done. I think that's my last slide. Quick question on a tier zone, would that be susceptible to a statewide if they go to affecting the tax rates and changing is the tier zone at risk for any state regulation. Because once it's in, it's in and I can't change it. Once it's in, but if we chose to do another one in the future, whatever the regulations are at that time, so that incremental piece might be very small. Okay. And again, if we go to potentially a 1% of property taxes, now you're trying to do an incremental piece of 1%, Which is going to impact our general fund on however long that tiers district may exist and it takes a while for that Tears district to build money in to rise up or you pull bonds at the front end to pay for it Well, and this is I've learned this is not a a favorite topic, but Even with the data center moving in there would be ways to implement tier zones that fall back on the incremental Property taxes from a data center that could certainly subsidize

[3:30:06] millions of dollars of infrastructure and remove it from calculations from other things and it would be protected and dedicated for infrastructure in the future. Just something that it's a long discussion every time and I'll wrap it up with this when it gets your part. I need the planning department to understand the purpose is to get those permits moved through. The goal is not a review. The goal and the purpose is to get them all the way through the department and out. And I don't know if you have a ranking of employees on who does it and who moves the most, but the goal is not the review. The goal is getting it all the way through and out. And I don't mean that to sound rude but I want everybody to understand your group is probably the most misunderstand department over in the whole city but we need things to move through in the circular I mean it's your department will be much more efficient when it revolves on turns instead of review and if we can get to that point and if you can rank your employees on you know what here's this person and they move this me through and this one handles it I think that would be awesome because it would give you tool to look at who's here to make sure we move those things all the way through. Thank you. Mayor, I was just gonna go back quickly to your question on the tiers. The properties within the tiers are pulled out of the calculation before we calculate what the tax rate should be. So those properties are not capped at the three and a half percent. Okay. With that council members for Aaron? Aaron, nice job. Thank you sir. Appreciate you. Sylvia, you're up. They're never capped ever in the tears. Under current state law, they are not. OK. Thanks.

[3:32:22] Do you hear everything all day long, like everybody else did? Oh, she got it. When I get questioned, why are you here? And then I don't. I get penalized. Absolutely. Go ahead, silly. Well, good afternoon. So we've got a Rama, Director of Municipal Court. So just to kind of kick off with our revenues, Any revenues that are generated from municipal corridor, incidental revenues? Oh, sorry. Yes. Any revenues that are collected are incidental revenues, and they consist of mainly fines and court costs. And that is determined by the volume of filings that we have every year. And of course, we review those and adjust them as according to state law. Okay, so that's all I really have as far as the revenue part goes. And I have put in a little chart here, just to kind of give you an overview, starting with fiscal year 18, that was the norm for us. Anywhere between 25 to 26,000 filings per year with approximately 10,000 warnings. As you can see, that has drastically declined over the year. So when it comes to our revenues, we're every year, we've declined by a significant amount. Any questions on that? Can you tell me why you think they've dropped that much? I cannot. That's nothing for me to answer, no sir, sorry. Okay, so expenditures, although the number of filings has significantly decreased over

[3:34:29] the years due to legislative changes, we've had to increase our work load per case. So we have to have additional notices and hearings and consideration of alternatives financing options, salary is the court's biggest expenditure, over as long as I've been there, I believe we have budgeted for 32 positions in the court. As filings have decreased, I have limited the hiring to a central personnel only. We're currently operating with 22 employees now, so that's an estimated savings of $490,000, and that's, of course, with benefits and salary. Travel, of course, that is one of the things that, in order to try to, you know, have some savings this year, travel is going to be minimal this year, and is only going to be mandatory for those that have certifications or licenses that require communication, or I'm sorry, continuing education hours. So as far as the opportunities for services, the state law mandate specific services that the court must provide along with the associated fees and their allocations. One service that we have been providing is the graffiti abatement program. I have no idea how that ended up in the courts budget. to be honest with you but they had a pressure washer is exactly how that happened and I hear about it three days a week probably I have no doubt but when

[3:36:33] I first started we had it was two employees that it required to operate this program and then it went down to one and it was a part-time position and with the salary of $37,000. This position has been vacant for a little over, for about a year now. I kind of wanted to see the needs and the requests that we were getting, but this is definitely a service that we could give to another department so that way they could recover the cost of this service. Yeah. Sorry, Patrick. Just keep rolling. We hear you. Okay. And then along with the personnel savings to the salary and personnel, we've relinquished a few vehicles and that's also allowed the court to save $10,000 in maintenance and gas to the court's budget. And efficiencies and process improvements. These are kind of some things that we are going to try to implement as far as going paperless and as permitted by the state law seek more automated payment services. We did try to get something going, but the way our citations are numbered, we couldn't get it to go through, so we're going to try that again. And then, of course, expanding electronic services and correspondence and cross-training staff as well to make sure that we can operate seamlessly and efficiently with the current staffing. So that is all I have, does anybody have any questions? So let's go back to your chart.

[3:38:33] Okay, yes, sir. So for the last seven years, we were probably less than half of the citations that come through municipal court, makes a new chart. We've discussed over the last two or three years how animal services need to be citing citizens more for unaltered dogs, running loose dogs, we've said the same thing about code compliance on tall grass trash, and I'm sure the police department does the same thing. That's basically where the citations come from and heard at municipal court, correct? Yes, sir. About 80 to 85 percent of those come from the police department and the rest are through other departments throughout the city. I just, this chart just floors me that we have less than half citations that were issued in 18 that were issued in 25. And we talk about this up here all the time. So I don't understand why that number shouldn't still be up there considerably higher than what is what's showing here today and which means to me I would you would have increased revenue and that so I don't know what that solution is but we talk about it almost every council meeting yes sir she processes the citations you didn't issue well I understand that but this is just this is what happens when When you don't have the citations you had seven years ago, this department now is struggling to run efficiently because they don't have enough revenue.

[3:40:34] So where is that other issue with those other groups that are evidently not issuing as many citations as they did in the past? In all fairness, Chief will be up here in a little bit and he can kind of address that as far as staffing. It's certain issues that he would like to talk about as well. So that definitely the conversation will be heading in a little bit. And I think you and I appreciate that you recognize the staff and our staffing needs. I have probably about four or five employees that have over 20 years of service with the city that have dedicated their time and they have been very, very loyal. So when I'm having to do a reorg and ask them to fill in different spots and cross train in other areas without hesitation that just speaks volumes for them and I'm very, very proud of them. That's kind of how you got graffiti management, was it not? Yeah, come on, we'll take it. What else you got? Well, they did and I heard about it and we had some graffiti right before some people were going to come look at it. Your group stepped up late at night, went and got a power washer, went, I mean, it shows the commitment to group paths and we appreciate that. But I think I'm going to go back to where Harry is talking about, is there a little bit of a lack of an enforcement and opinions upon are we being, as we say, are we being lenient as how we should be as a population and do we control things or we're losing control? I'll step in with traffic and let me say it's probably, if we had more people, we could probably do more things. I mean, it's all interdependent, but we do see the big picture, but I want to say thank you for your presentation this morning and we get it. But I don't want the police chief to think that we're not right enough tickets. That's not my that's not what I'm trying to say Is is that where it is? 85% of the citations that's fine Because I'm sure I'm going to hear from the citizens this week that I told the police chief he's not right

[3:42:34] No, that's not what I said. But anyway, thank you Civilian real quick on and and some of this and I came out to you But if we do come back in a month and go over more in depth I'd be curious to see the breakdown of citations in in 18 versus 25 to see where it has changed If y'all have I don't know if y'all have that information or not you mean in the numbers like an actual number How many were police citations how many were yeah the different types of citations? Oh, okay. Yes, sir Do you know roughly? I mean with your budget and the citations one how many are written off for or basically indigent circumstances, and then to how close are y'all to being self-funded? Are you way off? No, at this point, we're not. So we have our dedicated funds, we have a security fund, a building security fund, and a technology fund. Right now, we are able to maintain those, and we can pay our technology bills, and we can get what we need. How long that's gonna last if things keep continuing to decline the way They are we may there may be a point where we have to come and ask for some help on that But as of right now, we have been able because we're very frugal with those Funds and we make sure that we are saving those for a rainy day because we just don't ever know when we're gonna have to replace a server replace cameras, you know for monitoring services and things like like the bigger purchases so And then on that end and again and we can see most of you can get back to us But you know about how many of these citations are written off For I've been told from the departments. Hey, we read the citations and in the court Just waves them because people don't have the ability to pay them. Do you have any rough for indigency? No sir, but I can get them. I can get it. Okay. I'm not for you as well. Thank you anything else So good, thank you. I appreciate you Next is P.D. and Chief Griffith.

[3:44:36] First off, I want to say thank you to everybody up here. This is a lot to take out of your time and energy and it means a lot to me that you care enough to go past just the facade of what government is and get down into the nitty gritty. And obviously what we're seeing here today is that we have finite resources and we're limited to what we have as a city and you have some tough decisions to make, so I thank you for that. The San Angelo Police Department, that's an overview. We have very little revenue and we have some expenses, as we all know, and we're looking at efficiencies and processes of improvements. The San Angelo Police Department runs the only revenues that we get is from permits and report fees and false alarms. Out of the permits, you'll see that we have the alarm permits, and those alarm permits are running right at about $130,000 between a year roughly of what we bring in solicitation permits, super limited, 157. Again, probably could streamline that and put that into just a city permits area to save on that. And everything that we've seen in comparison, we have that within reason of what we're seeing from our other cities. We're within reason of the fees to cover the cost.

[3:46:40] Personnel, it's one of our biggest expenses. And I think it's something important to understand that we'll probably go ahead and just jump right into the issue at hand. Yeah, citations are down. Fill contacts are down. Extra patrols are down. We've been tasking the San Angelo police officers. I've been here for 18 years. And year over year, time and time again, we are 14, 15, 12% below our pay of our comparable cities. That's just reality. We have been a training ground time and time again for people to go to the Metroplex, to go to DPS, to go to other places, and then we're stuck with low level, not nearly as trained when we have to start back over. That's time and time again. In April, we'll be functioning at about 158 police officers for a town that should have over 200. When you're missing 45 police officers, it's hard to get the job done. And I think that that's the key thing. And I wish we could do more on traffic, because when we look at our traffic comparisons, which is something I've been on top of, we're up there with, you know, Midland. We're up there with Abilene, but there's some places that have a higher population, but it comes down to lack of enforcement. We don't have radars in every police car. Very few, actually. We've been trying to work on ways that we can streamline and get a ticket process that would, where we're not doing written tickets. Nobody's doing that. We're one of the last departments left. That's why we say thank you to IT for working through and getting us those phones because that's the next step we need to be. But it really comes down to us being able to manage the staffing issue that we have here, between the calls for service and the issues that we face. And I would love to say that this is some kind of new issue. St. Angelo has been this way since the 90s. The police have been underpaid and understaffed

[3:48:42] by millions of dollars year over year. And that's just facts. And I'm not trying to be over the top here. I'm not grandstanding. My guys are drowning in work. They are wore out. Shifts I want to imagine putting a bunch of cops in a boat from different divisions across our department and they're there's about 15 holes And they're all crossed over each other trying to plug the different holes and nobody can bail the water I got patrol officers on mandatory overtime to cover calls for service I have CID that are working overtime to cover the cases because they have half the staff they should have and Every capacity and every angle we are drowning And so last year I came here and I said here and I told you hey here's the facts and here's where we're at and our crime is not that great we're already two murders this year we have a lot of stuff that's that's creeping in and we need those bodies. Last year I asked for six additional civilians to get more cops on the streets and I didn't get any of them. I asked for six positions back and I didn't get any of them. Why that matters is key here. Y'all move that y'all move the need over a quick, Mr. Mayor, y'all have moved the needle for us and I want to say thank you to that. I'm not trying to look, I'm not trying to be rude, but I want to make sure that we're on the same page and know that when we start talking about revenues, we start talking about the numbers right and then right before I come up here, that that is one thing that these officers are going to watch this. I guarantee you they're watching right now and I won't stand by and be like, well, y'all need to make some more money. It's unconstitutional. not what we're here to do. Enforcement is designed to get people within a compliance of the law and if that means a citation that means a warning or whatever it is and it's only based on the time that they can go to it while they're answering calls for service. Go ahead, sir. I'm sorry. Well, number one, locker room talker Joe come here was not meant to be intentional to come up here and take it out on this council. They have done more for compensation for public safety than

[3:50:46] anybody in the past two or three years. I don't know what we have done for public safety, the exact number, maybe Veronica, but they have got more increases in salary than anybody, all right, than any other department. And we hear that, so it's not an argument here. We're talking about expenses. We're talking about revenues. We're talking about being more efficient. If somebody said something here that upsets you, that's on me, all right? And we'll just leave it at that. With that, please go ahead and continue. Well, and again, I don't mistake my passion for anger. It's not anger. It's realistic. And I can't stand by when I go to the shifts, when I talk to the officers, when we're seeing what's happening to them, right? They are war. I got cops that are quitting just because I can't do this anymore. I would be derelict in my job as the elected police chief to not come here and say this. And it is my passion. I'll go ahead and tell you, most people don't ever see me angry. This is passionate. I care about this. I care about my people. And when they're watching this, and they think that there's some sort of cool connection between funding and the amount of citations. This is the same old song and dance, and I'm not okay with that. And I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not addressed it publicly here. I'm not offended. I think it's just kind of something we've heard in the past that we've heard time and time again. It's the one thing that the police have as a revenue stream, they think it's citations. That's inaccurate. Law enforcement is designed for public safety to be out there to correct and do as appropriate. And there's a byproduct of that, but it's not our job to make money. And once we start doing that, We have a lost our way as a government. And so that's why I'm, it's tugging on that. And I want you to hear me on that. I'm not, I am not, y'all have done more than most councils. I want it 100%. But when I'm coming into 2007, we lost 36 police officers because we wouldn't pay them right. We've trained millions upon millions of dollars have been spent here in San Angelo to train other police officers to then send them somewhere else. In 2008, we trained from 2000, I think it was 2007 to 2010,

[3:52:51] we trained more police officers to go somewhere else than we have in our entire department. And we've done that time and time and time again. So don't mistake this for anger, because it's not anger. It's passionate and I care about my people and I can't stand by and not have them be heard because it's this same thing over and over. And we're seeing it now highlighted more so that every 14%, and when you compare that to public safety, to your point Mayor, I love our firemen. Our firemen within 5% on the firemen row, like our police officers at 14%, that's the issue. I'm not saying we need to take anything away from anybody, but we have to bring up our pay. We're at a tipping point inside our department where people are gonna start leaving, just like they did in 2007, and we suffered for that, and our crime went up because of that, and our people suffered through that, And our citizens would suffer through that. I don't want to see that happen again. So don't mistake passion for anger, because that's not the case. Our comparable cities. I mean, y'all guys control the first strings. You do what you do. I think the cities that we compared, when you're looking at the state of Texas, and you got Tambrian County, and you got the ASU as comparables on the market models, I would cut out Dittin, Lewisville, McKinney, Plano. Those cities are probably not fair, but if you start looking at Abilene, Beaumont, College Station, Wichita Falls, Waco, Tyler, Temple, Round Rock, Odessa, Midland, those are pretty fair. And at the end of the day they are all making about 100,000, which is again what we're seeing off that first number. So in the grand scheme from our revenues that we can have, we don't have anything, we've cut everything I know how to cut, We've gotten about $4 million worth of grants, we're continuing to push for grants to offset costs. I know we have fine out resources.

[3:54:51] When it comes to trying to offset shortage on manpower, we have offset those funding by trying to get drones for responder and trying to get license plate readers and trying to get any type of additional funding that we can bring in to offset that as force multipliers. And with that, I'll take questions. That's the only slide. I've got one, Mayor, before you get involved. Sorry. So we're talking about shortage of officers, but you can't get anybody into any qualified people into the academy. And you think it's because of the money? Yes, sir. Well, never been in law enforcement. But I was a businessman for more than 40 years before I became a councilman. And one of the first things I learned is somebody moves into that position, not for the pay, but because they want to be there. So I think pay may be one thing, but that's not the reason that some of your officers are leaving, not strictly because of the pay. There got to be something else in their Travis that's not holding them there. Again, I worked for a business for 40 years, and every time we went to a conference, First thing they say is, what's the number one thing in it? Well, it's not salary, so. I can tell you that everyone in the comparable cities that have a higher compensation rate have a much lower attrition rate. They pay it at a better rate, and people are going there. We lose them all over the Metroplex to DPS. DPS is picking off our middle group all day long, and that's the one that's in this that would be needing, We can get the pay up to 95, 100,000, they wouldn't leave.

[3:56:52] That's the issue, is that they leave because they're making 72,000, and they can go to work at DPS and live in San Angelo at 110. They can go to Abilene and make 104. They can go to Wichita Falls and make 100 right on the nose. Most every other city on that temple, Tyler, all these are right at 100,000. The cost of benefits is roughly $9,500 for your family that you take right off the top of that. So if you're a middle-level guy, and you're making $72,000 a year, and you're going to take off $10,000 off of that, now you're making $62,000, and you have to deal with the cost of living, which used to be San Angelo was much cheaper. But now it's higher than that of these other comparable cities in a lot of ways. So when it comes to trying to recruit people, The last group we did on testing, we had eight candidates out of that past. Out of those eight, five were dropped immediately for drug usage. That left us with three that might make it to a board. And if we get to board, we might have one of those make it, maybe. The problem is, is that we need to pay the people and hold on to what we got. We're losing them to other places and they're leaving for pay. We did everything we could. I've pulled out EverRabbit. I've looked at every grant, I've done everything I know how to do, and looked at other agencies and what they're doing and how we can do it. We're always trying to be more efficient, Mr. Thomas, and try to be able to recruit better. But the problem comes down to is notoriously, year over year, we have paid significantly lower in the rank and file of the San Diego Police. And we've paid for that, our tax pay, because we've paid a lot of people to go other places. Travis, I don't disagree with what you're saying. we have struggled. I've been here 10 years and every year except one since I bought on the council we ensured that public safety was number one and we weren't able to pay that year because it was a depression and we just didn't have any

[3:58:54] funds but the bottom line is that we're moving in that particular direction unfortunately what we saw earlier today is we're a long ways away from where that average is and so and I asked the question this morning all right in order for us to get with that particular individual said we needed to this morning four to five million dollars and I said I'm glad we got this report because I've been asked about four or five years but the bottom line is this here we are and we're looking at how we can cut services, how we can be more efficient, how we can do this. So citizens are not going to understand a four or five million dollar pay increase public safety when we may have to cut services someplace else. Next, I want everybody to understand and you've heard me say this a long time before you ever was police chief. I believe in public safety, and I believe we want to make sure we pay. But I also want to make sure that we pay every other employee in the city. Everybody has a job to do, and every job is important for that particular time. So. Chief, real quick. Yeah, and thank you for your points on that, Harry. I know that looking at police right now, and especially across the country, I mean, we're seeing police officers relieving the profession because of the disrespect. There's a lot that goes on, even the state of Texas in certain areas, you know? So there's been more of a demand for police officers, the simple laws of supplying demand. So you start seeing the need, this portion need to pay police officers more compared to what you would,

[4:00:55] a non-civil service employee. So again, just my observation from what I've read is that you are, this country is seeing a shortage, the state is seeing a shortage. So there's people competing for those positions, which causes the cost for those employees, the police officers to go up this proportionally compared to other employees as well. And I think that that was pretty obvious of the study that was conducted as far as the pay plan. So I think the solution, of course, has worked toward that solution and making sure that we develop a plan that actually addresses the need for public safety. And I've seen that from the council members, a commitment to make sure that that's being addressed. I think more so now that we see that report come back, we see how those numbers look. And I'd be surprised that we didn't have council members up here saying, hey, we do wanna do everything we can to make sure that if these employees are the ones that furthest behind, we do everything we can to move them up to at least where all the other employees are as well. But those efforts I guarantee will be, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, what I'm gonna be presenting is gonna be to make sure that we're addressing that pay. But I know what Harry just said a little while ago, those efforts have been there for years now to make sure that at times city employees got a certain percentage and so the service got a little bit higher than that. But again, we still know that we're being outpaced by that need for police officers at this point. So it needs to be addressed. Sir, can we get that? And I will, I'm gonna publicly apologize. Just say, if any way I came across as being a consending or whatever you wanna call this, I'm not trying to be that way. I'm not trying to be rude. I'm not trying to come across as angry. I don't know if anybody's ever really seen me angry. That's not what I'm trying to do here. I came from my one of the last meetings, is I got shortages in some primary areas,

[4:02:55] and people were worn out when they're quitting, when we're about to see what happened in 2007, where we're gonna have to start cutting services. I'm just a few positions away, where I might not be able to go to ever crash. I might not be able to go to the commercial theft and stuff like that. And we've seen this happen in a lot of other cities. And I need y'all to know that our police have been watching for years and years and years. And it's not a dig at anybody that's been on council for a long time. It's not a dig at anybody that's served before. It's, nobody's, I think, fairly evaluated where we're at in relation to our crime, in relation to what we're doing, and what we can try to do to offset that. And I'm doing everything I can. I'm trying not to put the burden on just y'all to say, hey, fix this problem. And Tom, you've done more than just about any mayor I've seen, and so thank you. And I'm not coming in to try to disrespect anybody. The key thing is that the passion shows, because my people are grounded in work. And I don't know what else to do. Trying to show the numbers, trying to show what we can do. And I think it's probably fair to say, I'm almost probably watching this. And I probably got a little frustrated. And I apologize, Harry. Totally understand your frustration. I don't have an answer either. I face it day-to-day with the business. Guys can go work in the old field where it makes twice as much. Is it good work? No, it ain't fun, but they make lots of money real quick and easy. I think there's a generational change as well that we're facing, because a lot of our good quality employees at my company are looking to ready to retire. It's that next generation. It's difficult. That's what happens. How do you get them? How do you retain them? It ain't just money, but it ain't, I totally understand your frustration. Don't have an answer. I hear you. That's all I have to say is I understand, but I don't know.

[4:04:57] I also understand what, you know, we try, but I understand you need more, but it's not just you, it's a whole problem in our country, our state, and fun time. So, Chris, the amount of money we have is set. and you you're gonna have some priorities when you come to budget. Yes, sir. And we've always tried away those. You and I were talking about this just two weeks ago. I called you and said just how much money do you need to support X number more people? And you gave me some numbers. Is it head count or is it money for retention? And to me you need both. Yes, sir. And we don't so what do we cut. And the purpose of these whole meetings was to sit down and look at what way we can manage our fund. But we're gonna have to cut people just to retain other people. It's a very competitive market. Public safety is huge. We lose them back and forth. I hear it all the time. I get calls from people. What are you paying? Where's it going? To me it almost doesn't matter because if you don't come to work with a purpose and your purpose as a policeman or as a fireman or as staff, engineering, whatever. If you don't know your purpose from start to finish, it's almost tough that you're there. We get it and if we, the good thing about this table is when this discussion's over and you go back sit, that's where it stops. All right. Nobody's going to carry a grudge out of here. Nobody's going to be mad. But we have been presented every time. Is it money or is it people at the end of the year when we've had our, you know, leftover budget money. We have dedicated, I don't know how many million we dedicated to PD this far. I just want to say, yeah, I don't think you've seen a lack of commitment from this council to provide you whether it's tasers, you know, whatever kind of entrance equipment, whatever

[4:06:59] you need. I don't think you've seen a shortage of it, same thing with fire department. You know, public safety is always our number one demand. It's our number one expense, but it's also our number one priority. And we all campaigned didn't talk about that. So as we move forward, we're gonna have to be clear on what your ask is. I don't think you can come with a bunch of ask but come with it. This is my priority and if it's retention of these employees, you get it to us very clear. We don't need to misinterpret. This is where my focus is and if it's money or if it's headcount or how you manage it, but we'll get up. We'll get a note from County Appraisal District and this is how much money you're gonna get based upon a praise and that's our handcuffs and I mean we can't go above that if you wanted to go above that then that would be an election and that would be on behalf of somebody to move forward with election for public safety compensation sure that's not been off the table but it's been discussed if you do do that there's a there's a risk that goes with that too just oversight but all those things are on the table and if something up here didn't mix well my polities on that this one's on me no it's not you I'm responsible for my own actions, and 18 years of build up here, I guess it's really what this is, is that I agree with what your statements that you, y'all guys have helped move the needle, but a lot of things is also that when you're giving people tools to do the job, it's just the tools to do the job. It's like trying to get Patrick's crew to do something not a bulldozer. A lot of those things that have been given have been the things that we need. The cars we've done pretty good on, I appreciate that. Having body cameras and tasers in today's world is a need. It's not, it's not a, you could do do it with the Aspaton, but your liabilities go up. A lot of what we've done has been common sense approaches. And what I'm asking for on this is a common sense approach to a fairly look back over the last 20 years in St. Angeloung, and you'll see that we have time and time again. The police in particular has a lower pay scale time and time again. And that's what I'm highlighting today. And that's what I guess the frustration that came forth is that I can't make more revenue

[4:09:03] when we're going from call to call and we're looking at the next step is I'm about three or four positions away from having to start cutting services and that's terrible. The options that we're strapped with as a city I get it and that's why I led with that. This is not an easy task but if we don't the tipping point and what we faced in 2007 can't be repeated, we have to learn from this. And whether that means it's a step plan. And that's the, again, also the thing is, y'all know this, I'm elected. And I don't get to go be a part of any of the talks of our employee staff. I'm not on the meet and confer team, and I don't have any input that I think you, to Veronica for helping out with that, but that's input. So that's also frustration when it's the biggest thing that we're seeing you drain on, and I don't have the ability to impact that. And then we're seeing this impact our community, and we're seeing impact our officers, where they're just wore out. Our commanders, we have the last meeting. Everybody, they used to want their lunch break. That was the big thing. When you're gonna get your lunch break, now they're just trying to get home, because they're wore out from working in crazy hours, or if we're trying to fill schools, we're trying to fill shifts, we're trying to fill detectives, where we got our officers that work mandatory over time will come in and help CID work cases. I don't know anywhere else, and I tried my best coming in to cut where I could, to save where I could, to get grants where we could, because I will even be in a good steward. But at this point, when we look at this and you go back to 2008, I was being a patrol officer, I've seen it, and what we're hearing inside of our department is our officers just don't feel like they're going to get fairly compensated. And that's why they look at going elsewhere. And I don't think we have to be dollar-for-dollar for abling, but if we can get within reason, get me within 5,000, give me within that.

[4:11:03] Who do you lose to the most? DPS is the biggest one right now, because they can just leave. They can leave and go make, because it's our middle people. And that's the frustrating part, is a lot of departments are shrinking their pay skills. So they're going from 25-year plans to five. Midland just did five years, I believe. And then Abilene's eight. And so these places, when you can leave as with your intermediate certificate and go to DPS at $110,000 and live in the same town with your house, you already bought at a good rate. And that's where we're losing those guys. Some of our very best will go from $72,000 to $110. I think, would you think twice about that if you're making 90, 95, 97, something like that? Yeah. And then that's why we see a lot of those places bump and their pay skills up to 100,000 so that they don't have them uproot their family and go somewhere else. We'll still have some of that with the Metroplex. And we've lost really good cops to Arlington and Plano and some smaller cities in the Metroplex, but ultimately we know we can't be them, but we can't be 14% below the average on our entry in police officer roles. And that's why we've seen them lead. Any other council questions? you good? You're probably good? Thanks Travis. Thanks Chief Appreciate it. I would say that I set Brody up pretty good after that. So wait for Tommy. So I'll echo Chief's

[4:13:03] comment about thank y'all for your time giving up an entire day to come listen to us as quite the achievement and we appreciate the ability to be able to come up here because there's a lot of asks and there's a lot of wants and a lot of need out there. Let's hold until we get those two back. Yes, sir. It is a good start, Chief. It was a great start. It was a great start, man. It's kind of warm up, I guess. It's kind of a stall tactic waiting for the other members to join us. Are these? Oh, I'm looking for fire. Okay, that's right. We're ready, Mayor. Ready? Okay, well then I'll get started. I'm gonna hit my timer because I intend to go under time. So I started off on this project, dove into it, thinking this is going to be pretty easy, because this is exactly what we've been doing over the last four years, looking for ways to increase revenue, looking for ways to be more efficient. I tell you, a lot of my personnel wear multiple hats on purpose, because if everybody's come up here and said, we're strapped for people,

[4:15:05] and we're going to find new and inventive ways to accomplish the same mission with less people and less time. So I dove off into it with that mindset, why was I wrong? Because we have been doing all these things for the last four years, it's tough to come up with new ideas and new suggestions to be even more efficient, to squeeze even more blood out of that turnip. So with that, I'm gonna get started with our revenues. I wanna highlight the fact that a public service industry is not traditionally known for generating revenue. We all know that. So Fire Department, traditionally, is not known for that. We do offer an ambulance service, and that is a service that we build for, and that is our largest revenue generating aspect of our department. Ambulance service fees generate over $6 million a year in ambulance revenue. That is an incredible amount of money. What I'm super proud of is three years ago that figure was about $3.4 million. We've grown that figure up over $6 million in a very short period of time. Some of that has been between our cause from increase in service fees, the actual call charge that we issue, some of that has been from increased billing services with a new billing company. A big piece of it is a collection agency. I see a big piece of it. It's actually a small piece. But it was money that was left on the table are billing company bills. And when Medicare and Medicaid and insurance has all been billed out, the patient receives one more bill with a balance bill. If nobody It calls on that, nobody pays on that, you all know that. So I noticed that we weren't sending any of our accounts, any of our delinquent bad debt account to a collection agency, billing it's done their job, now it's time for collections. So we had all this money sitting on the table, I went into contract with the collection agency and proud to say that we're collecting about two percent, that is a staggering low figure, but it's not far off the national average, unwanted, unsecured debt, the most difficult

[4:17:05] to collect and we're collecting about 2% of that and it generates about $30,000 a year. Like I said, not an incredible amount of money but it's $30,000 more than we had the year before. So another service fee that we get from Amulets is the standby events, the rodeo, football games, fun run, you name them, we do them and that generates approximately $82,000 with a revenue a year. Now that is not gross revenue, that's revenue and we still have to pay our personal overtime to work those events. But $82,000 for that increase for that revenue. Expecting a little bit of increase in the bad debt next year, the longer they have these accounts, the more they collect. And each, probably about every three months, I see about a 10.1% increase in the collection, right? Tina touched on highway cleanup. This is a service that we've actually been or a fee that we've been assessing for over 20 years now. Basically, there's a motor vehicle accident, and there is some sort of cleanup to happen. Our trucks go out there, we clean up the roadway, and then we build that responsible party's insurance company for that. The way we used to do it prior to 2025 was it was kind of like an a la carte. Used a pair of gloves, used a shovel, used a broom, used a absorbent. Each one of those items were built independently. Working with our vendor that provides a collection for us, they recommended a tiered billing service. Tier one, every single motor vehicle accident you go to, it gets charged this. Well, if there's a spill of a hazard material, it's a second tier. If the rescue truck goes out and you're doing vehicle extrication and command is set up, it's even greater fee. Well, we instituted that in 2025, based on the vendor's recommendation, And those prices are set by the Consumer Price Index. We looked at it in 2025 because we hadn't raised those fees

[4:19:05] in probably 10 years. The vendor recommended us moving more to a CPI version of it. And the increase in revenue has been about $15,000. We get about $90,000 for highway cleanup every year. It's a pretty huge program. And I expect it to continue to grow about 10% every year. For our prevention inspection and licensing, y'all graciously granted me an additional inspector. We're anticipating a $60,000, $70,000 increase in revenue in that department this next year. Why? Because I have an extra set of boots on the ground doing inspections. More inspections, more revenue, more fees. Now the licensing side of that, that remains fairly constant depends on the market and building, but all in all, licensing is about $58,000 at $93,000 is what we're anticipating for inspections this next coming year. Patrick mentioned about this demolition of these dangerous buildings. He put a number up there, I think it was $700,000 that he was able to find right now. I have an additional $50,000 that we budget in our fire prevention account for dangerous buildings for the demolition that if we get this new program, those funding that funding would be available to help fund these 15 additional people for this demolition group. So just throwing that out there to help you all with your decision. So now let's talk about some of the things that I don't really have data on, but the potential for growth in the future is huge. Talking about my fire training academy, excuse me. Our fire training academy over the last couple of years, we've been working to become accredited nationally and across the state. We can now teach civilians in our fire training academy, bring them straight off the street, put them to the training academy. They will pay us for that certification because it is state recognized, about $2,500 per student. We just recently got paramedic accreditation.

[4:21:06] This is a national accreditation. Same concept. We can take a person off the street, put them through our basic EMT program, and then turn around and put them through our paramedic program, $1,600 for basic EMT per student, $6,500 per student for paramedic. There has been small interest in this right now, but another program we've been working on is through TEEX, Texas Engineering Extension. They're down in college station, the largest firefighter training program in the state. Trying to get a negotiate an agreement with them that they will send us in San Angelo, their overflow students. If you're talking firefighters, They send me 10 students, that's $25,000 in four months. They send me 100 students in a year? That's not reasonable. So they send me 30 students a year. That's a lot of money at the end of the year. Then you pile that onto our paramedic program at 6,500, and that 6,500 is reimbursed to those students through Senate Bill 8, so it's almost cost neutral for the student to send them to us. We said, I don't have figures on this yet, because it's brand new, but the potential for the future of making San Angelo Training Center, a regional training hub with Teaks as a partner. This guy's the limit. And I'm dealing with the tip of the spirit, Teaks, Chief Coteney, and we're really close to making this happen. We've done several area schools, which is similar to this working with Teaks as a partner to bring in volunteer firefighters. We've done three small area schools where we certified these volunteer firefighters, And they have paid us to use our facility, small money, because this is where we're building the program and building that brand. Once that brand is built, again, the sky's the limit. We have a vehicle extrication class. This weekend, we have 30 students from all over the state of Texas that generates about $15,000 worth of revenue. I still have to pay my personnel to work that

[4:23:07] or pay them an hourly instructor rate. But we'll be working through the weekend to generate 15,000 in income. It's a great program. Training firefighters and we're making money. Everybody's happy, right? Grant funding. We have, I've got two of my personnel. Jose Rivera, we all know him, we all love him. He wears a separate hat. He's an exceptional grant rider, even though that is not his specialty. He's an emergency manager, okay? He's got a lot of experience right in grants, but let's face it, it is an additional duty. And then Garrett Luca, he's also assisting with this process. Both of them have, they've dug up dirt, they've done everything they can to find grants out there that we qualify for, and we apply for them, sometimes we get them, sometimes we don't. They've done a great job grabbing the ones that we are eligible for. I'm gonna touch on this later, so I'm gonna leave it at that for now. Now let's talk about the newest successful, incredibly successful program. I don't know if most y'all know what it is, It's tetanus. Texas' interstate fire mutual aid system. This is basically other jurisdictions requesting resources whenever they have some sort of emergency event they request resources statewide. Our department raises our hand. Here we are. Send me. So we go. Well, the state pays us for that. They pay for our personnel 100% while they're gone and they pay 100% of the backfill to fill those positions at that vacancy causes. Zero-costed city. They also pay us around the clock for our vehicles that we send currently We have four units deployed right now. We have a four-wheel drive pickup for a command vehicle We have two type six wildland units. It's a pickup with a pump on the back and then we have a type one regular fire truck All four of those units are deployed with 11 people up in the panhandle fighting those fires that are up there We're being paid around the clock for those units So last year was actually a slow year, believe it or not, with all the mid-year

[4:25:10] rains that we had, July 4th, we all remember that. Well, because that slowed down fire during the summer last year, what it did was create a problem that we were fighting now, excessive growth, lots of grass growth, and whenever that grass dried out and turned and died, now we're paying for it. The panhandle, especially right now. We've got another fire down in Gillespie County that is about 40% contained. This next year I'm anticipating 30% increase in revenue for this. Last year we hit $200,000 and that is just our vehicle replacement or a vehicle reimbursement cost. Direct revenue to the city. Next year I'm anticipating $300,000 to $400,000 in revenue. So what do we use this for? You all remember me coming to council. I want to buy two swift waterboats. They're $50,000. I'm not asking you for any money because I have it. Tifmus money. I want to buy type three wildland units. Well, how much is it? $500,000. I'm not asking you all for any money. I have it. Tifmus money. Same thing with an additional type, no, no. A type six we purchased, $320,000. Didn't ask for money because we had it in the Tifmus account. purchased, we paid 50% of a type one engine, that's a regular fire truck, 400,000 towards that. We've dug into this account for over a million dollars to offset the cost for these vehicles that we need to do our job, and to be more involved in tiffness. Now I wanna expand tiffness. This is something that Mr. Kelton and I discussed. He's got yellow equipment operators. Wildland uses lots of dozers, graders. His personnel need the training. I want to work with our tiffmus personnel to see if his personnel or Patrick's personnel can also be included in the star request because now if we can send off operational people

[4:27:11] that we're getting paid for these dozers and these graders and the equipment operators are going to get paid over time while they're gone, it's just expanding the system more and more. A swift water rescue, whenever we have hurricane deployment down on the coast, they will request these boats, expanding our already incredibly successful program. No? Chief, I want to make sure that to reinforce the fact that we primary for us as far as making sure our state is safe for us and most of all, because we do deploy individuals. But before you deploy, we had the conversation and we make sure that we have absolutely coverage here in our community that's never going to suffer. So I just want to make sure that we're stressed on I think the tippments of the wonderful program be done great as far as additional money's come in but again public safety for us here in San Angeles number one. So certainly before we respond to this start request from the state. First thing we assess is that do we have any immediately threats and any immediate threats in San Angel. Well we're all under red flag fire warning right now. So do you think I'm going to send out every single brush truck we own out of the city? Absolutely not. So we have two brush trucks deployed right now. We still have two at home. We We have a big one at home, the type 3, we just purchased and we also have a type 6, and all the personnel to operate that. So I will never deplete our resources at home to take care of somebody else's jurisdiction. Our number one priority is San Angel first. Any questions on any of those revenues? Are your tickness crews or lay volunteer? Yes, they do volunteer to be in that program. takes a lot of special training and a lot of these personnel, these personnel pay out of their own pocket for a lot of this special training and the gear, we will issue gear first up front and it's loaner gear until they've gone on a couple of deployments and then they purchase their own gear and you're just like okay so how much does a pair of pants? $500 for a pair of pants. It's expensive.

[4:29:12] So it's an investment into their future so they can deploy to make that extra over time for themselves. more questions on revenues on the stand-by revenue do you think that covers our cost of providing that service it was only 80,000 something like that I would say it's probably a little slider a little less than break even so we a budgets and I looked at that figure this year and we determined that it was time to raise the cost per hour for our standby ambulances because I use the figure when When I go to calculate this, I'll use a driver's overtime rate. Well, because they're in such high demand, sometimes I don't have a choice but to hire an officer to fill that role or even a battalion chief to fill that role, which is significantly higher than a driver or a husband's rate of overtime. But I have to charge a rate at the beginning set by counsel what that fee is, and I can't control who actually fills that role because we have to fill that envelope slot. And whenever it's sometimes it's a higher rank, it is what it is. So we did look at that and we analyzed it and we are going to be increasing $20 an hour, $25 an hour and I'm hoping for an even break, even point on that standby service. Because at the end of the day, we're here to be cost neutral when we're providing the service. At least for the stand by us. Yeah, I think with all of our other city services, something like that is not something that the city has to provide. as long as we're breaking even that's all we're asking but yes sir. Keeps and gets those guys some extra money too so that's always good. On the tiffness account you talked about dipping into it to pay for stuff. You have a running account of what's left in that. Last time I checked we had over $800,000 in that account and I think Jonathan just told me we just broke a million and we're about to get into why that's important. New truck I'm assuming. Oh one? Did you say one

[4:31:14] a new child? Yes, exactly. Thanks, it's all got you. Yes, sir. Thank you for that perfect segue. So now we're going to talk about capital needs. So our largest capital need that we have, and y'all have heard this same thing from me for four years now. Fire station number nine, and the importance of fire station number nine. We have an underserved portion of our community, southwest portion of town, and I've shown you all the graphics. I've shown you the data where there is a greater than a four minute response time to a large section of our city. That's just one reason. The biggest reason and the biggest looming reason why we need this station is because insurance service organization, ISO came in, didn't evaluation in 2022. And we retained our one superior rating. That is excellent. With the caveat to if there is not a night fire station when we come back in five years, you will drop, you will regress to a two. Okay, that five-year mark, clock is ticking, and we've got about 13 months left. March of 2027 is when they're coming, unless I can show them that we are making progress towards this new station. So what have we done for station nine? Council and finance gave me the funding to locate and purchased the land for station 9. The land has been acquired. I have contracted with an architect to produce concept drawings. So we have concept drawings done and a cost estimate. Here's the question. How much is it going to cost? It's a little sticker shock. The estimate is 11.1 million dollars. In 2018, we finished fire station number 4 and it was 3.8 million and a very short time that that cost is almost tripled. So Chief, have you looked for any grants? Absolutely. Absolutely. We've turned over every single stone. We have looked and we have looked and looked over the last three years and we keep landing on only

[4:33:17] one grant that is available for us to fund this station and that's the community project funding grant. The discretionary funds through through Congress and August Flugger is our representative for that. We are intending on applying for that tomorrow actually and the chances of being a proof of that I don't have a crystal ball I can't tell you but there are a lot of competing projects after that same money so we don't know if we're going to get it and then you bounce all the way down to personnel costs when you talk about building a station you always have personnel costs included in that we're looking at additional 20 people for that station that's around two and a half million dollars to find those positions we did apply for the safer grant last year to offset the cost. We did not get awarded the grant. We're going to apply for it again this year and it's about to open up any day now and there's about a 45 day window for applications and I should know September, October timeline this year whether we've been approved for that. So that's the intention for station nine and my plan moving forward there. Apparatus replacement, we do have one vehicle that is desperately in need of replacement and unfortunately it is our most expensive vehicle in the fleet and it's ladder one. It's a 100-foot platform. It is 16 years old this year. Recommendation is replacement at 15 years. Okay well we've taken really good care of it. It should last a little bit longer. We spent $50,000 on a new head last year. We blew a head gas. We blew a head gas and then cracked the head in the process. So that truck is out of service at least 25% of the year. And that is our only platform for the city, a critical piece of equipment for protection for high-rise and elevated master streams. That truck has to be replaced. I'm not going to sit here and ask Tina, not Tina anymore. I'm not going to sit here and ask the finance director to shell out two and a half million

[4:35:18] dollars without putting a little bit of my change in the bucket as well. I believe if we work together, then we can solve this problem together. I've been working with our vendor, another problem with this is there's a four-year construction timeline on it. We purchased it today, I won't get it for four more years, unless I can find a stock unit, meaning they've already purchased it four years ago, and it's coming up for construction. If I can jump on that, then we're not saving money on that, but what we are saving is the time delay, that four-year time delay, and if it comes open, I will have a one or two-day window to pull the trigger on it. And it's about two and a half million dollars for a new ladder truck. Anyways, y'all done with me telling you how much money I need? Because it's a bunch. Just like everybody else. So we're talking about operational efficiencies. This one was very, very difficult for me to come up with. I do want to highlight the point that I have never felt comfortable coming to you with my hand out without telling you, Look, this is what I'm doing to fill my own hand, but I need your help to fill this bucket the rest of the way. So that's what all those revenues were about. We're trying to fill our own bucket the best we can, and we're running out of money, just like everybody else. So efficiencies. I've already talked to you all about my personnel wearing multiple hats, and it goes well beyond just wearing multiple hats, janitorial services. What's that? We do it ourselves, lawn maintenance, what's that? We do it ourselves. Okay, well, firemen have all this extra time. You can do that, agreed. But do you agree that a fireman should be crawling underneath a truck and replacing a starter? Because we do. Do you believe an assistant chief should be crawling underneath a truck in a white shirt, changing out an exhaust system? Because we do.

[4:37:18] It's not about saving money. It's about extending the money that we have, that we do have as far as we can possibly stretch it, because at the end of the day, nobody has any money, but we have to have operational equipment. So, those efficiencies are already happening. We finally, so we used to have 12 foot ambulances that were all remounted. We can only refurbish those units three times before they're done with. Well, our fleet had exhausted those remount capabilities and we moved to a 14 foot chassis. We have reached the point where that 14 foot chassis, we have a fleet of 14 foot chassis, and now we're exploring the remount option. Now there's gives and takes on that. You know, you don't have a brand new unit, but the cost savings alone make this program worth exploring. It saves $100,000 per unit, you know, that's significant. I wasn't gonna do it, because I thought it was about 20 or 30,000, and the hassle that you have to go through for a remount, it's not worth $20,000. For $100,000, it's worth the hassle. So these units cost about $450,000, brand new. And we're able to offset each unit, $100,000. That's a big program. This is our first year of doing it again. Public safety grant specialist. This is more of an ask. This is a position, I think, that is very critical, not for fire, but for fire and police. I think there are a lot of grants out there that we don't even know about. I think there's a lot of grants that we're missing. And I'm gonna talk in fire, I'm talking fire and police. We have a grant specialist for the city right now. And where's Patrick at? She has got more to do than she can keep up with. And she has assisted us on our hazard mitigation grant. She was wonderful. But let's face it, she's got enough grants that she has to work with. But fire and police alone,

[4:39:18] we would fill one person's time up just searching for public safety grants. And then the money that that person would collect would more than pay for that position, probably tenfold if not more so. So this is a strong push that we need a public safety grant rider for our city. I talked about our multiple responsibilities for our personnel and our in-house maintenance program. We do have a fairly robust preventative maintenance. You know, every one of our vehicles are serviced when they're supposed to be serviced, oil chains, fluids chains, tires rotation, and we are trying to extend the life of every vehicle that we have in our fleet. A program that Chief Dunn started years ago is called a squad program. What is that? So instead of running that $1 million, $2 million piece of equipment down the road, those very expensive ladders that get, they cost $3 per mile that they drive. Instead of running that down the street for a medical call, we send a pickup truck, the same crew and the same capabilities to a medical call where you don't need a fire truck, you just need the extra hands there. So reducing the operating costs of that expensive piece of equipment and extending the life of that expensive piece of equipment. We've been doing that for some time. So with all of this said, and I'm sure this is to be true for every department across the city, efficiencies are tough because we have been squeezing everything we possibly have out of our personnel. You heard the frustration in Travis's voice. We have squeezed and squeezed and squeezed our personnel there's not a whole lot left. And going into this project, this will be easy until I can't squeeze anymore. And that's just where we're at. Do I have any questions on any of that? Any questions, Chief? 26 minutes. I think you've done a great job of looking for ways to listen to cost burden of your department and make money and help generate revenue. Not all departments are that easy to do and some

[4:41:21] I'm don't even have that capability correct, but you've done a good job of maximizing Ways to go make your department. I Won't say self-sufficient. It's not even close But what it does is it helps relieve the burden off other parts say and we all appreciate that well We don't generate enough revenue to be an enterprise son, and I don't say that I don't I'm not gonna say that we're ever gonna be Well, well, I'm not gonna say that we're ever gonna get to that point, but I can tell you that that at least 25% of our operating budget is recaptured through fees. And that's a lot for a service department. Absolutely. Gee, thank you. Appreciate you, man. And for the record, I'm ahead of time. Give us 10 minutes, actually. You got like the same thing. Parks and Recreation, Carl, you're next, sir. We're going to give it a three to four or five minute break

[4:44:06] here, Carl. Okay, if you will take your seats, Agent Hebert, Carl, as soon as he gets back, he can click and start it. Carl, you can. What? Giggum. A quick clarification. I'm not a short timer yet. There's too much work to be done. Everybody keeps asking me. Anyhow, a bit of indulgence, please. I'm looking at this introductory slide that we changed from time to time. It's been a few years since we changed it. But many times there are a lot of things to measure, but sometimes we just need to feel. These images that are up here, we could have chosen many different images. We could have had the Fort Contro up here. We could have had the airport up here, the University, of the rodeo fairgrounds, but on this slide we have a picture of a water lily, Texas Dawn, which is the Texas State Waterlily, officially. It's at the International Waterlily Collection. It was created by hybridizer Ken Landen. It's at Civic League Park, another image of Santa Fe Park, with Santa Fe Golf Course in the River Trail in downtown in the distance. And then there's City Hall Historic Art Deco structure with the beds and the trees. Thank you, Sandra, for the trees. She paid for several of them. And it reminds me that we don't necessarily think about these images, but we have them here

[4:46:06] because they remind us of who we are and where we're from. It gives us our sense of place. The reason why we're here, why do we choose to live here? because it's a beautiful city, there's a lot going on, a lot of places to work and play. So just looking at this may be, think about that. Sometimes, a lot of times you can measure things, but sometimes you just need to field things. Thank you for doing that. Every single director that's come up here so far has ignored that, it has not even gotten. It has not even gotten, has shame on y'all. Everybody back there, they came up or didn't point that out. You were taking credit for the opening slide been using for 10 15 years. I kept looking for another slide going, what the hell is he talking about? And then here you brought us all back to center. Thank you, Carl. You said that wasn't a going away speech, but it sure sounded like a going away speech. It's how I feel. And that's cool. Thank you, Carl. We all do actually. Thanks for that. I appreciate you. So yes, parks recreation. We are our Parks Division, Recreation Division, Fort Concho with the state office complex, civic events, and Fairmount Cemetery. First, we'll talk about revenue, then expenditures, then efficiencies, and then I'm gonna address some of the things that were brought up earlier if I don't already in this part of my presentation by finance. In some of these items that we're talking about, I think we may need to have separate discussions like with the sports conflict. There's a lot that goes into that, and I think we should have a separate discussion on that. So, first of all, if you look at the revenues and the expenditures, we're looking at about a half million dollars that we could gain in additional revenue and cut expenses.

[4:48:06] First of all, just by looking at all the different fees, and like Jonathan said earlier, looking at all the fees, adjusting fees, adding some new fees, across the board and our department, we're looking at about $80,000 that we can increase for this coming fiscal year. The next thing is sponsorships, advertising, naming rights. We've had an agreement with city-wise marketing for advertising sales, sponsorship sales, that is, you know, a company coming in and said they want to put their sign in our facility and we get revenue from that and naming rights. We've had three separate agreements with CityWise and McLaughlin for those agreements. All those three agreements have expired as of Valentine's Day and talking with the different divisions that those impact the desire was to step back and not have those agreements and see what we can do on our own again. Those were put in place in about 2007, 2008, those agreements. They're good in that, particularly the sponsorship and naming rights one, in that we don't have to spend the effort to go find the sponsors and the naming rights companies. But the downside is we don't get all the revenue from selling those, especially the sponsorship ones. We only get half of that revenue less the cost to put the signs up, and the naming rights This one is scaled depending on how much money the naming rights are. So giving you a shot, typically the four civic events and recreation are interested in going out on their own to get primarily the sponsorships and also travel the naming rights. The advertising one has a cost. That's where you go out and find advertising for your own needs. We're looking at adding $20,000 in revenue.

[4:50:06] The next one is ties into what Finance mentioned earlier about increasing activities at civic event venues and at the Sports Complex. And we kind of have this at the Texas Bayon Sports Complex. We do have a small fund that can provide incentives for bigger tournaments. Our idea is to increase that, currently it's 15,000, bump it up to 30,000, primarily to provide incentives for larger tournaments. Turnipments that are about 100 teams or more. Every year we get about 12 to 15 tournaments a year. This year we're scheduled for 20 tournaments. And I can talk about that. They don't all make sometimes because of weather, sometimes because of the organizer, it varies. Most of those are smaller tournaments. They're talking 30 to 50 teams. A small, another smaller amount are moderately sized tournaments, about 50 to 80 teams. And then the fewer amount are the larger tournaments, 80 and up. And we want to incentivize those larger tournaments. And so if we think we bump up that incentive fund, we can get, we're hoping, two additional larger tournaments. This coming year, which could help put money back into that incentive fund and also provide some revenue for the complex. And going back to the complex, I was here at the beginning when we built that complex. The primary reason was to consolidate some youth sports leagues into a new facility, primarily for the leagues. The second reason was to be an economic driver, an economic multiplier. It never really was the idea that this is going to pay for itself. And I'm not sure anybody thinks that it would fully pay for itself, but yes, we do need to maximize the revenues at the complex But I don't think we'll ever Generate revenue at the complex to pay for itself

[4:52:09] Economically it makes sense because of the tournaments and then the other is for civic events. They do not have an incentive Account like we've talked about at the sports complex. We think if we got them a 30,000 $30,000 incentive account that they could bring in some additional performances. We're about to finish, wrap up the project at the River Stage Phase 1A, which, as you know, has some accessibility improvements, restaurant improvements, the ticket box improvements, concession improvements. So, it's going to be kind of a new renovated facility. We hope to open that back up and add some additional performances. So one idea is to also create a fund there for civic events to tap into then incentivize performances. We've talked about this last year. We have the opportunity now that we acquired the Killing War Paints Building to convert that into the new office and consolidate with maintenance operations. There's a cost to that, of course. But the current office building, the cemetery has, once that renovation is done, we could sell that property, the property and the building. And then also at the maintenance, where the maintenance building is now, once the renovations are done and they move into that new building, that old building could be removed, which which frees up space for burial spaces, and then the acre and a half that we got from Angelo State University some years back, which was going to be the location for the new office. We could free that up for burial spaces with those new two new areas that adds about 1,400 spaces, which at the current rates would create more than a million, seven million dollars in revenue,

[4:54:10] which would extend the life of the cemetery. those are the revenues, expenditures. So looking at low hanging fruit, and yes, we're at the point of if we want to reduce costs, we're talking about reducing services. We're at that point, there's no fluff in our budget. But the low hanging fruit, one, with the renovation refurbishment expansion of the Colosseum and going into agreement with the Stock Show Radio Association to operate that facility. We could reduce one of our staff positions at civic events. In addition, parks, the Parks Division typically has anywhere from eight to 12 positions that are vacant. For a long while it was about 12, which is about a quarter of their total personnel. And as a vacant because we can't get them filled, not because we want a vacant. And it's not the same position, they change it. Usually somebody leaves, somebody can get promoted that frees up a lower position. Most of them usually are kind of the entry level positions. We're looking at holding on to not funding six of those positions. I was hoping to tap into that funding possibility to do some playground replacements, creating the fund to add money into the replace playgrounds over the next coming years. But this is something we could do to reduce costs this year and the next coming few years. The next two categories you can combine together, but there are properties that we're looking at that we could lease, for instance,

[4:56:14] the Ben-Fickland field off Ben-Fickland Road the south side by South Country River. There's a field there that we've leased it before. We could lease that again. That takes the operation and maintenance off of us. There's a couple of properties at the lake that are surrounded by homes. Shady Point Circle and Red Bluff Road Circle. They're surrounded by homes. Perhaps those neighborhoods could adopt those two properties, kind of like an HOA park where they could, at least it basically and maintain it and still be on the city books, but we would have no operation cost there. Also with adoptions and partnerships, many cities have like the Lions Park or the Kiwanas Park or the Rotary Park. We're working with the Rotary Club right now. There's an item coming to council at the next meeting to look at the MOU to set up a long-term adoption of that park by the Rotary Club. which would help reduce our maintenance costs. They're not looking to actually do the landscape maintenance, but replace picking tables, benches, paint, do painting, add some walkways, do some things that we haven't been able to do, which would reduce our costs. And then perhaps with some of the money, you could pull off some of the money from reduced, not funding some of the open positions, put into an account where you could do some contract maintenance on a smaller scale, take some of the medians, esplanades, triangles, circles, and contract the maintenance of those properties out, just to see how it goes and also to help us maintain properties that we can't get to as often as we'd like to. And then looking at efficiencies,

[4:58:17] We've done that a lot in recreation, civic events, but we haven't done it at the cemetery where the fort. We need to expand doing that at those locations to improve efficiencies. Labor multipliers, we've got those auto robotic mowers at the sports complex that has worked out fairly well. Robotic mowers at the sports complex that has worked out fairly well looking looking to expand that and then Just maximize the use of facilities with staff and then I wanted to address some of the items that were brought up earlier One divest subsidized enterprise funds the golf course Yes, we do subsidize that operation by eighty five thousand a year with that agreement The current agreement expires September of 27. If we did not have that operations agreement and the city had to maintain it, we would still have a cost. And that cost would actually be more than what we're currently subsidizing the golf course operations. So it's not ideal, but it is reducing our cost to maintain that property. And also we have the ongoing river parks master plan We hope to bring, finish that up towards the end of this year. We don't know what vision that's going to create, but long term that may change what's out there. There may be a direction not to have a full golf course out there. Maybe keep some golf element out there, but maybe in the future there's not a golf course. I agree. The city is not well providing golf at that location. The condition of the property is not as good as it could be, primarily because it doesn't have a curb-to-curb irrigation system. We can only water all the trees with the bubbler system

[5:00:18] and the greens of the golf course. So it looks nice when it rains. But during the heat of the summer, it's pretty brown. The pool, we're already looking at possibilities to lease the operations of that out. I agree that's something that we should look at. The Senior Center, it does have the lowest cost recovery. The primary function there is the congregate mill program, and we have been looking at possibly working with mills for the elderly. We've visited with them several times. It is possible that they could prepare the food there. We go pick it up, we bring it back, which would reduce our costs in terms of staffing. We wouldn't be cooking the mills just serving it. And then we probably wouldn't get all the revenue, of course, because mills would purchase the food and prepare it. So we would have a reduced cost, but we'd also have reduced revenue. Again, those programs at the senior center are the lowest cost recovery, but it is a different market. A lot of those folks who come there, They're getting only hundreds of dollars a month to live on social security. It's a different market. If we, before we totally divested it, or got rid of it as our operation, we would prefer looking at maybe reducing the opening instead of Monday through Friday, be Monday through Thursday, which would allow us to open up those facilities which do have rental rooms, which we've been able to rent those more frequently lately, to rent those on a Friday to generate some new revenue, and then also allow us to do some better maintenance of those facilities during that off day, as well as deeper cleaning. And then the closed down the recreation centers.

[5:02:20] So yes, we did lose the North sign recreation center to the flood. That one was kind of already offline. We only used it for the gym, for basketball, and for volleyball, otherwise it wasn't open. Now we have Carl Ray Johnson Recreation Center and Southside Recreation Center. The current uses are primarily the youth basketball program, adult basketball program, the volleyball program, summer camps, and Southside has been used as an election location. So if we do pull those off lines, that would directly impact those programs. And I think that's it. That's my presentation. Council, any questions for Carl? I see Sidney back there. I think he's desperate to say something. Sidney, you want to come up and say no, you're good? You're okay. So just got to go through the blue book. I was going through the blue book. We just got a sponsorship from Texas Bank. Where does that post in here? That was $100,000. I don't see that anywhere in the blue book. That should be the $21,000 that's reflected on page 32 and fund 203, that first line. So what was the total check? It's $105,000, I believe. Yes, it's $105,000. But we have to recognize it over a five-year period. OK. All right. That was the one I was looking for. to make sure it's in there, the sponsorships, if y'all want to take that on your own, I get it. McLaughlin and I have spoken many times about this. He's to the point, either way, but if he's going to be done with it, he wants to be done with it. He didn't want to call back and say, hey, well, we could never sell this. Can you come sell it for us?

[5:04:21] All right. And I'm not speaking for him, but we've had many conversations about the larger ones he sold and got there and he's to the point of what do you want one of you don't and these are people I've brought to you and they are in there now so if he's called me ask why this even came that way because we could almost at the dollar volume it is we could almost sign off it and keep it going but y'all are making a choice to go with this on your own as I read it as I hear it from you yes sir yes sir okay I need to get give it a year or two and see how it goes. If it's not working out like we want and look at, there's other vendors in town now that could probably pick up some of those services and look at repeating it a year or two. Also with the concessions, the food and drink concessions once that agreement expires in June of 28th. Remember that because I won't be here. I bet we'll have several people remind us of that. I don't think that's a word Carl. Well number one thank you all for booking that. I was wondering if that book by year and number two if you're going to go that path from some of that sold sponsorships for 10 years you know there's a difference between going it on your own and then praying off of somebody's else's customers that have already been there. I get that so with that that's y'all's decision. Other than that I don't have any other questions, am I from Council. Thanks Carl. Up next is Bucky and IT. Yeah, I know you're trying. Carl had to.

[5:06:21] Well, he had a lot of stuff on his time. He did take credit for the opening slide. Good afternoon. My name is Bucky Hasty. I'm the IT Director. IT is not a revenue-generating department as you probably know. We pay, we mostly pay for to the services that we provide to other departments. This has their licensing for Office 360, you know, for email, for software for the big, software purchases. But I did want to talk to y'all a little bit about a place, one of our biggest expenses where I believe that we could save some money. We've already started making progress on that and that's where the telecom expense is. It's a huge expense that we pay for the whole every department down to cell phones that y'all are using, but not just cell phones, but data plans for SCADA equipment, iPads, police vehicles, internet for remote sites, voice over IP lines, which everybody's real happy with right now, but we're working on it. Yeah, land lines, of course. And not just the cost on those, but there is an efficiency to be had in there as well, because to administrate these services, it takes a lot of personnel time, there's a lot of move ads, changes for the service for getting new cell phones, changing cell phones, somebody retired, somebody gets promoted, somebody needs a number of changed billing, paying the bills, accounting helps us out with this quite a bit, and not just paying the bills,

[5:08:22] but building them out internally, building them out the other departments. It's a pretty big task. I think Jonathan can be back there, you can not, is that on that. It's a pretty big task, and it's not handled quite in the most efficient manner. And reporting, when it's time for budget, time departments want to know how much they're gonna be charged for their cell phones, for their iPads, for their internet at their site. So it becomes a pretty big task, And we don't have a centralized software platform to do so. It's mostly kept tracking the old-fashioned way with Excel spreadsheets, and that gets a little inefficient for us, and I'm getting a phone call. So while looking for a software solution to this, we stumbled upon another solution that will simplify this for everyone and get us the software we want at no additional cost. At the same time, lowering our rates on everything, and that's a unified carrier. Unified carriers basically, they're the ones that they resell basically services such as cell phone, you know, Verizon AT&T, T-Mobile, even down to optimal here in town. And since they buy it in bulk, they'll give us a big discount on that. And just conservatively speaking, we're probably going to be saving about, I know it doesn't sound like a lot, but 5% on the bill, just very conservatively speaking. And I'm talking about a half a million dollars in services that we'll be saving 5% on. So it adds up. So hopefully that's going to, now we do have, I came to council a week or so ago. So there are some existing agreements we have to take into consideration with Verizon. to help us out quite a bit, putting those cell phones into the police officer's hands. But we have some alternatives to work around those.

[5:10:23] All right, now my next two are mostly having to do with efficiencies. Now, y'all have heard this mentioned here today already. And that is a software coordinator right now. My department is mainly hardware focused. We do help out with software. but we're our main focus on hardware, and cyber security, getting you the equipment you need, and if there is a software project, we'll have a seat at the table. But we don't, and Tommy, you asked me this one time, do you have a software type guru? If you sit us down at a table, we are more concerned of will at work, not is it the best solution for you. So we kind of look at things like, yeah, that should work. And not, hey, as a planner, as an accountant, is this the best software for my people? Just because it's hard to be an expert and all that type of things. So, and even though a software coordinator wouldn't necessarily be an expert, they would be able to dedicate more time than my people can to accomplish those goals. And one of the things that we have to worry about quite a bit is security, obviously, in compliance, And that would help out for them to focus on particular big software purchases, better software license management, as I mentioned earlier, standardization and interoperability. We have big, huge software packages that talk to each other. And I think everybody in this room, especially the works for the city, have been, have sat in on those meetings when you ask a vendor, will this work with our current software? What do they always say? Oh, sure, it will work. And they tell us every time, oh, yeah, it will work. Well, we've all been burned by that. So having somebody to keep a better eye on that and to make those phone calls to other cities and to try to keep that, you know, a true statement

[5:12:25] would help improve vendor management, like that kind of speaks for itself. We got one major point of contact for the city that a software coordinator could in fact be. And more efficient project delivery back to the same thing. We're struggling with some projects right now just because while same thing we were told, hey, this is going to work great, we always existing software. And yeah, it can work, but it may not just be very easy to make it work. And that's kind of what we're struggling with right now. So any questions on the software coordinator? I like y'all. All right. And this one I've spoken about before, about our about the city's IT divisions and so there's there's outlying IT divisions other than fall under me there's the PD has an IT department fire municipal court have have IT folks and the first thing I want to mention as there's all these all these IT divisions are functioning well there's nothing they're doing wrong I'm not saying hey I can get in there and clean it up and take care of it. They're very good at their job. What I do think we need to focus on is a more streamlined leadership of those groups. And by doing that, I think it would unify the city's overall vision for technology and align with the city's overall goals, help with that licensing and purchasing. Sometimes we find ourselves at the table buying something that the police department just bought a bunch of, just bought 500 licenses and we're buying another 500. Not duplicating but hey maybe we could have used that purchasing power a little bit more efficiently. Strengthen cybersecurity and consistent compliance. We have great software tools on our side of the network that we believe are critical to keeping our environment safe

[5:14:28] that they might not have. And same thing, they might not have tools and expertise on their side of the network that we don't have. So we'd like to combine those and kind of sit at the same table and of course with the best practices, sieges and HIPAA, they're just regulations that you have to follow and I think putting our heads together on that would help out quite a bit. Same thing, stream mom support and upgraded knowledge base, more heads in the room, more experience, I think it'd be a better product. To accomplish that, to make this merger more efficient and easier to swallow from my department was the software that I've been talking about a long time called Zero Trust. We have actually been able to procure that as of this week, so we're moving forward with that right now. It's going to make the combination of these resources a lot easier to handle, a lot easier to manage, and it will mitigate risk. I'm sure there's some surrounding cities around here that really wish they would have had some zero-trust software to assist in keeping their network safe. So I think that's all I have. Any questions from Bucky? Bucky? So Bucky came to talk to you a couple months ago, you and AJ. Walk me through this. If I have a problem with the fire department, who I call? Usually you. If I had to go to the very top, who's that one phone call? To do it. Yeah. I had to go to the police department to make one phone call. Who's that? Griff? Yeah. All right. I had to come here at the fourth floor. That phone call, it's Daniel. When you go to all these departments we have,

[5:16:31] who do you go to IT? Everybody has a different IT person, all right? And I get terrified about cloud-based systems. If something happens, or do we have the utmost insecurity, if a cloud-based system goes down, are we tied to that? Do we have ability to work somewhere else? Our water department, did we have a backup for that? I mean, who's our water? I mean, that was a third-party problem. But there needs to be one phone call. And if somebody wants to hook up a printer over at the fire department, does that come through you? Does it open up with that open up window that somebody could actually, us fixes they come through to get into our network? And as I look at all these things, I hate to bring it up, but I don't think having this thing split in four or five different silos or seven silos or whatever, when we wanna call and talk to somebody about IT, we want one phone call and we want that to be you. Do you think you can get us to that point and will other people share enough to grant you that authorization to govern IT as you should govern? I believe so. I know I can handle it. It's kind of a de facto role right now. It's gotten better over the years, but it's not defined on paper. You know what I'm saying? I'm kind of the guy, but I'm not 100% the guy all the time. So I believe I've built up enough trust with these guys to be that guy for them, and I would hope they would put that type of faith in me. Well, if you're not the guy, then they have a reason for using somebody else. Sure. It would be great to have one IT department. Right. That handled it all across the board. And to alleviate some of their concerns that they brought up in the past, we wouldn't be bringing their staff over to City Hall, you know, and keeping everybody. There would still be PDIT, there would still be Fire IT,

[5:18:33] we're still being municipal court IT. It would just be a streamlined leadership. Kind of how I see it. That's something I think needs to be your ask and a little bit of your goal on what you need to accomplish and work for for the next couple of years, if not starting that as soon as August, if not sooner. But I think you already alluded to many of those points here, just try to make sure we're all on the same page. Okay. And there's ASU out there that has volunteered, continuously volunteer to provide assets and personnel. part of their internship or program, I would not hesitate to beat them up for some free labor too just to help you get something in. Yeah, ASU is a great resource for us. We're a member of their R-SOC, they just hit, it was in the paper, they just hit 100 members. We were the first member. They provide our virus software to us for free. They're a great resource. All right, that's all the questions I have. Bucky, thank you sir, appreciate it. Thank you. Up next is the Health Department. Sandra? Oh yes. Good afternoon. Sandra Van Anne, Health Services Director. Okay, so Health Services is divided into three divisions. And basically three divisions. You have our clinical, environmental, and health admin. Under clinical, we have our immunization clinic, our STD STI clinic, communicable disease investigations, contact tracing, those types of things. And we have a public health emergency preparedness person

[5:20:35] that also is housed in our thing. Our environmental health division is made up of two inspectors, and then it is part-time seasonal admin assistant, and then it's health admin, which is me. The nursing division's revenue in 25, and you can see that we are general fund division. We received 213,000, brought in fees and it's revenue so I'm counting general fund as a revenue fees very limited but as Carl said we have a very different clientele very poor sometimes inability to pay. We have an 11-15 waiver grant that we were able to secure it took with 10 years of work, but we have some funds saved up and that pays for the lease of space for the nursing division to be out at St. John's campus. We have a Finc grant which is public health infrastructure grant that came about after COVID, the realized federal government that public health departments in general all across for many years had slowly dwindled in numbers and so they put some money out to try and increase staff and so that came about and we were able to participate in that. That is a five-year program that will expire or we will end up, we will finish that grant up November of 27. So that is about to expire And then we have the Public Health Emergency Preparedness Grant, again it pays for that one salaried individual.

[5:22:36] And we have been receiving that grant since like 2001, 2002. So 486,000 in revenue for the nursing department. Expenditures, obviously the biggest expense is salary and benefits. We do have the five full time and one part time, and that's nearly 356 operations is 79, and of course the lease of space, which is 47 currently, and we will be bringing agenda item on the March 3rd council meeting and to continue our lease of space and our contract with Shannon to do that. So, again, we tried to keep it, you know, 55th, well, that's basically our expenditures. I will say that, I guess I'm going to go back to that, I want to talk a little bit about that fig grant, that's 113, that's how much we will use up, or we used up in fiscal 25, and we probably will use the same amount in fiscal 26. year of fiscal 26, actually probably December 25, we will end up losing one of those positions and we will go 50% to another and then eventually we'll end up using that up again November 27 and so we will end up losing basically our admin assistant for environmental health and part-time nurse, and then we have two other staff, admin staff in nursing. So yeah, our personnel will dwindle at that point. And then we have our environmental health

[5:24:41] division. We saw, well, you can tell, we raised in fees in our permit fees, about $99,000, and it's roughly around $100,000 per year. You know, we kind of keep about the same number of establishments at around 600 to 620. And so that's our permit fees. It also includes some temporaries. And then we have an RLSS grant that we have also been receiving away even before I came into the picture 30 years ago. But that has not increased, so it's still 119. But again, we have a revenue for the two health inspectors of 217, almost 218,000. And those are our expenditures there. So the RLSS grant plays 100% of one inspector, and then like 20%, 30% of the other inspector, and then the rest of that is covered by the fees. So, basically, environmental is very stable currently. Of course, in July of this year, the state legislature said that the mobile units will now be permitted through the state. So, we will be losing roughly 50 establishments, 50 to 60 of those mumbles. However, but I have not seen the agreement, the state is supposed to be sending us an agreement and if we want to contract with them to do their inspections. So I'm just waiting to see that agreement and see if we so choose to do that. But we probably will, it'll just be the inspections that will be due based on the people that I guess continue to permit through the state.

[5:26:42] And we will be doing that. And of course Health Admin, General Fund is strictly General Funded, it's just me. And I do pay the Local Health Authority through that as well. And as you can see, our expenditures are very cut and dry. And as you can tell, I am the biggest expense to the general fund, so, but also the biggest expense anyway. So notables, as far as revenues through the nursing department, obviously it's very difficult to even think about raising any kind of fees, because the state sets the fee that we are allowed to charge for the administration of the vaccine. They give us the vaccine, the Texas vaccines for children, And we are only allowed to use it for Medicaid or non-insured children. And so then that's the cap. And the cap, I believe, is $13.65. And so then that's all that we are allowed to charge for the administration of that vaccine. And for our STD clinic, we are in this program, the TIP program, and they will provide us the G.C. chlamydia kits, and the state does the testing. We send the samples to the test, to the state, and they will do the testing also for free. Excuse me. And so they will also provide the medication, so in case anybody comes back positive GC chlamydia, we will treat, and again, the medication is given to us, us, so it's a minimal charge to the patient as well. BSHS, like I said, will perform the tests, and then they will also provide the HIV and

[5:28:46] syphilis testing, so we draw the sample and we send all of that to the state. We charge a very minimal charge is $25 per visit. We don't charge for the tests because they are obviously perform free, but we do charge like an office visit. And that's what that is. Now, it's also very difficult to, let's say, decide, I mean, we could decide to raise revenues on that, increase the fee, but however you've got a lot of, you've got at least a couple that I know of that are doing free SDD testing. You have the pregnancy, the sexual clinic on the PECOS, and then the state also provides free testing. So at the, I believe their office, they think they will also, they also will, like I said, will test and then send out to the state. So it'd be kind of difficult for us to say, okay, we're going to increase our rates when you've got people doing it for free. Now also the state statute does say that if somebody has the inability to pay, we cannot turn them away. And then also, I mean, give that person the opportunity to, let's say, we can waive the fee or we can decrease the fee and say, okay, you know, they can only provide half and then we can't turn that away. So, I mean, it would be kind of difficult as well if somebody comes in and says, I can't afford it, but I need it. We have basically state statute says we have to do it. So it would be kind of difficult to increase our revenues for those two clinics that we provide. And then also just wanted to point out there that we're basically 50-50. We have general fund, you know, like a general revenue, you

[5:30:46] know, 450, and then in grants that will bring in at 382, then environmental permits fees that so I mean basically you're looking at a fifty fifty for our department and I think that's all that I have that's all that I have questions any questions for Sandra you Sandra back here at the very beginning you've got a an income amount the same as the grant amount but the expense part of it was a lease is that true to former we leasing and then getting reimbursed for that expense the lease of space for the nursing department mm-hmm we are paying for the lease of space do we not have enough room in in our our facilities you know I guess it would be a two-fold deal if would would we qualify for those grant dollars in some form or fashion and then this so we could get that money but also find space where we want to eliminate that lease expense well okay so I can give you a story back in 2012 back in 2012 the state they changed the the way that we were able to basically charge for the TVFC we used to charge anybody and we were able to offer it to anyone they said no so and at the same time we went through this whole remodel so we were here at the health department the planning department that was all health department. That was our building. But then so we did the whole remodel and we had to find a house for us. So at that point, you know, Shannon had this available space. And we were in a small little unit, but then we were able to bring back an STD clinic because we had basically made the decision to close because we had no staff. And so anyway, but

[5:32:46] the thing is that there's a grant that's 47,000, basically it's just money that we have saved up. We're no longer going to be receiving that money. We have 600 and some thousand dollars saved up, but specifically just for that. So once that's, once we've depleted that amount, we won't have a place to go. And that's going to be something that. I think to answer your question a little more too, is that what the services they provide kind of specialized in the exam rooms and all that kind of stuff. So Sanders is correct. We were over here. The city saw a higher and better use for that. All the planning was consulted, moved here. So we found a space that was economically priced for us, to partner sort of with Shannon, because they had stuff. People, it's a spot that has good bus service. As far as people being able to get there, they know where it is, and so it's worked well. And Sandra was able to find grant funding that actually will allow us to pay that lease with the grant fund. Right. Well, since we're not getting that income anymore, and we've got about $680,000 in that within eight years or so, we're going to run out of money. That's cool. Are you thinking about that? Or is there a way that we can bring you in so we don't have to pay that expense? I won't be here. Oh, well, you two, get away. And to be real specific, Sandra, over the last several years, years ago we were having the same discussion because city was subsidizing this area quite heavily. There were grants that came in or there were state funding. A lot of that started to go away. Sandra found another way to subsidize that through grants which has actually lasted us for numerous years and you can tell numerous years into the future but we have no guarantee past that. So at that point you may be looking at you're not providing these type of services, you're only going to do community health, which means you may actually move the nurse under the fire department, you know, in providing, so they're, as we've talked about, as things change and

[5:34:50] evolve with funding from the state or not, that's where we have to adapt. Gotcha. And there may be some changes in that area that have to occur. And it was even really shaky this whole past summer, this whole past year with the new federal administration because a lot of the grants went away and we were even thinking okay some of these were decreasing as I thought it was supposed to be doing I mean they've all been obviously funded and we're okay but I know that that fig grant that wouldn't have a time frame that had a time frame and so will something else similar to that come around that we don't know right we don't know And we won't even know if this big grant, I mean, they might decide next year, so you know what, they're no longer going to fund it. So, I mean, we deal with this every single year. We reduce programs such as we stop having the SDD clinics and so forth. Then you may want to end the lease and move those staff into an existing space that's smaller where we can house them internally. Make sense? I'm going to quit talking to everybody because they're going to y'all leave. Everybody we've talked to today, they're going to, I won't be here. I mean, I definitely worry and I don't want to be the bad guy to say, oh my God, I don't, you know. But anyway, that's just it. I mean, it's always been, you know, we, I do believe we don't really take a lot in general fund. We're a very small department, and I've tried my best to get money. Oh, you're doing a great job. We appreciate all you do for us, so that's all the questions I had. Mary, we are looking forward to the changes that are coming with all the retirements and actually even the structuring and organizational chart and how that's going to work in the future. We'll leave our notes for the next folks that show up, but we do have some thoughts on the

[5:36:54] ideas of how to reduce your exponentials in their way though. So, but yeah, good question. I'm just just my final thought and I know that which is kind of hard to see it up there as like close nursing, but just a thought. God forbid that we ever have anything come around like COVID. Because public health is basically are the only ones that have the authority to do any kind of investigations to contact people to find things out and so I'm just gonna leave it at that. Thank you dear. Any other questions for Sandra? Okay thank you ma'am. Appreciate it. Mayor we are scheduled for a 15 minute break your thoughts on that. All right. We'll take a 15 minute break at this point, we'll be right back. We've got a neighborhood and family services next with Angela. Yes, sir. Do you have a question? Oh, you're good. You're good. You're good. You're good. You're good. You're good. Angela, you're on. Okay. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm going to go over neighborhood family services, which most of you know, entails code compliance, animal services, wick, and housing. So we're going to start with revenues and code compliance. So we are working with finance currently to go through the fees with both animal services and code compliance, and we're ensuring the alignment with the actual service costs. So Rudy's working on those as we speak. And then majority of codes revenue comes mainly from abatements. So that's where most of our stuff comes from. Animal services, we're about 12,000 higher than what we budgeted for FY26. Now we did do that budget prior to us taking on the adoption, so that budget was set a little

[5:38:54] low, but we are 12,000 over at the moment. And Amanda's also working with Finance to work on those fees to make sure they're close with actual service costs. Now adoptions will, you don't make money in adoption, so they won't ever be where they need to be, but, and then she does have, we do have opportunities to grow revenue through grant funding and she has applied for grant for Spain Newton for about $25,000, so hopefully we get to hear back from that soon. Wake is a fully grant funded and so it uses none of the city's funds to operate. It does include a 15% indirect cost allocation that does offset our shared administrative costs with the city, so what we spend, the city gets 15% of that. And then housing is funded primarily through federal grants. Now they do have some general fund. I want to say it's a little over 100,000. I could be off a little bit, but it's not a whole lot. And then Mari does actively pursue additional grants and partnerships for those projects. And that's all for my revenues. If y'all are good, I'm going to move on to expenses. For code compliance, Rudy runs a really lean budget. So all of his staff are cross-trained, and they have defined inspection zones, so they're not running all over the place. And Rudy does evaluate those inspection zones every two years. So it goes based off of calls. So he'll adjust those as calls commence so that everybody has the same average number of calls. We don't have a lot of opportunity to reduce any of our budget. Like I said, it's a very, very lean budget. There's not a whole lot of movement there. And we have six code compliance officers. So there's, I mean, if you, if we reduce the budget, we would have to reduce the code officer. Do you track them? Each one, how much? For the call of service. So we have five zones currently.

[5:40:55] And like I said, Rudy reevaluates their zones to make sure they all have the same average call volume. And he does have a spreadsheet that he tracks that. Could you copy all counsel on maybe give us a every couple months, give us summary on that? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Animal services, we did request, I think, through the task force, two additional ASO officers for FY26. After speaking with Amanda, we think that our current ASO team is handling the calls necessary, and they do have a little bit of downtime to finish a reporting that we don't think at this time we need those two additional officers. So our recommendation for cost savings is that we hold off on those two officers. Angela, before you move off on that, most people up here know that every afternoon, when it weathers okay, I said on my front porch, there's probably three or four dogs in that neighborhood that run every afternoon. Now they don't come out until five o'clock in the afternoon. Okay. And occasionally we'll find some additional ones get out of their yard. When we started talking about that, one of the things we were going to do was we were going to have an after hours ASO. With the two open spots, do we have that anymore? I think there is still room even if we don't fill those two officers that we could spread that timing out a little bit. Now, as far as the after hours going late into the evening, probably not, but I think we could push it so that it's seven to seven or something like that along those lines. We could look at 4, 10, 3, 12, that would be a little more difficult. But I think there is room with what we currently have to do something like that. The reason I ask that everybody just thinks at 5 o'clock everybody's gone home and so there's no no reason to try to call it an abble services officer because nobody's going to come anyway.

[5:42:56] Right. I understand. I think there's still room to do that. I mean I'm happy to take on the two additional officers but that comes with extra cost as far as fringe benefits and things like that and we will need, well, two more vehicles for them and I'm still down one vehicle for the five officers I have now. So I would need three vehicles and the two positions if we felt filled them. But I do think there is room for us to extend those hours. Well we did the task force last year. One of the things we heard was San Jo has a hundred 50 some I don't remember what that number was but Dogs on the street. I believe it was 500 and I've heard recently Okay Have we reduced that number down to a to a workable? Number in order for you to say hey, we don't need those two ASO's right now. I Don't know how that number was How they got to that number so I don't know how to calculate to get to that number So if I knew how they calculate it and how they saw based on the presentations I saw it was a windshield assessment and I have not done that personally. We're just going based off a calls of service because it's pretty much a complaint driven department, right? As the phone calls come in, we dispatch them out and they will patrol if they have extra time. So based on the calls of service, we've seen the calls of service go down. But again, I'll go back and say this. Yeah, citizens don't believe after five o'clock There's going to be an ASO available so they don't make the phone call and Previous to us put the task force together one of the things the task force said was people believe that We're not going to get a response from it animal services After you make a phone call and less there is a a bite Animal animal animal human whatever the case may be that's the most citizens today still believe that if they make a phone call,

[5:44:59] animal services, they're not going to get any response. Well, and I will say we are looking in the transitioning. We've been working closely with Chief Griffith to move over to their dispatch system. So the calls will no longer, you won't call to the shelter to dispatch them out. It'll go through the dispatch center and they will dispatch it out to our officers. So we are looking to change that. So the calls that come into the shelter or purely asking questions about adoptions, asking about hours of service and things like that, or a specific animal, or if they're animals at the shelter. And then calls for service will be routed through dispatch. I will say this, when you make changes out there, because that's, in the 10 years that I've been on council, that's the most controversial area of anything, this council, anybody that's up here has ever done, right, I mean, so when you make changes, let's get it out to the public to let them know what we're doing and why we're doing it. You know, quite honestly, in the last four months, I haven't fielded one or two phone calls for my dog, so I feel pretty comfortable. But I still don't think that the citizens are aware that we've made changes out there. Yeah and we'll make sure that gets out there. I have some other educational opportunities I'd like to do in other as well as animal services, code compliance and our infill division because I feel like that is also not out there. So we'll make sure we get that out there. We'll continue monitoring the situation. We meet on a weekly basis. We'll sit down and kind of review what we are, what's going on. If there's any assistance or any resources necessary and we've been I think we've We've had some really good meetings, and at any point that I'm told that, no, actually we're hurting right now, we believe we need more help, we can strategize around that as well though. But the meetings have been really great, and really good discussions, and we're definitely

[5:46:59] making some progress. There's more to go, there's plenty more to go, but I do appreciate the additional efforts that I'm seeing from animal services and Angela and Amanda of course, so thanks again. Yeah, of course, and it's really given us a time to get all of our staff trained, you know, we have a very high turnover, very new staff, we're able to send them to training, so we're able to focus on that, and so I'm not saying we won't ever get two officers, but I would like to hold off another year as we get them, you know, to their second ACO certifications to make sure they're all using Asia certified to make sure they're getting those leadership. I want a stellar staff before I add on new staff. Cause we need to fix what we have going on first before I add new. Yes. Let me begin by saying I think that there are discernible positives from your leadership and Amanda's leadership and the direction that the shelter has gone. Since she was hired in the conclusion of the task force, but I also want to speak in support of Harry's comments. I live in a completely different neighborhood. And while I don't see five or six, I can tell you that I probably see two to four every day, running past my house, running through yards in the Santa Rita neighborhood. So I immediately turn around and try to go the other way and hope that those loose dogs don't see me. So that's still not quite where we want it to be. I also get lots of calls. What do I do? Who do I call? I'm not getting an answer. I'm not getting a response. Chief Griffith already told us that his staff has overworked, so putting that on them while it seems logical, because I do know that the community continually defaults to the idea that they call the police non-emergency number. That precedes Morgan and precedes your leadership, and for some reason, they got that message through public information or habit or neighbors

[5:49:02] just passing the word along. So, I'm not sure what the answer is, but I would hazard a guess that the chair of the task force, Judge Gilbert, would be more than happy to sit down with you and review how they gathered data and go over the ordinance changes that they very ever so carefully have made. Well, and they have recommended some ordinance changes and they're currently sitting with the task force right now to review before we move on to legal. So we are still working with them pretty closely And I'm happy to get how they calculated that number. I just can't get that for you right now because I don't know how it is calculated. And I don't, all that to say, there's always gonna be a dog running around. I would love to say that there'll be a time that there won't, but there's always gonna be some sort of dog running around, unfortunately. I think that we're gonna do the best so that doesn't happen, but. I think we know that. Yeah. I mean, I think we are adult enough to realize that there's probably never going to be perfection. But if Harry's noticing it and others are noticing it and calls are coming in, it's still something, even if it's better. Yeah, no, and I don't disagree with you. And I, again, I'm not saying I don't want two more staff. I just want you to know that it does come with extra costs and extra training costs. And like I said, we have a very young staff and I would really like to get them where they need to be before we introduce two new, two more new staff. Do you feel like your staff retention and satisfaction is higher now than it was a few months ago? We've had the group we've had is probably the longest stuff that we've had in a while. So I don't know if morale's better or they just enjoy the work. I don't know. I would have to sit down and talk with them. But they are my longest staying group. What that reason is I don't have that answer. But I'm just happy for them to be there. And I do enjoy all of them. I tell Daniel on a daily basis. They're fantastic. All right. All right. So those are the only ones that can write citations for things like that? Yes.

[5:51:02] Okay. I'm going to echo what they said. I see two or four every time I step in my truck and then our side. So I think we need them still if we can find it in the budget. That's something I would not skip back on especially after a task force spent so much time trying to iron out what they thought would be the best fit. It's still a big issue and it's something that I think it's going to take anyone we can afford. gonna take them to get it right faster than later. Yeah and the north side is a beast in itself so we are I have a fifth officer that's kind of a we call him a floater. I mean it with all the love in my heart. So we are gonna divide that division into two so my floater will actually have his own division in that north side to kind of help so I will say that and I'll reiterate what Tina says because you don't have to like the recommendations. I'm just giving you everything I have, and I can't cut anything else. That's my only thing I can cut. So, oh, and then animal services is conducting adoptions in-house, so additional cost predictions are limited without impacting that service delivery. So, again, the only thing I have to offer is holding off on those two. They're going really well. Alga, our outcome coordinator, is fantastic. She does a really great job of counseling them and making sure they get the right pet in making sure they have everything need to make it successful. We have had a couple come back, but it's going really well. So, moving on to WIC. Again, they're fully covered by the grant, so we have reduced some staffing, so WIC provides staffing guidelines based on our participation, so we have reduced two positions through attrition, just to stick with those staffing standards. I'm sorry, I had to interrupt you. I had a question about my turn on animal services. Let me go around the table. There's soon have been some confusion

[5:53:03] on if animal services can ask solicit funds and stuff. And I understand the post on the Amazon supplies. That had to be taken down for the reason of animal services can receive donations, but they can't solicit donations. Is that just an interpretation or is that actual state law? I'm not sure how that works, I guess you can order it and it just gets delivered to the animal shelter. So normally there's, you know, if a staff receives a gift that is valued over $50, they're not allowed to accept that. And they're certainly not allowed to accept cash even for any amount or gift cards. Through our budget ordinance, we have authorized, or Council's authorized, Daniel, to accept gifts up to $5,000. I suggested taking down the wish list thing because there's no way to track that. And I don't want a city staff person that receives a gift in the mail unsolicited accepting that and then maybe it goes missing or how are we tracking that I don't know so I don't want anyone to get in trouble or that so my recommendation was if someone wants to donate

[5:55:05] either donate in a way where Daniel can improve it under the 5,000 or take it to council to accept that donation. Okay what about if even if they okay I get the Amazon thing but if they a dog is hit people, their hearts go out to it and they want to donate. Do we have a VIN mode, we have a PayPal, do we have anything that we could accept those without? I mean, it just, I don't know about that. I mean, if Daniel, if it's within the amount and Daniel offers it, I don't think there's any specific because it's really easy. We get that donation. I mean, because if it's cash or 50 bucks, there it goes. And then you know exactly what that number is. There are a lot of people that would like to feel like they're part of the solution, whether it be $5, $10, anything like that. I do understand that the difference between the Amazon and stuff coming from a third party. But when it's coming from your bank account to a designated thing, that certainly seems doable. And I would be all for it. If it's allowed if it's if it's yeah, I mean so long as it's allowed through the proper channels with Either Daniels approval or councils approval depending on the amount okay good deal one other thing now on your Has there been an increase in? Anybody Like enforcement on the ordinances or anything is there been improvement I know that y'all have worked on some language and stuff to update our ordinances and all have we seen better end results with enforcement of some of these ordinances? As far as my staff issue in citations? Yes, and then the closer. Yeah, I mean. Yes, end resolving them. Well, once we issue a citation,

[5:57:07] we issue it and then it goes through the court system. So I can't tell you what the end result is because I don't get that. Is there a way to find out? We sent five of them down and then what the end result was when it goes to the court. I'm not sure I can follow up with Sylvia on that. I'm sure there is. And I think Amanda has presented some numbers, but I don't know if it's to the extent to what you're asking. OK, because that would be the ultimate outcome of those efforts. And that would be if we're writing 100 tickets, and only five of them are getting processed, where there's some sort of resolution, then that to me would indicate we need to go back and look at how we're going to make it. So we write the citations. be times because you know we're looking for compliance that's all I want is compliance so if they go to Deborah which is who we work with and say I got Bella because that's the most common animal name fix and you provide documentation that you did and go to Deborah she'll drop the those are easy it's just don't yeah others when we've got chronic right and so there's multiple facets that I would have to go through so I'd have to go through Deborah to see which ones were dropped I'd have to you know what I mean and maybe that all can be done through the court. I'm not real sure. But. Yeah. I mean, at the point where it gets to Deborah, yeah, she has, again, looking for compliance and so she does dismiss those if they show the proof that they've been spayed new to her. They have their secure enclosure or whatever it may be. So. Okay. Yes. Of course. Okay. I think we went through WIC. Again, we don't want to cut because if we cut, we get less money. So we're not going to do that. housing over time that we've reduced due to the decline in grant funding so as that grant continues to decline so has staffing and duties have been consolidated they're cross-trained they can help when each other's out and so there's really no there's three people in that department there's not a whole

[5:59:08] lot of cuts that can be made there and the things that come from general under indigent cremation and infill. So infills role popular and we, Aaron and I have gone through the numbers. It is doing something to property tax. So it's doing what we wanted it to do. So I wouldn't recommend cutting that. Okay, efficiencies. We maintain an in-house abatement crew with code compliance. Rudy is a certified internal trainer. So any new new code compliance officers we get, he trains them in-house. So we don't send them anywhere, we don't have those costs, we don't have any of that. And then we continue to use mobile tools and everything like that to improve our case management efficiency. So again, I feel like code is very efficient in how Rudy runs it. I don't have a whole lot of changes to make there. Animal services, again, we talked about this already, routing animal services calls through police dispatch to improve consistency, working with our pet inventory. We use a pet point and I think they can do a lot more things that we haven't tapped into. Yeah, I think there's a lot more that it can do that we don't use it for. So I've asked Amanda to look into it and she's done a lot of things. We are now charting all of their vaccines in there and much other things. But I think there's a lot more it can do that we're not using it for. And then WIC, I mean, we're really dictated by state policy on that. So it's really hard to make a whole lot of changes there. We are working through making all of my staff over their clinical and clerical train, so anybody can do the functions. So they're not waiting on one side of the office. Everybody can pick up and help out when it needs it. And then housing, like I said, operates with three staff. So if grant funding continues to decline, And we may have to rely more on our Choto partner to help with those projects and that delivery.

[6:01:15] And that's it for me. Do we have any more questions? Angela, thank you. Appreciate it. Next up is airport. Justin. Good afternoon. You're Mike's working pretty good. Justin Fletcher, airport director. Appreciate everybody's time today. been inundated with information. I appreciate your patience and listening to us share these revenues, expenses, and efficiencies for our departments. I'm going to come out the gate swinging on my first one talking about revenues. Out at the airport, surface vehicle parking is one of our single largest untapped revenue sources. Airports do rely heavily on surface parking as a as a revenue generator and our parking lots when we first started this exercise with Daniel when he tasked us I went out and I counted cars in our parking lot I physically went out and counted cars we had 195 cars in our parking lot that day average down to about a hundred and fifty at eight dollars a day there's potentially four hundred and fifty thousand dollars annual revenue that those parking lots could be making us now when you look at the condition of our parking lots they're poor shade we have vegetation growing the the asphalt is aged they're in need of some upkeep and so you know we can work with with Shane and his crew we could work with our vendors sorry Shane we can work with Patrick I apologize we can work with we work with Patrick and his crews identifying the portions of the parking lot that are aged maybe seal code them can we reconstruct those areas

[6:03:18] to breathe new life into those parking lots so that we can bring them to a condition where they can start generating revenue. When you compare us to Abilene, Abilene has an hourly structure on their surface lots. And the first half hour is typically free. You know, if you're picking somebody up from the airport, you're meeting a loved one, that half hour is free. And then from there, you start incurring a charge as your vehicle stays in the parking lot. for a 24-hour period, I think we can introduce $8 a day, I think that's conservative. And as we improve our parking lots, we could raise that rate. I think when you look at $450,000 annual revenue, that really starts moving the needle for the airport. You know, we have our roof project that we're working on now. We have asphalt that needs to be seal-coded. We have all these projects, I could give you a laundry list of projects that we need to address. That starts moving the needle that the airport can start self-funding these projects, rather than, oh, now we're scrambling to call finance, hey, can we use some money? Can we use some general fund money to help us out with our projects? And this moves the airport to completely self-sustaining. So I understand some of these are heavy lift, some of these are a little more easily, implemented but this is this is real world and I'd like to see the airport move in this general direction all three we would we would look at all three lots long-term short-term altogether air service development air service we we always get phone calls about air service development this is a big conversation there's a lot of money tied to air service development and I think ultimately the decision would would fall back on city council we we always get calls. Hey, what happened to the Houston route? Are we ever going to get another

[6:05:21] airline here in San Angelo? And I think the potential is maybe. I think we need to look at the data. I think we need to have catchment and leakage studies conducted. Seeing how many of our community do they go to Midland? Do they go to Austin? Do they go to Abilene to catch those flights? What percentage of those people are leaving our community to utilize other airports when they could be using ours. And then where do people come from when they come to St. Angelo? There's vendors that utilize cell phone data. That cell phone data can start building a narrative that we can pitch to an air carrier about the potential service city operating another route. And it doesn't have to be a daily service. It could be a couple times a week service. A lot of the low cost carriers, this is their business model that that they're moving into serving a community a couple of times a week, and just providing that additional level of air service to that community. Air carriers at the airport, they generate revenue for us in terms of terminal rents. They lease space in the terminal use fees, so we levy a fee for them to use our jet bridges, our back belts, our counter spaces, and then landing fees. Landing fees are a big revenue generator for commercial operators. But you gotta spend money to make money, And that's where the decision lies, do we really want to pursue an air carrier when we have to put up a minimum revenue guarantee? An air carrier before they come out, they're going to want a minimum revenue guarantee. Typically that's a million dollars to supplement their operating expenses. And then potentially advertising. An air carrier may want the city or the chamber to supplement their advertising expenses for the new route to make sure it is a success when it's launched. So just conversations to be at as we progress. Hanger lease revenues. Hangers are a significant portion of our revenue

[6:07:22] out at the airport. The US Customs Leases, as we've brought the US Customs Leases up to current standards and lease rates, they are proving very beneficial to the airport and forms a revenue. The final hanger we're looking at is the Border Patrol Building. That's the small building at Town Hanger Road. And that building alone can potentially add $75,000 to our operating revenue every year. One thing we're working with with government services leasing is building in some of the operating expenses that we have at the airport, HVAC maintenance. We know how much it costs to replace an HVAC. We know a rough estimate on the amount we spend on plumbing costs, fire extinguisher inspections, and we're gonna build that back into the lease so that CBP is not only are they reimbursing us for the cost of the facility, but they're also reimbursing us for the expenses that we have to take on some of those landlord duties as we operate the building. Land lease, land leases, this is a drone shot we took of the South taxi lane on the South end of the airport. This is before we broke ground in October. This area is gonna be our next focus for hanger development on the airport. And we've already got two parcels that are spoken for of the 10,000 square foot hangers for development. So our current land lease rate is 12 cents a square foot. And I think that is very low. And so with the airport board, they've generated some direction. They provided some direction that, hey, we want to see higher land lease rates for the airport. And so with that direction, some of the South taxi lane leases, we started negotiating at 20 cents a square foot. And that's a little more competitive. Skyline GMR hanger we negotiated 30 cents a square foot and that one has frontage on knickerbocker very appealing parcel direct access to taxway alpha and a very short

[6:09:22] taxi to runway 1-8 that's beneficial to an aeromedical operator. So we had our consultants on the airport last week and we were walking the south taxi lane construction site and we were talking rates and charges and he said Justin what are you guys proposing on land lease race down here I said I think 25 to 30 sense might be competitive. And he said, I think you should set you rate at 30 cents and hold the line. He said with the cost of infrastructure, the city's investment, the airport's investment, 30 cents a square foot is going to be very competitive down here on the South taxi lane. And I'll show you a, I'll show you a land lease study. This was conducted by the Abilene Regional Airport in the fourth quarter of last year. They reached out to us. So we provided our, we participated in the study. And this is aeronautical land lease. So this is, these are real estate parcels that have direct access to aeronautical infrastructure. So they're tied into taxiways. And our current rate is 12 cents a square foot. So we're obviously low when compared to other cities, other comparable cities within the state. Abilina 25 cents, Lubbock at 23 cents, Amarillo 25 cents, Corpus Christi way up at 40 cents a square foot. So I think it depends on the market. But I think when you factor in the city's investment of a million dollars, when you factor in the airport's investment, 300,000, on that construction down there, we're putting in brand new infrastructure, fiber and electricity, called the electricity's going underground. It's going to be a very clean development complex that's ready for growth. I think 30 cents a square foot is competitive and I'd like to make that proposal to City Council. I'd like to make that proposal to the airport advisory board and and see start getting these competitive rates, because land is one of our most valuable assets at the airport, and we want to make sure that we leverage and we price it as such.

[6:11:26] Ground transportation, one thing we've overlooked, we need to address is Uber and Lyft, the TNCs, the transportation, network corporations, they're currently operating at the airport without agreements, and so we're missing out on revenue generating opportunities from those TNC operators. Uber and Lyft, we've all used them as we've traveled. They're currently operating, picking up passengers, they're utilizing our facility, they're picking up passengers, and we're not generating a revenue off of that. So typically, airports charge between two and $7 per pickup or drop off. I think the median is about $3.50, so we can build agreements with Uber and Lyft and start generating revenue off of those rideshare companies. Turro is kind of a newer business model that's come to airports. You could basically use their app and use your vehicle and basically rent your vehicle out as a rental car through their app. And we're getting a lot of interest out at the airport of special parking spots and almost like a black car service for these Turro operators. And they're currently operating, and we're just not collecting revenue off of them. And they're generating a commercial business, a commercial activity at the airport. So we do need to get these agreements executed so that we start getting revenue generated off of these commercial activities. It's geofence. It's geofence around the airport. Came through the airport. Piggyback in and off of Carl and his presentation, in terminal advertising, my experience in airports is airports have a business development staff that this is some of their sole focus is advertising

[6:13:29] and making sure that there's cohesive and professional and sleek advertising throughout the terminal. And I think we've all seen it as we've traveled. Jewelers and car dealerships and just a wide variety of people interested in advertising within the terminal space. And with the McLaughlin advertising contract expiring, that opens the door for the airport to start selling in terminal advertising space. And I think we could start with some of our digital signage. They're up in the concourse and down in the lobby. And it just opens up the door for another revenue source for the airport. And that contract had tens of thousands of dollars that we cost split, that we cost shared with McLaughlin. And so now with the agreement expiring 100% of those revenues will remain on airport. I think it's something that we should pursue. Now getting into expenses, the FAA tasks all airports to be as self-sustaining as possible. We should strive to be self-sustaining. So we operate the airport as lean as possible. We operate with a staff of 12, and that's, we maintain every aspect of the airport with a staff of 12. And sometimes that means Keith and myself getting down in a trench with a shovel, jumping on a tractor, jumping on a mower. If the job has to be done, we go and do it. Part of being self-sustaining means our revenues get reinvested back into the airport to meet our expenses. And that's how we tend to monitor our cash flow, monitor our expenses, making sure that our revenues do meet our expenses. And we do have events, like I mentioned with the roof project, work with Jonathan on can we identify source of funding that we can address these roof deficiencies. And I do want to mention our personnel costs. I'm glad we're having this conversation. It's, I will say it's almost a monthly conversation

[6:15:29] where our employees come to us. They're looking for more money, and they're looking outside of the city for employment. And I want to vocalize how hard it is to hire a maintenance technician for the airport, specifically one that has to operate on runways and taxiways. Training somebody to operate a vehicle on runways and taxiways, talking to tower, conducting their job, especially when we're high-tempo operations, is it's very hard to train somebody to work in that environment. And so I would like to do as much as possible to maintain our current staff. We have a good staff. They're currently very comfortable operating in runways and taxiways. And replacing somebody is very difficult to train somebody to operate in that environment, especially when towers call them. And it sounds that big booming voice on the radio, like you're getting yelled at. It's very hard, hard environment to train somebody to work in. Efficiency's, one of the things that we do in the background is federal compliance. Part 139 is the federal regulation that we fall under, and so a big portion of what we do is compliance with the federal government. Lights, signs, paints, and pavement, we get down into the minutia of maintaining the airport, training, and so one of the ways we still rely on Excel spreadsheets, during the snowstorm, I had 16 spreadsheets that I filled out, just tracking conditions of the airport throughout the snowstorm, and there's 16 different spreadsheets that we tracked over those few days that we had the snowstorm. And so that's kind of an antiquated way of doing things. The more modern way is this App 139. And it's GIS, GPS base, and it just tracks all of our, the status of our airfield, runways, taxiways, lights and signs if we have any discrepancies, work orders. What's critical is the work orders because the FAA wants to see that you open and close the work order loop.

[6:17:31] And that's what this software helps track. They want to see that, hey, you identified a discrepancy on your airfield, you tracked it, you followed through, and then you corrected and closed that loop, you corrected the discrepancy. And that software would help us do that. And it's typically about a $4,000 annual expense. And it would help us with our relationship with the fire station. We have a very strategic relationship with Fire Station 8 and their personnel. And it would just, I think it would help all of us, airport staff and the firefighters be a lot more efficient in how we operate on the airfield. Questions? That was a lot. We would need an FIS, what they call a federal inspection station. And it's a facility that is specifically purpose for the inspection of those aircraft that depart from Mexico, those foreign countries, and then they come to the United States to get cleared by customs. So we would need to construct an FIS and work with customs on staffing. What do you think that costs? I'll work up something, I'll have to work up something. I mean, is that a half million? Is that half to one billion? Yes, sir. Well, wait, I don't know if you could recoup that, but long, there are people that fly around as just to Midland at the Lubbock, then turn around and drive back. Right, okay. And there's user fees associated with that too. You can charge for those customs clearing, recoup that fee, right now. Good presentation, flex.

[6:19:31] Any questions from council? Justin, thank you, appreciate it. Up next, we have legal. If you'll make a way to the, you can stay right there, do you like? Oh, you don't have a microphone. Ed, maybe you want a few microphones, just gonna work. Too long, I don't need the batteries, but for sure. Okay, so we're gonna lump this into legal and real estate, real estate falls under the legal division. And as y'all know, legal is non-revenue generating, but real estate is. So, Sarah handles all of our lake lot leases, all of our rec-ag leases that join the Conto River. She does all the like city farm leases that get bit out. Also, the tax lots that get struck off due to property tax foreclosures, she handles all those. And So those are our main revenue sources. We also have liens from code enforcement liens, demolition liens that get filed, she helps prepare and file those and then collects those when those lots get sold, she'll get a call

[6:21:31] from the Todd company about getting payoffs on those. amounts fluctuate just depending on what's going on of course but average 80,000 for the lean side and then lease friends 90,000 but that that's just a percentage I think that goes to real estate and then the remainder goes to other departments and I think like that now's where the trust. I currently we have 85 residential lot leases although I think we just sold one today it's all one today So I think maybe that one lot currently under contract. That's when we closed on Again, this flutch waste just depending on the market and what's going on so you see there that 2024 we had ten lots sold compared to 2025 which is for and then you want to help me on that men maintenance fees, excess proceeds. Oh, the excess proceeds, when funds are distributed, when there's a tax sale, they get distributed to the taxing entities, and sometimes our excess proceeds, if there's no heirs, the district clerk holds those, and then every so often, there's really no timeline. They bring us to check with excess proceeds. So we never really know what we're going to get on that. So it goes into a fund and then they distribute it accordingly. And the expenditures, of course, our salaries are the biggest expenditures, you know, between legal and real estate. We have four attorneys, we have two paralegals and then Sarah being our real estate manager who's also a paralegal. But our big expenditures, you see these,

[6:23:33] recording fees, postage, that's a big one, mainly because of PIRs. Everything we send, we have to send off certified to the AG, just to be able to track that. We have our software, which is file management and legal research that is pretty much mandatory in any legal office to be able to function. And then our license and membership dues again for the four attorneys and three paralegals. Something on the office slide that's kind of, I don't have the actual number for this, but talking about the AG, when we send off PIRs, a big part of what we send off is body cam footage, and so we have to buy USBs, and previously the AG would send those back to us, so we could reuse them, and now they're telling us they're not sending them back anymore, so it's, PIRs are becoming a bigger monster as time goes, and it's just, I mean, even with little things like that, so. Well, I would like a P.L.R. to aim for the number of joke drops. I might, we could do that. All right, so efficiencies we talked about. The lease. So I guess the fees that we charge, we have granting fees and transfer fees. Those reflect the time that Sarah and legal staff take to prepare documents, handle transaction and then there's also the actual rent amounts that get charged for those. Those were last looked at in 2019 and I talked to Jonathan about of course re-looking at those. It's probably due to be updated. One of the things in the Lake Lot leases is those provide for rent adjustment up to 8% but in that

[6:25:33] 2019 policy the direction we had from council was to cap that at 6% I think because of kind of public outbursts that we received from increasing those rents but again this is estimated because depending on which lot cell how many we have we estimate revenue additional revenue of a hundred thousand a year if we did move up to that 8% that's allowed in the lease now that would need to go back can be reflected in the policy that was passed in 2019, but that is one possible thing to increase revenue. So on the tax lots, y'all, we brought these to you pretty recently where Sarah actually recommended not taking some bids and then going back out and rebitting them. And historically, we have gotten really low-ball offers on those tax lots. And it's been the same people bidding on them every time and they know the process and so this time after we took them to council we number one put a minimum bid on there and that was kind of a guesstimate but what we thought was fair and higher than the bids we had previously received and then number two we also marketed those through social media and there was a big outburst that day we posted them because people thought that the city was doing the foreclosure And it's really, that starts at the county, and if no one wins them, then it gets struck off to the city as the trustee for the other taxing entities. And so then we're allowed to go re-bid those out, and we hold them in trust for ourselves and those other entities. That was really successful, at least on one lot, where we had previously gotten a $5,600 high bid. We ended up selling that one for $30,000. And I think between the four lots that we sold it, it was like 100,000 when we probably would have recovered

[6:27:35] maybe 30,000 for those four lots previously. So, another efficiency we're looking at in that regard is going to our electronic bidding. I think we already have that set up. We just need to work with purchasing to do that better because we have been in a paper process where people have to come in with their sealed bids. So, and then otherwise on the legal side again, PIRs take up a lot of our time, a lot of, you guys, it's time too, because you get them for your emails. One of the attorneys in my office, probably 50 to 60 percent of her job is doing PIRs and that's a huge increase since I've gotten there, because I used to be responsible for doing PIRs and I did not spend that much time on them. then of course having a paralegal who probably have his job is helping her with PIRs and it's not unique to us city clerk has to deal with it PD has to deal with it especially on body cam they have someone dedicated to review those body cams or do the redacting and then they get turned over to us and we have to review them so I'm not really sure what the answer is I think there's some opportunity to have some shared personnel. I've talked to Heather and the chief about that. Maybe having an FTE that their sole function is that and they coordinate between those departments. I don't know what the number necessarily looks like for that, but it's a thought. And beyond that, that's what I had. So let's talk about PRs for a minute. How many hours do you think you spent in your department? Yes, and I mean it didn't have to be is it 200 hours 500 hours if like Kathleen for instance She's spending a half of her time. I mean, it's probably 20 hours that she's spending a week And then like if I'm involved in the PR. I usually look through my own

[6:29:39] Stuff, so I mean we've had big PRs on data centers. I mean that took me several hours Just compiling and figuring out what we had It was the AI-generated PR against AI back center. Yeah, and it's only going to get worse. I mean, GovQA, the software we have is great. It helps us interact better with the requesters and to turn information over to them. But I think it also sets us up for those AI-generated PIRs where, I mean, they just have to provide an email and shoot it off to us. And that's covered by the AG, but at one point, Help me remember this legacy group here. Did we not adjust the rate that we were charging for PRs? That's all done by state statute. I mean, we adopted a policy, and Heather might have to help me on this, about voluminous requests, if it goes over like 36 hours or something. But I don't think it helps us a lot. And the rate at which we can charge, that is not something that we can choose. that is set forth by the attorney general. And it's $15. I mean, I remember Julie bringing it, and it was a vexatious request, where it was strictly meant to be harmful and a pain. There was nothing, and of all these PRs, I see, I have yet to see something come back out of those. In nine or 10 years, I have yet to see something come out of those. So it's just a shame that the burden they put on people that we have to, you know, the cost of that is basically shared on every citizen. Thank you. in the city, and it is the most, and there are people watching this video, or that'll watch this, that they will, they brag about all the BRs they've done, and I think it's the most stupid thing in the world to brag about. I mean, we're all about transparency and free press, but if you're not gonna do something productive with it, if there wasn't something there, it just kills me, and there's no way to do this, except through Darby and going to the AG, correct, to try to handle these, because these are vexations requests.

[6:31:39] Yeah, and then, I mean, even the amounts that we are allowed to charge, like the attorney's time in like writing to the AG and figuring out the exceptions, none of that's chargeable. We can't recoup that time, so. Can we make those public? I mean, if someone asks for someone else's public information request, yeah, it's still public information. No, I would love to post the list of everybody that asks for a PR and the number of hours. It's like the old days where they used to ride a hot check I guess the problem with that is there are some requests where people have a special right of access if you know it's like a privacy issue or something medical stuff they're allowed to get their own stuff and I would hate for us to have to like sift through requests to see are we turning over someone like that as opposed to what you're talking about. If they request more than five, we throw their name up on it. I just, I think that would be kind of productive to the audience. I don't think it's probably legal. There's no snowball chance in hell, this is legal, all right? It is very, I mean, it infuriates me at how much of a burden it puts on the office department. And we'll get the phone call and I'm like, yeah, I just call Bucky. Bucky, you have free access to my folder, drive anything you want to go get anything you want. Just so you know, whenever you do that though, that does limit the amount of time that we can charge the price. I get that. But I mean, the point of it is, we have nothing to hide on this thing. And what people bring up on that, and people thought we've had all these opportunities and all the money. And my God, Patrick's got a Rolls Royce and Gary's got a brand new pink Cadillac. And what people say about this was just the most stupidest stuff I've ever seen. But anyway, with that oil, we'll let it go. We're trying to go today, I'm sorry. You hit my nerve, I'm sorry, y'all. Mary, you want a dollar amount on that?

[6:33:43] Okay. Any questions for legal? Thank you, guys. Ben and Sarah, thank y'all, appreciate y'all. Up next is public information, right? Let me start my timer, the way I know what I'm doing. Make sure you get that in my close to your mouth. I will, I can hear myself pretty good, thank you. Yeah, yeah. I just want to say y'all have done a really good job with your microphones today. So this room is, and I'm not, I'm not trying to be funny, like this room is not made for all of this, and it echoes, and y'all have done a good job to turn them on and off, and that helps us back there, so thank you. Okay, so my name is Brian Groves, I am the communications director for the city. This may have died too, no, there it goes. Okay, so revenue, we do not have very many revenue sources, is in fact we have one. So our TV channel is SATV and it's a peg channel, which is public education government channel. And so we receive a certain percentage from optimum for our peg channel and that can only be spent on things like microphones, cameras, things, our studio with the end goal of putting things on our TV channel. And so right now we have about 795,000 in that account. Obviously when we need things, We purchased things, but we are very careful and diligent with what we buy. We don't frivolously spend our money. And so because we know that we'll need to replace equipment. So we've replaced the council chambers twice now. And it's a big undertaking.

[6:35:44] One of the really nice upgrades from the last council chambers was the closed captioning. And so we have that on our TV channel. If we did not have our TV channel, we wouldn't be able to have this right now, because that's coming live from our TV channel. So it's just one of those things that shows the importance of our TV channel. It's one of our tools for communication. We are seeing a decline year over year, which kind of tracks with cord cutting and things like that. And so another reason why we're not just spending money on all these different things. We're saving it up, trying to make sure that we have enough to do those projects as things come up throughout the years. Any questions on PEG? When it comes to our operations and personnel, we don't really have any area to cut or reduce our staff. We're a two-person office, it's myself and Lorelai. In fact, we could use another person. I've been here for 18 years and it's always been two people and the workload, like with everybody else, continues to increase. One of our biggest holes is graphic design work and we get a lot of requests for graphic design work. And so we bring that request up from time to time. We have different options, you know, like a full-time employee, a part-time employee, maybe doing contracting that out. We've heard AI mentioned several times today. We've had several people say you should do that. Well, one of the things that we have to be careful with the city is we have to make sure we're in line with IT and all of our cybersecurity issues. So that limits the different AI agents that we can use. So we're in talks with them right now to try to see if there's some different AI agents and premium ones that we might be able to spend a little bit of money on to help us bridge that gap, but at some point it would be very beneficial for us to have a third person in order to really keep up with the work that is coming in. So, any questions?

[6:37:44] Just a quick comment. You said it's a two person team, actually, it's a two person award winning team, right? You won't allow me awards, so thank you for all the work that you guys do. See, I'll do it very efficiently with two staff members. So thank you. Yes, sir. Thank you. I will say before I move on to facilities, one of the biggest undertakings that we've had for the last two and a half years has been the website. We obviously did a redesign, which thank you guys for the funding. But that is taking up probably 80% to 90% of our time over the last two and a half years, getting ready for the ADA deadline that's coming in April. And so everything on the website, the website itself and PDFs have to meet a certain standard by the DOJ by a certain point in April. So you'll probably see a lot of changes on the website as we're trying to make sure that we're meeting those requirements. And it's a constant undertaking, but we're doing our best to meet that deadline. It comes to facilities. We're at the City Hall Annex on the second floor. We have outgrown our space, which is kind of funny to say when you have two people. But when you talk about all the equipment that we have and the various things that we do, we've run out of space. And so one of the things I would like to talk about is potentially moving and getting approval from you guys to explore the clinic building, which is over here. When July 4th happened this last year, I'm very big on efficiencies. I want us to be as efficient as possible for not being efficient. I want to correct it. And so one of the things that I saw was that we had lots of press conferences. We didn't really have a space that was meant for it. This worked, but it wasn't, it wasn't ideal, and we had moved stuff around all the time. had to kind of make shift things. And so when I talked with real estate, I asked what facilities do we have that we might be able to convert into a press conference space. And we didn't have that many options, but this was one of them. And at first, we thought maybe this would just be a press conference space, but there's a lot more room in there than we thought. So the idea rose of us potentially moving over there, officeing out of there.

[6:39:46] It would give us more room if we ever did have more people added to our office to office out of there, it would give us space for a studio, it would give us an area for a dedicated press conference space that we could use but also police could use whenever they hold their press conferences because right now they use their conference room which not many people know probably what it takes to use that space but there's a gigantic table in there and you run out of space very quickly and they do a really good job using it. We try to utilize this space or city council but as you can imagine there's about 15 boards in here a month plus training so this room is not not always available, and so it's a need not only for the city, but for the police department. And that also brought up, and Travis wants to come up at some point he can, that also brought up of what would we do with our space? Well, police is obviously busting at the seams and needs space as well, so that would open up our space to give the police department more space up on that second floor. They already have a big presence with CID, and they would be able to use our space for various needs that they need right now, which I think would be a huge use for them. So one of my asks for you guys today is approval to explore this building. The nice thing is we'd be able to use our peg funding for all of the construction and all those things because it's going to be used for TV operations and things like that. We would need assistance with utilities after the fact because peg cannot pay for that. But the majority of the project will be funded with our peg fund. So, I don't know how you all feel about that, but. Any questions for, yeah? Any questions for? No, but can we give direction on this? I mean. Actually, we, this is a kind of a discussion, yeah. That looks really cool. That slide looks really good, Brian. Good. That's it. Is that legal? Yeah. There you go. We're good. We're good. Brian, thank you. Thank you all so much.

[6:41:46] Appreciate it. Okay up next is Heather and I'm going to be so short and sweet. I didn't even do slide. No. So we are also not a revenue generating department, Brandon touched on the Vixacious Requestor policy that we did a few years ago. So you can almost say that it worked and that when we do send a cost estimate, the majority of the time the requester either lowers, reduces the request so that it no longer incurs a charge or they cancel their request. So that's why that is still, and I don't predict it becoming any type of rule, revenue for public information requests. usually don't even send out a cost estimate to a requester until it hits $100 threshold, which is about six hours worth of work, which six hours is a lot of time. And so most requests don't hit that. We're getting a lot of 20, 30 minute requests, things like that. So no revenue there. Our expenses, majority of our expenses, of course, is the two staff that we have. And at this point in time, I don't see anything that could reduce that. One thing to always consider, it has been mentioned a time or two today is elections. Next to staff time elections is probably our biggest cost. And unfortunately, we just don't have a lot of control over that. We contract with the county. It is what it is. And it's really up to y'all to determine whether that is a cost that we incur or not. You know, whenever we run elections,

[6:43:50] concurrent with other local governments, then obviously that reduces the cost, but if we ever have to have a special election, those elections run about $40,000 for us. So, and then efficiencies, right now it's Barbara and I, And I think we're running about as efficiently as you can ask us to run. So we are exploring some policies, things like that, you know, to help us run through things smoother, but that's really where we are. Actually Heather and Barbara, they do an incredible job for just two individuals in that office for a CDR size that's unheard of, you know. So again, as far as the efficiencies, you are running about as efficient as you can. So again, I had to thank you for the work that you and Barbara put in there. Mayor Council members, that's all the presenters at this point. We'd like to come back at the end of next month and Michelle will coordinate that with you all. There's things that are going to be more specific that we'll discuss at the next workshop, which includes strategy and action steps and dollar amounts or some of the savings and items that presented and also to give you all a list of all the services that we currently provide and get input from y'all as far as which services if anything you'd consider doing away with if worse comes to worse as far as budget moving forward. We thank you all for your time. I know it was a long day. If y'all have any questions let's ask them right now if not have we can go ahead and adjourn here. All right, thanks again. Staff, thank you.

Transcribed 2026-07-26 with faster-whisper (base.en) · source: youtube.com/watch?v=ZeXKDxrF7go