2026 at 9 47 a.m.

Um is uh this time I'll take a roll call.

Alder Roman O'Neil Alderman Thorpe and I am here.

Uh is there a motion to approve the agenda with the amendment of moving our FT 1126 and FT1226 above general discussion.

So we're just swapping general discussion and fund transfers in this.

So moved.

Second.

All those in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

Thank you.

Motion carries.

Sir, a motion to approve the minutes from yesterday's meeting as written.

So moved.

Second.

All those in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

Beautiful.

Motion carries.

All right.

We got a couple fun transfers from our good friends, or one's from our good friends of public works.

I guess the others from our pal over in the finance department.

But uh you want to come on up.

New Alder Roman O'Neill is going to have some questions about this important sidewalk project.

So wanted to make sure we actually gave an opportunity to talk about it.

Sure.

I think it's it's actually pretty straightforward as Director Vogel explained it to me.

But why don't you go ahead?

Uh yes, sure.

So the uh as part of the that Cedar Park Sidewalk project, um, based on the size of the project and the disturbance, um, there was a stormwater management um requirement for that project that required uh a certain without getting too technical, a certain volume of stormwater that needed to be treated.

Um and it was designed, there's a plan, but as this project was progressed, there was just site limitations and utility conflicts where it wasn't practical to install the stormwater on site.

So um the the dollars allocated to make sure that that stormwater is still being treated.

The plan is to transfer it to the MS4 account where it can supplement the stormwater management in that same subwatershed so that we still we don't just not do the requirement that was required based on the disturbance of the project.

Um so um we don't know exactly what yet, but um again, it'll be uh we'll it's more of an accounting.

We'll make sure that any restoration or projects we do in that subwatershed, you know, we'll still basically say, well, a lot of it was based on the additional impervious we added for the Cedar Park Sidewalk project.

So that's kind of in a nutshell what the situation is.

Thank you.

Aldo Roman O'Neill, you want to ask some questions?

Yes, please.

Go ahead.

Thank you very much.

Um, so just to be clear, so Cedar Park sidewalks is really two phases.

Um there's a phase from Window to Halsey that was completed in 2024.

And then there's the phase two that is from Taylor Avenue to Fair to uh locust that hasn't started.

Right.

So this is taking it out of the phase one because phase one was not able to adequately get the stormwater right.

The the project, the sidewalk was still installed for phase one.

It's just the stormwater management component of it.

The I believe it was a filter inlet.

The design just wasn't gonna work where there were conflicts that we that weren't done in the survey that just happened when you start digging up the road.

Um, so they couldn't do it on site there.

Um they still have to evaluate what the stormwater requirements gonna be for phase two, and hopefully, likely there might be some more open space area in that section where we could actually still do the stormwater.

The goal is to do the stormwater management on site, you know, as is directly to the point source of where you're putting your impervious uh location, but there's just times where it's practically difficult.

Um still acknowledging that there's still a volume requirement that we have to manage in that subwatershed.

So we're still gonna do and it's largely these redevelopment projects are pollution-based, so we need to do water quality improvements to the subwatershed.

So we as a city have opportunities to look elsewhere in that subwatershed to do water quality improvements.

All right, so you're moving this money out of that, but will it be moved back in when you do phase two, or will it be needed when you do phase two?

Phase two is budgeted based on what phase two is to do stormwater.

That budget should have enough to, or at least it's budgeted to do stormwater on site for that phase.

Um so that's already included in the phase two part.

It's just this stormwater part for phase one.

We're just moving into MS4, so we can we don't have to do it on site, we can look elsewhere in the subwater city to do the work.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Just a quick question.

When you say the city agreed to contribute to the stormwater account, who are we agreeing with?

MDE.

Um, no, I think it's just we agree that this money, you know, the the funds, this is the best way to transfer the the funds in order to make sure still make sure we get the goal uh achieved.

You know, we have had discussions with MDE in the past, and we don't need their approval to do this.

You know, we still have to do the requirement, knowing based off any disturbance for any capital project, there's a stormwater component to it.

Um, but they acknowledge that you know we have the design, we know how much we have to do, but there are just site constraints and you know conflicts that are tough to do on site.

So director of public works, I'll just chime in on this.

It's completely voluntary.

The way we handle city projects and doing stormwater management for city projects uh is generally uh a voluntary requirement.

Got it.

Okay.

Interesting.

Is your mic working?

I'm not seeing the red on it if you talk.

Yeah, the red was on.

Okay, cool.

Um, all right, Alderman Thorpe, you got any questions on this?

Oh, nope.

See no more questions.

Is there a motion for a favorable recommendation on FT 1126?

Send them.

Second.

All those in favor, please say aye.

Thanks so much for being here, gentlemen.

Um, let's just keep moving.

Next up, I've lost my place in our agenda, but I think it's FT1226, I would assume after FT 1126.

Yeah, thank you.

Uh, and it is allocating some money from our debt service to contractual services in the finance department.

Ms.

Bucklin, you want to talk about this?

Or Mr.

Palicall, whoever, or Mr.

Johnson, we got all sorts of finance folks in the room to talk about it.

Yeah, so this is a budget revision that basically is moving money out of non-allocated debt service that's not going to be needed this year into um contractual services, and then there's also some vacancy savings found from uh finance department to move into contractual services as well.

Uh this is to allow for the um finance department to continue operating with some of the existing consulting agreements that are in place.

Got it.

And um I had asked this at another time.

Um, and I don't know, maybe it's in our questions document it has an answer, but I have not noticed it.

If so for the FY27 budget, how are we sure that we're not overestimating our debt service in the way that we did for the FY26 budget?

So um that's a that is a good question.

And um you did ask um, I'm trying to see if um so that's a matter of of us uh scrubbing going back to scrub those numbers.

We do have the um the schedules we've got in the schedules from um have some schedules internally, we're fact checking that.

We asked for the schedules from Davenport because they keep copies, um, just to make sure that stuff is aligned so that we can check those numbers to make sure that we have essentially full track of everything and we're we're adding it together correctly.

No, it's that's right.

So I think what we need to what we need to do from a scrub perspective is see what is the historic debt, the existing debt, and then what the debt service is.

And to your point, that should be a bit more predictable and understandable.

I think where you see variability come into play is the timing of when you let and the timing of when you have payments, and then like so an example would be in the current proposed budget, there is a exploration for a capital service lease, and we have some amount of funding in there for debt service related to that.

And sorry, wait, so that again for a capital service lease.

A cap it's called a master capital lease.

It's for the fleet replacement.

That could be some debt, there's some debt service in there to potentially explore that.

Yeah, and that that really is the the thing that's variable that we will have less control over.

So what we're doing is scrubbing the past, but in terms of the future, um the budget includes some assumptions about how much debt we will le release this year, right and then therefore the costs associated with those bond sales and and the rest of that.

So there's the master lease for fleece fleet replacement, there's some some bond amounts, and historically we have not released as much in bonds as we were authorized for that may end up happen happening again.

We're trying to minimize that because from my perspective, that's been a problem.

Uh but more than likely we will we're certainly not gonna overspend that, right?

Like we tend to try to be on the conservative side of that.

So it is certainly possible that it will still come in less.

What we don't want is for it to come in a lot less, right?

We don't want that variance to be too big.

Yeah, and I I know I'm drilling in on what's really not that big of a deal in the grant human things.

But what I'm trying to understand here is it makes perfect sense to me that how much we it actually issue bonds for could vary from what we expect to.

Totally makes sense.

But because we're not paying debt service in the year that we're issuing those bonds, we're not paying debt service on those bonds in the year that we issue them.

How would that variability impact our debt service variability?

Isn't it only debt that we've issued previously, so we would already know what it is?

Uh not necessarily no.

Um, we would not have the full debt service load in the first year, but we typically will have at least one interest payment in the first year.

So there is some amount.

Like I said, it's not a large number, but those two things will be related.

Um, the the master lease, for example, right?

It's not the immediate, it's not FY27 where most of that would hit.

Most of that would really kick in in FY28, but there's there is an interest payment scheduled for 27.

That's part of included in the budget.

Yeah, and the issuance fees as well, correct.

Okay, so the issuance fees could be definitely a search variation, but I'm still not understanding that interest part because when we look at Davenport's report to us, and it says fiscal year 2027 bond issue.

In fiscal year 2027, we will pay zero principal and zero interest.

The master lease is not like that.

Ah, okay, got it.

For the fleet.

Got it.

Yes.

But your point's taken, and I think we'll reconcile back to it and get that, make it more clear for this group and for the just us generally that we have the level of clarity on it.

And so, and now I'm really getting off of this FT, but I appreciate you guys making sure that we fully understand this.

Why would that master lease agreement and that debt that's accruing to the fleet replacement or fleet service fund?

Replacement.

Fleet replacement fund.

Uh, why would that not be included as part of our debt capacity that Davenport talked to us about?

Because the capital lease collateralizes the vehicles, it actually is a different structure.

And so the bonds need to be collateralized against the city's assets, and that's why you use the general fund as your expenditure base.

But for the capital lease, you would be collateralizing the vehicles themselves.

Makes perfect sense.

We're not taking out a mortgage to on our house to buy a car.

Got it.

Right.

So generally, generally speaking, you've got kind of th three ways of covering that debt.

Um the bond side, you've got two options.

You've got general obligation bonds that go against the essentially the city's ability to tax.

Right.

And then separately, you can release revenue bonds, which the city does that covers like the enterprise funds, where we're bringing in revenue, we're counting on that revenue to pay the bond, right?

And and they are treated as separate things in the bond world.

Um, the debt capacity analysis is specific to the general obligation bonds, not the enterprise, uh, not the revenue bonds.

So you've got those two bond elements, and then the capital, the other thing to do is you you can put up a physical asset against that debt, which is what the capital lease does, right?

Got it.

And which is the cars themselves.

For our debt service policy, the making sure we're not spending more than 10%, that includes our general obligation bonds and our what you refer to as capital bonds.

Right debt service?

Revenue bonds, no, it's just the job.

Not revenue, but but capital and general, no?

Just the so the debt service capacity is just the general obligation bonds.

So it it's it's the debt service that is backed up by the city's ability to tax in general.

But if we see the line item for debt service in the budget, that line item would include both, it would include all three.

It includes all three.

Yeah, only general fund.

Yeah, but if you looked at debt service across all the funds, all the funds would show debt service as a line, but the different pieces are in different places, right?

The revenue bonds are sitting in their funds, the general obligation bonds are in the general fund, right?

Fleet replacement would have the capital, um, the capital lease money debt service.

But debt service appears in all of those funds, but they represent these different kind of avenues.

Yeah.

And that's that's why the fleet replacement fund is a separate fund, one of the reasons why it's a separate fund.

Okay.

Thank you.

I feel like we got a nice little crash course here.

I hope you guys don't mind me spending too much time on this.

Uh anybody got any other questions about FT 1226.

No.

I'm assuming it's paying jewels.

Yeah.

Uh all right.

With that, is there a motion for a favorable recommendation on FT 1226?

Second.

All those in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

Motion carries.

Oh all right, that brings us to our budget discussion for today, which is really going to center on what we need to get done in the next week.

So just to well, there's more, but in general, the the next week.

So we have a couple different deadlines.

Uh first is for getting in any questions, which has to happen by closed business today, so that's for any of us, but also any of our colleagues putting questions to the departments, follow-ups, that kind of thing.

Then the deadline for directors to respond to those is the end of the day tomorrow.

Um and I heard as I was walking up here that we're extending the deadline or the administration's extended the deadline for amendments to Monday.

Is that correct, Miss Buckland?

Yeah.

And do you want to say anything else about the process for not our big process changes for amendments, but the more narrow, like what you need to do with council members for amendments?

Uh that's probably something for for both of us to talk about.

Um the the form is there, it has um a lot of different fields in it.

Um my understanding is um that for um the funding source.

Uh, where is the money coming from to pay for this?

If someone has identified a funding source, enter it.

Um, but that this is part of the process you guys will be undertaking is working on that particular side of things.

Great.

And uh yeah, by code, we have to have the finance committee report done by Monday.

So that'll be fun.

That's uh guess I know what I'm doing my weekend.

Uh um, that'd be Monday.

Yeah, uh I'll I'll tell you later what I'm supposed to be doing this weekend.

Um so on that topic, what we've done in the past for the finance committee report is really to go section by section and talk about the good news, the challenges, and any committee recommendations.

So my plan today was just to open us up for a pretty broad discussion about where this committee sees needs for changes in the budget, and uh particularly any recommendations that we might make.

So my hope is we can just have a pretty broad conversation about that, and um just start with what are some of the top opportunities that any of us have seen and identified over the past two and a half weeks where we might want to make changes.

So don't all jump at once.

Oh, there we go.

I thought this was gonna be a thing I'd have to really facilitate.

Please go ahead.

All right, thank you very much.

Um I'll start by outlining I thought that the departments did a really great job of following the format that we had requested uh for their presentations, um, and sticking with within those.

Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Um, 15-minute timelines.

Um, I really thought that we were drilling down to what they asked for, what they needed, what they got, what they didn't get, um, which is super.

I would like to focus on um three parts.

Um one I'm gonna say the community grants.

Um, I think the community grant committee did a really nice job of following the idea that um it was more important in many cases to fund a project or a program more fully than just throwing a little bit of money at it.

I think that there's a lot of improvement we still can make in the whole process and how we tell people what the grants are.

Um but I was really worried because we have one organization that is the only organization in the city and in the county that um offers services um for LGBTQ, and we didn't fund them at all.

So I've been looking through the list and trying to pull back a little bit of funding from some in order to give funding to that one.

And I know that um Ottawa and Conti is doing the same thing for another organization that she felt very strongly about.

So I will present those probably tomorrow as far as the give and take of changing those.

Secondly, I was really intrigued by the Department of Central Services presentation.

And as history two years ago, we created the Department of Central Services after it had been eliminated eight years ago, 10 years ago.

And the intention really was for a director to come in, you know, a professional to come in and say, okay, this is what we need.

And I think that that's what Director Flinner Finner did really well.

So I would really like for us to see where we can make some movements, um, possibly fund two of the three that weren't funded.

Um he actually gave us a priority list, and I think that in following that will be helpful.

Um I was really excited to hear that this is my third topic, sorry, and then I'll we're just having a pretty informal conversation.

So pretend we're not on camera.

Yeah, feel free to feel free to bump in.

Um, these were just the notes that I've been taking all um for the last two weeks.

Um, I was really happy to hear that the county has earmarked funding um for the fire department for that um the extra crew.

I don't want to call it the extra crew for the um and not being able to know if that's actually going to pass in their budget or not, we still have to budget as if it were not until they pass their budget, which is usually about a week after we pass ours.

Um, so I think that we can take a look at that budget and kind of make some movement in that, knowing that we might be receiving that uh another 250,000 towards that um unit.

Um I just think that's something that we kind of need to be cognizant of.

Um, and then the fourth thing is um I really want to take a look at Oh, whoa, whoa you said you had three.

Sorry.

I'm gonna say four.

No, no, seriously, take as many as you want.

Go ahead.

We really need to take a look at parks and rec and um it was really striking that parks and rec is one of the few departments that is really revenue generating.

Um and it's revenue from both residents and outside of the city and county residents.

Um, and I think that we can make some changes in the way funds are allocated in that budget based on revenues and possibly changing some of the fees that are charged.

Um where we can work towards.

I know that Alderman Thorpe has often said, you know, camps should be available for all, and I think that in changing some of the fee structures, we can do that.

So those are the four parts that I really want to that I want to focus on.

Yeah.

So rather than us talk past each other and each go down the line and say the things we think, let's maybe spend some time going over each one of your things as the three of us, and then we can move on and you can go talk about some of the things you saw, and we can talk about each one of those.

Um you have any reactions, Karma, you want to go first?

Oh, go ahead.

Uh okay.

So, first of all, totally agree with you on parks and rec.

I think to me, I don't want to jack up fees in general, but I think we absolutely should increase some on non-residents.

I think we need to set up a bifurcated system there where if you're not a resident, you are paying more.

And uh I'll say something that I one of the relatively few things that I think the Trump administration has done very well is that they changed the fees on national parks for entry so that you now pay much more if you are not a US citizen and a little bit less if you're not, I mean, if you are.

Um so that it's just to say like there's precedent for this.

It may it just play makes sense.

Uh if you're a city resident, you shouldn't have to be paying twice necessarily because you're paying your taxes and you're paying your fee.

Um one area in particular, I think we could do that where I've had people be telling me this for over a year now is the boat ramp launch.

So uh maybe Ms.

Jackson, I don't know how exactly we want to do the report outs from this, but I do think it could go in as a question to wreck in parts as could you come to us with a proposal on bifurcating those fees.

Is that about what you're getting at?

Isn't boat ramp under Harbormaster, which is under city manager?

It very well might be, yeah.

That's as opposed to wreck and park.

Yeah, actually, that's a good point.

Uh I think of it as recreation, but you're right, it's not that so that should really be for both of them.

What I was saying is proposals from the Harbor Master specific to trucks and boat ramp and wreck and parks more generally for how we could bifurcate our fees for residents versus non-residents.

Now, ultimately Thorpe, something you've talked about before is not making these fees too complicated, and I really am sympathetic to that.

Do you think that asking folks whether they're a resident or not as we determine those?

Do you think that gets us to be too complicated?

So and I think that's where the qu asking the question to the responsible person, because I was sitting here thinking boat ramps.

Uh I don't know that the boat ramp system would allow to differentiate between a resident and a non-resident.

Now, if you show your driver's license, if you have to scan your driver's license in, but I don't think you do.

I think you just pay with a credit card and go.

So it may be more expensive to create a system.

Um I I totally agree with the concept.

Yeah.

Um, and then you know, I I do think uh Rex and Parks uh fees when you actually show a driver's license, we absolutely should have a bifurcated system.

And I would say the same thing about boat ramps across the board, and so maybe it's a uh do it where we can do it, yeah, and then task a plan uh to do it in other places.

Right.

I wonder if on the boat ramp it could be somewhat like the garage where there's a code that a city resident has a code.

So if you put in your code, it's $50, and if you know that it's $75, right?

I don't know what the fees are.

Yeah, yeah.

Whether a code is sorry, wait, I think maybe it's you you have a set fee, and then you can make it uh a discount for city residents, and that way it's you we're kind of putting the onus on, I'd say putting the onus on the resident, but we're we're creating a system where if we can't make it work, it's not a it's not as big of a deal.

Yeah.

Um okay, that makes a lot of sense on the wreck and parks thing.

Yeah, go ahead.

I I also think one of the things that's appealing to this idea is it doesn't, I'd like to not raise the rates for the residents.

Yes, if anything, reduce them.

Yeah.

Um, and because of all the other rates that are being increased and all that.

So it and it it makes all the sense in the world, especially if you're coming in to use Pit Moyer or something like that.

If you're a non-resident, you're not paying property taxes.

Yeah, right, exactly.

Um to your point about central services.

So when when I get to my turn to talk about things, I'll tell you, I've been mostly like finding cuts rather than things I want to fund.

Uh things I don't want to fund rather than things I don't fund.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Easy peasy, pal.

Uh, but I I felt like I have a lot of skepticism towards the risk management assistant in central services.

What I have seen, and and this is something we'll touch on tomorrow, I think, but I feel like there's been a lot of risk management that has made City Hall and other facilities less welcoming.

And it sounded to me like Director Flanner was saying that we need this rich management assistant to do exactly more of that, and that does not make me happy.

So uh it's one of those things where I'm like, not only can we spend the money better, but I don't really want to spend the money on what it sounds like it's going to go towards anyway.

So um, yeah, really just agree with you.

And so there was a request from him to have the deputy director and to have the real estate consultant.

I did not think the case was particularly strong for the deputy director.

I do think there's a real need for I shouldn't say consultant, but for the real estate position, and that's something that I think could really take some pressure off the office of law.

I think it could lead to having better services for residents.

I mean, I know it's I know there are good reasons for this, but I got a resident who's been dealing with a property issue for over two years with the city, and he's like he's so frustrated that part of it is our our attorneys, this is not their main thing.

This is not the main thing they should be doing.

So it seems like yeah, having somebody to actually just manage that real estate would be really helpful.

Now the trick is gonna be how do we how do we take the money that is currently one time?

Because they have have one-time money for a consultant, and what we really want is recurring funding for a staff member.

So that's gonna be tough.

Right.

He did say though, in his presentation, he reorganized um the priority of the positions that he'd asked for.

So I think we can take a look at the business positions that he did ask for and possibly make a swap out.

Yeah.

Well, what was the other one he got?

He got the risk management assistant.

And I gotta pull it up now.

Anybody remember what page in the budget book central services is?

Uh 45.

Oh, the other edition there, I think made a lot of sense.

It was essentially a facilities person, right?

Civil engineer two for facilities.

And a facility maintenance tech.

Oh, yeah you're right.

Yes, so this the civil engineer was just coming from elsewhere, the facilities maintenance tech was the actual enhancement, right?

Uh no, the engineer too is um is also net new.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah.

I uh both of those seem pretty defensible to me, but do you want to jump in on it and thorough?

Yeah, I I have not looked whether he's answered uh his questions, which might help answer this this question.

But I guess I'm a little struck with um with his desire to give up the ones he got and get the ones he didn't get, and that we don't have a city manager or mayor opinion on that.

Um I would love to hear Vicky's thoughts on that.

Um, what do what do you give up, especially Central Services being so cross-minded?

And before I turn it over, I I will tell you, I um I think the last billet you create is a deputy.

Uh yeah.

Um philosophically.

And so uh I'm um inclined not to want to create spend 200,000 on a job to back up the guy who's doing a main job, especially on a department this size, until I hear somebody say that he's maxed out.

Yeah.

I also think uh we heard from him this is there's only one other department that doesn't have a deputy director, and then I don't I looked and it seemed like there was more.

But yeah, Ms.

Bucklin, did you have something to add on that?

I mean, I know we're putting you on the spot here, but whatever you want to say.

Just in terms of the the logic of the choices that were made.

Yeah, the logic of the choices that were made in the marriage proposed budget versus what we heard from director Flitter that he might prefer.

Yeah, so um there is a lot of extra work that and funding that's going to central services in this budget.

Um for good reason.

We had we've had a lot of issues, you know.

That department, um Matt, Troy, the rest of those folks have really done a good job of of trying to pull together, you know, what does that picture really look like?

What are the needs?

Um, and and they deserve a lot of credit for a lot of hard work to try to bring um some order, some order to that chaos.

Um, but there is a lot of extra work.

And so the logic of the choices that were made was they're already stretched very thin, and we're giving them extra funding.

Let's give them the people to go with that funding.

So an extra engineer, an extra facility maintenance tech, right?

That was the logic of those positions.

Um, I have uh a lot of sympathy for his position about having a real estate administrator.

We ended up choosing to prioritize those other two positions and just continue the contractual money for another year.

Um in this particular budget, but I have sympathy for why he wants that and why he would prefer to have that as a as a merit staff.

That wasn't the choice we made in the proposed budget, but I understand why he wants that.

Um what I'm hearing from you is sort of along the lines of this was something that we could fund with one-time use money.

Yeah, and um, and there's still, I feel like uh an element of of frankly sort of stabilizing the city's facilities picture.

That's part of where we are now, which is why we prioritize those particular positions.

Um the risk management specialist um is a lot more than just the security at the buildings.

Um, you know, that job right now um really gets in and oversees the self-insurance fund um sort of the day in and day out aspects of that in a lot of different ways.

So all of the workers comp goes through through him, you know, every single accident, you know, all of that stuff he keeps track of, deals with the facilities side of all of that stuff.

Do we need to make changes at facilities?

Um there are some practices that we should have been doing for a while that we haven't made a practice of that they are wanting to focus on.

When was the last time any of us participated in a fire drill here, right?

Like that's should be something that's part of every just the normal cycle of risk management and safety writ large.

We should be having material data safety data sheets in all the buildings that reflect the chemicals that are actually used in those buildings, right?

Like there's a whole bunch of those OSHA requirements, and all of that stuff, in addition to the security, falls on this one person.

So this is the risk man someone to help in that risk management space is actually a request that's been made to us for several years running.

We went ahead and said yes this year to that.

Um, but that's not that's not a new request.

That's been they've they've asked for for that for a little while.

Um as far as the contract administrator goes, um, this is the world according to Vicky, and um so take it take it with a grain of salt.

Um, but I know that one of the things you remember this year we gave uh admin position from the city manager's office to central services.

That is filled.

The woman who filled it is really wonderful, um, came out of out of finance, and I think has been enormously helpful for them.

One of the things that's true there is that I think there's some general cleanup they're trying to do around how those contracts happen.

They do have a whole bunch of contracts.

They're not wrong about that.

Um, and there are probably some limits to how much they can simplify that picture.

But the other thing that makes contract administration tough is all the rest of the duties that go along with it invoicing and and payments and all that kind of stuff.

And I know that part of what they're looking at is can we streamline some of that stuff?

So part of the choice here is a reflection of let's see how far they get in that effort and what that gets them before we just outright have a new position, and these other two, we already know we're funding a whole bunch of additional stuff.

Now, all of that said, um uh I I can see that Matt's in the Matt's probably listening and and uh is in the presentation right now, probably looking at this very very slide.

Um so I think that you know, having his perspective again at the table is probably fine.

That's my perspective uh and and my version of that logic that's there.

Um obviously, you know, Matt has some other has some other priorities, and I don't want to minimize, I don't want to minim minimize that.

But that was what was behind the choice that was made.

And I want to really thank you and the director and the mayor for all being so candid about what the choices are and how those priority trade-offs were made.

Uh it would be much harder for us to do our jobs if you all got in the room beforehand and said, okay, here's our party line.

And I appreciate that that's not what was done.

Yeah, well, I mean, you know, the thing is, and this again, this is just me talking, but you know, any budget is this big balancing act of all these various factors that go into it.

Um we do see a few things a little bit differently.

Um, but you know, I do want to say, you know, Matt and his team, they've put in a lot of work to bring order, you know, and and regularity to a bunch of that work.

And I don't want to minimize, I don't want to minimize that effort.

Um this is this is the choice that got made here.

And you and you counsel may see that differently.

Yeah, go ahead.

So what would your all's reaction be, including you, city manager?

Um when I hear some of the things that you said, which is very helpful.

Um I I see the real need for the risk management specialist from a leadership from a city council, city manager, mayor position um point of view as compared to a deputy who I think Matt would feel very comfortable that would get more stuff, you know, help him get stuff done.

Um so I when I look at this, what what would your all's reaction be to maintain the budget request?

But I think we confirmed there's a hundred thousand dollar contractor in it in the budget for a real estate administrator, right?

So delete that, and if we could find the $56,000, actually put somebody on his staff to take care of the real estate administrator job.

Well, so an issue with that is that we're paying for the real estate consultant currently out of one-time money.

So we cannot have that be recurring, we can't put that towards a recurring staff position.

Now, what we could do is get rid of the 180,000 dollars for security guards, which I also don't love, and use that for a real estate person, and then we would have 100,000 of additional one-time money.

So that's that's recurring money.

Um I don't support that.

You uh I don't support that.

Yeah, I think I was here when the auditor was here, and it was a scary time for people, counsel and coming in.

Well then the auditor was here, what do you mean?

It was a guy called himself the auditor that would come.

Oh, I get what you're saying, yeah.

And he was frightening, and you didn't know what he was going to do, and violence erupted at an election site of him, and having security here.

There's been several times in the last three years where having a security here made me feel that my public service was okay because there was somebody that was watching out for those of us that were being attacked.

I just feel like if we spend a quarter of our budget on the police department, but they better be able to get to city hall.

They're minimal.

And I'm not suggesting we station them in city hall all the time, but if they aren't able to respond quickly enough to an event to city hall, then they're not able to respond quickly enough to an event anywhere in the city.

And so, and that tells me we in City Hall do not deserve, in my opinion, to have a greater level of security than residents.

If if our response time for our police are so unsatisfactory that they can't adequately secure city hall, then they're unsacked satisfactory across the board.

Yeah, I I um I'm I'm not sure I agree with that analysis.

In other words, I don't think that we have security in City Hall because of the I don't want to quote you because I don't exactly what you said, but it was you were critical of the police department's response time.

I mean I'm not, I'm saying their response time is great.

So I I think the security this is the seat of government for the state capital.

And uh as much as I really wish we didn't have to do it, um I think the uh creating a less soft target um where we have uh the visibility of security at the doors.

Um there's no police response that would stop somebody from coming in.

Uh I mean, I'm just gonna come out and say it, an active shooter or something like that.

Um, and if you don't have somebody at the door, that active shooter is or or person causing troubles is well into the facility well before the police are notified.

So you're adding minutes to their response time.

So I I would be very hesitant um to take away that uh security.

There's other options to your point about comparing to other um we could lock the building, um mostly well, but it would prevent public access during the work day.

Um that's a whole nother that's a whole nother problem.

So I I and I would argue you know, it might be worth looking into, but I um before we cut it, are there any other state capitals that don't have security in their head in their in their capital building?

Um we have no way of knowing if this is working, right?

Like to me, this is we we I asked the director and he said we don't know.

Well, we have no clue if this is saving one life or a hundred lives or zero lives.

And so to me, there's any number of places where we could put that money that we could be very sure that it is actually helping people.

And here I I have no I have no, and the director has no way to show that it actually is.

So uh I think that should be pretty high on our list of things we could cut.

Yeah, I mean, I you know me, I'm Mr.

Data guy, right?

But um, and not to get into a big philosophical discussion about the Department of Defense, but we could make the same argument about having a military, right?

And so I think the optic of having uh making the the providing security um is it's it to me it's all it's crazy to think of not having it, uh what that message sends um to anybody who is thinking of becoming the next person to walk in.

I mean, I gotta think of it a little bit like TSA, where we know they don't stop anything, right?

90% when you go and test the TSA, 90% of bombs or guns or knives or whatever get through.

It's a total waste of money.

It's all just theater.

And I'd rather if we took that money and put it into traffic calling.

I mean, to your point about the defense department too, right?

We could take one percent of the defense department, put it into making our roads safer, and we'd save probably a thousand lives a year across the country.

And like, yes, we can't know for sure how many lives are potentially being saved.

And I'm using live saved, I know that's kind of an inflammatory metric, but we can't know for sure how many lives are being saved with what we're currently spending it on, but we can be pretty darn sure with how many lives will be saved by what we could spend it on.

So to me, it's it's like it makes a lot of sense when you put that towards making West Street safer and not having people get hit by pedestrians.

We could put the money into putting some traffic calming right here on Duke of Gloucester where we know somebody was actually killed.

And I just think there's any number of better uses for that.

Okay.

Um let's talk some more.

Is there anything more about central services we want to talk about?

I think we've beat this coming down to where do what do we think?

Um yeah.

Ms.

Bucklin, you want to jump in?

I'm gonna um reserve the right to come back to that.

I I'm I'm texting with Matt, frankly, right now, and once I get to the other side of that, I may have a suggestion for you.

Okay, and it might be something that we want to come back to tomorrow, realistically.

Um was there anything else?

I think we've kind of touched on all this.

Auto Roman O'Neill had two other things, one was community grants, which I actually um so I'll I will I will actually make that suggestion.

So the other thing that you could consider um is right now we had made the choice of contract with real estate um merit with risk management specialist.

You could consider essentially swapping those.

That's a good point.

So sorry, say that again.

So we could pay for the you're saying we could pay for the security guards or at least uh four and I to that.

The right now the risk management specialist is an addition as a merit staff, and we left the real estate administrator as a contractor.

You could swap that, have the real estate administrator be the merit position and put contract money toward helping out on the risk management side.

That that is one of the options that's on the table for you.

That's a thoughtful.

That's a really thoughtful idea.

I I still am on the feeling with the risk management specialists, and I just plain don't want the money spent on that rather than that I think we could spend it better, but that's uh that's at least a good halfway improvement.

But it strikes me though, is the risk management specialist is an insider.

That's somebody we want, don't we?

That's very familiar with uh, you know, you you talk about fire drills and and uh yes and no, there's some of that that's training, and it's not uncommon to have third party trainers.

Like there are pieces of that work that could go to third parties pretty naturally and also it seems to me like the kind of thing where having somebody who does work in a bunch of cities and sees what they do that's particularly effective could be beneficial.

Yeah, just want to have it on.

Thank you.

That's one of your options.

I'm in favor of that idea.

Um okay, Otta Roman O'Neill, you talked about community grants.

I basically agree with you on community grants.

I don't really have anything to add there.

Uh Alderman Thorpe, you got any other thoughts on that?

Yeah, I would I would like to see uh what you and I talked about a little bit yesterday.

Um, and I don't know if we can do it in this time frame, but um more results oriented focused on what the city council is looking for and the results of the community grants program.

Um so I so uh however we could start down that path with what we do here would be helpful.

Yeah, I think it's past that point for this year's budget considerations, but I do think that it's something as Ms.

Buckland knows we've been talking about it for a few years, and I think that it'll take uh somebody really digging into it before January 27.

So what I'd like to do, oh yeah, why don't you go first?

Yeah, no, just to to piggyback on on that.

Um I think one of the things that council may want to consider is actually making some changes to the city code um that locks you into certain priorities, uh, and you might want to change how some of that stuff is structured in the code to give you a little bit more flexibility to reflect kind of where council is heading at this point.

Totally agree.

And um I think the solution on that is we should have a hearing on this in September, something like that.

And um, on what changes we'd want to make to code, get the three of us hopefully on the same page, we can talk about it at a finance meeting, come up with what we need, and then introduce an ordinance on that.

Um yeah, for my money, the changes I'd like to see are really aligning us more with the state's capital, uh, what do they call them?

Bond legislative bond initiative requirements, which we don't necessarily want to go entirely to capital and prevent operating, but I'd certainly like to shift us a little more towards that.

What I'd call it's catalytic, like your example with Annapolis Pride of yes, it would be operating money to hire a development director, but the idea is we're trying to wean them off, as it were.

Um I also like some of the other requirements that the state has about uh it's not going to religious institutions, and it has to be somewhat durable, there's some other good ones.

So that's my template for how we should start with that.

Um and the what was your fourth thing?

Remind me central services, wreck and parks, community grant Jackson.

I know I scared you.

Um can we roll back the tape?

We can we could come back to it.

Um Thorpe, you want to talk about some of the things you've noticed in the budget?

Yeah, I think my my biggest takeaway um is that the need to focus on the core of the city and uh and the I guess the term would be infrastructure, but um as I look at the budget and and I talk to public works and I talk to planning and zoning, um it just strikes me that we're spending a lot of little monies in a lot of places that prevent us from um from making our city uh a better place to live.

Um a a micro story here is that and I think you all have heard me talk about it on President Street when there was a volunteer effort to clean it up, and then public works came in and painted the red curves.

In the in I in doing that, we realized that the dumpsters were dumpsting dumping trash, um, and nobody was noticing.

There weren't any garbage cans, and so now working with Haka, there's a focus on on fixing that.

But when you walk the city, um we we are I think this is your terms.

We are never gonna catch up the way we're tracking.

Um I I don't know that Eastport's any different than anywhere else, but when you walk down the street in Eastport and you um walk across crack sidewalks around a utility pole, um next to a car parked on a on a faded red curb to get to a water access park that looks like a third world country.

I mean, I think we ought to just state what the situation is.

Um there's 16 water access parks, and there's not any port.

Um I say 16 plus one because Truxton Park, which is really ward six.

Um, and not one of them could you look walk to and look at and go, it looks good.

Um there are some that are acceptable, and um, but so you know, my effort is really to find out where we can put more funding into infrastructure.

Um the the second thing I think that I'm struck overarching, and people have talked about this, but I'm just not sure we're doing anything about it uh in this budget, um, or we're doing enough about it because we are doing something, is communication.

Um, the complaint about traffic for the boat show was 50-50 about 50 percent that people didn't like what happened, but the other 50 percent of note was that they didn't know about it.

Yeah, um that we've just got to accept the fact that the Annapolis Capitol, that we don't have the single source uh non-governmental information source, and not everybody wants to read our emails.

Um not everyone is for yourself is looped into it.

Well, it wasn't my work.

Um but so do we do enough in this budget?

You know, what are the citizens looking for?

What are the residents looking for?

And uh a lot of the things we talk about are really important from operating the government, uh you know, the central services discussion, right?

Behind the scenes, things that are happening.

But at the end of the day, I think what the residents want are um better, safer streets, better, safer sidewalks, and to know more about what's going on.

Um I'd like to to have some discussion about what how we can um move revenue, move exp move revenue to those kind of expenses where um it just gets stuff done.

I think we all heard quite a bit, we don't need plans, we just need to do it.

And I and I'm struck with both um that Chris Kubiak wanting the hundred thousand dollars to do the um uh the AI.

I we've got to make sure that gets into the budget because that's a direct impact on the residents.

Um when Burr Vogel says if I just had 25,000 more um as he went at you know through the budget process for snow removal technology, um we've got those are things that directly impact um the residents that will you know directly benefit from those expenses, and then you know, I mean it's it's sidewalks and streets.

Yeah, sidewalks and streets.

I couldn't agree more.

Um I that was one of the big things I was going to bring up.

And I think where I'm struggling a little bit with that is I I couldn't agree more with you, that is the most important thing we can place we can put money.

I'm also struggling a little bit with like where would we actually put it that it will actually get spent, right?

Um in my in our conversation the other day about the capital budget, I said to the public works director, how did you come up with the amount of money that's going to streets?

And the response was basically we put as much money in there as we think we can spend.

I'm like, well, we're not keeping up, we're not catching up.

So how do we figure out how to put more?

Well, maybe we're keeping up.

Some people say we are, some people say we're not.

But we're definitely not catching up.

And so how do we put more money into fixing that?

How do we make it so people can actually see it?

And that's before we even get to the question of where do we take it from.

But I think you were starting to get to the answer of about where to be taken from, which is there's a lot of stuff in this budget that is internal that is about having a uh better working government.

And that's obviously important to some extent, but people don't care how well the government's working if it's not working for them.

And I think that's what the infrastructure piece speaks to.

And uh, I think you talked about this a little bit, but one place that it strikes me it's really obvious that we could see a real return on our money is in parks maintenance.

And we heard from Mr.

Dillard about wanting to convert those seasonal employees to full time.

I think that's that seems like one good way to do it.

I've also just thought we need to actually add more people there.

And I brought it up at the time to wreck and parks that we have so many people every time I go to the desk at Pitmoir.

And I think the stat, if I remember this correctly from last budget, was we have twice as many people working at Pitmoir as working to maintain all of our parks.

Which in a way makes sense.

It's more resource intensive, but also it's like that just doesn't seem right to me.

So finding some ways that we can add funding for our parks maintenance seems like a real I don't want to say easy, but obvious.

But yeah, on the infrastructure side, I'm not sure.

You got any thoughts on like if if the director is saying we're only putting as much money in there as we think we can spend, and you and I are saying, boy, you're not spending you're not getting enough done.

How do we make it work?

How do we get out of that impasse?

And I'd love to hear your thoughts, but maybe Vicky also has a way to land.

But you if you want to go first.

I'll give the philosophical answer, you give the real answer.

I mean, my my thinking is I I'm I'm tremendously impressed at our public works department.

Um I think they're underrated.

Um where I come from, you look at them uh and you and you you ask that hard question, um, you're doing seven with a capacity to do six.

We need you to do nine and not tell us you can't do more than seven.

You tell us what does it take to get to nine.

Um and it's a hard, it's a hard question, and you can't do it if you don't have a very strong person in the job because he'll give you the answer to get to 12.

But I think we've got the in public works, I think we've got the um the people on the the leadership uh in place um uh to be able to give you a uh an answer of how to get to nine.

Um but if we continue to think that we do seven, um, and I'm not saying he that public works is comfortable.

I mean, they repeat they they demonstrated over and over that they live outside their comfort zone in some of the things they have gotten done.

Um but we got to get to nine.

Um because if we stay at seven, um we're yeah, the deterioration rate is negative eight, and we've been living at four for a very long time.

Yeah.

So that's my philosophical answer.

I'm I'm not sure I necessarily have a better answer.

I mean, I I have a lot of faith in those departments ability to execute.

I think that the I think that the marginal question of uh because it's not it's not a one for one.

I had this thing, and therefore I need one extra person, right?

Um I think that I think that there's more art than science to knowing when that line has been crossed.

Um and I think that I think that all the departments um recognize that there are some things they're gonna end up living with in the name of getting other things.

So they make they make choices about what to advocate for the same way that all of us do, right?

Um part of what we tried to do this year, and the message we tried to send was no one can say yes if we don't know what the need is.

So we want you to don't don't self-censor kind of you know, give us give us what you got, and then we will weigh that.

We've been much more open this year internally and with council in here's everything that was on the table and what got funded and what didn't, and and all of that.

Um and so I'm gonna trust that they actually followed those directions.

I don't know if that helps.

And I mean, I think it's back, it's the philosophical answer, right?

It's um it you know, in this idea of city council over site, um I mean it what comes first.

Does the city council give you the resources to that we think to go do nine?

Um and then task you to go do nine.

That's that's not the leadership background I come from, but um but but if that's the way we it how how do we break how do we break that cycle?

How do we get out of that comfort zone of seven?

the resources to that we think to go do nine um and then task you to go do nine that's that's not the leadership background I come from but um but but if that's the way we it how how do we break how do we break that cycle how do we get out of that comfort zone of seven and comfort zone might be the wrong term because I think they're they're they're running marathons and nobody's comfortable running running a marathon to continue to use metaphors but um but I mean I think that's our challenge is is it's 2026 are we comfortable with what our city looks like and I think the residents are speaking loudly um very loudly um and you know it it kind of comes under annapolis works I mean it it's how do we create the city that they want um and I think nine is what we gotta get them to at least demonstrate we're working to get there um I'll I'll say from my perspective and Otto Roman O'Neill has more history than I do but the frustration to me a little bit is I'm gonna keep using your numbers it's as though for a while we were saying we we're giving you money to do seven and only five was really getting done and we heard okay okay how do we break out of this logjam all right we need an additional what's the position we gave last year is like con not contract administrative project manager project manager yes thank you so we're like okay we think this is the thing to do we'll we'll break us out of it by adding this additional capacity and then we're still on track to to not spend the money that was getting allocated and so I'm I'm on the one hand frustrated that we're not spending the money that we're allocating and then I'm frustrated that we tried to increase the capacity to spend the money that was allocated and it doesn't for my perspective it doesn't seem to have worked or at least not worked as much as we would hope it would and so it's it's like okay we tried both things like you can you can either increase the amount of of water you're putting through the funnel you can increase the size of the funnel and we tried both and we're still not seeing more water at the bottom um which is certainly oversimplifying but it that's my frustration.

Yeah I I I think that um I'm gonna use a particular example um but this I think happens in in lots of places so um we were not moving as fast as we wanted to in like the water and sewer rehab right for a while yeah absolutely right and at the end of the day uh there was there was a part of that that was related to laying the groundwork for the visible part of execution making sure all the contracts were in place we had the right methodology like all of that stuff which still takes time and they finally they finally got over that hump and now they've been working on project after project after project right and that logjam right like that backlog is getting worked on right they've been doing a ton of work and I think that happens to us in a number of different places and it gets very frustrating when the visible part of execution isn't happening and I think the question ends up being if we're not at that place where I want to be I want to see the visible part of execution because that's frankly why we had the project but are we at least making progress on laying the groundwork and are how close are we to getting to the visible part of execution I'm not saying that's true for everything but it's certainly been true in some cases where there was time spent laying the groundwork for execution I I know I've said this in a in a number of different contexts but I think it's true here as well the city has been in this transition from a much more um you know mom and pop you know just a uh a smaller jurisdiction to a much more complicated one with a lot more projects and and uh there's been I think this focus for a number of several number of years now on sort of upping the city's game and that does in fact take some time um we're working on that on a lot of different places and this is one of them um I think your question is a valid one um I wish I had a better answer for you I think that's um that's a place where I think Burr himself probably has a better answer than I do but I'm certainly aware of I'm certainly aware of some of these cases um and there's more stuff that's coming right that's the other thing is that they're also dealing with we already know that there's some work coming from rules the feds have have passed and all that that's coming down the pike that they're trying to plan for um sorry I'm not sure that was a helpful answer.

Um and there's more stuff that's coming, right?

That's the other thing is that they're also dealing with, we already know that there's some work coming from rules the feds have passed and all that that's coming down the pike that they're trying to plan for.

Um sorry, I'm not sure that was a helpful answer.

No, I I think I take your point that part of the reason we feel frustrated, or maybe I should just speak for myself, is that we're not seeing those visible parts.

And what you're saying is that even if we're not quite seeing them yet, there is significant planning underway to see more of those.

And I do trying, yeah, and in some sense, I'm not trying to talk you out of being frustrated.

Um I this is gonna sound terrible, but the fact that you're frustrated is part of what helps keep us honest about where we are, right?

Like I'm not gonna I'm not gonna try to talk you out of being frustrated.

There's a reason you're frustrated, right?

You want to get to that visible part, which is the point of why the city invested, right?

Like I I get it.

Um I think part of what I'm hearing is most of us are patient if we have a sense of I know what's going on and I know what I'm waiting for, right?

I know why I'm waiting, right?

It's like this is such a trite example, but like back in the day when I was a waitress, right?

Like if you got slammed and you weren't gonna be getting to a table for a little while, as long as they didn't think that you'd forgotten them, they were willing to wait, right?

The thing that they got frustrated about and that you would get penalized for was if they thought you forgot about them.

And I feel like in some sense there's a little bit of a similar dynamic that part of what you're reacting to is what am I waiting for, right?

Just make sure I want to know that you haven't forgotten about us on these things, and that I think is on us, right?

Well, but I agree.

And I think our director of public work shares that same emotion.

And so I think it's on us to either relax the pressure, yeah, i.e.

the crowd's gonna go, you know, the the crowd's gonna go away, or up the number of servers.

Um I think that's where the hard choice is.

I mean, it if you ask me what's the number one thing that this budget needs more of, it's that.

Um but I don't and I I believe that our director of public works can support that if given an opportunity.

And we just got to figure out how to get him that opportunity.

Yeah, and and ultimately that's gonna come down to where like once we figure out where to put the money, we gotta figure out where it's gonna come from.

And what I'm hearing from you and agree with is that it's gonna come from the things that are more internal facing, and that's why I'm I was pointing all that risk management specialist, seems to me like one of the most low-hanging fruits of that.

I think another example uh could be the assistant chief of code enforcement.

That's those are things that well, actually, maybe that's not a good example, but things that that are relatively internal facing, and if we want more external facing things, we need to look at those internal facing things as the place that we're gonna cut.

Uh so can I imagine one more thing?

It's is this something different?

Because I have one more thought on your infrastructure idea, which is a question for the city manager that really would be good for public works.

We have uh I was really surprised at how much our operating budget for streets is.

I I should know the budget in and out, but I was surprised at that considering how much we also put in our capital budget for streets.

And I'm wondering if there's a way that as much as we want streets and sidewalks to be better.

If I have to pick one, I'm picking sidewalks.

And I think we've heard that repeatedly from the council both this year and last year.

So I'm wondering if there's some way that we can direct, or that you can direct, and you want to just tell us you guys shut up, I'm gonna do this.

The streets budget to be more a greater percentage that to be about fixing sidewalks.

Um I would want to have I would want to have a conversation with the director about that.

Um I'm not sure I'd necessarily want to provide an answer off the top of my head here.

Um I I think I think part of what I'm hearing in your question, and ple I want to know if I heard this correctly, is um you may not know what that split is now, correct.

And so what you're interested in is is there a way to increase that portion of the pie, but not I'm not hearing a specific number out of you of I'm shooting for this or that because you don't know where we're starting from.

Absolutely, yes, that's true.

My uh justification is I hear a lot more complaints about sidewalks than about streets, which is again we we want ideally more of both, but um if we have to pick one, it it that tells me that we're not allocating those resources totally appropriately if they're so out of whack that I again I want to make sure I heard correctly.

You at least amongst the council members would be fine if what you heard were equal amounts of complaints about the two sure, or closer to that.

Like it like you're willing to tolerate more complaints about roads to get fewer complaints about sidewalks, is in my sure I'm hearing correctly.

Uh yes, you are hearing that, and in fact, me personally, I would even be more willing be willing to tolerate slightly more complaints about roads than about sidewalks because I think the people who complain about roads have a greater willingness to complain than the people who complain about sidewalks, but that's that's uh uh bit of a you know, we're splitting hairs at that point.

So could we put as an action item or a question that it would be worthwhile to see if there's some way that we can within the contact of the context of this 4.3 million dollars of operating money for streets have more of it go a greater percentage of it go towards fixing sidewalks.

I will do some follow-up with the director.

Like I said, I I don't know the answer to that off the top of my head.

I would have to have a conversation with him.

And I think it might be a harder question or harder answer than a question.

In other words, just speaking from an Eastport perspective, because the the road situation in Eastport has been not improved upon to um slow traffic and uh make it safer.

There actually might be a very large bill.

Um proposal on the street is to, so to speak, is to raise the the uh intersections um and not just in eastport.

I think he's looking at that as an idea everywhere.

Um that could get expensive.

Uh that could add up, and so I'd I'd be careful to give a metric that more in one less than another that's not uh requirements based.

No, I I hear you, Oliver Thorpe, and I want to make uh I want to make an important distinction.

What I think you're talking about would be under the capital budget, right?

Raising up sidewalks would be in the capital budget.

I'm talking specifically about the operating budget.

Fair.

But I but I also agree with you, it's not that we're trying to get to a 4.2 billion budget we spend 2.1 on sidewalks and 2.1 on streets for no other reason, if for no other reason than there's gonna be overlap, but also because the two things don't cost the same.

But yeah, I just I want to make perfectly clear.

I'm talking about within this operating budget that we call streets.

I think should really be more about streets and sidewalks.

Um but you had a third thing you wanted to bring up as a I did.

I I don't know that we ever got the answer to the big question of we moved a lot of money in this budget to central services.

And one of two things have to happen with that more effective execution or saving money.

And I don't know that I know we the one straightforward answer that I'd like to know is what is the what is the the addition of all the money that was moved out of departments, and what was the addition in central services and how do those two compare?

Yeah, I still don't feel like we have that.

But Ms.

Turner, you want to jump in?

Yeah.

Probably center budget analyst.

I'm actually going to share the centralization form.

I completed it yesterday.

Oh so you'll be able to see it.

And but I think you're oh, you want to go ahead, Mr.

Powell?

I just wanted to add one more point, just Alderman Thorpe to your point about those two outcomes.

I there is a third outcome that I think you do need to add to your list there.

There's efficiency gained, there's some savings, but you also have to recognize that there's also just a new heightened awareness to some of the stuff that's maybe been not managed and maybe not being worked upon.

And so therefore that's why you would see some increases and enhancements of this notion that centralization just only acts as a cost-cutting measure is not necessarily true because now it's gonna bring awareness and highlight areas that need improvement and additional investment.

So that also is factored in the budget.

So I just want to make sure to clarify that because I think that that's something that I've heard pretty consistently is folks are expecting numbers to wash out or go to zero, but there are improvements too.

Yeah, thank you.

And and here's one of the things that I fear, and I'm gonna try to use a metaphor that I don't know if it'll work, but if you hire more painters, you're gonna identify a need that more walls need to be painted.

Oh my god, yes, agree.

And so my concern by my hope with central services creation is that we are a better city because we're managing our facilities better, managing our fleet of vehicles better, all that stuff.

My fear is we've I we now identify all these other things that we were doing fine, not doing.

Some of them to Ms.

Buckland's point, it wasn't okay that we weren't doing them.

So it would be good to see that analysis that here are the things we're doing that we weren't doing, and we need to be doing them.

That's why they're that's why we're doing it.

Here's the savings we we got, and here's the efficiencies we got.

So I mean it's it's a multidimensional answer, but I don't think we and the city, the finance committee have that answer.

And and some of it is clearly numbers, it's a math problem.

Some of it is the city manager saying these this list of 14 things we weren't doing, and we need to do them, and so that took the savings, but we're a better city for it, or whatever.

Yeah, I mean, part of the whole reason this is happening in central services in in particular, um, you know, just looking at at our outcomes from this last year, like at one point we had four HVAC systems that were down, four buildings where there were HVAC systems down at one time.

And you know, like we can't we can't keep doing that.

Yeah, yeah.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing against it.

I'm just trying to, I think this is an area, it's probably the largest strategic shift that the city's made in this period of years, but we don't have that information.

Um and quite frankly, for me, I'd like to be able to take that to the residents and say, hey, look at the savings and look at the better city we are at, or conversely, I'd like to move that money into more sidewalks and roads.

Um I really take your point about painters, and that's that's exactly how I feel about that risk management specialist.

It's it's going to cost us a lot of money, uh, is the way I see it.

Um but you also talked about communications, and I think that's so I was honestly a little surprised to hear you say that because I think this budget, not because I don't agree with your assessment of the problem, but because I think this budget addresses it a lot.

We're putting an additional communication in the mayor's office, we're making that position full time, or not we, but the budget proposes and there's some additional software.

So I just want to understand.

Do you feel like that doesn't go far enough?

I think I think the city manager and the mayor need to answer that question.

Knowing, you know, what the gentleman that testified yesterday, who's a civic leader in Ward One, um, you know, and things like that.

I mean, is that gonna is that what is our stand where where is our standard and is that enough?

I can make an argument, even if it's not one step at a time, three steps at a time, but but clearly we need to make sure that this budget represents that increase.

Can you clarify what you mean about what is our standard?

What standard are we trying to achieve?

Oh for communications.

Right.

For for communication, oh communications, sorry.

Coming coming full circle.

Yeah, I'm sorry, no, no, no.

It's all good.

I got it.

Um yeah, got it.

Alderman Thurp, one suggestion I have on this, and there are arguments against it, but I think that on balance I come down that we should put all of our public information officers under one public information officer.

I think we could, it just seems obvious to me that there are days where the police PIO has a ton of work to do, and there are days where they don't have much of any.

And there are days where the regular, the the non-police PIO has a ton of non-police PIO work to do, and then there are days where I don't know there are any days where Mitchell has no work to do, but certainly less.

Like the snowstorm was a good example where for the most part people were now committing crimes in the cell.

And so it would have been, but there was a ton of other communications to do.

And so it to me seems beneficial to let those two be able to balance each other out by putting them all under one office.

So we're we're talking right now about we have proposed in this budget a full-time PIO, a full-time assistant PIO, a communications consultant, a part-time fire PIO, and a full-time police PIO.

Strikes me that if you were to consolidate all those into one office, you might even be able to get better communication with less money.

We also have a marketing person who does PIO work for Parks and Right.

Yeah, right.

We might then so it's another one.

So I would be short, I would stop short of reorganizing the public information office.

Um for two reasons.

One, I think the mayor and the city manager need to need to work that.

Um, every reorganization like that, I kind of am reminded of moving the the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.

Um and three consolidating it a one office isn't always the best in the communication world because you want people inside uh your major organizations.

Um the situation where you have uh all hands on deck, uh like the snowstorm, when you have Rex and Parks people shoveling snow, uh, and you have the PIO helping out.

Um it's one thing to do that organizationally, it's another thing to do that performance-wise.

So I think where I'm my focus is not is less moving the chairs around and making sure that the capacity's there.

Um, and quite frankly, the mindset's there.

Um, as much as as we can do that, and we probably can only affect mindset by capacity.

So uh so I I would say just making sure that these plans to uh you know, we we can redo the website, but if we don't have the capacity for everybody to update the website, um then there's nothing the PIO can do to have a good website other than bang their head against the wall.

So I think the real question is do we have the capacity and the mindset?

Do we have the capacity in place and the capacity creates a mindset?

Yeah, uh I I take your your point and certainly appreciate your wisdom on this particular topic, but uh from where I'm sitting, the situation is something like we're asking 2.7 FTEs of work and putting 2.5 in the mayor's office, and we're asking 0.8 in the police department and giving them one.

And so combining those uh seems like it would provide additional it would get us closer to having the capacity match the requirements, but I I also have a very high bar for reorganizations in the budget.

I think we like we have enough other stuff to deal with.

I hate when there's a boy, let's put the office of law under the mayor's office, or let's put the harbor master under racking parks.

I hate that um because I think it's just too much to do in a budget when we have too much other stuff.

But in this case, we're talking about potentially moving one and a half, or if you want to lump in wrecking parks, two and a half positions, it seems much more manageable to me than say we're gonna move the whole office of law.

It seems much more manageable to me than say we're gonna move the whole office of law.

So I don't know that we have a resolution on that.

I would be interested in the idea of moving the marketing person out of Wrecks and Parks and putting them in the PIO section.

That would that would be an interesting discussion.

Um they would make the PIO, it would give the PIO another responsibility, i.e.

more work.

Um I mean, we uh I I you'd have to think through that one.

That's a that's a management decision, not a city council decision.

You're gonna have to get back to me on why it makes sense for wreck and parks and not for police.

But yeah, we could we can figure that out.

Um the other part on comms is just I do think some of the software that's getting talked about uh in the mayor's office could help with that.

That said, we've also got four software projects in the mayor's office uh that are actually under IT, but that are going to the mayor's office.

And I think we should take a look at whether all four of them are really the most worthwhile.

We had uh the two intergov, I think ones, right?

And then there was Slack, and there was a fourth one.

I'd have to go back and live in the mayor's presentation.

Uh can I go back something?

Sure, of course.

Where are we on getting the answer on central services?

I think that's a tangible question for money being centralized.

Yeah.

Capri send it to us like five minutes ago.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right, thank you.

Um, because yes, that's a very important intangible question.

Yeah.

It's our uh did our PIO walk into the room for any particular reason.

Anything you uh want to add?

If not, that's fine.

Okay, I appreciate the meeting about your ears were burning just in case you wanted to talk to her directly.

No, I appreciate it.

No, I don't I don't have any particular questions for you.

If you have questions, require specific the answers.

Wonderful.

Nothing specific.

Thank you.

All right.

So let me jump into some of the things that I'm thinking about.

Um pretty much everything that Otterman Thorpe was saying about infrastructure and parks and external versus internal was on the top of my list.

And I think that um I think what I was suggesting about the streets budget, there might be some ways to make that a little bit more sidewalk focused.

I think there it seems very straightforward to me that we would be smart to invest in more parks maintenance people.

There's a couple different ways we could do that, but I put it as a pretty high priority.

Um, and just to say why, among other reasons, it's they keep doing it when it's not currently, they don't currently have the funding for it.

I have had multiple times where there are parks that where we've added a street end park in ward one, and literally like two or three different ones that we've added that we sort of or I'll say that residents expect Wreck and Parks to maintain, and when we do it, we don't give them additional money.

So, in my opinion, it's high time we catch up on giving them some additional capacity.

Um again, there are a couple different ways we could do it.

We could add seasonal workers, we could convert the seasonal ones to full-time, we could even increase some of their contract funding.

At this point, wreck and parks came to us and asked that we convert seasonal to full-time, and so that's where I'm leaning.

But um, if if the city manager or if one of my colleagues wanted to convince me that there is a better way to get at that end result, I am very open to it.

So that's my thoughts on infrastructure.

And ultimately, again, if we want to fix some of those external facing things in the way the residents can see, what we're gonna have to cut back on is the internal facing things, the uh slack in the mayor's office uh or the um risk management specialists, those kinds of things, the things that residents don't see.

If if I could jump in on the um like the parks maintenance question.

Thank you.

Um, this is one of the reasons why we're trying to do better at having the operating budget impacts for individual projects as part of the C disclosed as part of the CIP.

Um in the parks space, because of the seasonal worker aspect to that, it's a that's actually a little bit easier because those are that's just a giant group pin anyway.

And so as those projects get finished, here's the operating budget.

Here's our estimate of how much maintenance would cost.

Like in a perfect world, like those things would feed each other, you'd add that much into that seasonal line, right?

To to allow for that.

But that is part of the reason to focus on disclosure of operating budget impacts is that should be giving us a preview of what do we expect on the other side?

Absolutely.

And I think that's something that the new I keep forgetting what we're calling them, but the new city council person in the mayor's office for implementation.

Like that's the perfect thing for them to follow up on when we're putting together the budget and say, okay, last year we put in five new capital improvement projects that each said they had this much maintenance impact on parks and rec, and then they go in and they check the mayor's proposed budget as it's coming up and say, gosh, you didn't add any money to parks and rec maintenance.

Like, why not?

So is there any I know I'm again asking you to potentially contradict the department head, but is there any glaring reason why we would if we want to see better maintained parks, we should not go the route of making those seasonal workers full time that we would be better off adding seasonal workers or adding to the contract budget.

So your your question really is whether you is um the question comes down to is that maintenance needed year round, or is there a surge that's needed at certain times of the year, right?

That's really the question you're asking.

Um I I think that there's I I would I would need to have a conversation with Wreck and Parks about the balance between those two things, but I think it is undeniable that there is a surge that's needed at certain times of the year and not others, right?

There's a reason that we're that we and everyone else is sort of organized that way.

Um because you know, you're you aren't doing the same amount of maintenance in the parks year round that you do at other times of the year.

Yeah.

Um I would need to have a conversation with them about the balance between those two things, but you're always gonna have a seasonal component.

No, and I I I recognize that, and I think the answer it can still make sense to add full-time staff, even if it is very seasonal work in my line of work, it could be, you know, obviously farming is a very seasonal business, but if your tractor keeps breaking down when you're trying to do planting, it might be because you didn't have enough people working in the off season to do that maintenance then.

Uh so yes, I I agree with the question you're asking.

What I'm saying is just the answer can still be yes, and it can make sense to add full-time staff.

So I don't know.

I think at the end of the day, I'm looking for somebody to tell me what to do on that.

And we heard once from our parks maintenance supervisor, his answer seemed counterintuitive to me.

And so I'm hoping somebody else can validate either no, I Harry am wrong, or no, there's a reason why what Rodney is saying doesn't make sense.

Um anything to add on that parks infrastructure piece?

Any reactions before I go on?

I mean, I agree with parks infrastructure.

One of my budget priorities was taking a look at all of our projects and working out maintenance, you know, long-term maintenance plans.

Um we don't do enough of that, like you said, we put parks online and then we forget about them because it's either not funded to take care of them.

Yeah.

Um, so I do think that that's important.

I believe that there could probably be some reorganization in parks in rec.

Um, like you said, there's often a lot of people in the office.

Um there's it seems to be heavy on admin versus a worker bee.

People fixing the park, right?

People working on the park.

Um, that's probably my one number one complaint that I get from residents is that you know, here you have this beautiful park on Annapolis Street, and yet it's unmote or um I have pictures from residents where it's three people and one guy's in the truck on the phone.

Um, one guy's weed whacking and the other guy is eating his lunch on the leaning up against the back of the truck.

So, you know, I think that it could be a little bit better managed.

Um, I understand that you have to send certain people for different jobs, but um, I do get a lot of those kind of pictures, so I think that there could be some more efficiencies in that in the way we do things.

Um, it would be great if there was a schedule so that you know, during Greenscape, um, residents are taking care of some of those parks.

Um it would be great if there was a schedule so that you know during Greenscape um residents are taking care of some of those parks, um mulching, weeding, things like that, and if there was a printed schedule, much like I had asked Director Vogel for for street sweeping, there was a printed schedule that you know parks in ward one were taking care of the first week of the month, parks and wards two and three are second week, you know.

Um we could better work with the residents and set expectations better.

So I think that we just need to work on some of the efficiencies that are going on there.

So how do we do that?

Again, I'm a victim of my past.

Um I'm gonna go here, turn my microphone off if you would like.

But but if we think as city council members that we can impact that when we don't actually have the personnel authority to uh create goals and things like that, realizing we have the strategic performance metrics.

I'm gonna go here just for conversation purposes.

Our only way to to do that is to say we are not pleased with the maintenance up, just building on what you just said, we are not pleased with the maintenance performance in Rex and Parks, and so we are gonna cut it five percent.

I mean, that's the way it happens in the DOD.

Now I'm not saying the DOD is a model for for for budgeting, but we we really have, I think, as I look at this, um, my my phone's going off.

It's not the director of Rex and Parks.

Um but uh or Vicki.

Um, but I mean, what is our role?

I mean, as as we're sitting here having this conversation, what is our role?

It do we have a role in driving performance improvement with our budget decisions or not, or or do we not?

I and that's a legitimate question.

I'm not asking, um that's not a metaphorical question.

I think we do, and that's the purpose of the hearings uh departments coming before us to talk about their budget priorities, their how they are creating their budgets.

Um I think that how we approve or take away some of the budget requests signifies where our priorities lie um in answering to our constituents, and ultimately it comes down to city manager's office to be relaying that, but I think ultimately as a city we're working towards the contentment of our constituents, right?

We talked about this about they need to see value, like I'm willing to spend more money on something that I know if it's value versus buying on the cheap and then knowing I'm gonna have to replace it twice or three times if I'm gonna use it a lot.

Or buying on the hope when we don't really know, and so if we can show that you know, our city budget we're passing, and it's you know one percent higher than last year's city budget that we passed, but here are the benefits, and there we talk about what they can see and what they can't see, right?

Um but putting in our budget priorities and talking with the directors about this is the performance measure we're looking for, um, and therefore we will continue to fund the programs that were getting those performance measures, and we're hitting those marks, and if we're not, then we're removing it and putting it elsewhere where we can see the benefit.

Does that make sense?

It does, and and I think if you take that another step, and I think there's two areas, and this is a now we're talking specific concept and turn it into specifics.

Do you if we believe that Rex and Parks maintenance could do better with the funds they have, the only tool we have is to cut the funds and make them come back and defend for them.

And then I'll I'll at some point I can do it now or later, but but I've opened up Ms.

Turner's document.

Um, and if I read this document appropriately, we didn't save a dime by creating central services.

The we moved four 4.29 4 million 296,050 from different departments into central services.

And there's or IT or wherever.

Right.

It's it's so it's sensoralizing to different departments, and you're not gonna see a savings just from the centralization.

Um as the acting director said, there were some increases to the base um for reoccurring services, but also the savings that you're going to see, you're gonna see an FY28 from everything being consolidated and them having time to assess it, work through it, understanding um if they need to combine um contractors, remove contractors, seek new contractors, have same software, it it takes time for them to go through that, and it's gonna be the FY27 period that they go through that, and then when we come an FY28, you'll see the savings there.

This is just something I mean to me.

Yeah, it's just aligning everything to one place for them to be able to well, I mean, central services isn't being created on July 1st.

It was created several years ago.

So I mean, if if we if we have a contract for if we have 20 contracts for two things, and we go to the contractor and we say we want one contract for 40 things and we want a discount, I mean, we ought to already be seeing savings, no.

Not for F not right now in FY27.

Because they can't central services can't go and have that negotiation until the money's in their budget.

Like I can I can confirm that they're already working on it, for instance, for um heating and electricity for the whole city.

They've put a contract together for the whole city, so we're gonna see savings there, but you're not gonna see it until um quarter one budget versus actual FY2027.

They've already begun to start working on it.

We're just aligning the budget to the department.

Uh, you what you just told me is that we are going to see those savings at FY27, and we should be budgeting as such.

Right.

So you'll see the savings because they're currently working on it in anticipation that they know this uh centralization is happening.

It's just you're not seeing it in the budget because the budget is aligning to removing it from department.

So FY26 has it broken out into different departments, and they could be using the same service provider at different rates, the same rates, but the departments don't know there, it's in their separate budgets by aligning it within the same budget, then we can have access to those savings and renewing the contracts at better rates.

Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna, I was just gonna head you off, Alderman Huntley.

Just if the work is getting worked on now, we can't put it in the budget now.

So we're using the information that we have available to us to budget.

We will see we are expecting and anticipating that there will be savings experienced in something such as electricity.

We can't quantify that today, and we're not gonna put the city in a position of making an incorrect estimate to then have to then come back and do an upward adjustment.

We would allow for the completion of the work and then budget revisions will occur in 2027 to adjust for that.

Uh I would rather if we know it's going to go down, and we're all sure it's going to go down, but not by how much.

Right.

I'd rather we decrease it by somewhere between a dollar and a thousand dollars.

And if we know it like I'd rather we'd have it be something.

But uh Alderman Thorpe, did you want to say something?

Yeah, I mean, I I think I'm in the same place you are I I think they're we're talking two different things here.

We're talking one, the budget document compared to real savings, and then talking we we budget conservatively here in a city, which makes all the sense in the world, but running a business when you consolidate the CFO in his office has an idea that we're gonna save between one and a thousand dollars.

And I and if that's the answer, but we're not budgeting it because we don't know, I would be comfortable with that answer.

We don't anticipate by our budget any savings, and by lack of it being said, any improvements by the consolidation, which I don't think is true, but but we've we we ought to it's the same criticism in a different area that we get for budgeting, all our billets being filled and everybody uh taking max benefits because that's the safest thing to do.

But at the end of the day, yeah, I I would love to respond with maybe two or three factors.

The first one being uh in a private business, I totally agree the fluidity and the flexibility to be able to make those changes in real time and actually come back to the table is present in the process that we're in today, we have regulatory or legally mandated deadlines, and so as a result of some of that constriction, we're gonna have to go with best available use numbers at that time, recognizing that there will be changes.

So there's a there is a component here just tied to things had to be done by April 1st, things had to be done by April 13th.

There's a specific dates while recognizing that we're not trying to operate from a place of not being more accurate, but the nature of the conservatism in this process is largely due to the fact that we have to maintain a balanced budget.

And so the risks that come associated with under budgeting are more significant than over budgeting, right?

And so, like that is another factor at play here.

And so as the budget uh process continues to improve as we continue to work towards that more accurate uh projections versus actuals, you'll see that continue to whittle down.

And so, like, I think additional measures can be taken in the budgeting process, and then I'll go with the excuse uh route, which is we've had some turnover, the ACFR was completed late later in the process.

Like, there's other factors at play here that would disallow for the precision to be there, um, which are all things that are being constantly currently evaluated and work towards being enhanced and fixed going into the next budgeting season.

So between those three things, that's really the conversation here.

But I agree that you would pivot, you would adjust.

Um, and I think we can look to have that conversation.

But now at this point, it would be an amendment to change that and bring it down, just tied to some level of analysis.

So that's something that would have to just be taken with the team.

So let me ask a question.

I just I just don't want to say go ahead and ask the question, but I just want to say I don't want to spend too much more time on this because I am getting to the point of feeling like it's not going to lead to us changing this budget as proposed.

But go ahead and ask your question.

Great straight man.

Because we moved 4.3 million dollars to IT and central services.

And what levers does the city council have?

So it might let me just ask a question to the group.

What if we said we want to take a number out of that?

200,000.

You know, one one percent would be uh 420,000, is that right?

No, be 42,000.

42,000.

So um so we want to take 5% or 2%.

Could we do that?

And what would the reaction?

I mean, the in other words, how do we how do we as a city council drive to the savings when we're not gonna change the way that we find that we create the budget?

It makes all the sense in the world that he's doing that we're doing it that way.

But the other alternative with Joel's proposal is, and I'm not criticizing you, but trust me, and in six months we'll come back to you and tell you what the savings are.

And so we're agreeing to zero savings, zero efficiencies, uh, and no and no savings, or no, we're not driving to any savings.

Arguably it's up to the city staff.

We're they they could identify 250,000 in savings and use all that money to do better, right?

And which is also a very logical way to do things, but we don't have we don't give any guidance about this, and so is that an option?

Well, I was a great straight man because you totally convinced me.

I think the the if we don't know whether the savings are five percent, twenty percent, three percent, whatever, but we all agree they're not zero percent.

Like we can all 100% say we're not doing this unless we're very confident that we're going to save some money over the course of the next year.

Then yeah, we should say take one percent out of it.

I think that makes perfect sense.

I scared both of you.

Whichever one of you wants to jump in.

Go ahead.

Yeah, I mean, I think this goes back to what Ms.

Turner was saying earlier, right?

There is an effort here to consolidate and centralize.

And so while it is reasonable, justifiable to say that you'd get 1% savings without having full scope of knowledge that you know, say I'm just gonna make this example up because I don't want to use anything that's real.

But say the finance department used an uh you know, a software and had 10 licenses, and then HR uses the same software and had five licenses, and IT used the same software and had 20 licenses, and we're all on three separate contracts, all three different terms.

This is arguably why you do it.

You go into one contract, you go from having three different contracts to go to one contract, get you get your uh economies of scale, but you're likely not gonna experience that for 12 months because you're gonna be locked into your existing agreements up to their certain time points.

You may get some level of renegotiation power, but like that to say that you're immediately gonna get the economies of scale from day one would be I think also a bit of a force, right?

You'd have to say there has to be time to renegotiate the contract, there has to be time to find what that actual benefit is and roll forward, and so that's where Ms.

Turner's comments about you'd experience some of the savings in 2028.

This is now the process of aligning, giving people the level of information and budget to now execute against that alignment process, you would experience the savings in the following year.

But yes, naturally you would expect that there should be some immediate impact.

So it's just where are we drawing that line is the tough question.

Yeah, and I and I think the other part of that that I want to underscore is that part of the whole point of centralizing is to have better visibility into the spend.

Like in some sense, the I I get the impatience.

Um, but the other side of this is that we were seemingly just fine spending this amount of money spread out across the departments, but we object to spending it now that it's centralized, and we have there's there's the the hope and the possibility and the intention of streamlining and cost savings and stuff, and now that I'm aware, I want that now.

But this is the process of get of getting to that, and and part of it is them having the opportunity to have that better visibility, that better understanding where are those efficiencies.

I get it, right?

Like I I understand there is that's the entire reason we're doing this, right?

And and I think it's safe to say that all of us would probably share, you know, probably do share that desire to already be on the other side of that, but that isn't where we are, right?

Yeah, like I said, I don't want to spend a ton more time on this.

Hold on, O'Neill, did you have something to add?

I was just going to say that I would not support removing money from that fund.

It's sort of like in my small business, um, we're talking thousands of dollars, not millions of dollars, but I make decisions every day.

I own a Kemba account and I have other subcontractors who also use Canva.

We each have our own Canva account.

If I were to combine them all, it would save those other contractors the money in a year because of their contract.

Um I think that we wait and see the savings and apply it to FY28 budget.

I don't I don't think that you can pull out with the anticipation that we're hoping for a 1% or 5% savings, because if we're wrong and that doesn't come, then we are basically screwing ourselves later on, and we'll have to find that money to give back.

So I say we have patience and wait.

I appreciate you share that perspective.

I want to move on from this topic because we've got uh I I have a hard stop today, by the way, guys.

I have a work meeting I have to be at at 1230.

Um so uh I want to share the couple other things I had coming out of this.

So the next one is really on me in that I think I did not schedule our hearings in a way that lets us dig into the capital budget.

And um totally immediate culpa that I was thinking last Thursday we were going to really have the opportunity to get into individual projects, and for perfectly good reasons we did not.

Uh it we I mean the good reason just we only had two hours, but I feel like there are quite a few capital projects that I have not seen clear my bar for this is why we should spend this money on that.

And this is not a that's not to say boy, we ought to go and cut some money out of them because nobody's explained it to me.

It's to bring up a problem and see what solutions you guys have.

Do we need I mean, we're we're coming up on time, so I don't know that the solution is boy, let's schedule a whole nother hearing on Thursday.

But the the one that particularly comes to mind is two million dollars on planning for those fire stations.

And we've not had any justification for why we need two million dollars as opposed to 1.5 million dollars, why we need two million dollars in this year as opposed to 1 million this year, 1 million next year.

So I'm bringing up totally a problem that is of my own creation, but I look forward to hearing if you guys have any thoughts.

If you if you agree it's a problem, and whether you have any thoughts on how we could solve it.

Either one of you go ahead.

Um I like the way you're thinking.

Um I think as we get to the where the rubber meets the road, um, if we're gonna take action as a finance committee to it to the city with recommendations to city council, as we take the pluses and minuses, we've demonstrated today how hard that is.

Um there is no easy solution.

I thought one percent actually would be an easy solution to pick up 42,000 or 84,000, but to your point, it's not easy.

Um so uh creating the time or the opportunity, uh whether we do it in writing or whatever, um, but we in my mind we simply need to find more capacity for sidewalks and streets.

Um and if that means delaying one third of the fire stations or something like that, it it's clear to me we're we we need to seek the best of the worst the the best of yeah, exactly.

That's what I was looking for.

So uh creating that opportunity to do that, I think is really important because that we've demonstrated today working together that we can't find it.

Can we ask?

Can can we make a list of the projects that we have questions about, send them to the director?

He was out in the hallway, but I don't see him anymore.

Um Vogel or for Vogel.

Oh honestly, most of the ones that I have questions about are more the central services ones.

But yeah, so I think if if we made a list, even if it's a finance committee question as opposed to ward specific um with those questions, I think that accurately they could come back with us in a day, possibly two days by Thursday to say if you cut this budget, this project can't move forward.

It's kind of like the community grants, right?

If I ask you for 50 and you give me two, I really can't do the project I'm trying to do.

Yeah, and so it's kind of not worth it.

But if it's delayed, like you know, I get frustrated about sidewalk projects being delayed for three years when they were funded in a budget two years ago.

Um but I think that if we ask the director point blank, what would happen if this project if 500,000 was pulled from this project, or you know, two percent of this project was pulled back um and waited until another year, what would happen with those projects?

Does that what is the due?

There's obviously going to be a delay, but they might not be even able to start the projects.

So yeah, so maybe a way to phrase that is there are if I remember correctly, sort of three or four big new newly added capital projects, right?

There is uh, well, this one's not newly added, but it's a bunch of new money in city facility city hall upgrades.

There is the new fire stations.

There is a big $800,000 for the police department.

I think there's one other one that I'm not thinking about.

But those are the big new uses of bond funding in this budget.

And maybe we can just say what leeway is on the uh is there on those.

What if $200,000 gets pushed back in the fire department, fire station one, are we is the whole thing not going to get done for a year?

Like that's really what you're suggesting we ask, right?

Correct.

What does that do to the project timeline?

Um that that seems about as good uh as we're going to get to me.

That's not what I was looking for.

All right.

Anything else on that point?

No, okay, I'll move on.

So another one that I think Alderman Thorpe also briefly touched on was the need for software and artificial intelligence support and uh across a couple different departments.

So we heard planning and zoning say 100,000 for an AI consultant.

I'd like to know where that $100,000 figure came from.

Uh could it really be $50,000?

But ultimately, I think putting some funds towards that seems like what I'm getting at is it seems like there are a lot of places where we could invest some, I'm gonna call it capital, but I mean in an economic sense, not in a uh accounting sense, to reduce our staff, uh reduce our salaries and benefits in the long run.

So the three places that that popped up to me were planning and zonings request, the public works request about um snow, and then I think just putting some relatively unallocated money into the department of IT for essentially for whatever department comes to them and says, Boy, we think we could use an enterprise AI uh subscription, or we need compute uh for we need to instead of having a $20 a month subscription to Claude, we need to actually get the API and and pay for it by the um what do they call it by the I'm blanking on the the word um no the you you pay for a particular unit um I can't remember it doesn't matter, but by by the unit is what I'm saying.

So putting a little a relatively small amount of funding, like I'm talking maybe as little as five thousand dollars, somewhere between five and twenty in IT to just say this money's there if anybody needs it in the interest of encouraging some um efficiency gains, I think would be smart.

So that's what I got on AI and software.

Uh any thoughts on that?

No.

No.

Makes sense.

You guys are makes sense.

Are generally supportive, but obviously we have to figure out a way to pay for it.

Is that fair to characterize?

Yeah, I mean, I really like the fact that our plan is running person.

I think that's fantastic.

Oh my god, amazing, right?

I put it in my newsletter to the Word One Residence Association that I wrote last night.

I said I quoted him directly and said, I wish every department director would come and say that.

I thought that was amazing.

So then the last thing I've got before I just talk about some opportunities I saw for cuts, is uh I think it is not good practice that we have vacancy savings in the police department and don't do it for our other large departments.

I'm not proposing that we do it for somewhere as small as HR where there's significant variation or IT, but I think we should for our four to six largest departments go through and say over the past five years, what is the percent difference between your salaries and benefits as budgeted and your salaries and benefits that you actually spent, and then look at the three three years where there is the smallest difference to be conservative, take the average of those three, and then apply that percentage to these those four to six departments in this budget.

Um, and when I say four to six, I'm including police where we already do that.

And what we would then do with that money, in my opinion, is put half of it into contingency so that we, if we're wrong, if we really screwed this up, that money is there.

They can uh they can access it, we can transfer it to planning and zoning, really did a great job of filling out all their staff this year.

They don't have vacancy savings like they historically have.

We're gonna make sure that they have access to that pool of money.

That also alleviates my other concern, which I have a really big concern that in here there is way too little in contingency.

There is 300, if I'm remembering correctly, 300,000 in contingency, and there is, and we overspent for our snowstorm by I'm looking at the wrong page now, but like $600,000, like double that in one snowstorm.

And that scares me.

So I think we really need to increase that contingency pot.

I think we've sort of treated the uh vacancy savings, the difference between what we actually spend on salaries benefits and what we we budget for as a de facto contingency.

And if we, the committee and the council want to be serious about having a budget that is really reflective of reality, then I think we need to go in and I'm not saying I have the perfect algorithm there, but the we need to come up with some kind of calculation for what those vacancy savings are in those large departments.

We put half of it to contingency to make sure that we are not uh to to give us some some wheel room, and then I think the other half should be used to lower the tax rate.

So that is probably my most complicated proposal for this budget, but I think it's one that uh would be really worthwhile.

You guys got reactions?

I scare you.

Did I do you like it?

What do you think?

I was tracking all the way into the last thing you said.

Um I I'm not at a tax rate point until we are providing the services that need to be served served.

And I think the first place to do that is to look for where we can get savings and make the hard decisions to do that.

Um but I think they're all combined in one, right?

So if if you if we're able to find the savings, um, do we use that money for more roads or or sidewalks or AI or tax breaks?

But I'm I mean that I'm sitting here trying to figure out how we get from here to one July.

Meaning how do we do this faster?

Oh, yeah.

You know, I mean, I just I'm just trying to find money to pay for what I think we need to pay for.

And that's where I think um the improved amendment process that we've talked about could really help.

Um, what we what we could do in this is you know, we can all agree that that is this isn't exactly a cut because it's money we weren't really gonna spend anyway, but we can all agree that the cut makes sense, and we can have differences on how we should spend it, and we need a better process, which is what I'm hoping to bring forward on how we spend that money rather than in the past it was oh, you know, Harry was so clever, he came up with this great way to to find cut a bunch of money, but then you have to spend it on the thing that Harry wants to spend it on.

And I don't think that's the best way to budget.

So that's why I think you could agree the quote unquote cut makes sense, and you can feel free to disagree on how we should spend it.

I will hold the line that a lot of that, maybe not exactly 50%, but a lot of it needs to go into the contingency.

I don't think we can do this in this first year without saying that we need to to cover our butts on it and put a lot of it, if not an outright majority of it, into contingency.

What do you think, Aldo Romanonial?

I mean, it's an interesting concept.

I've been talking to a lot of people about how can we cut and where do we make cuts?

And everybody on the outside always thinks that we have too many staff, but we're hearing you know, projects aren't getting done because we don't have the staff capacity to get things done.

So there is a there's a difference of what people see versus what the reality is.

Um I also one of my things that I wrote down was okay, we overspent snow by this amount of money.

This was the second year in a row that we've had a snow event.

Um where we for many years we didn't, so we had cut that budget and cut that budget and cut that budget.

Um, so yes, contingency is important.

So for me, it's just gonna be running the numbers and seeing where we fall out, like going back to that idea that residents want to see the value in the dollars that they spend, and if we're not cutting, but we're able to add value.

That's one model, right?

If we're cutting and still adding value, that's even better.

Um but yeah, yeah, that is better, right?

Something for nothing is always ideal.

The downside to this that I need to point out is that we would, in future years, by being more precise in our budgeting, have less money for the budget stabilization fund, the capital reserve, and the one-time use money, right?

We would have less, if we're being more precise, which is what this is aimed to do, we would end up with less fund balance in the future, which trickles down to all three of those things.

And that's that's uh a choice that I think we need to make very eyes wide open because we've seen just between this year's budget and last year's budget, how having less reserve for one-time use is leading to more friction uh between the mayor and the council.

So I say less meant more friction, more friction between the mayor and the council.

What do you guys think about my suggestion of how we would calculate it?

That we would be looking back to that percent difference in previous years, and we would again try to be conservative, take the three out of the five that are smallest is sort of like an Olympic average, and uh and use that as the factor for coming up with it.

That was meant to YouTube, but it seemed like maybe you two wanted to answer it.

No, they're asking for our opinion.

I I did mean it for YouTube, but if neither of you have responses on that, then so the obvious question is there's real benefits of what you're saying to do.

But the obvious outcome is also is we're telling the police department we don't expect you to hire all those people.

Well, the police department we're already telling them that, right?

Like we're already doing this for police.

It's more we're telling the fire department that we recognize some people are gonna be on paternity leave, and we recognize the public works is if they have 60 staff at any given time, two of them aren't gonna be filled.

So, yeah, I hear you of police, but I think we're already doing that to the police.

Help me understand that.

So police already have vacancy savings built in.

They're the only one where we're already doing this, but not the full true.

If we were to so we could do this one of two ways with police, we could we could stick with what we're already doing with police, which is I don't know, Ms.

Turner would tell us how much vacancy savings we built in for police, or we could go back and recalculate police using this two billion dollars, she says, or we could go back and recalculate police the same way that I'm proposing we do for fire, public works, racket parks, planning and zoning.

Either way, I don't have a strong preference.

Yeah, we could do is regulate overtime.

I'm all over that.

But I I think that's a bit of a different question.

You guys want to weigh in now on my scary proposal?

Uh okay.

I'm gonna give you the world of Corney Vicky.

I'm gonna watch Capri cringe over here.

Um so I I think that there um I think that part of this situation is a conflict between the the concept and the execution of that concept.

Um right now we regularly budget um and and typically how we have budgeted vacancy savings has been to attribute that to individual departments, right?

And it gets reflected in the individual department's budget.

The limiting factor there ends up being, as you said, let's look at you know, let's look at only the top, the largest departments, because the variation year to year is once you get into smaller departments, that's very hard to predict, and so we again we take this very conservative approach.

Um I get that.

Um the other way of looking at that is to look at what is the citywide vacancy rate, and is there this is where the like the concept of does the city as a whole tend to have a vacancy rate?

What's the average city salary?

And is there a way to capture that?

It would not be attributable to any one department at that point, right?

How would that mechanically work in the budget?

But I think that's what I'm hearing you sort of reach for is that there's this vacancy savings that we only really look at in one place, but we do in fact, or two places.

Um but we obviously we have vacancies in other places, and that goes um sort of unrealized in the budget as a whole.

I haven't seen you cringe yet.

So I'm I'm hopeful.

Can you tell me why you said two places?

It's built into planning and zoning and police.

Um so I I want to add that this applies for sensralization and um vacancies, honestly, the budget and whole.

When we are building the budget, we are looking at historical trends.

So we're already decreasing where we see we have savings at.

Um that is part of the analysis of the budget as we're building it.

Um so anywhere that you may potentially see savings may be potentially built in for um anticipated or unanticipated things occurring.

Um outside of that, we would have to come to you for an essay and find funding within the budget for it.

But if there is vacancy savings that we see, and there's a historical trend for it, we will build it into the budget.

So one thing that I think I need, and this this very well may be a technical limitation.

We need to know that.

That I did not know that planning and zoning had vacancy savings built in, maybe to some extent, it's a fault of me for not having asked, but it's not there's no way that we would know that it if we didn't ask, it's not a line item.

It's not in my ideal world, we see police department, 130 positions, 100,000 per position, therefore 13 million dollars.

And then we would see the next line item is negative 200,000 or whatever.

Like we I think we need to actually have that in a way that we can understand where that is coming from.

And so my particular question is technologically, is it possible for OpenGov to have a negative expenditure, which is really what we're asking for I believe it can.

Yeah, the um I I think let's let's explore on the tech side.

Yes.

Um conceptually, like I said now, we do that in limited circumstances because it's difficult department by department to capture it when you when you get outside of of large departments.

Um I think that's the other thing that potentially we can explore.

Yeah, Ms.

Pallet Call, you had something else to add.

Yeah, I I would want to take it back just a step and just make sure I understood intent and uh the value of like the information sharing.

So one thing that just based on this conversation is unclear to me, is the intention to identify cost savings to then better inform the budgeted figures, which then could allow for additional money to be spent on other initiatives or otherwise you know put more pay-go towards sidewalks or you know, reduce the tax rate, right?

Like there's some intention here, or is the intention to better understand departmental vacancy.

And so if there is an intention to understand departmental vacancy, such as you know, the police department year over year over year has $2 million of vacancy savings.

We really need to bolster our recruiting, we really need to consider increasing salaries to attract talent.

We need to have different retention metrics so that we would do like there, I think there needs to be a level of understanding as to like what is the goal, yeah.

And then we can then execute based on that to then do it.

I think the answer is we should be able to do anything.

It's just a matter of how is it need to be presented in the budget to best inform council residents and others, and then also drive change.

So that's what I instead of just looking for the number, like let's take a bead to like figure out what it is that we're actually trying to accomplish.

Absolutely.

My my goal is to have more precise budgeting.

That is what I want us to see uh ultimately, and so more number two than number one.

It sounded like what well, I I don't need to restate what you were saying, but my goal is to get us to a point where our budget is more precise, and we three, eight have more insight into it.

Uh, and this seems like a good way to do that.

Now, my sense, and I and I have done enough digging into it to feel pretty confident in this sense is that if we were to do that, we could both cover our butts by putting a bunch of it in contingency and have a bunch of money left over that, in my opinion, we should return to residents because we haven't really been using it.

Or to Alderman Thorpe's point, maybe we want to put it as pay go for sidewalks.

Um God knows I love a good sidewalk.

Uh so just to clarify, so that the way we view contingency is it's a non-allocated pot.

Right.

And what do you say?

Non-allocated.

It's a non-allocated pot.

And so that that is why the crux of my questions coming in is because we're talking about moving from allocated to non-allocated.

It could create the illusion of it, just it it without a person being educated through that pathway of the the where the money goes, it would almost make it look like your non-allocated like revenues were increased by let's call it three million dollars because you now have this additional contingency money, and now you're just booking a non-allocated contingency to offset that three million.

So it just creates uh it could it could create a different perspective.

Somebody might look at the city.

Yeah, it could it could create almost less um insight because we're we're taking money out of departments and putting it into contingency.

My goal, I think if we do this right, is that every year we have one or two departments that say actually we do need some of that contingency money.

And so, yes, in that sense, we would be obscuring that not obscuring, that sounds too intentional, but we would be making less clear that some of that non-allocated money is going to go to somebody.

But the reason it's going there in my ideal world is because we don't know who that somebody is.

If we're budgeting it more precisely, we don't know whether it's gonna be plenty in Sony who exceeds our expectations or public works.

And that's why I think it does make sense to have it in that non-allocated.

So I hear what you're saying.

I've considered it.

I I think there's still a benefit.

Um I gotta run in about five minutes.

So is there more that we need to talk about on this topic?

I'd what I'd like to do is come to the finance director with the exact numbers, and I I started to try and pull them, but I had to go back to a bunch of different budgets, so I didn't quite get it done last night.

Um, come back to the finance director with what would this actually look like?

What would the numbers really be if I did this across four to six biggest departments?

And um and have you dig into it and tell me, boy, Harry, this is really not justifiable, our bond rating agencies are gonna tear us apart, or yeah, your downside is you're not gonna have as much one-time use money in future years, but this is defensible and and you could go ahead and do it.

So I'll I'll bring you those actual numbers.

All right.

Last thing I wanted to just go over was some opportunities I've identified throughout for cuts.

I talked about a couple of these, or not cuts, but pay for's is how I'm calling them, because some of it is revenue raisers.

Uh somebody, I think it's Alder Roman O'Neill, brought up the uh fire department and the medic unit that that is potentially an additional funding, but it's not because we don't we haven't seen the county's budget, so we shouldn't include it.

Um I would defer to you or to the finance director, whoever tells us no, we can't include that, I'm not gonna fight that fight.

But I do think we should include additional revenue that we would get from this ambulance.

And I heard the chief come up and say why he thinks we shouldn't, which is as I took it, no, we can't because we don't know whether we're gonna get this started in August or in next May.

And that's super reasonable, but if we don't start it till next May, we're not gonna be spending the money on the expenditure side.

So uh it seems very reasonable to me to either include both the revenue from it and the expenditure from it, or include neither, or say we're gonna discount both of them by half of the year because we don't think we're going to get this done until halfway through the year.

So uh I think we could add as a pay for 100, 150, 200,000 that we expect to generate from that ambulance.

So that's one thing.

Um we talked about raising fees for non-residents on parks.

Alderman Thorpe's talked before, and I agree about increasing STR fees and fines, although I do think it I would love to come up with a proposal, and I'm gonna work with the city manager on what this could look like for how we could bifurcate or trifurcate even the fees for the STRs, because I just got a complaint the other day from a lady who's saying I rent my room for a couple days a year, and why am I having to pay in $650 fee right now?

That's basically all the money I'm making.

Um potentially we could adjust some of our fees for inflation.

I I don't want to do that too willy-nilly, but I think maybe we could take a subset of these.

I'm looking at specifically liquor licenses because it's been a while since we've updated those, and just say how many years has it been since we updated liquor license fees.

Let's bump it up by whatever the CPI increased by in that time.

Can I say something like that?

Liquor license?

That was all my revenue, so go ahead.

So liquor licenses is something that I've been trying to dig into.

Um the cost of a liquor license is supposed to pay for a liquor inspector.

We don't have a liquor inspector.

Oh, we did.

There's so many in planet zoning, right?

Look at it.

Okay, go ahead.

I do not believe that we have a liquor inspector.

Um, when we raise the cost of liquor licenses, and I'm going to go back before my time on the council, and I'm gonna say 10 years.

Okay.

Um, there was a plan that the liquor license fees play paid for two police officers and a liquor inspector.

And can finance talk to that?

Do we know that for a fact?

That that is still happening.

I have that.

We have two alcohol beverage control enforcement officers, and then we have two temporary inspector pool positions in planning and zoning as well that work as backup for the alcohol beverage.

Just the inspectors.

There's two full-time liquor inspectors.

Yes.

Wait, these guys are listed as part-time.

So you have two alcohol beverage control enforcement, and then you have two temporary inspector pool positions.

All four of them are listed as part-time.

That's two full time.

Or less.

I don't know.

We don't know if they're we don't know if they're 20 hours a week or 10 hours.

I don't know how many I would have to.

Right.

Because there is there's a lot of talk among liquor license holders that their fees far outweigh, far outpace the actual cost.

Oh, okay.

So I would I would just have us delve into that before we started talking about raising those liquor licenses.

Sure.

I so far I had only heard one side of this, which was the clerk's office telling me we haven't raised these fees in a long time.

So point taken, we should hear from both sides on it.

Um, anybody you guys got any other reactions on those revenue things I brought up?

I can quickly run through the couple other cuts that we haven't talked about.

Um I talked about the risk management specialist.

Um this is kind of a cut, but more just a reorganization.

I think we might need to rethink exactly how the IT the fire department IT staffer works.

I don't want to get rid of it entirely, but there might be a better use within IT for that money.

Um the mayor's office requested a live enhancement around software and consultant, so I think we need to take a close look at those as we are looking for money.

Uh the one-time money, huh?

All three consultants.

No, I I'm well, we should look at all of them, but uh I feel strongly that the philanthropy one is worth the money.

Um, that's where I come I'm starting from, but you guys may disagree.

Um, and then there were four software packages the mayor's office asked for police special cleaning.

That that 200,000 uh just kind of galls me that we're talking about spending 200,000 for cleaning the police department and 18,000 for cleaning everywhere else.

Uh one thing that we should have sort of as an automatic is that now we know the deputy chief of staff's benefits, and that's gonna be a little bit lower, so that does free up a little bit of money for us, not a lot.

Um that's pretty much all the ones that I haven't otherwise talked about.

So that was my list of some cuts within the operating budget.

You guys got anything else you want to talk about today before we reconvene tomorrow for our closed session?

Just the closed session.

Uh just the closed session, and then I think we have time scheduled for additional deliberations.

But I'm hoping we can actually get out a little early tomorrow.

Nothing right now.

All right.

With that, is there a motion to adjourn?

Motion to adjourn.

Second.

All those in favor, please say aye.

Aye.