Alright, thank everybody for being here.

Appreciate all city staff and council members.

We'll call the uh Belgrade City Council workshop meeting to order.

And if you will please rise and follow me in the pledge.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands.

One nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

Roll call, please.

Here.

Here.

Here she's not insulting.

She's never gonna answer.

Here.

All right.

Look for a motion to excuse Councilmember Bell.

So by Deputy Mayor Madmo, second by Councilmember Menicucci.

Is there any discussion?

Is there any discussion?

Is there any discussion?

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

All those opposed, same sign.

Passes unanimously.

All right.

Moving on to our discussion agenda.

So discuss the funding framework for the Belgrade Forestry Assessment.

Mr.

Green.

Thank you, Mayor, members of the council.

Thank you.

I was going to forget.

Haven't used this clicker to go forward before on the slide, so bear with me if I can't figure out the two buttons.

Alright, so I'm going to be talking today about the funding framework that we currently have in place and then some recommendations for the future of the program for the urban forestry assessment fee that we have in the future and currently being formed urban forestry program and department in the city.

So taking a step back, the reason we're talking about this today is that we do have the beginnings of an urban forestry department, which is a very important part of any city.

Management, specifically, you know, the maintenance of existing trees for aesthetic purposes, but also for liability purposes as well, for safety purposes, and just keeping track of the existing maintenance, the existing inventory that we have.

There's also the planning component, you know, things like uh new developments that are happening, making sure that the trees that are selected and uh maintained in those developments are you know the right tree in the right place uh for the city and for the climate that we're in, as well as an education and community involvement uh element that we see as being part of the forestry department as well, uh working with the homeowners and property owners in our town to select again the right trees, really improve the strength of urban forest, and also and and definitely not least importantly, you know, the public health aspect that forestry brings to the city of Belgrade.

There's countless studies that show you know that a robust urban forest access to trees, you know, have uh benefits on both uh mental and physical health for communities and for members of those communities.

Uh so the reason we're talking here today is um because we are I think believe in the second year now of uh having a forestry assessment in place that was previously established through a flat fee method, um, and there's the potential to explore other options to figure out how this uh fee might be assessed better in the future to really capitalize on the equity um component of the fee schedules that we have and also you know to consider some of the more administrative components of uh of fee calculations.

Some of some of those administrative things are listed here now.

Some of the questions that we asked with our um with our consultants uh are we following established methods?

Uh have other cities been doing what we're doing.

Are the fees that we're looking at assessing proportional and related to the impacts that these types of parcels and lots have on the urban forest?

Is it easy to implement?

Is it easy for us to track and stay consistent year after year with the uh type of assessment that we're doing for the program?

And so we worked with our consultants, Cushing Terrell to take all these questions and really look at you know what our options are to establish a um a more equitable framework for the tree assessment for the forestry assessment.

Um so you can see the approach that Cushing Terrell take took when they uh were looking through uh some of their research, presenting some of their findings to us, uh really wanted it to be a goal-driven discussion.

What are we trying to get out of this?

What are the questions that we're trying to get answered by looking into this assessment?

What data is available that we're able to utilize?

What data is the city have available?

So we don't not trying to recreate the wheel when we're working on this assessment, as well as how is implementation going to look.

How is that methodology for implementation going to look?

With the ultimate goal of developing, like I said, an equitable alternative for funding the urban forestry program.

And then, like I said, so previous slide had a lot of those more administrative questions.

What are we really you know looking at as far as the feasibility of implementing an assessment fee?

But really, some of the other questions that we need to be asking ourselves too are the equity component of this.

You know, before we were doing a flat free approach, but there are a lot of considerations, a lot of factors in play that uh you know may influence how certain properties might pay into this assessment more than other properties.

Uh who's sharing a bigger cost of the burden of the maintenance of the forestry division.

Um that's kind of a hard question to answer, uh, which is why we're here tonight discussing this is you know, a lot of the different assessments, a lot of the different districts that the city has or that cities have, are a little bit more easily identifiable to what the impact specific properties might have.

But a good urban forest benefits everyone.

You know, everyone benefits from having a good tree care, good urban forest in their town, and not every property might have the same impacts on decreasing you know the aesthetics or something that the city might have that we're trying to mitigate with the uh with the urban forest and with the forestry divisions.