I will call the second budget meeting to order and ask the clerk to call the roll.

Ms.

Malahan.

Present.

Ms.

PMC Smith.

Present.

Ms.

Quitec.

Present.

Laird.

Ms.

Leon present.

Ms.

Wilhelm.

Present.

And Mr.

Cologne.

Councilman Laring, Councilman Cologne will not be joining us tonight due to family emergencies.

YouTube reminder if you start this meeting after 6 p.m., make sure to scroll ahead so that the YouTube stream is current rather than a recording of an earlier portion of this meeting.

The following proposed budgets will be reviewed tonight.

Golf course enterprise fund on page 259, administration on page 27.

Council Mayor, Treasurer, Controller, Law Bureau on page nine, general fund revenue on page one, general expenses on page 170, civic expenses 174, debt services 178.

After each topic, I will recognize council members for questions.

After certain topic groupings, I will take public comments solely on those topics.

First up is the golf course enterprise fund.

I'll recognize Mr.

Eric Evans Business Administrator to make the presentation.

Yep.

Night two of three.

So to kick it off, we do start with the golf fund.

I will begin by uh introducing Mr.

Paul Viola, who is the PGA pro out of the golf course and runs it 12 months a year, seven days a week, sun up to sundown.

And although the course closes for play at 11 30 into December, still a lot of work that gets done in order to prepare for the opening each year, and that's weather dependent.

But I think this year we started in March 12.

Okay.

But he is also golf pro, but he's also the general manager.

So we'll be in charge of all operations at the golf course.

So if you turn to page 259, we'll start with the operating revenues of the course.

We'll begin by saying some of the opening ideas is that the golf fund, the golf course itself was established and built and opened for play in 1956.

It is an enterprise fund.

So like some of the funds we talked about the other night, they're self-sustaining, independent of the general fund.

There are a number of sources of revenues, and you'll see them listed on page 259.

But there's an 18-hole course on Illox Mill Road.

Across the street from the 18 hole is a nine-hole course, and we collect both green fees and cart rentals, and you'll see those listed.

Next to the nine-hole course on Illox Mill Road, which is behind um there's uh the I guess the cabin that also is the driving range, and that's open every day at the golf course is open.

It gets a lot of play.

This is something that used to be a side note, and really since the improvements were made, things have taken off, much like they have um on the as at the course as well.

But even that picture you see in the bottom, it's loaded with men, women, and children.

Almost any nice day, you're gonna see it filled up.

Other sources of revenue, the restaurant lease.

Uh, it's Clubhouse Grill.

They've been with us for some time.

We just renewed, and if you remember this summer, that lease came to you and was approved for an additional seven years.

So they're still operating under the 2025 um lease, but as of 1126 through 2020 32 will be the new terms and conditions.

We're both really happy.

They've been a great partner, not only to the city, but to the community.

The cart barn lease we call it, it's at the bottom.

If you ever enter and you come in to the golf course prior, you come down the hill where the big parking lot is on the left was a it was a cart barn it and call it that because it held the golf carts, and in uh 2020, we approached by and we interested, and then if most of you signed off on that lease, became a fully operational golf simulator that is again open year-round.

It it's not in any way a competitor to golf course, but we see it more with synergies that it brings up.

It's raining, people can still play golf.

Um it and it allows the golf players off season to continue improving their game.

So that lease 21 through 2027.

So it's next year in the following year until that one would be up.

The next snapshot, a little hard to see.

I did give a hard copy to members of council.

This is an ongoing draft that tracks revenue by month from 2010 to 2025.

And we can start moving some of those older years off, but you'll see the yellows when the course was struggling, yellow, red, and green are there to signify revenue levels.

Uh, in 16, so it really started to spin to 1.3, the bottom number 1.2 to 1.1.

That point we're well below.

And if and with the idea of being a self-sustaining fund, the idea is you should be making enough revenue to cover all your direct costs as well as general fund charges, the medical and uh pension and everything else that goes along with it.

And to they they do do that.

But the course, uh, and in 2018, we borrowed money, but we are now able to make actually capital appropriations each year.

That if their revenues for now are exceeding the expenses, that money is placed into account to help invest at uh to into the larger assets, whether it be equipment or property or playing conditions at the course.

And you'll see really post COVID, like um different things reacted um coming out of COVID in different ways.

Golf was really something that was say it had a rebirth, but it really took off.

Allow also experienced some surging.

But between that and the improvements we made into the course 22, 23, 4 and 5, you'll see year after year revenues increased to 16 in 2021 to two, which included a LSA grant.

So the number below the green line, the 1.8 or 1.9 is uh the actual number if you if you adjust for the the 160,000 grant.

2022 hit 1.9.

Last year it was 2.1, 2024 was 2.2.

And if you look to the newest column, we're at 2.237 with two months.

So there's a very good chance November's been kind enough.

The numbers drop off, the days get shorter, frost delays enter.

So the window certainly closes, but there's enough play left that we should be able to reach that 2.3, which would be new record.

And each of the blue block the blocks there are the cells that are lit up in blue, represent the high water mark for each particular month.

And you'll notice, and if you remember from 2025, it was a slow start to the summer.

We came out of spring, April, May, especially June was quite unseasonable.

We saw that at both at the pools, which I'll talk about a little bit later.

The revenue in the attendance really took off in July and really high in August.

The same thing happened at the golf course.

May and June didn't set records because it's very weather dependent.

And uh by the time the summer conditions showed up, uh, the numbers certainly responded.

So revenues are are in a great place.

Next, we'll move to the expenses, and that's those are listed on page 261.

The golf course is run with four full-time year-round employees, two are TAMS and two are union SEIU.

One is the mechanic, one is uh the maintenance worker, the two full-time is Paul as a general manager, and Chris Judd as the course superintendent.

They are supplemented with a large part-time or what you call temporary help seasonal crew, they get hired in March and the course opens, and when the course shuts down, uh, that that employment will end for that that crew, and then they fire them up again in the spring.

After the employment costs, which are uh listed on 261, we'll move down into material supplies and equipment.

You'll see at the bottom um propane.

Uh what I say the bottom, I'm talking about account 42, 141.

Propane account entered uh exited this year as part of the new lease.

The clubhouse taking over the building is taking over the propane bill.

So, what was paid for by the golf course this year will now be paid by the Clubhouse Grill.

So that's an expense that will fall off in 2026.

Uh, I will point you to the 42075 through 42092, the last uh six, eight accounts or all the general fund charges.

That's what show that's the part that shows the course not only pays its direct costs, but does make the payment for the MMO general fund charges, their own medical workman's comp, social security, and the last two line items are the uh bond redemption.

That's the the note that we took out in 2018.

Uh that is a 20-year note, it's 125,000 each year, and that was to paid for the number of upgrades that were made to the course when we did not have cash.

This slide will kind of pre uh cover what we did 18 to 23.

There goes early steps to reduce full-time staff, backfield of seasonal crew, we renegotiated the restaurant lease to bride new revenue, brought in the new tenant in the former cart barn.

We did take the borrowing for the bank note to get things started.

Those that money has been spent, and the improvements are listed.

Drainage, the course um flooding a lot of areas made unplayable.

And if you can't play, then your revenue is zero for those days.

So that happens very little from when versus uh pre-2018.

Irrigation to control water on the course is critical.

So irrigation was improved and replaced on both the 18, but also the nine hole.

Uh, the pavilion was added out back, those are for events.

Uh, and before that, it was just a tent that was posted up that didn't work very well.

So now it's a permanent pavilion, which makes us much more competitive to attract tournaments.

All the sand traps or bunkers were revamped, replaced, some were added, some were taken away.

The cart passed, the blacktop were torn up.

They were greatly damaged by the trees on the course.

So they're removed, reduced, and then replaced.

And after those were done, there's been uh an investment in the turf and maintenance equipment.

Those are the mowers and other machines that are needed to maintain course conditions.

More recently, last year in 2024, the Pro Shop.

If you look at the pictures on the left, that red box covers the area next to the cart barn and the picture on the top left.

You'll see the cart barn in the parking lot.

That area is where a small shed.

So if you look at the picture on the bottom left, that was the shed that existed where they want where they would operate out of it, meet the golfers to set them up.

That's where you pay, you get prepared and just head out to the golf course.

That was really just a hot dog turning station of snacks that barn that was built in um early 2010.

Never designed to have uh a number of people working in there.

They used to work up top, but it was much more efficient down here that they chose to invest, and we did, and you'll see the picture on the right at the bottom.

The second one in second from the left is a new park barn that's completed, and we always welcome you to go and visit it.

That's where the starters are located.

That's where Paul's office.

It's small, it's humble, but it's new, and it's uh very appropriately sized, and uh has a bathroom in there.

You can service from the front, and also inside a small closet office and um merchandise is available at the pro shop.

So that was been completed with the help of our engineering department.

So Mike Alcallin Basil Yandam were critical on that.

And we now are working with them for the next steps of the of the barn on the bottom right hand side.

You all recognize that that's up on it looks middle road next to the recycling.

If you come out of the recycling center, that's what you're looking at.

It's in bad condition.

It's it's quite damaged.

Uh, engineering's put eyes on it a number of times with the idea can it be renovated or replaced?

Uh it cannot be renovated.

It's uh deteriorated behind beyond that.

That the plan is to take the top off of it, maintain the foundation, and build uh above the for keep the first level and build two and three.

But that's in the hands of our engineers, and uh they hope that they're able to move that into design and build next summer, so that can be replaced.

Because if you come out of recycling center, you'll notice part of the roof, the slate roof is starting to deteriorate, some of the doors, you know, a little rattly.

So it's definitely time for a number of reasons to have that replaced.

So that's the next operation at the golf course.

That ends our section on the golf course at this time.

Uh, Paul is with us.

If you could approach the podium, please.

And Paul will be available to answer any questions they may have regarding operations of the course, or if we have any questions about uh the budget.

Thank you.

Welcome, Paul.

Thank you.

Um, I will turn to the parks and recreation committee.

Uh, committee chair is not with us this afternoon.

Um, but I will turn to the committee members.

Uh Mr.

Callahan, do you have any questions?

Sure.

Paul, how you doing?

I'm doing well.

Thank you.

I want to congratulate you and your staff over there from you know, making this probably one of the nicest public um courses in the state.

I know there's what there's three of them, right?

I think in the state.

Allentown's got one.

I think Wilkesburg's got one, Erie or four.

Correct.

Yeah.

Um, well, it's come a long way since you know 2018.

Thank you.

Um, what's going on?

What's the uh story with the the first floor?

Do we have any plans for that?

The uh of the original clubhouse where the bathrooms, the old bathrooms were.

Yeah, so the that is now been included with the restaurant took that over.

Uh so the restaurant has the whole building, they're gonna be using that for uh events, parties, and coffee, like a coffee facility in the in the spring.

Are they ripping out the bathrooms down here?

Well, they're supposed to be are they ripping them out?

They're supposed to be renovating it.

Yes, all right.

And then um on the barn.

Uh, if we get rid of that, I I've never been in there, you know, to be honest with you.

So is there really a need for a three-story barn there?

Or is that just yeah.

So it's is there a need for a three-story?

Well, it's two stories.

It is so it's just two stories, yeah.

Correct.

It's just two stories, and the rosters are very large.

It looks like the three does, yeah.

It's just it's very tall on the inside.

Um, is there a need for that much space for our equipment?

Yes.

There is.

Yes.

What do we have on the second floor up there?

Like, what do we use that for?

The second floors where we store because the garage doors are bigger and there's enough of clearance.

Uh, it's most of the uh rough units, the 16-footers, uh, because they don't fit in the other barn.

It's too too small.

All right.

Do we have any idea what what that renovation costs will be?

Uh at this time, we don't right now.

We are we're entertaining.

We have two two companies have come out.

We're just waiting for some uh quotes from them.

Um, as far as the the price of the project, we we don't know at this point what it's gonna be.

Yeah, so all the work that we did on in in 2018, Mr.

Evans me and you and Mr.

Bark and a few people.

Um what was the gentleman's name that you know that we hired?

I forgot his name again.

Kelsey Kelsener, yeah, Larry, yeah.

Yeah.

Um I mean, it the the irrigation is 100% better.

The traps, you know, there was water in the traps all the time after rain, they're irrigating.

The sand's unbelievable.

Uh the um we have an automated system now for the fertilizing and the um, yeah.

So I you know, that's part of it.

I mean, obviously, yes, correct.

Yeah, but uh the irrigation I was talking about, the water removal off the course and off the the drainage, yeah.

Drainage, yeah.

Yeah, yes.

So we we come a long way.

We knocked down how many trees?

Over 250.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

It was a lot.

So the the only thing I want to see that I like to see, and I don't know, I have no idea how much it costs.

But everybody talks about there's no water on the course.

So when I when I'm whenever I play, I'm always looking at where can we put like a little pond?

And I don't know if it's possible.

I don't I think I've talked to you about this.

We have, I mean, we we've discussed it in the past.

Uh, you know, maybe putting some putting one down on 15 uh down in front of the green.

Um, you know, what one of the things that makes us very successful is the fact that we are very user-friendly on the golf course.

There isn't water.

There, it's it's a little bit easier for a lot of the seniors.

They they have the opportunity to run everything up to the green.

So yes, everybody would love to see water on the golf course.

I don't know what that would cost to put in a man-made water feature.

I I don't know.

I was thinking like if you when you're coming up approaching 18 before the um before the green, there's a water line already there.

I mean water line.

I don't know how much we'd have to use, but there's also like a little bit of a a swale right in front of the the green.

And I think that if we could get people, I don't know if the unions would be against us or whatever, but if we could get someone to volunteer, and I think I could get some contractors to to do that to dig out the pond area, you know, uh pond area, and put we'd have to pay for the liner, obviously.

But you know, I could get someone to probably donate their time as far as digging it out.

We in the city could do the liner, and then there's all there's a um a water main line there to fill it up, but I think the the water there's ear there there's drainage swales already there, you know.

I mean, and I think it'd be like a I this is just a uh you know a wish list a home run, right?

Yeah, I mean, of course.

I mean, we we would all love to have the water feature in there.

Yeah, and it it would be a signature hole too, you know.

Correct.

So and you know, if you look at like uh you know a lot of the other golf courses, they put like a little um fountain, yeah, fountain in there.

Well, you need that.

You gotta you can't have it stagnant, right?

Right.

You know, that's the biggest issue with having water is just to make sure, you know, the I'm I'm looking at hopefully sometime down the road.

So other than that, you know, I uh I want to thank you and all your staff for all the way the place is amazing.

Uh the it was in great shape this year.

Uh the greens are in great shape.

So you know, I want to thank you and your staff for all the work you do over here.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Uh Ms.

Wilhelm.

Sure.

Uh I I just I missed the dates of the closing and opening.

Could you just sure?

Yeah.

So we we stop uh usually sometime around November 30th.

It all depends on when it falls.

So this year it would be November 30th, again, weather pending.

Uh and then we reopen in March, usually the second week of March, like around the 10th.

Um that's when the staff comes back.

Uh again, that's weather pending too.

So this year we I think we opened up on the 12th.

Okay.

So is it just you for those winter months?

It's myself and the it's the four full-time people.

It's the two uh the union members, the the the worker and the mechanic, and we do all the winter maintenance on the on the equipment, try to get some projects on the course if the weather allows us to, and the superintendent myself.

Got it.

Um and I was just curious to know if the virtual, I forget the name of it.

I'm I don't got it.

Or to flight.

Yes, yeah.

Is is that you finding that to be more successful each year?

Are people taking advantage of it?

They they are.

I mean, it's it's it's we go hand in hand.

Uh they're their busy season is obviously in the winter, the the colder months when we're close.

So our our patrons have a place to go, keeping them in-house, you know.

So it's been a it's been a very good relationship.

Good.

That's that's good to hear.

And um, no other questions, just congratulations on the success of the course and thank you.

You know, every year we hear about the very hard work that you put into it on a smaller staff than you're and you used to have.

Um that hard work is reflected in these excellent financials as well.

So congratulations and thank you.

Questions from council?

Councilman Crimson.

Oh, okay.

I just wanted to say thank you so much, Paul.

I think um, I hear a lot of great things about the uh course, even though I'm not a golfer, and I know Mr.

Judd is really dedicated for Solid Hours and the restaurant I do go to, and I think that just keeps getting better and better.

Um and the restaurant I do go to, and I think that just keeps getting better and better.

I know you lease it, but just the quality of staff and the food.

Um, and I just wanted to ask.

I know you in the past, are we still doing like complimentary um you know, discounts or fees for students and letting students from the different high schools come and use it?

Okay, that's great.

Yeah, we still have student rates and you know, high school age.

Uh, we still service all the high school golf teams.

There's three of them that play there.

So from the beginning of August till usually the end of October, they they get you know, the teams have full full use of our facilities.

Great.

That's great for the kids.

Thank you so much.

You're welcome.

Keep up the good work.

Thank you.

Councilman Kitzer.

Thank you.

And thanks for all your hard work.

Um thank you.

Uh I had two quick questions.

One was related to youth golf, so I'll just start there.

Um, are any use of the um course for developmental, like for below high school to bring kids in and expose them to golf and sure.

So we we we put we have a partnership with uh the uh first T uh the Lehab Alley.

So uh we we donate the facility to them on Mondays for four hours throughout the course of the summer, they're there for like 14 weeks.

Uh so anyone can come in, join in that class, and it's all free for them to do that.

And then uh, you know, we we run programs at the golf course.

Obviously, there's fees some you know, fees involved with some of those for for juniors, junior camps, junior clinics, junior programs uh for for them to come out and play.

And they're they're all reasonably cost.

That's great.

And then my only other question was the um the number for gas really stood out to me.

Um, and uh I know you've put a lot of investments into equipment and things like that already, but is the gas for the golf carts?

Golf carts and the maintenance equipment, the turf equipment, yes.

So any chance that the next round of golf carts might be EV.

So the only problem with that is it is the I have nowhere to house them.

Um each golf court needs a charger, needs to be hooked up to electricity.

Yeah, and you will need inside storage, and then you need a charger for every one of them, and then they all have to be plugged in, charged in every night, and it needs to be covered in from from elements and weather.

Okay, so that would be another investment.

And yes, it would correct.

Okay, all right.

Thank you very much.

You're welcome.

Um that exhaust council.

Uh I see you once a year, and it's always great news.

So thank you for that.

Thank you.

Um, I'll accept any public comments.

Okay.

Can I ask one more question?

Go for it.

How many acres is the um nine-hole course?

Nine hole.

I I I wouldn't know off time.

I mean, I can find out.

I I don't know exactly off top.

I think the whole facility is 246 acres.

And how many how many rounds?

Um, I mean, it went up substantially, Mr.

Evans said, as far as uh on the nine hole.

Yes.

Yeah, the nine.

How many rounds on the nine hole?

The nine holes doing between, I mean, I don't have the exact number for this year, uh, but we do between 17 and 19,000 rounds on the nine hole.

All right, thank you.

You're welcome.

Yeah, the 18 took off, but really the larger margins were the nine hole in the yeah, and the and the range is what we just saw.

Nine hole in the range, to be to be very honest with everyone.

That's that's where we make our money.

Nine hole in the range.

The you know, I can only put so many people out on the on the 18-hole course.

We do start, you know, obviously starting times every 10 minutes for four groups, um, short of raising rates, which we don't, you know, we do every two years.

Um, but uh and it's very minimal, like this year we raised it a dollar and two dollars.

I mean, it wasn't much.

Uh so we're kind of you know locked into the amount of rate uh that we can make right now.

We run at about a 94 to 96 percent uh fill on the t-sheet pretty much all summer.

Um so the nine-hole in the driving range is where we've seen the uh the biggest the biggest increase, the biggest thing, you know, between the two facilities at the 18-hole course we do between 36 and 38, 39,000 rounds, and then like I said, in about another 17 to 19.

You remember it's only nine holes, so we gotta dovetail people in there, get them working, get them going.

So yeah.

Yeah, if you could I'm gonna say tomorrow the next week, if we could possibly find out how much acreage the nine hole course has, you know.

I'm just curious.

Yep, I could do that.

Thank you.

Yeah.

All right.

I didn't see anybody from the public for any public comments.

Um, so we will move on to our next agenda item.

Thank you, Paul.

Thank you, Paul.

Thanks for coming out.

It's great to see you again.

Um turning back to Mr.

Evans for the administration.

I will now recognize Mr.

Evans again.

This is administrators to review your budget.

Thank you.

I don't think Paul, you know, Paul Z is leaving now that we talked the other night about some tough years on 2010.

We looked at some memos, and when you looked at that chart, Paul's been with us long.

And if he came with us from from Silver Creek uh over two decades ago, so that that period that 15, 16, 718, he was through and he knew when it was tough the golf course couldn't pay its bills and didn't have any cash.

So that the turnarounds, a lot of credit to him and his his staff that returns every year.

If you go there, they're all they're also renowned, not only for their professional conditions, but the services when you get there.

The uh the men and women that work there are all very well respected and very respectful because there's a lot of a lot of clients.

They have thousands and thousands of visitors and golfers each and every summer.

So very proud of that.

Um, we will turn then to page 29, I guess, is the where the numbers start for administration.

Uh, we'll move into that.

And like to begin as the departments traditionally done, including what we saw on Monday night with Water Sword and Public Works, the leadership of the administration is in attendance tonight, and they're sitting behind me.

I will acknowledge they are true professionals and experts in their field.

And I want to thank him for the continued dedication of the city of Bethlehem.

On page 29 is the administration, it's made up of two people.

You'll see, and I've talked about this before.

I need to know there we go.

Okay, that slide that you see now is that the administration city hall is is very lean.

And when you see the numbers, you know, it's one and two.

There are people that have vacation and sick days.

Often some of these bureaus are you know one one deep.

So we continue to work hard with uh the staff that we have.

Administration, two people a business administrator and the director of budget, uh Lenny Lazarchek, who you're also familiar with.

Salaries are the biggest expense for the administration.

Uh, as most as with most initiatives in the city, the budget and audit are the largest lifts for many people.

But Lindy has a large role in bringing both of them together.

They happen to come to completion at the same time.

Our audit as you were aware, we did send it to you in a couple of weeks, right?

The same time that this budget was coming together.

So it was a real peak period for us.

And uh from the administration, we spend our time working with partners for banking, finance, medical insurance, workman's comp.

We complete reports for the state.

Uh, we work with the pensions, we negotiate negotiate the late uh labor union contracts for three bargain units.

And if you're aware of that, we completed a four-year contract with SEIU last year.

That was one of our achievements.

That's 25 through 2028.

Next year, it will be one of our large uh goals as both the FOP and the IAFF enter the fourth and final year.

Their four-year contracts run from 2023 through 2026.

So you can stay tuned as we move into 2026.

Uh, if we turn to page moving to page 33.

IS administrative services or IT.

This is a group of five.

It's led by Jonathan Pelosi, the Jonathan Paul's there, networking manager who's behind me.

Paul's he and uh Doug Shadel, who's our programming manager.

They they are co-supervisors of this, they have different roles, but they work together, they've worked together for quite some time.

They're experienced, high skilled.

They try to take vacations, but they also by the nature of what they do are on call andor available 24-7 and 365 for the entire city.

To IT Bureau's list of achievements and goals is overwhelming as they control all the hardware, software, programming, database, integration with regard to both ongoing maintenance, the security, the support desk, and all the new initiatives across the city is a support PCs, servers, body cams, car cams, uh, cameras on the buildings and the light poles.

So it's not just internal to city, but it's our field work and it's the city itself.

The largest expense in IT you'll see is department contracts, and that's a uh account 42047.

It's a very large number, including includes if you turn to page 34, a number of support subscriptions.

Our newest one being the the move to Windows 365 is now a rather than purchasing and owning uh for useful life.

Now it's a subscription.

So you'll see that as a last item of department contracts at a healthy price of 205,000 uh for all the cities.

We did ramp up, and uh, believe Jonathan, everyone's on now.

Almost almost almost all the city.

The last was uh some of the platoons in uh fire as well as some of the police, but uh everyone's now converted to that.

So, but that's new ongoing expense in IT that you'll see.

If we move to page 37 in financial services, Joe Vlasic is the director of financial services.

He sits behind me.

You've I maybe I've met him at a finance committee meeting.

Uh the financial services task is accounting for the 244.

The cover slide I had on tonight showed our combined.

We have we talk about the proposed budget, but it's actually truly 10 budgets as each fund is self-sustaining and balance.

So we have 10 budgets for accumulated um total of 244 million dollars, and that's revenue.

So when you think about through financial services eyes, 244 of revenue, but there's also 244 million of expense because if it's balance, that's coming in and also going out.

So the responsibility of that bureau is that they they're gonna collect that either through cash, through check, through ACH through wire, each transaction needs to be identified, the correct amount and account, the funds need to be reconciled as this surges from all the each of the different departments across the city.

So in this bureau, it's organization, persistence, attention to details paramount to keep it because it's it's incessant in what is coming at them day to day again with the limited staff.

So Joe's job is to review all existing processes.

He's done that.

Joe has been in here a year and a half, but his background is in auditing, so he has a unique perspective, what he brings to the table, not only what he's seen today today, but his past experience.

So we've made a number of changes in financial services, uh, including cross-training the staff, and that's continuing as we continue to uh review all our processes across uh the entire administration.

He is also the primary point of our audit again, which just wrapped up.

So on December 2nd, Joe will be here and we'll be involved with some of the question answering during that period.

Turn to page 41.

We move to procurement.

This is a staff of two.

Sandy Steidel is with us in the background, Sandy.

And uh Shane Filman is uh specialist that's been with us uh a couple years.

Uh, Sandy L also mentions is leader not only in administration but across the Lehab Valley.

She's a president of Lehigh Valley Cooperating Purchasing Council and also vice president of the Pennsylvania Purchasing Association.

So this administrative function is to pursue strategic, efficient, and also the word compliant sourcing methods.

And when you work when people come from outside to work for municipality, they do realize a number of compliance issues we have, and they're all for good reasons.

So she does spending a good deal of her time working closely with both the controller's office as well as the law bureau to make sure everything's in line that we want to move.

We want to be efficient and quick, but also we're taking the necessary steps ahead of time so that all those checks, uh check boxes are under control.

So she will work across the city to create and develop the bid specs when we talk about the RFPs.

She worked through contracts.

She was um instrumental in setting up the uh software program SharePoint, which we mentioned for the electronic passing through of contracts.

So that continues, and we look to build that out to add more functions to our SharePoint.

Uh, the largest expense in procurement is gonna be um department contracts, but also the advertising as when we talked about the business that needs to go out there.

We move to taxes um in 0206.

That's on page 45.

Ellie Rosario is our tax auditor.

So thank you, LS.

She's responsible for administrating the city real estate tax.

Do that directly and also assist our vendors, tri-state Keystone in the collection of our outer taxes and our 511, which is a business privilege.

You'll see what when we talk about rip when we talk about revenue, mercantile, EIT, LS LST.

The collection for these are outsourced, so she will have a lot of interaction with them, updating, auditing.

She routinely runs audits with our enterprise software to cross check and examine, make sure the businesses and everyone is compliant.

She'll work with special events to ensure the vendors at our many, many events are also in compliance with all our vending laws and uh tax, I believe, of I would say of all our bureaus within the administration is the most frontward facing me, other than I guess the golf, is that meaning that they work with the public.

And Ellie spends a lot of time and she works very hard, making sure our citizens and businesses both understand, we're able to follow the tax laws.

And she does that through phone calls, but also lots of public visits, and she's also developed a great website.

So anyone with any questions, director of that site.

It's up to date, interactive, and uh full of information.

So she has a great job in there.

That she's working now that you'll see it's just one person, it's one person as a as doing this.

We have a part-time that position is now vacant for a part-time position.

We're looking to we had a couple interviews that didn't quite work out, but we're looking to fill that because she's uh in the meantime um holding the fort up there in the tax bureau on the third floor.

And then we move to the last bureau in administration.

This is human resources.

This is a uh staff of three.

The director Michelle Sahaki is with us in the macro in the middle.

Uh, Michelle is a has been our director and similar to the other bureaus, uh, the department within our department of administration.

Human resources assists and supports all the departments uh from recruiting onboarding new employees, training them once they're here in a number of different ways, whether it's police or fire or it's entire groups, it could be safety training, uh tending to the needs of both our current and also our retired employees who at times still need supports and are looking for supports from their previous employer.

She works with each of our and is a really a key point person in each of our three bargaining units uh on key issues day to day and week to week, uh, as well as when the contract comes up.

She's gonna be part of that team when we sit down to negotiate contracts.

Her bureau is also responsible for a long list of federal, state, and local laws to be compliant with.

They do handle all of payroll internally.

We do that inside, uh, as well as work with our partners for medical workmen's comp, define benefit, and um pension plans.

In addition, workplace policies are continually reviewed, so they're met so they meet today's workplace environment in a fair and equitable manner.

And Michelle excels just by the nature of this uh position in this bureau, some of the most delicate, difficult and stressful circumstances and the schedule that turns upside down in a minute.

So with the staff of three, uh that like all our bureaus, they remain very busy.

So these are the leaders of the administrative team, they're responsible, dependable, highly skilled.

And this time, uh, either they or I I can answer any questions you may have relative to the bureau or department.

Right, thank you.

Turning to council, any council members with any questions?

Uh nope.

No, it's just not a denotes.

So um, council members with questions.

Yeah, yeah.

Hello, thank you for that information excuse me.

Um I wrote something down here, and I hope I'm going to remember where it was.

But uh had a question for IS.

First of all, a thank you to Jonathan for always being there for me because working in the Mac and Google world of technology, I often end up losing my access to my email, and I don't know why, but he's always there for me.

So thank you, Jonathan.

I did have a question though about moving from the cloud to an internal enterprise server.

There's a piece, there was a piece in the um where was it?

It's a it's a specific server.

Uh GIS really.

Yes, thank you.

ARC GIS, yes.

Good one.

Um, so if you could go to the microphone, uh I was just curious because everybody seems to be moving to the cloud.

So while we're kind of pulling it back in to uh uh server, certainly.

It's uh it's mainly uh it's it's administered by our GIS manager, uh Steven, who is not here tonight.

So I can't give you the details, but the idea is to have more security, more control, and um to be able to build more applications internally and then supply external contacts through the Ezri cloud to be able to get to that type of thing, but we have much more control internally than we would externally.

Got it.

Okay, thank you.

Sure.

That was the only question I had for you guys.

Um, and then I was just curious how often we go out to bid on the um tax collection contracts and whether there are multiple third-party vendors who handle this and and just wondering um, you know, I have nothing against the tax collectors we're using a keystone.

It's very easy to use, but I'm just curious about um the process.

Keystone is a county collector, so they collect for all the municipalities across that.

So it's not something we don't have control over to do that.

I'm on the Ms.

Lazarchek.

If you could join us at the microphone, take their mic, yeah.

There's actually it's countywide collection, and each um municipality has a representative, and I'm part of on that board.

And um, the majority we could go out for bid if the majority would want to do so.

Okay, thank you.

And then uh is that the same for um Tri State is our collector, I believe two more years.

We have two more years in the contract, and then we'll look to see um what the result if there's a need to go out to bid, if we're not satisfied with his collection efforts, or we'll just determine it at that point in time.

Great.

Thank you.

I was just wondering when it was gonna come up and yeah, yeah.

Appreciate that.

Um, and then I just wanted to um definitely uh um offer some praise to the HR team for uh 77 hires in one year with a team of uh three, two and a half.

What is it?

It's most impressive.

Um, having come from you know working in HR for a long time uh and working on employer brand and recruitment and everything with with our talent team.

I know that that is an incredible number for the size of your team.

So um, and also appreciation to your team for helping me with my W4 this just this week.

So uh great job there.

Um, and those are the only things I had.

So thank you.

Thanks to everybody again.

Questions from other members of council.

Councilwoman Well.

My my one question was about the jump in the uh department contracts in the in IT.

You answered that.

But so um really I just wanted to say thank you all.

Um we all say many times every budget season, every year that the budget is the reflection of so many people working uh behind the scenes.

And I feel like you're behind the behind the scenes.

Um, and but you know, what this represents is just an extraordinarily strong foundation on which everything else builds.

So um I thank you for that.

And and please um pass our thanks on to your teams.

Although I know we are operate very leanly and meanly, and most of you are here.

Um you are the team, but um, just wanted to express my thanks for for your service and dedication to the city.

Any other questions from members of council?

Okay, I would now recognize the mayor or his administration to review his budget.

Thank you.

And I just want uh I want to thank also the council people for the compliments here, and you know, going back to my time in councils, like I really think that every time one of these bureaus or departments has an opportunity to present, it is an opportunity to say thank you because we have just amazing employees, and um, you know, many departments we don't have for a lot of reasons, we just don't have extra people to be able to take on these tasks.

And when there's a new task that comes up, it becomes something that becomes shared by our current uh employees most times.

Um, and the people, and this is not unique to the people behind me now.

Um, but we really do have the level of service that people come to expect from the city is from the people that are delivering these services.

Just want to make one comment on the IT space, and this is not a specific one, is it it is an area that in the coming years, you know, a rather large look at how the city handles a lot of things as far as IT is going to be necessary.

And this is an oversimplification, but as technology technology has developed over the past 20, 25 years with the internet, you have different systems that often operate independent of each other.

And the technology doesn't always necessarily exist to be able to tie all those systems into each other.

Oftentimes to be able to have systems tie into each other, you have to almost ask people to build specific connection systems for operator system A and operator system B that we may have gotten in 2003 and 2009.

So it would not it will not be cheap and it will not be quick, but it is one of those things that people within individual departments talk about as something that over, and when I say the city, I'm talking about the next you know, five, 10, 15 years, is it's gonna be it, it's it's gonna be one of the big things for the city to take on, and we're not alone there.

I mean, other places are in the same position where you can't just rebuild your entire infrastructure every five years.

So a lot of other places, school districts are similar, colleges, universities, private business, where you just have basically every time you added a system, you added the possibility or the probability that it didn't connect to your individual system.

So one department might not have access to all of the information in another department within the same system, and then even if you make the decision to do the upfront infrastructure cost of buying new system, you both have to think forward as far as how long is this going to be good for.

But then there's obviously the I'm not sure if interruption is the word, but all of the services you're providing currently are gonna have to go through that transition as well.

And that takes training, that takes all sorts of different things, and with our the way many of our jobs are, where we have one finance fantastic person, but we don't have people in an office that aren't doing work, you don't have other people that can just go do that other task.

So it's gonna take a lot of planning.

Um, I'm not sure exactly where it's going, but I just wanted to mention that that is sometimes people in council or other people ask, well, doesn't this system talk to that system?

And trust me, we spend a lot of time in the IT department does as good of a job as possible trying to develop those um those systems, but it is just it is is something that we're going to have to focus on as a city at some point in the future, but it's not going to be easy, it's not gonna be quick, and it's not gonna be cheap.

Um so before you move on to your budget, I would be remiss if I didn't uh I know councilwoman Laird isn't here, but her and I have talked at length about this very issue about the an IT upgrade to the city and what that's actually gonna look like in cost, and it's one of those things where people don't see the immediate benefit where it's like we spend a million dollars on a park and there's this amazing park, but the services that they would get will be faster and higher quality.

And to turn to John and say thank you for the 10,000 resets of my password.

I apologize for not mentioning that.

So thank you, thank you, thank you again.

I'm not sure any upgrades are gonna help with that particular issue.

But that's a racial necessary upgrade.

I'm working on it.

It it is it is uh it is something where, and then obviously the other factor that is implicit to all this obviously is AI and what AI is able to do or not able to do.

And I mean, that world is just moving so quickly.

Um, that when I talk to people when you look at people in other cities, like nobody has the perfect long-term answer.

There are people that are making very large short-term investments with the idea that they think things are plateauing or they think they know where things are going, and so on and so forth.

And you very much need to do that.

But with that being said, um, you know, it's not, there's no easy answers.

And a lot of the current, I'm not sure if limitations is the word.

Um, but when people say, can't we do this?

Sometimes that's a situation where like we literally just can't do it.

And people's expectations with the internet and with technology are getting higher and higher as far as quick as far as what you can do as far as can't I just go on and do one thing, can I do this in 20 seconds?

Can I have everything?

And so they're just it's nothing is in a silo, and we haven't um necessarily taken a look at the big at the big picture, but at some point in the next couple of years, I think there's going to be some kind of like long-range systemic planning because right now we have like financial systems that don't talk to these systems and don't talk to these systems, and the current people are doing a great job, but it's just there's a better way to do this over the long term.

Yeah.

So I don't know if anybody has any quite any other questions about that important topic.

Any questions about the topic of transitioning and IT within the city?

No.

Okay.

I think we will move to see your budget, sir.

Absolutely.

Um, so then I will be uh talking about the next couple here.

And uh, if you turn to page um, I believe it is page 14 and 15.

Um, I just want to um say thank you to the um employees in my office who often work long hours, they work weekends, they are probably with the exception of the police chief, um and uh uh they are the most public facing of our employees, uh, other than the police chief and myself.

And um, I really just want to take the opportunity to thank them.

And I think if you look at page 14 and 15, uh that list of accomplishments gets longer and longer as the years go on.

And um, when we talk about the achievements, and I go to a lot of places and people talk about a lot of the great things that are going on in the city.

Um, and I think if I just counted real quick in 1415, you're looking at 39 different things that were just listed in here.

Um, and some of these are comprehensive as far as taking in more than one topic.

Uh, but as with everything with the city, every time an idea or a plan comes together, there's a lot of people that have done the work there.

And uh when you take a look at our financial success, the efficiency of city services, all sorts of different things.

Um, the people within um our office are just doing a fantastic job.

Um, so I know that uh if you take a look at 14 and 15, um, there's a lot there that we have focused on as an office over the past year.

Um, I will certainly I could go through that list, but I think um everybody is aware of all of those things.

Um, but I certainly can answer any questions that you may have um as far as uh that list or our achievements or our priorities for the upcoming year.

Right, thank you, sir.

Turning to council, do any council members have questions over the mayor's administrative budget?

Councilman.

Thank you.

I um I have a question about on page 17 professional services, information officer and communication support.

Is that a position or no contract?

That's the contract that we have for I think it's um $1,500 a month, I believe it is, to handle uh a lot of our uh communication and social media that uh company produces like our firefighter recruitment video, our police recruitment video, a lot of those uh four-facing things, do a lot of the live streaming, a lot of different postings, um, a lot of focuses on different things.

I think they also uh do things like they help the health bureau with their like air quality video and things like that.

So that's what that's what that is.

When that decision originally was made, like looked around, and most other cities actually have just a full-time communications person, like within their mayor's office.

Allentown is one of those places, um, Easton as well.

So we chose to just make that a we thought it was better to do it that way.

And this is the fourth year that we've had that contract, and is that that has not gone up.

And and who's the contract with?

Um, I believe it's Lehigh Valley with Love.

Okay.

And um, and I'm sure you feel that it's it's a necessary entity, then like no one else in like director may initiatives or someone else in your staff can't do that, just given you know, the um improvements in technology, even just with you know, iPads and phones and whatnot.

Yeah, it's a different type.

And I would say is like when we first came here, I had looked around as far as like who else was out there.

I had met with several different companies, organizations about who could do it, and all of them more expensive, and also the synergy that we have with um Leah Valley with Love is the idea that they also do it for the Beth and Mary School District.

Um, so it allows us a lot of like cross content as our strongest partner.

Um, but the type of things that somebody, one of the people that work in our office might post is different than what they're doing.

And like I said, it has focused on it's kind of evolved over time.

And if you take a look at kind of what they do now, it has gone into other uh it's now I would actually say mostly other departments.

And I know that they've focused on doing fire and police recruitment videos and things like that.

So I do think that that's a a good use of those of those dollars.

And it's got I thought it was a good deal four years ago.

And I mean, the number has not gone up at all this year.

But if the question is, could the people that are currently working, they both do not have the time and they don't have the expertise to be able to produce um that type of content.

I think the other option would be would be to look at somebody to hire full time to be able to do communications throughout the city of Bethlehem if we weren't going to have a part-time contract, and that's something that comes up every year.

Um, there are some people within City Hall that think we should hire somebody full-time just because they would like to produce that much more content, but then you're looking at another salary of 70,000 plus benefits and things like that.

And like I said, while that's what other cities have done, we've found a way without doing that.

Okay, thank you.

Any other questions from members of council?

Councilman.

Um no question, but I will say it's a it's a reason, it's a reasonable question.

But just um being in the work of marketing and digital digital communications myself, um, it's really hard to overstate the amount of time it takes to put together what even appears to be a simple piece of content.

I think we're getting our more than our money's worth with Lehigh Valley with Love and would would never presume that that would be the kind of task that could be added on as good as your phone or iPad is.

Uh, it's extremely time consuming and even more time consuming to do well.

Um, but I I you said it at the beginning of the presentation, and I just want to say again to your team, Ms.

Time is Centuro.

Um Ms.

Algelo, I guess we still consider to be in the mayor's office, and now Ms.

White, um what is represented on these two pages is just so a vast amount of initiatives and partnerships and programs, and uh each one of these has its own many moving parts.

Um and as you said, your team is uh you and your team are are visible and upfront.

And I think what this represents is um the city's effort to literally open doors to people and to invite voices in, because so much of this is seeking public input.

Um, you know, to invite voices in who may not have felt invited to be part of the process in the past.

So um, and to do it also diligently and to even sort of seek more opportunities to do so, which is my experience in some of my non-council roles, um, and to be knowledgeable and and friendly and pleasant uh all the while.

I I uh wish that they were here to thank personally, but I have thanked them and and wanted to do it in this context as well.

Thank you.

And I would say one of the things that we are fortunate about, I never take for granted is how often they just want to go to things on weekends and at night, that they're just committed to the mission of the city and mission of the community.

And I think if you look at, and Ms.

Jello is now paid for half out of our department and half out of community economic development because as we talked about last year, having to do with world heritage, even though that's what she does now full time.

It's like that's 90% of her job is is working on that.

But it is each one of those individuals, and we take a lot of pride in this as a as a city administration, is that each one of them do have those connections, the community that are unique.

And it is one of the things that they bring to their job is a passion for the work, but also unique connections, unique ways of seeing things, um, uh from a cultural point of view that I you know am just extraordinarily grateful for, but we all should be like they don't have the same story, and I think that they they all spend time in different areas and come back and they uh differ have different experiences that I think then lead to a work product um that becomes very comprehensive as far as a collection of the different identities in the city of Bethlehem.

Uh, and it's one of the things that we are we we try to we try to prioritize Bables.

Any other questions for members of council?

Councilman Cowan.

Uh Mr.

I so when um I wasn't here, I wasn't on council at the time when when you became mayor, but uh didn't Mr.

uh differ have different experiences that i think then lead to a work product um that becomes very comprehensive as far as a collection of the different identities in the city of bethlehem uh and it's one of the things that we are we we try to we try to prioritize bubbles any other questions for members of council councilman calling uh i so when um i wasn't here i wasn't on council at the time when when you became mayor but uh didn't mr donchez just have two two staff members in his in his office at the time no he had three yeah three three full time yep all right so um the director of uh the mayor's and you just changed the titles in on these correct and then the only thing that changed as far as so the job titles have changed and as far as what their roles have been I think every mayor has his own people do something a little bit different but the thing that has changed is that Ms.

Ajello who was in Mr.

Donchez's office handling different administrative duties has obviously now taken on this position of world heritage coordinator which is as part of our world heritage inscription is like in the mayor's office and she's still physically located there but like as I said 90% of her work is not doing something having to do with the rest of like the mayor's office and that job is paid half out of the mayor's budget and then half out of community economic development um because of all the things she does with tourism and things like that.

So I mean I'm just getting back to um councilwoman's uh crampsy smith's question like she she's pretty much jammed up like she couldn't do that that um um Lehigh Valley would love no responsibilities no she's I mean uh I I don't like to I don't turn it into a competition as far as city employees are concerned because I think most people are doing as much as they can um but world heritage is a full-time job for her and it's part of the reason why not part of the reason it's in our inscription it's also why Marie even hired a site manager was because previous to that she was doing both the world heritage coordinator job and a lot of site manager duties um that's also not her expertise all right so um just so I have everything straight because I was again I was not here so Miss Stein is your is the uh director of the mayor's initiatives that is her job title I think the best way to think about like what the individual people do is to take a look at page 14 and 15 and think about all of those priorities and accomplishments on there are shared as a team so for example there could be a day where she's working on what's the first one here um the implementation of city's climate action plan and then there's another day where Ms.

Santor is doing that or Miss White's doing stuff and so on and so forth.

So as far as like the tasks there like concerned they it's it's very much a team oriented situation.

No I get it.

And then the director of equity and inclusion is uh is Miss Santoro correct.

And then the chief of staff is Miss Agello.

It's still Miss it's still Miss Agello.

It is okay.

And then uh what's the tempor over on page 17 what's the temporary help uh line air for the executive assistant so that was when we went from the situation of having three employees to essentially having three and a half employees which we did I think now about two years ago almost now wasn't I think it was the beginning of 2024 when we had that conversation is when Miss Angello when we were heading into our inscription and most of her at the time under Mr.

Donchez she had all of these kind of like administrative tasks some of which she was carrying over into our administration.

But then as World Heritage were getting closer and closer to the inscription which occurred in July of 2024 it was untenable for her to be able to continue to do anything other than to get ready for the World Heritage inscription all these things need we need to do in year one and so on and so forth which is at which point we came to city council and essentially what we did was we split her job where essentially it was like half of her so if you think about like the money here is then like we split her job so then she was getting paid half in the mayor's office then someone else is getting paid up to 20 hours a week in the mayor's office which was Ms.

Vitalis and now it's Ms.

White right and then we added the revenue from community economic development to be able from their temporary help to be able to pay Mrs.

Agello.

So like she then transferred all those tasks over into World Heritage but someone needed to pick up her administrative tasks which is how we went from three to three point five but like I said you could say we actually are still at three because half of it is Department of Community Economic Development.

Right.

So so the only thing that was added since I was last on council is the temporary help and then the the the professional services help for Leah Valley would love that's it.

Correct so all right and then and and and who owns the Lehigh Valley Woodlove that would be George Wacker.

Mr.

He worked on my campaign in 2020.

Juan, yes.

I did not need anybody in 2025, but he worked in 2021.

All right.

I mean, it's it's not that big of an increase.

I just, you know, it's eight eighteen thousand, eighteen thousand dollars.

I just, you know, if you're saying that's it's needed, I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna trust you on it because uh it you know, I I give great leeway to mayors in in providing for their own staff and staff of their you know their own uh office.

So um if you think it's needed, uh you know, I understand.

So thank you.

All right.

Um the only input I have is that I'm always gonna be team communications officer.

Uh having recently gotten involved in producing media, I do two hours for a five minute bit, and I don't understand how the price is what it is.

Um, and I would love to see a full-time position there because there is so much when it comes to communicating with with city residents, but I do understand um what a budgetary ask that is as opposed to 15,000 or 18,000 of consultation work versus another position.

Is it's to me it is um a steal.

I've enjoyed the work that he has done.

Um, and as we continue to get strong as a city financially, I would hope that we can move to the realm of communications officer.

I understand we have way more priorities to deal with uh right now when it comes to staffing up, but it would be great to see a communications officer at some point, even if it's not in the the near future.

Yeah, and I think a couple of things.

One there it says one of the values that I think he has brought too is the ability to live stream a lot of these meetings that are whether or not it's about housing or parks or whatever these different things are, that has just really opened up the opportunity for citizens to be a part of it.

And one of the things I learned during the planning of the climate action plan back in like 19 and 20 was just how valuable it is to get people to attend any of these meetings as far as then having an ownership and being a part of the implementation of the process moving forward.

Um, so you know, it I mean, in a perfect world, I would end the contract tomorrow and just hire somebody, but like we obviously are not bringing forward that there's a reason why most other mayor's offices do that, but like we look at it overall as like this is a better way to do this than it is to hire somebody.

Um and you know, I I would uh I would just uh the thing that we appreciate the most, other than their ability to be able to create specialized content for these different departments, is the ability to be able to live stream so many of these different things that has just really changed how invested people are and how they get that information and the fact they can walk through what's going on with choice neighborhoods, they can walk through what's going on the climate action plan.

Um, and that's why we just we didn't we didn't think it was something that would it would make all of our lives a lot easier, but not something that I think rises to the level yet of as you said, balancing head count and other needs that it's something that we're like we're in this position where we want to do it.

A direct example is the 40 and 10 is tonight, and there's a community watch party yeah in uh Indian Hill to watch the 40 and 10, and that's possible because it is being live streamed, which is great because it coincides with a community meeting, so they get to talk about it.

So um, no notes on on the the current I I really would, you know, as as we continue to staff up and become what I like to think is is right size the city hall because you guys are so lean and mean.

Um, you know, in the next couple of years, I would love to see a communications officer, not obviously not top priority right now when we're getting the services that we're getting.

Right.

So this if there's no other questions or comments on the mayor's budget, I will just address the city council's budget, which is on page 11.

The um the increase will be enacted with newly elected council members that are come being sworn in in January.

Other than that, there is uh no change to the city council's budget.

Uh we will just take this moment to appreciate and show some some love to our city clerks who continue to do the most with the lease.

We very much appreciate you.

We are a very busy office.

This is a very busy council and administration, and we continue to appreciate all the hard work that you put in on a daily basis.

Um, I will turn to council if anyone has any questions or comments regarding this portion.

Second, just to thank you so much.

Really, you uh you help us uh sort of manage everything so smoothly, and you're incredibly responsive.

Um, just taking care of so many administrative aspects of this um this role and um helping us function so well.

So we're we're very appreciative.

It's my last chance to thank you from this seat.

So thank you.

All right, any other comments or questions from members of council.

All right, we're gonna move on to the controller.

I will now recognize George Yasso, controller to review his budget.

um just taking care of so many administrative aspects of this um this role and um helping us function so well so we're we're very appreciative it's my last chance to thank you from this seat so thank you all right any other comments or questions from members of council all right we're gonna move on to the controller i will now recognize georgiasso controller to review his budget thank you good evening everyone so the controller's office things are uh going well in the controller's office and that is uh the majority of that is to do with uh the fact that I'm happy to report that I still have Michelle and Michelle as my staff uh I will I will start with Michelle in Millward uh we also call her MA or she is Michelle with two L's in her name uh she's on her fourth year here she's in your in your book as the uh count clerk too uh she's she's in her fourth year um as most of you know I I have turned over my entire staff and also got leaner and meaner through through uh the people that I inherited when I first came in uh so it is myself Michelle Michelle um and again with with MA she's our count clerk too in the book she's absolutely phenomenal uh with with technology she's got a a a great uh skill set um that it it's almost tailor made for this position and a lot of that is from she came from the outside from the private sector and had a lot of a lot of different accounting jobs and a lot of different supervisory jobs that I I just was was so happy when when she came across uh when she came across my lap to be able to um not only find her but uh I've been lucky enough to keep her she does an absolutely phenomenal job the city's luck lucky to have her and and will absolutely benefit for as long as she remains here um as I go to uh Michelle with one elf or Michelle liberto who is with us tonight um she is the deputy city controller who you all know in the book Michelle is now here 12 years uh she she spent uh a good deal of that time down in financial services um I was able to take advantage of you know her her her knowledge her her her institutional knowledge her incredible accounting background and education uh and and her overall uh demeanor personality and trustworthiness again very very lucky to have found her and have her as my right hand um as you guys know I'm oh I'm not here uh as a full-time position I can only be here so much I I am here every day pretty much um my other office is right up the street within walking distance so a lot of times I'm I'm in and out two three times a day here but the constants are Michelle and Michelle and Michelle Liberto in particular I have to trust to be me when I'm not when I'm not there and it it's it's a big responsibility that I am so grateful uh to her uh for for you know she is one of the people that you can trust when you're not looking and I have to right and and I've been so so happy with her and so proud of her uh again um I've I've been fortunate enough to not only find great people but so far been able to keep them and uh and so she just like just like uh Michelle Ann the city will continue to benefit gratefully greatly as long as uh they are both here um as far as our goals objectives achievements those things um I I think for goals and objectives that the top ones are are really our emphasis uh continuing to encourage city administration to increase electronic payment capabilities we have seen some uh some growth in that um we we continue to uh think it can be done on a much larger scale moving forward uh we also continue to urge city administration to strengthen policies and procedures not only just for financial services processes but for processes in general um again something we have seen some progress on but we would like to see much more um I can't I can say that you know we have had collaborative meetings to work towards these goals as recently as yesterday um and and we're very positive about the the outlook going forward and and think it will be a strong partnership to help achieve those goals I mean those are those are things that we will we will always be on top of and always be on top of them for um you know I will say about our office in general um you know I'm I'm I'm proud of the work that the three of us do um you know as a team as a as a small team I think we we do a very good job of managing the independence and oversight aspect that we have to to maintain along with being a direct resource and work directly with the administration as a kind of integral and and necessary part of the business workflow that we that the city goes through every day.

You know, it is a a um a tough line to tow, right?

Um, but I think we I think we do a great job of it.

Um, you know, we have to ask a lot of a lot of tough questions, and Michelle has to be the representative to do this a lot, and and it's not easy, right?

When you have to ask a lot of tough questions, especially of your colleagues, right?

The people that you you work with and see every day.

But I think she does a phenomenal job of it.

I think we do a phenomenal job of it, and I think we do a great job uh kind of managing it with again with being a resource, you know, stuff city business does not get hold held up in the controller's office.

If there is any piece of city business in the controller's office, it is a there for a reason and b actively being cared about and being paid attention to, and we'll move on as soon as it's as soon as it's able to.

Um as far as the actual budget numbers, um, there's there's not really anything different to discuss.

I I can say I can thank council for what is not in the budget, and that was the increase to the controllers' uh salary, which would have had been attributed essentially directly to me as a cost.

And I'm happy that I and I understand we felt very strongly about that, but I'm very happy that I think we came to uh a conclusion together to do the right thing.

And as I told you then remains the same now.

I will not uh pursue another another term beyond this this one.

So as early as whenever Miss Laird or anyone else would like to bring that forward for the next person, I will not oppose it.

And I'm sure it can be done, but I will thank you guys for understanding why that was important to me and uh ultimately budgets exactly where I want it now.

So happy to answer any questions.

Did I miss anything, Michelle, that you have to add?

Come up if you like.

Okay.

Um, so I would answer any questions.

Okay, thank you.

So I need to counsel for any questions.

Councilman Crampton Smith.

Uh, I just want to say again, thank you for the great job that you and your staff do.

I know um, you know, sort of related since my brother did that for 30 years, that it's not an easy job, and you have to be, you know, the intermediary and you have to go between people to make sure that everything is legit.

And um, I know it's not easy, so I really appreciate all that you do.

Thank you very much.

And also thank you for you know your service on the on council for all those years.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Any other comments from questions from members of council?

Councilwoman.

I'd like to express my thanks as well.

Something I have learned in this role is um, you know, that it's a tough job that you have, and it's understood that with regard to the accounting and reporting and contracts and compliance, that that's a really high uh, you know, it's a high set of skills that you have to have, but that um it's the other part.

It's that the part where you have to have the tough conversations with people that you work with every day.

We got a little bit of a look into that earlier this week.

And um, you know, I I've worked more with with you than with you, Michelle.

But um, you know, hearing your presentation every year is uh it's uh impressive and inspiring, sort of the respect that you have for one another and and the tight ship that you run.

And I I wanted to thank you specifically for um the way that you engage with me with regard to my wish to increase your salary.

I um you respected why I was seeking that and I respected your wishes um to not accept it, but um, I just appreciated, you know, similarly, as I was just referring to, these complex conversations that you need to have.

Um, you do so well, and I uh really appreciated our engagement around that topic.

So thank you.

And thank you for all your years of service for council as well as you as you do part.

Any other comments or questions from council?

Um, well, thank you for thank you for your presentation.

Um and my appreciation for your service was that vote that I didn't like, but I appreciate it.

I won't forget that.

Yeah, no worries.

All right, there's been no change to the treasurer budget, so we will move on to the law bureau.

I will now recognize uh Jack Sperks, City Solicitor to review the law budget.

Uh thank you.

Not much here.

If you look at the bottom line, um from 450,000 to 473.

I did the math.

That's a 5.13% increase.

I'm told by financial finance that that is uh largely a function of the three percent across the board salary increase and the fact that there's a 27th pay.

Okay.

Well, I have to express my thanks to you and your team as well.

Um, we appreciate your presence at meetings and knowing that you have to jump in regularly to explain um things.

You're uh you've been an extremely helpful resource to us um in in real time.

So we appreciate that.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ms.

Rick.

Thank you, team for us.

Right.

It looks like public comments on the budgets for the administration council, mayor, controller, treasurer, and law bureau.

Turning to my left, my center and my right that concludes public comment.

Moving on to the general fund, I will now recognize a representative of the administration to review the general fund.

Thank you all for being with us tonight.

You can start and then I'll jump in.

Thank you.

Okay, if you um revenue, we turn to page one at the beginning.

I have the pie chart up there behind this.

Something I like to show to show when we break down our revenues, where's the bulk of it come?

It's still real estate taxes, EIT has been our most powerful mover these last couple of years, but it's real estate that brings home the most revenue.

And on page one, you'll see it reach 35 million this year, 35.5 million.

That's an increase of 444,000.

But percentage-wise, when we talk about percents, uh, it moved up 1.2%.

And that's a bit of the challenge when the largest part of your revenue pie, unless you do a tax increase, which we're not doing, uh the assessed value, there is growth, there is development.

For the most part, we're developed safe.

So even with all the development you see, it's not gonna be millions of dollars a year that we gain.

So our largest number one is one percent.

And if you look at the slide here, here's our real estate slide.

We looked at this last year.

The budget versus actual, it's very easy or very um to predict.

You'll see in some of those other like EIT when it goes either above or below.

We're almost always on the money.

It's it's quite predictable.

The growth year to year, the assessed value times the millage.

There's gonna be some growth, there's gonna be people pay at the discount, but we usually we usually nail this when we talk about the budget itself versus what the actuals we found.

This has been an accurate predictor of ours.

Uh, if we move down to um on that page, I'll try to put the slide.

The next most powerful now, good, is uh EIT, the largest at 12 and a half percent.

This is a 600,000 dollar increase.

And we talked about this the other night.

We're of some surpluses come the last couple of years.

You see in years 22, 3 and 4.

If you focus on the blue, we are moving up, but each year that orange is outperforming, which is a good thing.

It didn't underperform, like of course in 2020, but even pre-pandemic in 2018, our our actual didn't reach what our budget was.

So we can have come up short sometimes.

And it was this growth is out of the ordinary.

We've enjoyed that growth as cities around Pennsylvania have.

And this is driven on uh wages, and as wages increase coming out of the pandemic, so to the EIT.

So we believe now that we've probably hit that mark, that's we've been conservative to move it up because we know I'm gonna get caught on that downside.

But this is a five percent growth.

When we look at our mark, we went from 10.8 back in 22.

We're at 11.9 in 2025.

And uh this year we did move it up 600,000 for that five percent.

So that that helped our budget for sure.

Also on page one, just below EIT, I'll point to D transfer is a hundred thousand dollar.

We talked about some of these surpluses the other day.

Uh LST 50,000 and mercantile, we moved up 150,000 to 3.4.

So if I turn my slides, these are some of the ones you see on the slide are the ones I will now highlight as we move on, but we'll take questions about any of them where we came up or what they mean.

Staying on on page one, below the Act 511 tax I just spoke of.

You move you'll look into city licenses and permits, you'll see permits moved up.

Uh, we did that last year.

We added some inspectors and we moved up the budget accordingly because inspectors do inspections, inspection produces revenues, and that's what made the addition of those two staff budget neutral last year.

It's reflected in the budget.

Below that is housing.

That was um added.

We talked about that uh last week at council.

Um, the the staffing uh and housing was also moving up from one one to uh 1.3.

So between the code, which was the staff and the inspectors, uh there's revenue general.

If you'll see in 3023 five cable TV franchise actually decreased, and that's something we know people are not as linked into Service Electric RCN as they were.

People are streaming.

Uh, we do have franchise, and that has dropped from 700 used to be over a million dollars, but in 22, we are trying to bring it down as quickly as we can and be responsible.

So when from 718 last year was 620, we dropped another 600.

We think that should be on the mark.

We've been trying to bring it down to keep up with that revenues.

It's one of those unfortunate revenue sources that it goes in the wrong direction, but that's just the sign of the times.

And even with Comcast, we talked about Comcast coming in.

It's not gonna be really new.

It's it may replace and they may choose, but the people that if if they sign up for internet, it's not the impact, it's the cable.

So if they come to Comcast and go and stream, it's not gonna make the difference.

But if they go to cable, more than likely it's just gonna be a switch with RCN or service.

So we we don't see anything moving from that recent development.

So that's the highlights on page one.

Uh page two is long, it's all grants.

We can take questions if you have any specific grants.

But when you look at page two, I would point to the top.

The second line, city health is a big number, 3.7 and three lines down from that, that 3.4 cares act will all will be both be handled on next Thursday with I met Miss Wendrick from the Health Bureau.

If we move down the page to 3042 zero state subsidy pension, when we get our pension MMOs we make each year, each September, we do receive a reimbursement from the state.

And uh that moved up $300,000 when we received this year allowed us.

You'll see a couple of years ago in 22, or is that 42 to 46?

So that's been a nice mover for us, and that's a 300,000 increase from last year to this to the $5 million mark.

Halfway down the page 30461 lost revenue reimbursement.

This is what we talked about the other night, the two million dollars in revenue in order to balance the budget from 22 to 25 was in there.

That goes away.

So you'll see that moves down two plus million dollars.

Two million of it is because the lost revenue reimbursement is removed.

And it's also that the accounts in 0901, which is community recovery account, the affordable housing and the homeless, those accounts are being spent down a little bit as well.

And when we get to 0901 in a in a little bit, we'll see what those numbers look like.

But that's what that big number is.

Uh so that's all I have to highlight on page two.

The total of grants is 23 million dollars, which is a lot.

The rest of it's a lot of police, a lot of fire.

You'll see EMS split in there, county, federal, FBI, DEA, recycling, etc.

And I'll turn to the mayor.

Yeah, I just want to make a couple of comments.

Ones that I had made during the budget presentation as well.

Is if you just take a look on page one, um, just a couple of things.

One is if you look at our real estate to earned income tax ratio, it's approximately three to one.

I think I've mentioned if you look at like Allentown and Easton, they actually bring in more earned income tax than they do property tax.

Um, and you know, I think thankfully, and I'm not sure if you know Eric was planning on going through some of those, uh, I see the chart right here, the historical real estate uh taxes.

Um, but we we don't have every year in January, we essentially have somewhere between a 1.5 to 2 million dollar new revenue problem because whether or not it's the pension or the medical or the guaranteed salary increases through your contracts, it's new revenue that has to be found.

Um, and our ability to be able to add natural economic growth in those real estate taxes with new properties coming on, is obviously good.

I mean, that's part of the reason why we are successful as a city.

Other cities are able to because they're able to do things where they're earned income tax, but we are limited by law to only charging one percent.

So if we have never entered into those financial troubles that every other third class city in Pennsylvania just about has, by which your pension gets below a certain percentage of fun of uh funding percentage, you have a certain amount of debt to uh revenue ratio, that then one of the things that like early Act 47 intervention allows you to do is be able to raise that above 1%.

So if you take a look at our earned income tax at 1%, it's gonna give us you know somewhere around 12 point, hopefully 12.5 million dollars next year.

Um, it doesn't take a math whiz to be like even if you could just turn that into 1.1%, that's an extra 1.25 million dollars, um, which is equivalent to doing some quick math, uh, Linny's probably gonna have a calculator.

It is like that's like a four percent between four and five percent property tax real estate increase.

If you were just able to go from one to one point one.

Now, I don't like to throw other cities under the bus.

That's why I when I do the charts, I show you what theirs are without using their names.

People could look it up, obviously.

But there's other cities that have earned income tax that are 2.0, 3.1, 3.3, the majority of their um revenues are coming from earned income tax.

Ours are not, so it's a limitation we have, which is because we have this long history of being financially secure, that we weren't even able to do this even in the tough days, 15, 20 years ago when mayors Cunningham and Callahan were looking at uh more difficult choices than we have to make.

They weren't able to touch it because once again, we were responsible at paying our pensions, we were responsible about paying off that debt.

We were responsible about paying off that debt.

So it's one less task that we have to do.

Um, but if you look at that earned income tax growth, and I've used this number before as well, that we can basically judge this based on our um uh now.

I see not all of those people are living in the city of Bethlehem.

But if you look at our job creation, um, like the $52 tax that we pay, uh, between over the last 15 years or so, we've gone from about 28,000 jobs to about 42,000 jobs in the city, um, which is which is impressive.

I mean, that's an impressive number.

Um, and part of the reason why we've seen these increases is because we've been adding jobs in a natural way that's allowed us over the past take Mr.

Evans um tax rate going back to 1981 over the last, just to give you a little did you have your own slide on this?

No, no, no.

So in the 1980s, the average tax increase in the city of Bethlehem was 5.2% from your property taxes.

In the 1990s, it was 2.5.

In the 2000s, it was 2.7.

In the 2010s, it was 2.6.

And then in the last seven years, it's been 1.1.

So it is as our city collectively, not just our administration, everybody, the private sector, the public sector, previous administrations have worked to improve over a pan of 40 span of 45 years.

We have seen this systemic decrease in need to be able to raise our property taxes.

And that's why if you look at our particular millage rate versus the millage rate of comparable cities, like we even have a lower, like I was looking the other day.

I think that the borough of Fountain Hill, they're talking about a tax increase next year for the it's in Lehigh County, and their millage rate, I think is somewhere gonna be over 11.

Like ours for Lehigh County is I for uh is I think six point something.

6.2.24.

6.21.

6.21, sorry.

So it's just it's it is one of those systemic stories.

And you know, the controller's office does a great job.

You guys do a great job.

Everybody kind of works as hard as we can.

But if you take a look at this, you know, and you know, Mr.

Evans has this, I'm sure he could email this too if you want to.

But you're looking at some times back, and I know there's often a need for nostalgia at times, but in the 80s, 1983, 11.9, 1984, 7.1, 1986, 8.9, 1995, 7.1, 2006, 12.8.

I mean, they were needed to be done.

I mean, we had good leaders then too, making the right decision.

We have just been able to collectively, with all of the different things moving in the right direction as a community in the public and private sector, be able to create this natural income growth, which has been able to allow us to minimize the amount of property tax increases that we have come forward with.

But once in a while you need one, and obviously there's not one in this budget.

Who knows what's going to happen in the future?

But that kind of idea that we've looked at incremental ones now for 25, 30 years, has allowed us this opportunity to be able to get into the space where I think we've had two in the last seven years.

Um, and like I said, over the past.

So over the last seven years, 1.1 average increase over the last 10 years, going back to 2017, 1.4, which is the lowest that we've had in the 50 years that we were able to track millage rates.

Um, so like I said, it's just uh it's uh it's good, it's good information to know as we take a look at these things, but the um everything's continuing moving the right direction.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor.

I we're on on page three, we'll jump to departmental earnings.

These are highlighted by roster duties from fire police and EMS when they cover special events.

Uh, this includes planning fees, zoning inspections, uh, ambulance fees is a large one.

That's that's a mover for us too.

When we added that additional crew, the plus four paramedics, there's an increase from 3.9 to 4.2 for next year's.

That was one of our gains of revenue.

Recycling it as a large number, but it's quite flat.

That's our recycling fee that you play pay with your water bill.

And we don't have no, we don't have any movement for that.

This number of subscribers, of course, the rate stays the same.

Uh, and then below that, you'll see recycling the sale of materials.

It's a little volatile, it's a little sluggish, it's down a little bit, but not hard hitter than the compost in the township.

The municipal recreation section, that municipal it's labeled municipal enterprise 30601.

That just represents 150,000 that the golf course pays to the general fund.

So, as I talked before, they pay their own medical, their own pension, they pay all their bills, and then they pay money to the general fund.

Uh, recreation fees is pretty steady.

The swimming uh pool started out slow, much like the golf course, the numbers were down, but the beautiful July and great August we had, they actually ended up within a couple dollars of of budget, right at 275.

So we kept that the same.

Although they hit 300 last year, that was unique year, very dry, very hot.

275 is a good number.

Skinny rinks only halfway done.

We collect half that revenue in January, the other half as we start their uh the rink, which is now opened, we'll we'll start showing up now.

But we we believe that two that 290 is also a good number.

Below uh the general fund charges, the ones that paid through the uh based on the maximum study, you'll see uh the water, the sewer, uh the operations of stormwater are in there, as well as uh the Bethlehem parking authority contribution, which was reduced uh over the last couple of years.

You'll see in 2025 parking authority 30713 is up.

That's the contribution they made, uh, lights, which we talked about at the last meeting.

That's why that's 440.

That was a special uh contribution that they made, but we moved it back to the standard number of 350, which we brought down, which was 1500 to 400.

So we reduced that number.

Uh again, returns and allowances are two good pieces of news for the sewer.

If you and you'll see on December 2nd, when when we look at the audit, one of uh the recommendations is to continue to look at the contributions from the sewer fund.

Can you re reduce the reliance on the SOAR fund?

And we took that and we're looking working on it, and you'll see there are two lines.

Number first of all, number 3080, the very last one pension debt reimbursement.

That was lowered from 1.1 to 800,000.

So that's 300 less of revenue for the general fund, but it also lowers the expense to the SOAR fund, so they can do other things with regard to reinvestment that Mr.

Boscola talked about Monday night.

The other one is 30820, right in the middle, sewer landfill payment many years ago.

30 years, Lenny.

Um years 1998.

Uh, a large piece of debt was taken on with the sale of the landfill is uh legendary couple nights, I guess what amongst council went many long late lot nights a decision was made and the city ended up selling the landfill, but also ending up with debt at the same time.

It's a complex situation, and that payment was split between the sewer fund and the general fund.

That's again the way it was able where they were able to structure it, and that's what's been going on.

Next year, this is the last year that is there.

So that sewer landfill payment of 400, we'll stop getting it.

But when we get to debt service, that also disappears.

So that between the two, that's $700,000 more.

The general the uh sewer fund will have next year, and that that's a good thing to properly align the way the funds are split.

Uh, to wrap up revenues on page four investment interest is uh something we saw surge on.

We talked about surpluses on Monday night.

And if you look across the board at the top, 250 to 350, then it exploded in 24 when interest rates doubled when you're talking about something that was one and two percent becomes four.

Then you can or or even five that we were at for a while uh in 24.

Uh 25 is starting to come down a little bit, and we're trying to track that trend.

And what we believe is a responsible move is to reduce that revenue item from the one one down to the 750.

And again, it's a painful when a revenue is moving in the wrong direction, going down, but we we believe you want to stay ahead of it.

Uh, that's what we have uh everyone's heard that's forecasted.

So that again is a um an addition and a significant change.

Miscellaneous revenues escrow 30904 is a large number that represents a 27th pay that we talked in great detail about a couple of weeks ago.

We have the memo that supported that.

So that savings that we talked about appears there as a revenue, and then the expense will be spread out to the 27th pay across all salaries.

And the last one, the point 30927 host fee moved from the 99, where you'll see from it's been consistent since you know 10, 12 years at that 98 to 99 range.

We get it quarterly at 249.

That Act 42 that I discussed on Monday night appears, and that's what causes the host fee to go from 99 to 114 in 2026.

So our total budget balanced is at 112,792, 300.

If you look at the bottom of the page, expenditures by category, you'll notice in that category personnel costs are the largest single thing we do.

74 million of the 112 is personnel.

So that's it's a service industry, or it's our people that we invest in to make the things go and you get the things done.

So that's a wrap on revenues.

We'll take any questions if you have specific questions on any line items.

All right, thank you so much, Mr.

Evans.

I will now turn to uh the chair of the finance committee.

Um, so councilman Cramsey Smith.

Do you have any questions?

Thank you.

Yeah, I just have a few.

Um on page two.

Uh Eric, under the the lost revenue and reimbursement.

Okay, so that's 10 million, and then it's gonna go down to 7.5 for next year.

That's the anticipated.

Um, what is that earmarked for?

Is that I mean if you turn to page 171.

Okay.

Oh, 173.

174.

Okay.

It is the total of 95011 community recovery fund.

It was 1.6.

174.

I'm sorry, 175.

175.

Okay.

I'm sorry, the um 95011, right in the middle recovery fund.

Okay.

16.

Uh 95041 homeless initiative, 1.951.

And affordable housing 95042 for the 4 million.

So it's the homeless initiative, affordable housing, and the community recovery fund.

Yes.

Those three would total up to last year.

Was when we just for that.

Okay.

Thanks and then what about the ambulance fees?

Because that's um that's on page three.

That's a pretty big increase, right?

That we we're let's see.

That well, we expect, I mean, it was three nine, and we're looking expecting it to go to four two, but it's it's continually seems to go up, except for last last it went down a little last year.

It moved up that three nine shot was taken at 930 at we made that projection on when we are printing the budget, what it's gonna be for 2025.

So when you look at that number, 2025 isn't done yet.

We expect it to reach over around four three, close to it.

So again, we're trying to move it up conservatively.

So uh we believe the number will be there.

We don't okay.

Yeah, last year.

And I mean, I'm sure it's used to for the general operations, but um, I'm assuming there's a surplus above and beyond the general operations with the ambulance, or is it just meeting the expenses for you know EMS and the ambulance service?

So you're saying is the four or three equal to everything that EMS does as a bureau.

That that's something I don't have.

I like we can take a look exactly what that for many years it was below.

We used to look at it and study because we have it under earnings, but um, you know, we're not accounting for I don't have the expenses right here.

So I'm yeah, I'm just wondering what the you know the the new.

You mean like does it break it?

If it was its own fund because you're yours years ago, we talked about or you know, just considered spinning it off.

Does it some places do it privately, which we've never endorsed?

I think um it was talked about a couple mayors ago, and the decision at that time was to keep it in-house, even though it was underwater or losing, not losing money, but costing more to provide and then revenues are brought in.

This recent change at the federal level with Medicaid reimbursement and Medicare reimbursements, medicare reimbursement at the time we also added the crew, resulted in this increase in revenues that you see.

So it's a combination of the two.

More recently, we haven't done a full breakdown because it's not it again, it's own individual fund or it stands al uh stands alone in that way.

And I asked Linny, they they do not it does not cover so the general fund in our taxes subsidize so it's not an excess of that fund.

They they access the fees oftentimes because the people that are um I mean whatever percentage of people that are on Medicaid or Medicare that call for the 901 transport are not paying what the full cost is.

So then that becomes something that the taxpayers end up picking up.

Okay, that makes sense.

Thanks.

And um, the only other final question I think I have is the um page for the page four, the escrow account 30904 for revenues.

So can you just explain that's significant from well, it may not it's fluctuates all over, but we're going from 400,000 to 2.2 million.

We're anticipating.

Yeah, those are unique, sir.

I think I believe last year the number that we had in there was was that from the uh Academy.

Academy.

Yeah, last year we set that up from the fire academy.

We sent, I think 262,500 was from the 18 cadets that we sent to the academy in 2025.

You put that money aside.

That's how much we brought forward of it.

This year, we have not made that move yet.

We'll make that transfer in December, like we did last year.

It'll show up in the budget.

So it doesn't appear here, although we're gonna use escrow funds once we try made the transfer to pay for 10 of the 15 cadets.

So what you're seeing right now, that full 2205 is all for that 27th pay, which is the was in the memo I provide the front and back, which said this is happens every 11 years.

So we had a escrow account labeled 27th pay made up of a number of different deposits.

So we bring that in as revenue to offset the expense of the 27 pay that's spread out through all the salary accounts.

That might that doesn't look as good as it appears.

It's a one it's a one time that we brought in that we've been setting, you know, saving on the side for the express purpose.

Now the story begins to do it again sometime before 2038.

Yeah, at whatever rate we can do.

Right.

And the only other thing I know we talked about last year, we had a lot, a real lot of transfers, remember in reconciliations, and I think we waited till we had a meeting and it was like in February or March.

Remember the finance meeting, and we said we would definitely try to look at not having that happen again.

Yeah, what we're always gonna have to do, it's a matter of like um making it a longer meeting, like making it a one-off because there's everything that happens, like especially example, the capital where we talked about Monday night, uh, the capital plan or the capital budget.

There's guesses or not, not guesses.

We take a shot.

We used to guess how much projects will get done and put a number.

And if Mike Alcohol thought the project was done, he'd put a zero.

And if it didn't, did it we'd have to spend the money in January?

We have to say, guess what?

It didn't finish it, the money wasn't spent.

We need to add to the budget and do that dozens of times.

We thought we felt to be more consistent than predicting how projects could finish, uh, is to take a snapshot at 9 30 September 30th, use those numbers.

What are the accounts then?

Some of the projects, some of the accounts stayed exactly the same.

Sometimes a purchase was made or the project was complete and the money was spent down.

We don't know that the last three months are unknown.

So when we get to 1231, we know what happened.

We have to make those calculations and then come to council.

And there's a number of accounts that do it in the capital budget.

We also do it with the those 0901 accounts we talked about with uh ARPA accounts, right?

So we do it, and when we do that, we take our time to say this happened or didn't happen.

So it's a big number.

And if you know, if we take our time and make either do a I can't remember what happened the night, whether it was uh six o'clock, it was I think there was just a lot of memos.

So just do one or start a 5 30 to but I remember I I understand all that, but remember we had said that because there was so many that we try to do them, not just wait because it was like February or March that we would try to do them as soon as we can earlier in here, you know what I mean?

Earlier the better, because that yeah, it opens up the money.

Everyone's a you can reconcile and do them, you know.

That's just my recommendation because we we agreed to that.

We said it was too much, remember it was a lot of side.

Yeah, and I think part of the challenge on the council side is, and it's not necessarily existed in 2025, but in 2026 is if you want them to go to finance committee, a finance committee doesn't exist until like the end of January.

So, like there's no so in 20 in January of 2020 or February 2025, the choice is either like do you handle some of them in January and some of them in February?

So then the story you're telling in January is only partly about how the year ends, and you go to February.

The challenge in January of 2026 will be when do those finance committee, when are the finance committee assignments?

Because we've gone through this before in years past.

Um just with last year was really um more significant than other years, you know what I mean.

We've done it before, but it just was like there was such a volume of reconciliations and transfers, and um, and you know, that's why the ones that we can do earlier the better, you know, and not wait until just have all of them like in March.

Yeah, and one of the things that I think, and I'm sure Mr.

Evans pointed this out at some point in the last two nights is like that 2025 budget with transfers number is often September 30th.

So then some of our costs, like for example, like the pension payment we get, like that's like a one-time thing.

So if it says five million dollars and it's five million dollars next year, it's like, oh, we got all of it, but it just becomes confusing because the old way was like the negative was as Mr.

Evans was saying, it's like you would have to anticipate what your revenue is going to be over the final three months.

So then council members would rightfully be in like January, it's like in the in the book, it said it was gonna be 4.2 and we got 4.0 because we were trying to assume on what their earnings were going to be for the rest of for the rest of the year.

So I've often wondered why we don't just put like September 30th, like number like right there rather than 2025 budget with transfers.

Um, but as soon as council kind of has the finance committee, unless it's a situation where people just wanted us to bring all of those to council as a whole, but they have to announce the meeting, they have to do all those type of things.

But however it is that makes the most amount of sense, we'll certainly be fine with it if it's as early as possible there.

Um, but you know, whatever is practical.

That's all I have.

Thank you.

Right.

Uh turning to councilwoman clear technology.

Okay.

Um turning to other council members.

Does anyone have councilman Calvin?

So Ms.

Evans on the um on the earned income tax, that's one percent of of the salary of of everybody in the city.

Yeah.

All right.

So and then um yeah, people that live here, not people that work here.

Yeah, yeah.

People that live here.

Yes.

And then we also, as Lenny points out, is like, I think, but if you ever ran the numbers, like the one percent, because then like the 12 million that we're gonna get is half of what people pay, yeah, because the other half goes to the school district.

So the total amount of one percent of all the people working is twice that number.

We just get half of it in the school district, it's the other half.

Yeah, working and living here.

All right.

So on the uh on on the permits, if someone's pulling a permit, is that based on the uh uh just a flat fee, or is that based on the amount of the project?

I think it depends on which permit is that they're pulling, and I think that's a question to ask Ms.

Collins, Mr.

Simonson next week.

Um, but I think it depends on the nature of the project.

Well, what I I think it's a combination, it's a combination of flat fees and then also on the nature of the project.

Yes, and that would be the same on the on the licenses on the city licenses, uh uh, I think it's probably less on that, but I don't know.

That's a good question for Mr.

Simonson and Miss Collins.

All right.

I I just ask because I want to make sure that you know, in the months to come, I I do want to have a discussion in you know how I feel about the Martin Tower site.

I think with that property with those two medical office buildings getting done, I think it's a shame that we don't try to roll right into getting the rest of the property developed.

Uh I know we've had philosophical differences as far as what uh should be done there, but I think if if we it'd be a shame to let it sit there for the next four years because the property uh the numbers don't pencil out for the developers uh because uh it wasn't a uh a blank piece of land um that they just went up to farmland, there was a lot of costs involved, you know, over 30 million dollars.

So just in the uh this is just a hypothetical, and if I'm wrong, correct me.

Just on the EIT taxes, then if it's one percent, let's say they wanted to do a thousand units there, because the the 1800 I told you is off the charts.

It's it's off the books, they're not doing it.

But if they put a thousand units there, so most of them would be one in two bedrooms.

Let's say there's 1500 people live living on that site, 1500 people.

Uh it they're they're probably making 80,000 a year to to afford to live in those things.

You're looking at 1.2 million dollars a year and lost revenue per year.

It's it's it's 80,000 hours times 0.01, it's 800 hours per right.

And what's it what's what's 800 times 1500?

Well, the the 1500 people, yeah, right.

That takes you to 1.2 million and over a four-year period, if it sits there for the next four years, we're losing 4.8 million dollars, just an eit tax.

We could probably take that money and put it in the affordable housing and other things.

I'm just I'm just yeah, and I and I would say like if somebody was gonna build that many, they're gonna obviously build it in phases and things like that.

So it's gonna be a good thing.

That's my point.

And if and if if they presented plans today, which they're not, they have nothing uh to present because there's nothing going on there.

We're still looking at a year and a half.

Yeah, if they broke ground today, it's still a year and a half before anything's built.

Yeah, and I I would just I would just say two quick things.

One is because I I want to correct myself as Lenny did it's like we do get half of that, as I had said before.

Right, right.

So then we don't we don't get so even when it would be fully built out at some point, yeah, if the people were making that, you're not getting 1.5 million, you're getting 750,000.

Right, but that also doesn't count um the all the new revenue on real estate taxes, and in it because we're looking at like hundreds of millions of dollars in in in new real estate or or new development there.

So I I'm just talking what we need someone needs to find out what the real numbers are all about.

What are we losing there by the property sitting there?

What's the city losing per year uh in EIT taxes and permits in uh um uh I mean if if it's a percentage of the of uh of the development, I I don't even know what the the I don't even know what the cost would be or what the fees for the cities uh would be for all the permits there between electrical and plumbing and and and and everything else.

That's why I want someone to to try to find what how much money are we losing per year by letting the property sit there and then multiply it times the next four four years because Mr.

And you know, it is it is obviously the situation that's in front of us, but we are not responsible for what private property owners do with their own property.

And if somebody makes the choice not to invest there, the language that we use as far as like we're not letting it sit there, like the property owners have the ability to do something there or or not to.

So, like to hit the ball into the public's court to say it's our responsibility to be able to do something is just not is not the it's not the words that I would use to describe what the situation is.

Well, I would because it's it's obviously very difficult piece of property to get developed because of the all the uh money that had to go into the property in order to get it to where it is right now.

Right now, it's just a flat lot and it doesn't pencil according to the developers uh to do anything there as it is right now without some type of incentive program, and so we either let it sit there for the next four years, and I know you're you're not saying it, but to the developers, if they let that property sit there for the next four years, it's not losing value, it's gonna increase in value.

It's the most expensive property in eastern Pennsylvania.

So they're already it's already paid off.

But they if then if the project doesn't pencil, why would they they're not going, they've not presented anything, they've not have not told me anything about it.

They haven't told you anything about it, or Miss Collins about it.

If the property just sits there, it with which it's going to for the next four years.

There's nothing even presented right now.

And even if something was presented today, it's still another two years down the road, be you know, a year and a half down the road before you even break ground, and probably two and a half years down the road before the first phase is even uh built.

So I'm just trying to figure out how much money are we losing by not incentivizing this project going forward by not by not giving the property owner more money?

We're not what I'm saying though, is like so the the equation to do, and like I said, we don't need to talk about this now.

We've talked about it before.

I think it's something if you want to talk to Ms.

Collins, Mr.

Simonson about what the numbers are and so on and so forth.

But it comes down to as we've talked about, as a general principle, when you're talking about tax incentives, you're offering a lot of different balanced things, and a lot of what our feelings are, not just here but throughout the city as far as neighborhood appropriate development, comes from people who live in the city of Bethlehem who say, I don't want this here, I don't want this here, I don't want this here.

Like, there isn't necessarily a project that exists there, but we have the same rationale throughout the entire city of Bethlehem is that we will say that we support projects that we think reflect what people want.

So, in this particular case, something that we have shared many times is a mix of housing types, a mix of income levels, a mix of all those different things that we believe that we hear from people, even from people who often criticize what is natural market rate development now in the city of Bethlehem, that this is the largest.

So there's a lot of different balancing interests here, but obviously, part of the equation is the idea that like whatever it is that somebody has or doesn't have to be able to give them more money as far as that equation is concerned, becomes a cost benefit analysis.

What are your opportunities that you were losing or you are gaining as far as if this is revenue that goes here?

What are we not getting back?

Versus somebody sitting on a property, deciding not to do anything, deciding not to cut the grass.

They're not the only property owner that we do this same dance with.

What I will say, and there can be a difference of opinion on this, is multiple mayors, multiple administrations, multiple zoning hearing boards for 20, 25, 30 years, there's been the same type of conversation about where do we need to give up tax revenue to help to be able to push ahead properties, and where is it that the market's going to take care of itself?

And people in the city of Bethlehem have very strong feelings about that.

We've seen that as we have restricted what the LERTA was from 20, 25 years ago, where at one point we needed that because of what was going on here and the promises and obligations we had, versus now that the market got going and people were like, wait a second, do we really need to incentivize that type of development there?

Or if we incentivize that type of development, who's going to do the project and so on and so forth.

So it is it is a it is a kind of global conversation.

It is, I think, as far as all of these things are concerned.

And we we will continue to think about it, have interactions.

But I would just say the kind of level of trust that goes into these decisions about what we support and what we don't support, is really the same equation that if somebody came forward, I'm just making this up.

Somebody came forward with 600, 700, 800, 900 apartments.

We have people that criticize apartments going up on half an acre and say, why don't they just decide to put one or two single family homes there rather than put up all those apartments?

Which doesn't make any sense.

You do that over there, you're gonna have a different conversation with people.

So we are very respectful of what surrounding neighborhoods are, of what our neighborhoods that work, making things feel like they're Bethlehem, and all those different types of things.

I think we deal with we deal with the budget every single day.

The thing that we got to understand, it's new revenue, even if it's only 50% of that, it's new revenue coming in.

And I don't want to make the, but the one thing that I think we can all agree on on the uh if you look at the numbers on the South Side Affordable Housing Project, right?

It's not affordable.

We're we're doing we're building how many units there, 120.

Two phases, 120.

120 total.

Yeah, it's costing 50 million dollars.

Because the idea is is that you're obviously then 400,000 a unit.

Hey, gentlemen, I'm I'm I'm sorry, I feel like we're just getting a little bit more.

No, I know, I know.

Yeah, I because I appreciate the conversation about the other thing.

I'm just saying, though, I it the one thing that's it.

That's why it doesn't pencil over there.

That's what you I think we're not understanding.

It's a discussion we can have it and follow meetings, but the affordable housing, the affordable housing plan on the south side isn't is not affordable.

We're spending 50 million dollars.

That that should cost about 18 to 20 million dollars to build those amount of units over there.

So the developer is getting paid an extra 20, 25 million dollars up front for his profit over what a normal developer would take over a 30-year period.

I mean, the those units over there are 450,000 a unit.

That's what it's coming out to.

And president alone, Leon, I will finish up my comments here, but I just think it's important thing because I don't think I'm gonna be here for the budget hearing next week.

Is that like the reason why units like that it cost that much is because you don't get the you don't get the natural market rate over the future?

So the cost more expensive, they're more expensive here, and the project is more expensive because you don't get the return on the investment as the guarantee that people there get to live in affordability for so on and so forth.

So, what the conversation is is how do you create as much natural affordable housing as possible?

How many, how do you put as many strings as possible, which we've talked about before?

But I think it as I've said, it's a conversation for a different different day.

It is, and I all I want to do with all the only thing uh bring this up was that I want to find out how much money by not doing anything over there for the next four years, how much money is the city not taking in?

And that's something that I I want to um moving into the new year.

I'd like to do.

I I want to find out real numbers.

How much money are we losing the EIT tax permits and real estate taxes by not doing anything and letting it sit there for four years?

Because I think it'd be a shame to the city and to the taxpayers to lose that amount of money, which I think would be so substantial amount of money.

So yeah, I think a complex meeting about this would be uh appropriate at a different point.

I take your no, you're fine.

I I take your point about the it and all that stuff.

Um, I just want to stay on track with with this.

So another meeting about this very complex site.

I just brought it up tonight because the the um the I didn't even think about the IET yeah uh money coming in, and but then I started thinking, you know, hey, how do we bring in more money with the EIT, bringing more people into the city?

So I just that's why it stimulated the conversation.

And I apologize if it got off track a little bit.

And thank you.

No, thank you so much.

Um, so I will turn to other members of council.

Did you have anything, councilman Wolhelm?

Okay.

Uh the only question I really had was I was looking at some of the other things that we've um, and it's just a point of interest on my part.

I was looking at some of the the things that we have been lipulated over time, and we've also talked about the earned income tax.

I was curious about this this deed transfer tax.

If if there's anything we ever do to manipulate that, like to increase the deed transfer tax.

Is that something that we have historically done, or is that something that's available to us to do?

I'm not suggesting that we increase the deed transfer tax at all.

I'm just curious as to what mechanisms we're doing.

Allen Town, there's a story about Allentown looking to fairly recall.

We have not considered that, you know, it moves on its own with the price of housing.

Yeah, that's why you see our our growth, even when interest rates went up, it activity is still high and prices were high.

So when you look at the equation, the numbers still grew when rates came down and the housing really took off, then it got big, but it has remained a strong income revenue driver for us.

But no, we have not considered the visiting that ordinance or changing the D transfer.

Again, I'm not I'm not suggesting that it was I had read about all the time.

I was thinking about other streams of revenue that we have and what we can and can't manipulate it.

This doesn't seem like regressive.

It leaves like you know, it's a service that's being rendered.

So increasing that to me feels like increasing a fee as you use it.

So it was just uh a point of interest for me, not a suggestion that we increase our deed transfer tax.

All right, so I think that's everything from our general fund.

Um I'm gonna hold all public comments at the end of the meeting.

Uh so we'll move on to the general expenses.

I will recognize the representative of the administration to go ahead and do your thing, Eric.

Thank you.

On page 171 are the numbers for general expenses.

170 has a description of what it is, and you'll see them on one 91 listed by line item.

The biggest numbers here are the pensions.

Uh, total general expenses are 27 million, but uh police pension is 7 million, fire three PMRS 3.3.

So it's a total of 13 million dollars of our our budget is for pensions.

Moving down the city insurance package, which uh raises, I think it rose around eight, eight percent.

That's property liability at 1.1.

The other large number by point to is medical, which is have been very much controlled compared to our peers.

We do use BSI as an advisor for our medical.

They put RFPs out regularly.

We are with Capital Blue Cross.

We we do take a look at a number of medical providers, prescription, dental, stop loss.

We make decisions on each of those when when they come back, but we're happy with the that number for sure.

When you when we talk about medical being a large very large, if it can be contained and controlled, it has you know that we are self-insured.

Uh, we get that number each Thursday.

When we take a look, is it 200,000, 250?

It's okay.

Some some weeks it's 400,000, but in the end, uh each of the last couple of years, the number has been has been very stable.

So we're very happy with our medical.

I will um make a couple comments about pension number one.

You'll use go ahead.

I just want to add to the medical and just repeat what I had said of the budget hearings.

Obviously, what is going on?

We are not on an island where we are the only people that pay our providers and our hospitals and so on and so forth, and all of the different medical conversations that are going on as far as subsidies are concerned for ACA and Medicaid and all those kind of things, they will eventually catch up with us and they will catch up with our own employees.

Now, that may or may not happen in 2026, but it is just it is a time bomb waiting to go off when you take a look at the commercial markets versus the governmental markets there.

And it is going to affect care and everything else.

So as those conversations are going, I know some states have seen the increases in the subsidies go up over 100%.

There's talk now about health savings accounts as being something that people have, which would likely take healthy people off the exchanges, um, which would not be good.

We need as many people as possible in the same exchange.

Everybody's dancing around, like what that means over the long term, is like eventually we need everybody in the same pool to be able to drive down the cost based on how long people are living and what the cost of healthcare is going to be.

Um, but it just wanted I want to be clear about that.

So if we come back at some point in 2026 or the 2027 budget and say that like the medical landscape has changed, it is going to be related to what are those subsidized markets currently.

I think like 80% of everybody that reserved that receives an ACA subsidy or 80 80% of the 24 million dollars, 24 million people that are currently on the exchanges get some level of subsidy.

And a lot of those people just don't even know yet about what that's going to mean for their individual um uh kind of costs going forward.

So this will be something we may come back on.

Uh the slide you have in front of you is a just uh a scan of the memo you get.

You can see this one was in August.

Uh, we know exactly what these numbers are unlike a lot of the budget where we're making projections based on patterns or insights.

These are actual numbers we know are going to be uh to the dollar.

See the employee contribution, that's a known uh and based on the number in the worksheets we get from actual when we run the worksheets.

We we deliver this to you.

So we know in August what it is gonna be for the next year.

So those three numbers you see in the TAN match up with what's in your book.

Second point about pensions is they didn't move this year.

It's an every other year thing when they get reevaluated.

The actuary takes a whole look at what our fund is.

We know there's money going in from the employees.

The fund goes to work, hopefully makes enough money to pay all the outflow, all the pensioneers.

Any shortfalls made up by what is the MMO.

So the vulnerable part is the MMO, the market and the funds will hopefully do well enough that it controls our MMO.

If you look at 2024, the left column, it's 11 million for all three of them.

If you do, I think you do remember last year because of the performance earlier in 2122.

We look at the increase to 1.9 million dollars we absorbed last year as an increased expense when the police went from six to seven million dollars in one year.

This year, though, because it's not an actual aerial year, uh it just only changes due to the changes in salaries.

So when we ran our numbers, you'll see police only up 10,000.

That's a rounding error based on the numbers we're talking about.

Fire uh actually went down a little bit, and PMRS went up a little bit.

So uh $17,000 change and a $13 million is a tenth of a percent.

So we would say the pension stayed flat.

So if medical and pension, two of the biggest drivers stayed flat, that's a very good thing, and that's what helped control our budget this year.

This slide just shows you there's three sections of the that first one where it says last.

That's the hit when we got 1.9.

That's that's our market performance of our pension funds, fire and police.

So when you see when it increased enough, um to carry the one that says now, that's what was in the book.

That's what we're paying.

And uh 2020.

Well, I'm sorry, what that was 21.

What's your I'm sorry, 21 and 22, 21 was up the team.

22 was big enough of a hit, it was down 10%.

So over two years, five percent growth in our fund resulted in not enough, too much was going out.

That didn't bring enough in and resulted in the large MMOs.

What we know going forward in the column labeled next is a performance in 23 and 24 was good.

That's locked in.

23 and 24 are in our past, so those calculations would be based on an 11% return and a nine.

So cumulative instead of a five percent, this next MMO will be based on a 20% growth to our fund in the last two years.

So 26, we know we feel optimistic about the 27 to 28 MMO because we already know the calculations that would be used to do the actual studies.

And just to add to that, and I I checked with Miss Lazarchek, is that the one thing that may go down a little bit or we'll see what it is, like the employee contributions, because if obviously we've had a lot of retirements, um, both in the fire department and the police department.

Obviously, if somebody retires, even if they're paying the same percentage that the previous person was doing, you're bringing in less revenue.

Um, so that's just something as well to like think about is that those employee contributions, which I think work out to um what I forget what it was seven and a half percent.

Yeah, yeah.

Is that number will uh that number may decrease, which might uh in yeah, increase our contribution a little bit because we have younger people and not to pass it's one of the reasons why, as well as as people some people retire and you hire younger employees, your medical then just based on the kind of actuary numbers can sometimes stay flat, so it just kind of bounces out on both sides.

All right, pension.

We move to medical.

I talked about that in the line item that just shows uh the graph of because we are self-insured a little a little more difficult to nail it down.

We don't pay premiums, we pay as we go.

So uh we try and move it up and down accordingly, and you see the budget moving up and down, and also their response that we try and keep it on the mark.

Uh then we'll turn okay.

You turn to civicates is the next page, councilwoman Leon.

And then we'll take questions on general and civic together.

Because they're in the same section.

Okay, civic is a quick one.

These are smaller numbers uh in these categories.

The largest one, of course, is the library.

That does not change.

We make a large contribution to the library, it will be in at 1.15.

I will mention that community recovery fund, homeless initiative, affordable housing that councilwoman Smith asked about earlier, will be addressed on Thursday night.

Those are really controlled by uh community and economic development.

So when Miss Collins is here next Thursday, we can take questions about that, but anything else we could also um take questions about, including the fourth of July, uh the fireworks contract, the Halloween parade, shamrocks are in here, the Shamrock Parade, fine arts and human relations commissions are are funded in here as well as the sister city.

Uh, they're typically on the um smaller mounts, 10 to 20,000.

We're not talking about million dollar accounts in here, other than the four I previously mentioned.

So that wraps up general and civic.

That we take any questions about those.

Awesome.

We'll start with uh the finance committee.

Uh, because there were the general so turn to councilman Crampsy Smith.

Do you have any questions over general or civic expenses?

Thank you.

Um, I don't think so.

I think we'll get more into specifics of the other the recovery fund and the housing next week.

Um, I don't have any questions.

Thank you.

Okay, sorry.

Councilman Kleatech.

Any questions?

Yes, thank you.

I just had um a couple of quick questions.

First, on um the general expenses.

I I saw the um line item for accumulated sick leave.

Um, do you also account for accumulated vacation time?

I don't see it on the expense.

Yeah, it if that comes up in the severance situation that that would be paid out of the 4001 account.

The salaries was embedded as a way that okay, but you account for it.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Something that I've learned over the last couple of years is you know, with the carryover that you have to have it on your balance sheet because if everybody quit tomorrow, you would have to pay them all out on their accumulated compensated apps.

It's like a aura, it's an OPEP.

Is that what it is?

OPEP.

Can you repeat what you're doing?

Yeah, could you?

I'm sorry, I can't hear you.

Can you go to the micro microphone?

Um, we have on our balance sheets through the audit, they're called OPEBs.

It's a line that it's um other benefits other than pension benefits.

So as like I earn vacation and I'm not taking and accumulating them in sick days.

We have a liability on our books for that.

Okay, good.

And just one question on that.

How much can people carry over from year to year?

Um, vacation days, five days, but then they have to use it the first quarter, sick days.

I think it's two 10.

Is it is that the max they carry, but I'm not sure what the max 210 hours.

210 days.

Oh, 210 days.

Okay.

For sick.

Yeah.

Okay.

And they have to use those five days in the first quarter of the next year over vacation.

They're use carried over to the first quarter of the year.

Wow.

Okay.

That's lean and and yeah, that keeps you from having a big liability on your books.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cool.

Um, and then I did um wonder if our do our is there a cost share on the premiums for medical with for our employees, or do or is it a fully no 100% paid by there's a family plan and a single plan, and you have to pay um a certain amount.

And then um also there's dental, there's different tiers, so you can pick what tier you want.

And there are premiums associated with for the employees.

Okay, great.

Um those are my two questions on that.

And now, and then on the civic budget, um, I noticed that the fine arts commission did ask for a slight increase in their budget to $15,000 to uh account for you know the cost of everything going up, um, and uh tariffs and all kinds of stuff.

Uh and I do see that that's not in here.

Is that just that um you didn't get that request in time to consider it, or did you decide not to increase it?

So their their line item is 12,000 in the 2026 budget, but in their letter, um, which granted is from September.

So yeah, it was that in a matter of attempting to balance a budget, all the ask, it was you know, we did note that it was something that's almost doubled of what was 2022, it's grown quite rapidly.

So are also the growth one seven to 10 and then to 12 and then to 15.

So we did move it up.

But as we tried to share the wealth to make sure that the asks were all being met, you know, there's a lot of asks that come across from all the departments as well that get curbed a bit that you know we do move it up, but don't not everyone gets everything they ask for, kind of thing.

But then I would add to that though, and this is a good example is the the ones where there are expenditures that aren't involving city employees, often become somewhat cumbersome to necessarily execute.

So the kind of at least what I've said is the implicit message all the time is like if there is something else that comes up in the middle of the year that's like we really want to do this thing and we've spent our money and we need another two thousand dollars, we'll figure it out.

But it's just like, and I don't want to speak for Mr.

Yass on the controller, but as I as a general like idea, like these, those type of like here's 10,000 or 12,000 or $7,000 to this commission to spend, it gets a little bit clunky as far as what the execution of those dollars looks like, and it's hard to come up with a kind of one size fits all process for it, especially when you're not dealing with people that are city employees, right?

So it's just uh it's a it's a concern once again.

I don't want to speak for Mr.

Yasso, but it is something that I felt before, where occasionally something would be like somebody spent this 175 dollars, but then ends up leading to 13 hours of staff time trying to figure out figure out how to figure out how it houses.

But and I say this to them too, is like if they came to uh the early earlier that they come to us to say, look, this is an expenditure that we're looking at next year or the year after, whatever it is, the easier it is to be able to set up that plan and so on and so forth.

So that's just thank you.

And um the the Tanobayashi sister city commission, um, they're kind of yeah, they have they do have a cash balance.

It's just it does seem like they're running a little, it's a little scary when I looked at their numbers.

I was so um, but I but I don't see I don't see that they specifically ask for uh for uh an increase.

No, and those sister city ones come down to who's hosting who and who's coming or somebody going.

Um, and that so they kind of go year to year.

But once again, it's the same thing.

Jellos learned that with World Heritage.

It's just like the current process, which is kind of why we're looking at a different model going forward, is is clunky and inefficient and very time consuming.

Got it.

Thank you.

Still on the topic of general and civic expenses.

Any other questions or comments from council members?

Um, I only had two comments.

Uh one, I just wanted to pass on my gratitude to Miss Santoro and all of her work with the sister city in in Patias.

I've been down there a couple of times, and it's actually very well received in the community down in Patias.

And it is her work there was remarkable.

Um, the other thing was I read a book when I first got on council called public pension obligations and city solvency, which is riveting reading.

Um, if you're ever bored and want to die by book, but there's something that you guys say quite often, and that's that we are going to keep our promises, meaning these pension obligations.

Um, and it's a statement that I think I've become quite accustomed to hearing at this point, but it is it feels like a Herculean task to accomplish that year after year.

Um, especially when you read so many of these case studies where cities become insolvent because of the pension obligation.

So it's just it's it's once again commendable on the part of the administration, your your financial team, um, how well we continue to make these obligations because they are promises that we make to our city workers, our firefighters, our police officers.

Um, and it is worth doing and and it's done well in the city, and I appreciate that.

Yeah, I would add to that.

It's like, and I mean, same thing with teachers, and it's changed since 2010.

But I mean, teachers pay seven and a half percent of their salary.

I remember having this conversation with teachers at when I was working, when they would understand they didn't understand always like the math behind tough decisions that the school district was making.

But I just took, I just did some extrapolating as far as um uh not an actuary, but I just ran some numbers, put them up on the board, and it's like, look, if you're paying seven and a half percent of your salary over the next 35 years, and then you live 25 years and you're able to retire as like a teacher at like your two and a half multiplier, how many years you work.

So if you work 35 years times two and a half, it's 87%.

So you get 87% of your final three years of average and so on and so forth.

I mean, you end up paying like a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars in contributions, and you end up getting back if you live 25 years or 20 years, you're getting 1.5, 1.7 million.

Some of that comes from growth in the stock market, but a lot of that comes from the taxpayers.

And it is we want good people to want to be teachers.

We want good people to want to be police officers, but there is a there's obviously a cost there that we're constantly trying to think about as far as who should bear that cost, how much should and how can we both treat people with respect in a number that will make them want to be here, but also understand that like it's very easy to get into financial trouble because you can say we're not going to pay into this and then lower what your obligation is like 15 or 20 years from now, where it's somebody else, which I talked about at the budget thing.

It's like we're not gonna do that.

No one's ever gonna come back and be like they didn't make a pension payment, so they could go build something else.

Like we've just found ways to do that without them doing that.

Well, once again, for anybody listening online or all of our captive audience, pension public pension obligations and city solvency, if you're interested in that book.

All right, so we're gonna ask a quick question.

Sure.

Uh so is are we still talking about uh civic expenses?

Yes.

Okay.

So on page 175.

So um we're spending four million dollars.

The the four million dollars for the affordable housing.

Is that going towards the Ms.

Collins will talk about this next week, but that's not it's the same thing happens with the homeless initiative and the community recovery fund, is that those are carryover numbers.

One of the things Mr.

Tulo and Miss Collins have laid out is like how we intend to spend that 4.2 million dollars over the next like five, six, seven years.

Is that ARPA money?

But that that is part of the ARPA dollars, yes.

We're gonna talk about that next week then.

Well, you're gonna talk about those individual, right?

Those those individual ones as I think Mr.

Evans has talked about the money that we have put aside versus lost revenue versus the cap the avoiding the capital borrowings.

But those numbers, the 1.9 is associated with the BES expansion, the community recovery fund is the number that has been allocated um for the next couple of years as far as the applications like that, and then the affordable housing number, which Mr.

Tool and Miss Collins is going into is spoken for, though, in between our different projects that we currently have, but it's all not going to get spent next year.

So if like you went back like to like 2022, that was when that number was five million dollars.

And so then, like if you looked at the 2022 budget, it was like five million dollars, and then the 2023 budget would have been like, you know, we only spent 20,000 then, and then we spent 542,000.

So that 4.2 is like that's not getting spent in 2026.

That's going to get spent over the next like five, six years.

Right.

All right.

So we're going to move on to debt services.

Uh turning to you once again, Mr.

Evans.

Thank you.

We talked about this a little bit there tonight.

So this will be quick to wrap up our night.

Quick one I think in the middle of it, please.

Okay, the point about debt service.

Number one, C is relied on a bot in issuance every other year.

So this is repeat from Monday night.

It ties into our story about um the capital reserves.

Plus, there have been some additional borrowings as needed in the past for different topics.

The last borrowing was 2019.

Uh, we do plan to use 22 million reserves to fund 2026 capital needs.

So there'd be no additional debt requests this year.

Last bullet point was a bullet point carried over from last year's slide is that we will continue to review a restructure opportunity in 2026.

As we said, and under investment income, that rates are expected or forecasted to drop.

We also want to look at that opportunity on the debt side, less income, but it's also gonna be cheaper to borrow.

So we have debt on page 170.

180 and 181 is when you see all the ones we have, all the pieces.

The one to focus on is I'll speak about is to the right column, the total.

It's 10.8 next year, the following year's schedule be 10.8, then to 10.

This chart is something you're familiar with from Monday night.

That um our debt service in 2022 is 121 million.

You could see how level it's been 10.8 from 22, 34, 56, uh, with the small drop-off coming up in 2028.

It was 121 in the first four years of this administration.

We've paid off 44 million dollars.

So that 121 is now down to 77.

You'll see that ties to your book.

If you look on page 181, right hand column, bottom, there's that same number, 77, and it adds up.

The next four years as it stands, we're due to pay 41 million dollars in debt.

That would be 26 to 29.

Then after that, there's small pieces, everything below that 10 million bar line.

But if you look at those last five pieces, those last five years, they total 36 million dollars uh with the idea they would be all paid by 2034.

Uh, that does imply that there are no changes at all.

But uh any conversation we have about the changing of debt, uh, we will, as we've have said, had paid it very aggressively going back to 2015.

This was something not was at 121, but it was 170 million to pay off 140 million to get it down to this low over this period of time has been quite aggressive.

So we will explore opportunities to maybe remove some of that what I call tabletop when you see a couple flat years and then just drops off by millions.

Why it would be nice to be here the year, the three or four millions, it's a lot easier to budget if you more put together more of a glide pattern, have a little drop each year, even if it adds a year or two.

If the rates are right, it may make sense to do that versus having to come up with those payments and then have one big drop-off next.

Or it's it's just uh again really clunky to budget accordingly.

So we're gonna meet with PFM, uh, our financial advisors.

We've already looked at a couple different ways each of the last couple of years.

This year wasn't the right year to do it, rates didn't move down, but if they do, and uh we also have some debt that's callable and we match it up and it makes sense, and we'll be in front of you maybe in spring and summer, talking about what that restructure looks like uh in preparation for the 27 budget.

So this chart might change a little bit.

And just to add to that, to go back to our original like ARPA conversation, which if you remember in my first budget presentations in stated cities and things like that, and we had the 34 million dollars, we made a policy determination that we were going to pay for capital expenditures to be able to avoid having to take on debt to be able to create more flexibility over the long term.

So when we got 34 million dollars, the goal of that 34 million dollars, the purpose of why Congress passed that money was to be able to assist those that were affected by the pandemic.

It's hard to make the argument that somehow buying city infrastructure that covers all 80,000 people is completely aligned with what that original purpose was.

So the long-term uh goal here was the idea that if you're paying off these long-term expenditures that you have, it creates more ability to be able to invest systemically into your community in the manner that's able to help out with what we felt were a lot of the systemic issues that came up during the pandemic.

So as we look at what the refinancing is now that we've taken care of our capital expenditures that are the traditional ones over the next four years, the options are on the table for what we're gonna necessarily do to be able to uphold our commitment to spend all 34 million of those dollars on obligations that are assisting the goals and priorities that we have for the city of Bethlehem.

So for example, when we got 34 million dollars, and then like we didn't borrow money, and I'm not paying my tax dollars to pay off debt to buy ambulances and fire engines and all these different types of things.

That's an obligation I no longer have because we spent American rescue plan dollars.

And I want to be very clear here as we talk into the future as far as like what the potential things are that we're going to invest in as a city.

We have a lot of options, including the idea of refinancing.

So we don't know exactly what that's going to look like or what opportunities we're gonna have, but we have a lot of things that were underway as a community that we're gonna have a unique opportunity because people in this room and others did their job in a responsible long-term way.

Um, and I don't believe there's one member of the public here other than people that work for the city of Bethlehem to hear this, but it's truly a remarkable opportunity, and that may include more opportunities for us to be able to invest in the things that we hear people ask for every day.

Um so I will turn to our finance committee chair first.

So, Councilman Cramcy Smith, do you have any questions or no?

Thank you.

All right, Councilman Kuyotech, do you have any questions or comments?

No, I'm good.

Uh, members of council, do you have any questions or comments?

All right.

Uh my only comments is uh as to the statements that you all made.

Um, we've seen we've already seen some of the investments that have been made, especially with the community recovery fund.

Um, a lot of the investments that were made into the community cover recovery fund where programs that were supported, like extended hours at for basketball in Broccole and other things that we're seeing now help to food pantries that you've we've earmarked funds that are now like being invested now.

Sorry, I'm so turned around by this.

But I'm I'm excited for what we can do independently as a city when we're entering times where we're just not as certain at the federal and the state level where we can be financially independent to invest in our own city and make sure that we are able to keep each other safe and strong.

And I think that we made the right decision at first when we were doing ARPA, I was like, I'm not sure if we should be doing doing this.

Um, but looking back, I really genuinely believe it was the right decision to make.

So if there are no more questions or comments from council or from the administration, I will turn to the public for comment regarding the past four budgeting items to my left, to my center and to my right.

All right.

The third budget meeting will be Thursday, November 20th at 6 p.m.

If necessary, the final budget meeting will be at 6 p.m.

on Thursday, December 4th.

Final reading and enactment of the 2026 budget ordinance will take place at the Tuesday, December 16th council meeting.

The second budget meeting is adjourned.

Thank you.

What I was trying to do is if you would the orange button, as you probably know.