This meeting of the Bloomington City Council Committee of the Whole considered three appropriation ordinances for the 2026 fiscal year: the water and wastewater utilities budget, the Bloomington Transit budget, and the civil city (general government) budget. All ordinances were recommended for adoption by the full council after presentations, council questions, and public comment. The meeting also included extensive discussion of the city's fiscal outlook, tax rates, sanitation fund subsidies, and audit timeliness.
I call the committee of the whole to order, and we will start with appropriation ordinance 2025-13. The council will now receive a presentation from Caslin Zager, Director of the Utilities Department. Welcome. Please state your name for the record. And hi. Uh Kat Zager, Utilities Director. I'm presenting the uh an ordinance adopting the budget for the operation maintenance debt service and capital improvements for the water and wastewater utility departments for the city of Bloomington, Indiana for the year 2026. Our uh water utility budget totals 23,119,000. And our wastewater utility budget is 34,590,000. Happy to take any questions. Thank you. The floor is now open for questions from council members. Under Bloomington Municipal Code Section 2.04.250, parentheses C. There is no limit on how often a member may speak. However, no member may speak for longer than five minutes at a time. Any questions from council members? Oh councilmember Piedmont Smith. Yes, um, I asked this in the written questions, but I and you answered, but I still don't understand. So I'm hoping to get some clarity. And that is the extensions and replacements under section one of the water utility is a negative amount, negative $603,000. Um why are we budgeting a negative amount? Yeah, sure. Um so I'll answer that question. Also another question I received around the same topic. So when you look at our budget, there's actuals and then our budgeted amount. The actuals are zero or close to zero because we don't um charge things to extensions and replacements. Extensions and replacements is how we balance our water budget, which needs to be a net zero budget. So when we have a positive extensions and replacements, we use that for things like unexpected expenses and maintenance. When it is negative, it's indicative of a shortfall, which I discussed during our budget presentation. Um that shortfall, we are planning on taking a one-time loan from our sewer utility to make up for that. Helper. Yes. So what why is why is it called extensions and replacements? Is that just historical? Yeah, it's a historical name for it. It doesn't actually refer to extending or replacing people assume it means it's physically extending and replacing pipe, but that's not the meaning of it. No. So it's its own fund. Yes. Okay. All right, thank you. Any other council members have questions? Councilmember Rollo. Yes, thanks. Um I had a question. Forgot to ask it during budget, and that is um I'm curious to know what our current spare capacity is of our water treatment plant. In other words, where are we in terms of um it's you know, we we had improvements about 10 or 12 years ago, maybe more, 15 years ago. And I don't think there have been any other expansions since then. Where are we? I think the maximum was about 34 million per day or so the maximum capacity of our water treatment plant is 30 million gallons per day.