Dean?

Yes.

Yardy?

Yes.

Bowie.

Ford?

Here.

Hagan?

Here.

Lop.

Here.

Schneider.

Swanson.

Yeah.

All right.

Action item three, presentations to six-158.

Discussion about the seven propositions for the 2026 general obligation bond package.

So we have a special guest here this afternoon.

City manager Michael Spurgeon is going to talk to you all about the Go Bond.

Thank you, Michaela.

So I have to apologize to Jennifer and Ted, they've heard it three, four times.

I know I know that.

So I've started actually been doing this for on behalf of the council administration for about 45 days now.

So the first thing I do is I look around the room to see how many folks have actually been in one of the previous presentations, and then I try to tailor it towards that.

But uh members of the board, I really do appreciate the opportunity to be here to spend a couple of minutes with you to talk about this exciting initiative that the city council uh officially authorized on on January 6th.

And so what I'd like to do today is just walk you through a little bit of it and then hopefully answer a question or two of you as citizens and or business owners or operators, uh you may get encountered by folks that uh you engage every single day that you can maybe answer one of their questions.

So um the first thing I want to mention is I believe everybody has one sheets or the palm cards.

So you have the one sheets.

Up on the board, I've got what we call the palm card, and I'll I'll explain that in a minute.

So let me let me go back a little bit and just share with you that this initiative that the city undertook started about two and a half years ago.

And whenever you put a bond package together, it does take time because uh mainly you want to make sure that it's community driven.

So when we still sat down for the first time, we were looking at probably close to 1.2 billion dollars worth of projects that we could choose from for this community.

Now, we decided to do this as a program rather than just a one-time bond package.

So in 2020 2036 and 2046, the mayor and the councils at the time, city managers won't have to try to reinvent the wheel, is they'll have a program of projects that were not included in this bond package that they can consider, they'll just have to update the estimates, and they'll have a real good starting point to work off of in addition to all the other exciting opportunities that could be happening ten years from now.

And so, in order to keep the property tax rate the same, which council said as we've done in the past, we had to narrow that 1.2 billion down to 415 million dollars.

So obviously we had to cut two-thirds of that.

We actually didn't have trouble getting to about 615 million, but between 615 and and 415, it was a little challenging because there are just so many great projects that the the community weighed in on, we had to make some tough decisions, and I'll speak in that in just a few minutes.

Um I wanted to share with you is over the last two years, this was not a package that I like to say that was put together in a smoke-filled back room by the council and myself.

Okay.

We've never been that way, we're fully transparent.

Our new city hall municipal service building working on is going to have a lot of glass because of the theme of being transparent.

And so we did uh three public forums last summer.

We had HOA meetings, we had community meetings, we had meetings with citizens, uh, we met with our partners at the chamber and the broken arrow uh school district, and we had a steering committee.

And so the projects that are in this package are truly a representation of what the community felt was most important at this particular time.

And that was tough because obviously we only had 415 million uh dollars, and there was much more uh projects that there were than that.

But I can tell you is that of the 129 projects that are in all eight propositions, we feel comfortable that these are the projects that broken air residents that responded, whether it was to one of the six surveys or to attend at any of the meetings uh engaged with the council and myself, these are the projects they would like to see.

So uh if you can see up there on the board, the on the palm card, which I'll work off, the the package is broken into two parts.

There's a tag there's a part that's broken into property taxes, which is propositions one through seven, four hundred and fifteen million dollars that keeps the property tax rate exactly the same, which is about sixteen point four eight.

And what's interesting is out of one dollar, I just learned this recently, out of every single dollar you pay in property taxes, the city gets 13 cents.

Because remember, we don't we don't get any money from property taxes to pay for operations.

We only get we only get proper the property taxes we receive from all of you, albeit for your home or your business, goes toward the repayment of bonds or repayment of any judgments.

So our our operational expenses come predominantly from sales tax and other revenues.

So that 13 cents you pay is what is used to repay bonds.

And so 415 million keep the same property tax rate.

How do we do that?

Well, we have bonds approved previously that will roll off that we'll we're making debt service payments on, and then the assessed value of the city will increase with new homes and new businesses will give us the capacity to issue the additional bonds over over the 10 years of the package.

The second part of the initiative is a sales tax initiative, which I'll talk about here in just just a second.

I want to share with you is that uh this is eight votes.

It's not one time, go in, one vote, winner take all.

You have to go in and you have to vote eight times.