The meeting began with the introduction of a new assistant city attorney, Jake Schorlemer. The FY25 audit was presented by Amy Shrek of Forbus Mazars, resulting in a clean opinion and a material weakness regarding CDBG sub-award reporting timelines. The main discussion centered on Phase 5 of the riverfront project, including a playground, dog park, and donor plaza. Council members expressed disappointment that the project details had not been brought to them before and directed that the dog park be relocated to a dry-side location and that the donor plaza be reconsidered due to levee right-of-way concerns. Several consent agenda items and public hearings were addressed, including the North Line senior housing development, which generated significant public comment. The meeting also included a failed rezoning ordinance, a resolution to study ICE coordination, and directives to explore employee leave policy and traffic improvements on Ivy Drive.
Go ahead and get going. We have a few items on the study session for today. So I'm gonna start. Danielle, would you like to introduce our first guests? Oh, sorry. Apologies. We're actually gonna jump ahead. And Mimi, would you like to introduce our new member of our staff? Sure. Um, Jake, do you want to come up to this podium over here and introduce yourself? This is George Jake Schorlemer, our new attorney. Awesome. All right, yeah. Um Jake Shoilamer, as she correctly pronounced. Um, so I'm the new assistant city attorney. Um I was working at legal aid for the past year, and before here in Council Bluffs, and before that, I lived in Grinnell, Iowa. I went to law school in New York, Syracuse, and um undergrad at the University of Arkansas. Not sure what else I need to say, but welcome. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay. Now, Danielle, would you like to introduce our first guest? Sure. Um, I have the honor of introducing um Amy Shrek with Forvus Mazars. This is um our opportunity to kind of present to you our FY25 um audit. You all have a copy of in front of you. Um kind of go over what the audit entails, why it's important, and then any significant findings or anything that she deems necessary to discuss with you guys today. Um, with that, I will turn it over to Amy. These are ours, we can mark these up, right? Yep. Good afternoon. As Danielle said, my name is Amy Shrek. I'm a partner with Forbus Mazars from the Omaha office, 1120 South 101st Street, Omaha, Nebraska, 68124. And I'm here to present the results of the fiscal year 2025 audit with you. The audit is kind of like eating vegetables. It's not very fun, it's not very exciting, but it's necessary, it's important. It helps to demonstrate financial transparency and accountability to taxpayers, to granting agencies and others. It's required for compliance with state statutes or state code, and it's also required for the federal grants that the city receives. So it's very important that it is done and that it's done timely in accordance with all of the standards. We do provide perform these audits under a number of standards, and I thought you know you have a short meeting today, so we'll go through this document page by page. I'm joking. I will give you the summary. If you do have questions, happy to answer those as we go through. The first portion is the opinion on the financial statement. So we look at these financial statements, we audit them under generally accepted auditing standards, and the takeaway from that is that we issued an unmodified or clean opinion on the financial statements. That means they are fairly stated in all material respects in accordance with accounting standards in the United States for local governments. That's the result that you want to see. These numbers are as you would want them presented under those standards. We also present or audit the financial statements under government accounting standards. Government auditing standards, I apologize.