Call the committee of the whole meeting for the City of Elgin special committee of the whole meeting for the Elgin City Council for November 12th 2025 to order.

We'll please call the roll.

Council members of our Dixon.

Present.

Good.

Here.

Martinez?

Here.

Ortiz?

Here.

Powell.

Stefan.

Here.

Thor.

Here.

Mayor Captain.

Here.

Uh, we have no one uh signed up for public comment this evening.

So, Mr.

Manager, you're gonna work from down on uh main floor tonight.

Mayor Council members, good evening.

This is the first of three meetings of budget deliberation regarding the 21 decision proposal budget and through your financial plan.

We got a reintroduction last week to lay the groundwork for what to expect as part of the discussions.

And this evening, we are going to be hearing from Deb Naraki with discussions about the general fund, the recreation fund, the river boat fund, and after we get that information, we will segue into information on the proposed capital improvements in the 2026 budget, and at that time you will hear department heads coming out with brief descriptions of the initiatives that they're recommending for this year, and in every instance when the council has an inclination to ask me or any of the department heads a question or seek clarification, no need to wait until the end of the meeting, just fire away in the normal manner that you do working through the mayor.

So on the November 19th, the plan is any follow-up items or questions that are unresolved after this meeting will be resolved at the beginning of those budget deliberations.

But also scheduled during that time will be a presentation on the utility fund that includes water, sewer, and all of the money and incredible number of capital projects that flow through that through that initiative.

We put everything together on November 19th in preparation for the truth in taxation hearing that will be occurring on December.

That's the first Wednesday in December.

December 3rd is really the final meeting in which we need to dial in any potential changes or amendments to the budget because by December 17th, the third Wednesday in December, we're obligated by law to approve a balanced budget.

And unless anybody wants to stay until the end of the year to work through the holidays through that, that has been the plan as long as I've been working for the city.

So the hope is to work through this evening for about an hour and a half or so.

And if the mayor is so inclined, perhaps a 15-minute break, and we'll go on with that.

We have work planned that'll take us to about nine o'clock, but if the council wants to go any later than that, we're certainly able to do that.

So before we begin going through the previews for the benefit of the public or those that are watching from home, Karina Nava is gonna come up and do a quick walkthrough with the online budget book to show the most salient portions to help and then to help not anybody on the dais, but everybody at home follow along with what we're presenting.

So Ms.

Nava.

Thank you.

Hello, good evening.

Um so for those not too familiar with our online budget.

I'm just gonna walk through how to access it.

So if you go to Elgin IL.gov, um that's our home page.

You can access the budget right from there.

Um but uh first at the cover we have uh budget introduction.

We have the menu on the left-hand side.

So you're able to see the letter of transmittal, uh, personnel changes, that's where those live.

Um actually it's easier if I look at the computer screen.

My eyes are not that great.

All right, uh, under general information, uh, we've got uh the demographics, the how to use this document, budget process, all of that, and then uh fund summaries.

So this is where you'll find the summaries for the general fund, the river boat fund, any special revenue funds, um, enterprise funds, so you can explore there, and then um under departments um has the departmental uh summaries of departmental budgets.

We've got the user fees, and then um under capital improvement plan, department requests is where you will be able to find a lot of the uh capital requests that we will be talking about today.

And what's neat about this is let's say that you want to learn more about let's see who do we want to pick on.

Well, I'll be talking about this today later.

So the electronic voting and agenda management system.

So you can click on that, and it'll take you to the description of that initiative along with details of what strategic plan outcome area it's tied to and um information about the budget, uh what's being requested.

Is this a one-year initiative, two years, three years, um any ongoing costs with that?

So that's just a little example there.

And that's it.

And if you would prefer to print it, you can do that by going to PDF over here, creating a PDF.

You can include all the pages, which I will warn you, it's a little bit over 700 pages.

But if you want to just select certain sections, you can also do that, so that would reduce the amount of pages you're printing.

And that's about it.

Thanks.

Okay.

Good evening, Mayor and City Council.

We're gonna start out with a overview of the general fund.

If you're following along on your laptop, if you under a fund summary over overview, if you click on general fund, it will take you to the general fund.

And if you scroll down to the comprehensive fund summary, that's what I'm gonna be speaking from.

Okay.

All right, I want to start out first talking about 2025, what our budgeted expectations were, and where we see this year ending in comparison to the budget.

Beginning with revenues, the city has three um types of revenues, and um, as we go through these, I think you'll agree that they balance each other out and it it provides for some nice diversity.

Um, the first category I would call very consistent and predictable, and those are revenues such as the local alcohol tax, the local motor fuel tax, the municipal gas and electricity taxes.

If you look at those revenues over the years, you'll see they're like practically identical from year to year, they're so close.

The second category of revenues are revenues that uh vary annually.

An example of this would be a grant that you might have in one year but not another year.

Um the refuse fee increases from year to year based on a contractual obligation, and um I would also put property tax in this category.

Obviously, we set our levy, so um that can vary from year to year, but um it's also a very predictable revenue source because once we set our levy, we collect at least 99% of what we levy, so we can kind of be sure we're gonna have that revenue, and then the final category would be the more volatile revenue streams that are up that are more affected by what's going on in the economy, like sales taxes, income taxes, and investment income.

So, looking at revenue for 2025, we budgeted 176.8 million dollars, and we're estimating to come in at 177.7, just about 900,000 more than planned, which is a very small percentage of such a large budget.

So, overall, we're very um close, but what I want to call out um in the revenue categories are some of the revenues had um larger swings compared to the budget, either over budget or under budget, but they net each other out.

But there's some important information that can be gleaned from going through those.

So starting at the top would be the ambulance revenue where we budgeted eight and a half million dollars, and we're estimating nine point six, which is an increase of 1.1 million dollars.

This is uh very consistent with 2024 actuals of 9.7.

The GEMT revenues that are a part of ambulance revenue are difficult to predict, and I believe we saw some significant increases in GEMT revenue after we set last year's budget, which explains the um increase over the budget.

If you go down and look at intergovernmental revenue, this was budgeted at 11.4 million dollars, and we're anticipating 2.4, which is nine million dollars under budget.

There's um two significant pieces that make up that difference.

One is the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity Rise grant that the DNA applied for and did not receive in the amount of 500,000 dollars.

And beyond that, we had budgeted $7.5 million in expectation of finding a potential funding source to purchase a building for housing for unsheltered individuals.

We are not continuing that revenue into 2026 as we don't have certainty in obtaining that funding.

If you move down to the other category, budgeted at 9.4 million.2 million or an increase of 4.8 over budget.

This is a huge portion of this, about $3 million is our investment income exceeding expectations.

Also, in this category, you will find the use of roadway impact fees.

When we collect impact fees, they go into an escrow account.

When we determine a road project that will use those impact fees, we recognize them as revenue to cover the cost of the road project, and that was just a matter of timing with the road projects.

The impact fees get used when the expense side occurs.

So the fees for the refuse service did increase 21% in 2025, explaining that variance.

There's an offsetting expense in the expenditures because as you know the refuse fees are a pass through.

If you move down to replacement tax, this is for the personal property replacement tax, was budgeted at $2.6 million, and we're anticipating $1.4 million, about $1.2 million less than planned.

This is a result of the Department of Revenue doing a true-up of how they allocated revenue between the PPRT and income taxes.

And so our PPRT revenues are being reduced, but we should see an increase in income tax for a portion of that.

Next, looking at sales tax, budgeted at $39.2 million.

We're expecting that to be about $42.5 million, up about $3.3 million over budget, and I think the inflationary environment we're in can explain that.

Income tax was budgeted at $20.2 million, and we're anticipating $20.7 million, about a half a million dollar increase, which I think could partially have come from that reallocation from the personal property replacement tax.

So overall those areas that I called out had a net increase of $1.2 million.

Moving down to the expenses for $25.

They were budgeted at $176.2 million and we're anticipating $184.1 million, which is $7.9 million dollars over budget.1 million and is actually expected to come in below budget at $118.4, about $1.7 million below budget.

This is the result of a few things.

But as a condition of the grant, it has to add new employees.

So we had to wait to add firefighters until after we knew if we received the grant or not.

But I think we found out in October that we got the grant.

So those new firefighters are going to start on December 29th, so they don't really impact the 2025 expenses, but do contribute significantly to that variance.

In addition, there's always general vacancies in positions that don't get filled during the year or people leave and it takes some time to replace them, so we have some savings there.

From time to time in the police department, and sometimes in fire two, we will overhire behind beyond our authorized strength, knowing that there's going to be a number of significant retirements coming up, and the department needs to get those officers hired and meet an academy date to get them started on their training so they can replace the officers that are leaving.

If we move down to the contractual expenditures, they were budgeted at 26 million, and we're projecting them to come in at 31 million, five million dollars over budget, and this is the result of two things.

One being an unbudget ex unbudgeted expenditure of two million dollars for the cleanup of 10 city, and the other piece is the offsetting increase in the refuse fees.

Capital expenditures were anticipated to be $13.8 million dollars, and we're check projecting about $18.2 million, about $4.4 million over budget.

This is a category that will fluctuate from budget almost every year, depending on the timing of completion of capital projects.

Affecting that variance, and on the opposite side, the um capital budget included funding for a housing alternative for the unsheltered, which did not occur in 2025, reducing the expenditures in that category.

So overall, the budget planned for revenues and expenditures to balance each other out and add only $600,000 to our reserve funds, which would have made our fund balance $129.2 million or $73% of our annual expenditures.

However, the projections indicate that expenditures are going to exceed revenue by $6.4 million, reducing the fund balance to $122 million or $66% of annual expenditures.

Obviously, still above our minimum target of 30%.

So that's 2025.

Any questions?

Thank you.

At 3.8 million, and then it looks like it's gonna be or budgeted at that and then estimated at that.

Can you give me a little bit more information?

What are those additional charges that are under other charges?

So that's a significant amount.

Other charge.

Oh, you're in expenditures, yeah.

Um basically things don't fall into those other categories if there's um economic incentive payments in the budget that houses the contingency fund.

Um could I get a list of those?

Can I I can provide that to you?

Yeah, yeah.

I appreciate that.

Just because it's a significant amount, and if it doesn't fit into like salary and supplies is already on there, I'm just really curious on what is adding up to three million, three point eight million dollars for other charges.

Okay, thank you.

I will get you that okay.

Okay, now we'll move on to 2020 the 2026 proposed budget.

Okay.

And like in the prior year, there's things that have gone up and things that have gone down that net out to that increase.

Beginning with property taxes.

The property tax levy has six components.

Three of them are recorded in the general fund.

Our general corporate tax levy to fund ongoing operations, the police pension fund contribution, and the fire pension plan contribution.

These three pieces of the levy are proposed to go up $7.3 million.

The general piece that goes from $27.8 up to $32 million has remained flat for 11 years.

We had it at $27.8 million.

So it's been a while since we've had to increase that levy.

The police and fire pension contributions reflect the annual required contribution determined by an actuary.

And also actuarial assumptions are changed to better reflect expected experience in both of those funds.

Okay.

So obviously no change, but I just wanted to point out the differences and inform you about the grants that are in there.

In the 2025 number, we had utilized about 1.4 million dollars in grants from Kane County and the Illinois Department of Human Services for the motel costs at the Lexington Hotel.

In 2026, we plan to use about $400,000 of that funding from the Department of Human Services again for the Lexington Hotel.

And also we will receive $1.2 million from the SAFER grant to cover a portion of those firefighters previously discussed under the SAFER grant.

The SAFER grant is a three-year grant.

Over three years, we're going to get $3 million.

We'll get $1.2 million in 26, $1.2 million in 27, and $600,000 in the final year of 2028.

Okay, in the other category, and we saw in 2025 that was $14.2 million, and it's down to $8.8 in 2026, a decrease of $5.4 million.

This again is based on partially based on the use of impact fees for those road projects previously described described.

We used a fair amount of impact fees for US 20 and ranking road and US 20 and long common.

The proposed budget for tax year 2025 to be received in 2026 is 65.6 million dollars, an increase of 7.7 million dollars or 13.2%.

The remaining three portions of the levy, the IMRF Social Security, the tax receipts from that portion of the levy go into the special revenue fund labeled IMRF, and basically pays the IMRF and Social Security payments for city employees.

The special recreation portion of the levy goes into the special revenue fund called special recreation, and those funds are our earmarked for our NISRA payments and portions of projects that have ADA improvements.

And finally, the debt service fund, which decreased slightly is recorded in the debt service fund.

And this should be noted that the debt service fund is for corporate debt, not for utility debt.

The last time we issued debt was in 2022 for some part stuff and some, but generally from year to year, we're primarily issuing utility fund debt, which is recorded in the utility fund, and we do not levy for it.

It's the tax is abated and it's covered by utility rates.

Okay.

So that's the levy.

And if we go back up to the overall chart, I just want to talk about the expenditures in the 2026 budget.

In 2025, they're projected to be 184.1 million, and they're going up to 190 million, about 5.9 million or a 3.2% increase.

The earnings and benefits category sees the biggest increase, going from 118.4 to 129.4, an 11 million dollar increase.

This is there's a number of factors that play into this increase.

First, the collective bargaining agreement, colas and contract adjustments, and the new management pay plan.

Increases to the pension contributions that we discussed.

But our consultants tell us that you know that's pretty good for what's in the market right now.

When we started out, we were over 20%, and with Horton, the consultants' help, they were able to negotiate, and we ended up at 11.2.

So I guess we should be thankful for that, but it is a large increase.

Additionally, the category is increased by positions that were vacant in 2025 that we anticipate filling in 2026.

Again, those nine firefighters that are going to be hired at the end of the year are going to impact the 2026 budget.

New this year in the budget is a firefighter paramedic training program that is going to be handled in-house by the fire department.

This program is going to increase earnings and benefits by a million dollars for overtime because the classes are going to be taught on overtime.

At the beginning of 2026, the fire department's going to have approximately 25 EMT firefighters that need to get their paramedic license.

Commodities expenditures are consistent with the prior year, and uh contractual expenditures are also considered um commensurate with the prior year at about 31 million dollars.

But um that would beg the question in this inflationary market, why aren't we seeing that um expenditure category increase?

But the reason for that is that the contractual expenditures in 2025 include the two million dollars to clean up 10 cities that we will not be experiencing in 2026, so that funding is going to other items.

One of the items in that category is the increase in the LRS contract.

This contractual services category also includes an equipment replacement fee that general fund departments pay to fund our equipment replacement fund, which is an internal service fund, and it it houses our fleet department and also captures the expenditures for citywide um IT investment, citywide programs such as Salesforce and things like that.

Um over the years, you know, we've made some substantial investments into IT initiatives.

The fleet department has seen increasing costs related to higher gas prices, just the cost to repair vehicles, the cost of vehicles in general.

So those charges to the general fund departments are going to increase by 1.1 million dollars in 2026, and that is part of that contractual services expense line.

In addition, um, which I'll talk about more in the river boat fund presentation, there's some expenditures that have traditionally been charged to the river boat that are going to come back to the general fund due to declining revenue in the river boat, and in this category, there's a $400,000 was transferred from the river boat back into the general fund for tree work.

Okay.

Um to other funds category, in the current year, it was $8.8 million and it's going up to $9.5, which is about $700,000.

This category will include the $1.2 million that the council determined should be allocated to lead service line replacements from the grocery tax.

The category only goes up $100,000, even though that was a $1.2 million transfer, because the 2025 budget included a $500,000 transfer to the retiree health trust, which is a fiduciary fund that funds retirement health insurance for former employees.

And instead of transferring that $500,000 from the general fund next year, we're going to transfer it from the medical insurance fund because there's funding available there and it will free up some money in the general fund.

Okay.

Those initiatives that are being moved from the river boat into back to the general fund, and include economic development payments for the auto mall and the PSA with the LGIN development group.

In capital expenditures in 2025, we anticipate spending $18.2 million, and that is going to drop down to 10.8, a $7.3 million decrease.

Also, in 2025, we will be purchasing three ambulances.

Where in 2026, we'll be scheduled to just have one ambulance.

So that also contributes to the decrease in that category.

So overall, in the 2026 budget, we anticipate um expenditures exceeding revenues by 8.8 million dollars, reducing our fund balance to 11.4 million, which is 60 percent of annual expenditures.

So far, thank you, Mayor.

Um thank you, Deb.

I'm the newest council member on here, and I we have a member up from the public here.

Thank you for being here, and those watching at home.

You stated in 11 years we haven't increased the levy, but pro as homes values have increased, property taxes have increased.

So you can you clarify how that's staying how that has stayed flat?

Because you indicated in 11 years our levy has stayed flat.

Well, as you know other taxing districts go in to individual homes tax bills, so that's dependent on what U 46 is doing or any of the other districts, and also if the county has increased the value of your home, your taxes are gonna go up whether or not you know we increase our levy.

So if the if the property value goes up, right?

And the overall does our levy get an increase and and that percentage because we get a percentage of the levy.

No, it's flat.

We don't say static, right?

Yeah in years past, way back we would um levy up a rate, but for years we've levied a flat amount.

Okay, so although it's not change.

So although this is saying like a 13.2 percent, what you're saying is the levy that we've had now has been a static flat rate for 11 years for the exact same price for that component levy, right?

The the 20%, yeah.

The general police punch is different.

Yeah, yeah, those have gone up in prior years.

Thank you.

Any other questions?

I have one.

No.

Uh we talked about the revenue from our investments.

Yeah, better throw myself back on.

Um the uh we talked about revenue from investments.

Can you tell me uh give me a ballpark about the average maturity of our bond investments?

Because that's going to be germane as we move on as um interest rates go up and down.

Yeah, um, it depends on what fund we're investing from.

Like certain funds, like the a good example would be the sewer development fund.

There's significant cash there that can only be used for specific purposes, and as we don't see utilizing it in the short term, we can go out two or three years on that money, but in you know, the river boat fund, for example, where the the cash flow is tighter, you know, we we look at it and determine most of them I would say average probably a year when we make a new investment.

Okay, and we also um our investment advisors will kind of tell us you know what makes sense too based on what they see in the market.

Okay, okay.

Anything else?

Ms.

Powell, yes, thank you.

Um a question regarding our home rule sales tax.

Um can you refresh everyone's memory on what our current home rule sales where are we with that?

How much um our home rules sales taxes?

And I know in the past there was a really nice comparison that showed where our home rule sales tax compared to some of the neighboring communities.

Would you be able to provide something like that at a later date?

Definitely.

I can break that sales tax number down into there's three components as you know, the sales tax, the home rules sales tax, and then the um sales use tax.

Yep, and then um could bring that back next week.

And and where I'm going with this is you know, obviously, as we're looking at ways to close the get the budget gap that we're looking at.

I I guess my question is raising the increment on the sales tax an alternative option to raising property taxes, and if we did that, what would we have to raise the sales tax?

What rate would we have to raise it to in order to accomplish that?

I'm I'm just curious because obviously, with um you know none of it is ideal.

I I realize that, and especially now.

Um, but at least looking at it from the sales tax perspective, it gets spread out amongst folks that um live in our community, but you know, buy gas in our community, uh shop in our community, maybe we look at you know the gas tax, because I know that we do have a gas tax.

Um I'm looking at I guess I'm curious about alternatives to just raising the property tax.

Okay.

Have we looked at that and and what that would look like and where that would put us in comparison to our neighboring communities?

We could take a look at that and bring that back to you.

Okay.

Yeah, I appreciate the chance to ask some questions because I've thought of some after other people have asked.

Is it possible to maybe it's happened, I just haven't seen it yet in what I've read, to take the proposed tax property tax increase and translate that into what it would the result on average air quotes uh average house of say $300,000 value.

What would that translate to actually um um when we're when I'm finished geo, um Hungo is gonna come up and talk about that very topic.

Okay.

Because it it segues into another question.

I'm gonna show my age here because for a couple years we had uh an attempt to do this with our budget and all our revenue streams and and fees and taxes.

Um it was back when Aaron Constantino was our assistant manager, so this is a while ago.

We had the fictional Gifford family, and we with a lot of caveats because it was average of everything, average household size, average income, average house value, and we there was an attempt to try to show the effect of all of our major taxes.

I don't think it was all of them, but at least the major ones, how it would affect that average family.

I think I mean again it's a lot of caveats and a lot of um generalities.

I think the the family size had a decimal point for the the number of children because that was what the average size of the family was like 1.2 children.

So you know, you're trying to calculate the expenses on a family with two parents and 1.2 kids, it's kind of hard to conceptualize, but it was an attempt to try to show the effect of all our some of our major sales tax property taxes on this fictional Gifford family that supposedly lived in Elgin and was an average of everything.

So I see from the I see from the expression that I'm not I'm not making this up.

I think we had this at some point, yeah.

So geo's isn't that extensive.

We're focusing on the impact for the increase in the general levy, and he'll provide that type of information.

If it's something that we're going down the line where there's consideration for looking through other revenue streams, we can continue with that analysis as well.

In addition to the home rule sales tax, you know, that there's the electricity tax, the natural gas tax, there's the local motor fuel tax, there's a whole number of those other issues, and the debates that go along or with the merit, the pros and cons of increasing those or keeping those the same as well.

Great, thank you.

Those are my questions.

Thanks.

Okay.

All right.

Then just to finish up quickly, I just want to talk briefly about as you know, this is a three-year plan, and what we're anticipating happening in 2027 and 2028 in this three-year plan.

In 2027, the revenues are projected to decrease by about 1.4%.

And in 2028, they would be consistent with the 2027 uh budget.

In those um two out years, property taxes for the general levy would stay at the 32 million dollars, and the police pension and the fire pension portion of the levy would see um slight increases.

We're estimating about $800,000 per year.

As we spoke about previously, the by the end of the three-year plan, the safer grant runs out.

And sales taxes in the two out years of the plan were decreased slightly from where they are right now, which is an all-time high, with the hope that we're gonna see some uh easing of inflation, but the other revenue streams are all pretty consistent with 20 what we talked about for 2026.

Um the expenditures in the two out years of the plan increase 4.6 percent in 2027 and 4.8 percent in 2028.

Um the earnings and benefits categories increase by 4% each year with anticipated cost of living adjustments, um, pension contribution increases, and uh possible medical insurance premium increases.

The commodities contractual transfers and other categories see two to three percent increases in each year.

The capital expenditures um increase by uh 19 percent in 2027 and by 19% in 2028.

Um, this is reflective of the declining revenue in the river boat, where we would see more capital being budgeted in uh the general fund.

What's important to note down at the bottom of this chart, in 2027, expenditures are projected to exceed revenues by nearly 20 million dollars, reducing our general fund balance to 93.4 million, which is 47 percent of annual expenditures in 2028.

The expenditures are again expected to exceed revenues and the amount of 29.6 million dollars, reducing general fund um fund balance to 63.8, which is 31 percent of our annual expenditures, which is just above our minimum target of 30 percent.

So you can see where we started back in uh 2025 at 73 percent, these significant draws throughout the life of the plan are bringing us down to 31 percent.

That's all for the general fund.

Okay, not that I need to provide the introduction, but as you we suspected that people would want to know what the impact is on the household from the 4.2 million dollar annual increase.

And while I don't think you use the Gifford family, use some uh some statistics, and Gio's going to explain the method behind the calculations that he created to give the most accurate representation of what the impact would be on the typical Elgin household.

Thanks, Gill.

And for the geo jungle management analysts, thank you.

Yeah, good evening, Mayor and City Council.

So, like Rick mentioned, I will be talking about the impact of household, and I'll be going over other things such as where do your property taxes actually go.

So, in order to start, let's follow on the online budget of your on it.

Open up the budget introduction, and then click on property tax overview.

If you scroll down, you'll see a dollar bill that's broken down.

So I'm gonna go over a little bit of that.

So, where do our property taxes actually go?

So, property taxes collected from Elgin residents are distributed among multiple local taxing bodies, as you guys know.

Of every dollar paid, the city of Elgin receives about 16 to 18 cents of it, uh, which helps fund police and fire services and pensions, streets and infrastructure, parks, and other core services.

The remaining 82 to 84 cents uh support essential public services like the school districts, uh the Elgin Community College, Guild Board and Library, Townships, etc.

So for most Elgin properties, 63 to 67 percent actually goes to the school districts, and only 16 to 80 percent comes to the city of Elgin, and then remaining to the other taxing bodies.

So in this graph, you might wonder why is it ranges instead of a specific number?

So Elgin is a big city with multiple counties, multiple school districts, multiple townships, multiple taxing bodies essentially.

So for those that might live on Highland Woods that are on Plato's township and school district 301, they had different taxing bodies, so their percentage is a different range than somebody that lives out east at the Hanover Township with the school district U46.

And it also differs from somebody that lives near downtown with the Elgin Township in Kane County.

So that's the reason why there's a range instead of just one specific number.

But they all fall within that category from for Elgin, they get we received 16 to 18%.

And for the school districts, it's for most of them is 63 to 67%.

Another thing to note, um Elgin doesn't have a separate park district, and uh the parks and recreation department, we run it here in house.

So many other municipalities, when you're comparing this to other municipalities, our number might seem inflated because our park district essentially is included within the city of Elgin.

So instead of us being 14 to 16% range, we're a little higher in that aspect.

And now moving on to what most people want to know the impact to household.

Before I show that number, I want you all to open up general information on the budget book.

From there, if you can click on demographics, and I want to talk about three items before I dive in deep into the uh numbers.

So within the demographics, our budget book actually pulls information from the census.

So the most recent census that we have regarding median home value, it's the 2023 census.

So this pulls directly, like I said, from the census, and it shows information such as medium home value, home value distribution, and other information.

Another item that I want to talk about regarding before I show, like I said, the impact to household, is the impact to households calculated based on assessment from the counties, not based on the real estate market, not based on what the appraiser said, but it's based on the actual tax assessor.

So the difference between the three real estate market, that's obviously what you see on Zillow on Redfin on RealTrade.com.

You typically see those prices a little more elevated depending on the timing of the market.

The other one, it is obviously an appraisal value.

That's an actual professional appraiser that goes to your property, does the full inspection, and does it based on comparable sales.

And lastly, it's the assessed value, which is used for this calculation.

So what the county uses to calculate your property taxes, that's essentially what this is.

The assessor uses formulas and data, not a full inspection to keep values consistent across parcels.

Another thing to keep in mind, they use one to three years of uh sales and neighborhood um uh data.

They don't they're not like the housing market where it's hot, whatever the housing market's hot at the moment, it's all about the moment.

They use more data of out years to keep consistent.

So typically you see the real estate housing market up here, and up in this market, I should say, the price are right below it, and then the assessor behind it as well.

So I'm saying that is important because that's like I said, in order to calculate the impact, we are using assessed value, not what you see on Sillow or Redfin or Realtor.com.

The last thing I want to say before I show the numbers, uh, is that I am working with 2023 Cook County total assessed valuation because that's the latest information they have available.

As you all know, they're behind on taxes.

We have they had technological difficulties, so that's why they're barely sending actually tax bills that are due on December 1st.

So I've been in contact with them, but the information that they still don't have information for 2024.

So I'm working with 2023 data for Kane County.

I'm working on 2024 data, because obviously that's the most recent data that we have.

The 2025 year has not ended.

But for 2026, for the real impact for household, they will be using both Cook County and Kane County 2025 data, which will determine the actual impact to household.

Um another thing to note is when essentially when property values in the city grow faster than the amount the city collects, the tax rate drops.

So each home ends up paying essentially a smaller portion.

So right now I'm working with data that essentially, if we had plateaued and the market had not risen for Cook County and King County since 2023 and 2024.

So right now it seems like those total assessed values are here, but we raised our proposed property tax levy.

Like I said, those numbers are going to change for 2025.

And now I will show you the numbers.

Alright, so based on the median home value that we have from the census, that's the only real number that we have.

So that 2023 shows that the median home value of a property in LG2023 was 253,000.

Now, if we were to say what the yearly impact that would be to the average resident here in Elgin, it would be about 150 dollars with three cents, which is about 12 dollars and 50 cents.

So the reason so that 253 number, you might think it's slow, but remember we're using assessed value.

So if you looked at uh retfin or realtor.com or sillo for 2023 shows that in Elgin the amount was 32,000 dollars.

So show it it was a big discrepancy.

It's about 50,000.

Honestly, I don't obviously I don't know what that number is gonna be for 2025.

That's the real number that we're gonna use.

But for this, actually it doesn't matter.

You could technically ignore that 253 number.

I'm just showing you that's what the average person would be paying.

But you can look at this charts, and based on your property, if it's if you believe it's going to be assessed next year at 300,000, you kind of look at this chart, and you see that the yearly impact's about 180.

But also, I like to really call this a ballpark estimate because like I said, I don't have 2025 data.

It uh total assessed value for Canon Cook County really increased higher.

I don't know what percent they it increased.

Uh the market has been crazy the last four to five years.

I've seen ranges from two to more than 15%.

So that really changes those numbers.

So if there's more money in that pot, our percent that we increase becomes a little smaller.

So in the last several years, this has been off from anywhere from 10 bucks to 40 dollars on either on either side, and it's based on that, depending on the market and how it goes.

So since I'm working with 23 and 24 data, this is how it would be the typical impact based on that data.

Um another thing to keep in mind, going back to the dollar, that's why it's important to reference the dollar.

So a lot of people might see this chart and say, well, you it mentioned that the yearly impact was going to be 180 bucks, but my bill increased 500.

Well, it increased 500 due to the other taxing bodies.

So there's a bunch of other taxing bodies that are also increasing their tax amount, so that's why you see your bill higher than what is proposed.

Because this is just the city portion of the tax bill.

I'll give an example of my property, the city of Elgin uh tax bill for for my end last year, it increased a few bucks.

But the overall my taxable increased over 350 bucks, but it was all the other taxing bodies.

Our portion was a fraction of what everybody else was taxing.

So that's why this is uh I call this a ballpark estimate because I'm working with older data, and I'm always working with older data.

We never have the current data.

We don't know that the counties don't even know that, and they won't know that until next year.

So yeah, so any questions regarding this data and numbers.

Okay, any questions?

Mr.

Dixon.

Uh thank you, Gio, for your presentation, and um also thank you, Deb, for your call back this morning to talk about the email that I sent out, and thank you, Gio, too, for your for your time.

As well, um I do have a question uh as it pertains to the breakdown per household, and I like the the chart that you that you showed there.

Um this is hypothetical, this is rough, this is an estimate.

So I just want to put that out there first.

But approximately, my understanding is that approximately 20% of the households affected by the proposed tax increase are um have a uh senior leading debt home, so at least one of the you know spouses, if there are two, um they are a C a senior citizen.

And so my question uh to city staff was if we recognizing that it is very difficult financially for this entire community, state, the country, financially, like we are having a very difficult time as a country.

Everything is going up, certainly the price of government, which is being demonstrated this evening, but just on a granular le granular level, um, you know, we are charged with trying to do everything that we can for our residents.

And so my question that I that I posed to to Gio, and you know, he gave me back a hypothetical again, was if we were to say we're gonna put a senior um freeze, so a tax free.

So that 20% of households that are senior-led, we freeze the increase for them, and we transfer that portion to the 80 percent, that would mean that approximately um a household on average would go from paying maybe a hundred and fifty dollars on average to about a hundred and eighty to a hundred and ninety estimates in order to absorb the cost in order to provide that relief to senior-led homes.

Um and so I would like to add that to the list of things that we discuss as we are looking into what the possibilities of not only just figuring out what revenue streams we could go after, but also trying to figure out how to provide relief to our most vulnerable pop population, who many of which are on a limited uh on a limited income and capped income.

So um so again, thank you for that for that information answer answering uh my questions, but um I just wanted to put that out there for everyone.

Yeah, no, for sure, and something I didn't mention, obviously the exemptions do bring that um that number at the end down.

So for example, there's a senior exemption and there's the freeze, the senior freeze.

So those those exemptions would even bring the number a little lower.

So the 150 is just for the regular homeowner.

But when you get the senior, you can get uh you can get the uh home exemption, the homestead exemption, the senior exemption, and the freeze.

So you can get up to three exemptions and really lower up your bill.

So something I forgot to mention, but just wanted to put out there.

Yeah, and and just to take it a little bit further to uh to a deeper level, like on a um on a monthly amount, it looks like based on the the chart that you had up there that that 150 on average, 150 dollars on average, which is 12 breaks down to about 12 dollars and fifty cents per month in addition.

But if we um if if we were to do that increase and provide that relief to seniors, which is 20 percent, um that number looks like it would go up to about fifteen dollars or between fifteen and seventeen dollars a month on average um versus twelve dollars.

So we're we're talking about maybe less than five dollars increase if you were to break it down to a monthly that other households would have to pay in order to provide that senior tax freeze.

So thank you, Gio.

Thank you.

Okay.

Anything else?

Mr.

Ortiz, yeah.

Yeah, uh Mr.

Dixon remind me something about other sources of revenue, and I think Mr.

Stefan alluded to earlier.

Uh other municipalities around us, it's probably going back to Miss Naraki's uh presentation.

Um I think what the one of the Dundees, I think Cook County is looking or say Chicago is looking at a streaming tax.

Have we looked at anything like that?

Uh it's Arlington Heights, and I believe we are looking into that.

Okay.

And then for the senior freeze for Mr.

Dixon's talking about so you you would want uh anybody that doesn't have a senior qualifying status to have their property tax capped and everybody else cover the difference, right?

Is that how I'm understanding it?

Right.

Seniors would not see an increase.

Is that the portion that you were saying would be capped?

Okay.

Yeah, so that so it would stay as is, so it would not affect senior households, senior-led households that is.

But it it would continue to affect the other 80 percent.

So the senior-led households is approximately 20 percent uh of the population, and that's um, but and then the other percent is non-senior-led households, so that's the 80 percent.

So the 80 percent would see a little bit more of an increase.

They were going to have to pay the and I'm included in that, right?

We were gonna have to pay the increase anyways, but it would just be a few more dollars per month essentially in order to provide that relief to seniors.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm just trying to think how the rebate would work because the way the county does it or the state and the county is that they give all that money back to the city, so then we would have to refund that money.

So we'll have to make a whole new like department or refund department, I guess.

Yeah, I don't I don't know if we would have to create a whole new department.

I don't see how we how we would, but in all honesty, we didn't get that far into the conversation.

This is something for us to discuss.

Yeah, yeah.

So you know, so we're we're discussing it live, but we haven't fleshed this thing all the way out and say, you know, if we do this, we would have to do X, Y, and Z in order to execute it.

I don't we don't know that yet.

But if there's enough interest in exploring this option, we could probably run that down.

Okay.

Right now, I don't know if if I personally don't like it, because then if we go that route, then I would want to give it to veterans and give them a freeze because veterans deserve it also, in my opinion.

But uh Mr.

Hungo said there's veterans get a tax exemption, there's disabilities, low income.

One of my neighbors has the low-income single tax freeze, and she gets a huge portion off, which she deserves it because she was a low-income lady.

And uh it seemed like we went away from that with last year's garbage contract when the single family homes were subsidizing the multifamily homes, and we asked people on the council that were advocating to keep that subsidy for the trash contract, and then the council agreed that everybody should pay the fair share.

And it seems like this way too, everybody, if we do do this, then I think everybody should pay their fair share, and then if they acquire qualify for any of these exemptions that the county gives, then I urge them to apply for these exemptions, and to say that they're the most vulnerable.

I don't know about that.

I think my generation, and maybe the ones right above me that are still working the most vulnerable because we come on a house homeowner is so out of reach with them, and the ones that bought it 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, or got their foot in the door like I did, because my dad bought the house in 02, sold it to me, so I got my foot in the door to get into the house market.

People that don't have that benefit, it's a lot harder for them to make that threshold.

So I think the younger generation or the vulnerable ones, and if they try to get into the house market and then have to subsidize another population, it's even putting them farther out of the market.

I don't know.

I'm not in that generation.

Maybe the mayor or Steve, they're in that generation of uh of the community, so they could probably talk on it.

So I call you guys up.

Yeah, I and if I could just re reply to that, it's really it's not a debate.

You know, it's you know, it's say my relative, yeah, it's it's relative, right?

And I don't know, and because seniors are vulnerable, doesn't mean that disabled are not vulnerable, that veterans aren't vulnerable, that you know, all these other groups that may have blockages uh in their path on vulnerable.

But my larger point is is that we may have an opportunity to provide some relief to what we know to be a vulnerable population.

Not saying that it's the only, but it is an option.

Yeah.

Well, that's what the community holders talking about.

Give my side your side, and see if the council thinks.

But my side is right.

I don't know.

I bet that's the difference.

That's the difference.

It's only right when you look in the mirror, man.

Just a comment, you know, and I listen to what everybody's got to say here.

And uh, we go through this.

Um this is uh I've been doing this a long time, over 20 years.

Yeah, uh just be cautious here.

Yeah, I'll give you one thing to think about.

Uh who when you talk about these things and how you're moving the tax money around, think about one thing.

Who do you hurt and who do you help?

Period.

That's it, because you're gonna help some people and you're gonna hurt some people, and that's that's important.

So Ms.

Alfaro.

Thank you, Mayor.

I do appreciate the brainstorming on the dais as it is a very tough year with a lot of people hurting with a lot of money being taken away in different programs, and um it's a tough budget year.

Uh my concern is in looking at that chart and looking at this home value distribute distribution, the majority of our tax money is coming from homes value 299,000 and less, which I think we need to figure out like in talking about who who we help, who's hurting, etc.

Who's vulnerable, etc.?

The majority of our community that has a home value 299 is gonna be paying this potential proposed tax increase.

And so I'm a little concerned with that.

Um so thinking about attorneys, I think is something we need to consider.

And then I had a question for you, Gio or city manager.

Um so what currently is the levy right now that's flat?

It's the general 27 point, yeah, it's 27.8 million.

But but what is it per home right now?

What is it per home?

Yeah.

Huh?

It depends.

Well, it depends on the value of the property.

Okay.

Yeah, it'll everything depends on the value of the property.

Could we get a chart similar to that to what it is right now?

Just to give us an idea as well, what are we adding, right?

If a home is valued at 300,000 dollars and they're paying 110 to the city, then we know that from your chart, which sorry, I don't have it up.

Was it like 150?

So that 110 would be at 150 added on.

No, so essentially that's the difference from a current, like right now from whatever if you paid whatever 50 bucks this year, it's that difference next year.

Okay.

So instead of paying 50 bucks, you would see 150.

I would like to know the difference.

So if we could get information on that, like what are currently people paying at their home value?

Based on the that home median home value, the same home value.

Well depending on the give it a comparison.

Okay.

Right, to give me an idea of what it is.

Again, it's a tough budget year, and I don't feel comfortable right now, so I just need to I appreciate everyone brainstorming and coming up ideas, and so just trying to get a bigger picture.

Okay.

Thank you.

Yep, thank you.

Okay.

Mr.

Steph.

Yeah, I just want to make a comment.

Gio, thank you.

And the comment is to invite people to check out the demographic section.

There's some interesting findings here that kind of surprised me and certainly are important to consider when we think about these ideas that people are coming up with as far as trying to spread the pain or move the pain.

Um we are weight, I mean, allergy's way below average, the state average for single people in town.

We're waiting, we're even further below average for seniors living alone.

If you look at the income distribution, um we tend to have a big bubble, or our bell curve is bigger in the middle with incomes between I think here it's 25,000, which is really low up to 20 to 200,000, but then lower than average at the extremes.

So we we to the this community tends to have a lot of people that earn money, earn a salary that kind of falls into the middle of the range.

So I I find those, and the last thing I I saw that caught my attention when I reviewed this before tonight is we have a slightly lower rate of renters than the state average, and correspondingly a slightly higher rate of homeowners in the community than the state average.

So certainly relevant to the conversation, but kind of taking the conversation off the tough stuff for a little bit.

But thank you for pointing all that out.

Thank you.

Okay.

Mr.

Good.

Thank you, Mayor.

Um, so like it we're just uh talking out loud or thinking out loud here.

Um, so I'll provide the context at least from how I see it.

Is that um as mentioned, you know, this is a tough budget year for every single entity, um, taxing bodies, families across the board.

Um again, looking at some of these demographics, you know, we do have it looks like higher than state average for family households.

Um, and so is I think the only person up here who's a renter, um, I'm very familiar with the dynamics right now, uh, facing everybody who's looking to start a family and get a house.

So um I just want to highlight like everything is astronomically expensive, um, starting with child care.

Um so that is uh the demographic I want to be very considerate of.

Um we don't know everybody's situation based on their age, but um if you have a house, you can get a line of equity.

Um you can leverage that for different purchases, you know, for renters, um, tax proper or property tax increases still passed through your uh lease agreement because your landlord is paying that, so it passes through.

Um so I just want to be mindful of the fact that uh one of the biggest ticket items for for families right now is daycare and and groceries, and so we know those are just extremely high right now, and it that so that's just me trying to throw out some of the like the peripheral stuff that I think of when I I look at this.

Um, but I guess where we should probably start is for the programs that the county runs.

Are those how is that work legally?

Is that through the state?

Did the state say that they can do that?

And then are we able to even consider doing this with a carve out for a certain age group?

And then would that be set at 65 or is this just what we're gonna be formulating as we consider this?

From what I know, the exemptions are by statute.

At least I know the veterans one is.

I'm not in that group, so I don't never looked into it.

We won't be able to segregate the levy.

Whatever the council decides what the what the general levy will be, that will go across the board, any of the rebates that will have to be something that's managed internally, calculated, creating a system from the inside.

Okay, I appreciate the clarity of the case.

I had to sense that's the question you were answering.

I think so, yeah.

I mean, it's the first time I think this has been considered since I've been on the diets because this is the first time we're looking at this for the property tax.

The county's not going to do that for us.

Okay.

Um yeah, I again I it's it's hard to, I mean, I completely understand where the sentiment is coming from the idea.

It's just to try and I mean because that would be uh operational expense to the city, I think.

Um, and that's part of the reason why we're in a tough spot is because operational expenses of the city is pretty high.

Um not relative, but just because of the size of the organization.

So I don't know.

I mean, what is the rest of the council think?

I mean, again, this is the first time I've I've heard a proposal like this, so um I'd be curious.

And let me just clarify, it was not a proposal, it was a a question that it was something that I thought about, that I reached out to staff and got some information, had a conversation with Deb and Gio just this afternoon.

So this is not a proposal as it has been fleshed out.

This was something that I thought of, and I'm just bringing I haven't talked to anybody else about it, you know, that's up for live here tonight.

So please don't hold you hold us into anything.

I'm just gonna put it up this year.

No, I mean I I think I yeah, I appreciate that.

That's why I think it's you know, we're fortunate to have council members bring items like this to the table.

So I think everybody is obviously looking to do uh alleviation wherever we can for everybody.

Um, and so I guess that's I would prefer to look at that route just off the top of my head with some of the issues that I've already bubbled up without even diving into this, but um yeah, I think we're all in agreement that we we we would like to see uh no increase ideally, but that's uh not the situation right here.

So um thank you for the presentation though.

Thank you.

All right, anything else?

Okay, Ms.

Powell.

So part of the budget includes um a number of new positions.

I think there are 13, 15 new full-time positions that are included.

Um obviously when we talk about adding salary infringes and long-term legacy costs, uh, those are costs that add up over time for the city.

Um how can we look at, you know, are are there ways to potentially delay or not hire, not create some of these new positions, and what would the impact be?

I mean, because I again just trying to look at all pieces of the equation.

Um, you know, we're looking at hey, how can we raise more money to fill the gap?

I also think it would, you know, it also makes sense for us to look at how how do we reduce the need to fill, how do we reduce that gap?

So are there positions that we could potentially go without hiring?

Um are there projects that we could potentially um put off or you know, not move forward with?

I mean, I know that that's part of the discussion that we're all gonna be tasked with, but um I guess I would be curious, and I think um, you know, I I appreciate the descriptions of of what each of these new positions would be tasked with doing.

I'm just probably more interested now in understanding what's the impact if we don't hire these people.

So we know our audience, and you provided the next segue into the next in the next phase of this evening's presentation.

Before we go to that though, to provide just a little bit more of the context with this, and in council member Alfaro brought up some good questions.

Um the city used to levy a tax based on a rate, and so it was able to take advantage of right rising home prices with the revenue diversification that the city put in place in 2012, it has been hearing to adhering to what has been a flat general property tax levy.

But what I want to make clear is though, that doesn't mean that property taxes have not been increasing during that time period.

And that is because we needed to make payments based on what when we had control of those pension funds, our actuaries were recommending in order to maintain proper funding levels.

And now since the state has taken over the management of the police and fire pensions, we don't have any choice in what payments to make.

So what's unique about this budget this year for the first time in 11 years is we're looking at how to close what is a 4.2 million dollar gap in essentially trying to keep the core operations functioning.

I look back at 2015 when the 27.8 million dollar general levy went in place, and our earnings and benefits at that time was 79 million dollars.

You just heard Deb talk about for the 2026 budget, it's up to 129.4 million dollars.

Earnings benefits, it's people.

The most expensive component of local government is the people that come to work every day providing the services.

If you're looking for ways to make meaningful cuts, it's going to come from taking people off of the payroll and finding ways to delay what work is occurring.

In this instance, this is about as lean of a budget in terms of of uh staffing recommendations that we've made in a number of years.

Since 2019 or so, we've probably added close to about a hundred full-time positions or had budgeting for that.

We're here, you're gonna hear presentations this evening from Aaron Neal and Chief Sogan about the need for the fleet mechanics and why that's occurring.

And then Jen Hermanson is also going to talk about the need for the employees that we're recommending for the parks and recreation department and why we believe that these are necessary in this instance.

Certainly, the city council has the ability to do whatever it chooses in terms of delays, holding back on initiatives, or even beginning rolling in on some of the services that are being provided.

But what we're recommending today is what we believe is consistent with the direction that we've received from the city council, and the when what we're proposing is minimally necessary to maintain the service levels that we've been expecting, or that that you've come to expect.

So without further ado, Chief Sogan and public work.

Oh, yep.

Is that okay?

Okay, thank you, Mayor.

Sorry.

Uh, you mentioned uh since 2019 we've added a hundred positions.

Roughly roughly do you know how many is between full-time and part-time?

That's that's closer to full-time, part-time numbers.

Okay, maybe about half of that, a little bit less than half of that.

Thank you.

And again, in a lot of that, that includes that includes the new firefighters, new police officers, those types of things.

Okay.

We have a sustainability department now, we've expanded special events with a bunch of those numbers, those numbers in that instance.

So Ms.

Martinez has a question.

She's got a chance to speak to you.

I don't really have a question.

I just have a comment.

Um listening to our conversation and saying how the household um that's what we're talking about, because that's where we get most of our our revenue from property taxes.

You know, it's uh knowing that the age limit has gone up from uh people buying houses.

It used to be like 35, now the 35 years old, and now it's 40.

You know, and then I look at what our population here in Elgin is, and um that's like the highest that we have from 25 to 54 year olds.

But um, what I find very interesting is right now, for the longest time we've been saying that we have lean staffing uh for many years here at the city, and then now that we are increasing the staff, it's like wow, it's really expensive.

You know, I just wanted to make that uh observation, you know, because I remember you've been told many times, you know, your staff is very lean, you know, you need to hire more people.

So then now we do it, and it's like that's very expensive.

That was just my comment.

Thank you.

I appreciate the the one thing I forgot to mention again uh before we had them up again.

What you heard from Gio was again after 11 years, we're looking for an additional 12 dollars a month from the property owners in the city to continue the level of service that we provided.

I don't want to suggest the $12 is a drop in the bucket and it adds up to more than $100 or $150 at the end of the day, but for 11 years, this organization has expanded and operated with the same flat level of revenue during that time period.

All good things have to come to an end, and I'm particularly proud of what we have all collectively been able to accomplish during that time period.

It was with great debate and deliberation that this recommendation for this modest increase was coming, but we thought that the property tax increase rather than going to other revenue sources was the most efficient and economical way to begin to recover what is needed that four million dollars to maintain the level of city operations.

But we're here in the direction from the council, and at the next meeting, we will be able to come back with proposals for what other revenue streams could be looked at for potential increases to fill that gap.

So Chief Robert Sogan and Public Works Director Aaron Neal.

Good evening, everyone.

So when you look at these first three positions that we're going to talk about tonight, which are the fleet mechanic positions, these are technically for public work, the city fleet department through under public works.

However, this initiative was started by the fire department, whereas we looked about a year ago, started to realize that we're running into, we're going to be running into a problem with our internal fleet program.

As far as anybody can tell, the fire department has been doing its own fleet maintenance, possibly all the way back to the inception of the fire department.

That has been a model that has worked for many generations, but it's coming to an end.

We're getting too large, and also with that is the change in the technology of the vehicles.

Our fleet division today is all made up of firefighters who are working on overtime on their days off fixing our fleet.

Though they have been doing a phenomenal job over the years, it's getting to a point now where the technology of these vehicles, the need for more advanced diagnostic capabilities, the need for higher level of experience as well as training in that fleet knowledge base is just exceeding where we are today.

And the third component is we just don't have the pool of firefighters anymore who have that capability.

So so many people, and I am not a car individual, but I know people, some of you are, it you don't have as many of the uh driveway mechanics that you that we used to have, who had that ability to come in and be like, I want to learn how to do a fire truck, I want to learn how to fix an ambulance, and we could teach that.

It's just become too complex.

And so we looked about a year ago saying that we have this looming problem.

We don't have a bench to draw from any longer once the current fleet division members age out, retire, or get promoted up and those types of things.

So we identified a problem, but our problem was we couldn't fix it ourselves.

And so we were able to turn to the city fleet division and ask them if this is something that that they could take on, put all the city fleet under one roof, and allow the opportunity for the fire department mechanics to to for that system to go away and be able to now put everything under city fleet.

And Aaron's gonna talk about what they'll be able to do and the changes and benefits of doing that.

One of the things that's going to happen, though, is if you remember Station 7 on Longcommon Parkway, is our fire department fleet station.

And it is a half the station is set up for this purpose.

It was built in 2008 for this purpose.

So we are going to be turning that facility, that part of the facility over to City Fleet for them to manage with these with these personnel.

So those are the reasons why the fire department came up with this idea and trying to be proactive.

And now I'm gonna have Aaron come up and talk about how they'll manage that.

Good evening, Mr.

Mayor City Council.

Um, when we talk about lean staffing models, and I'm I'm glad that came up today.

Um, the city's fleet services division from the public works department has seven full-time employees, and we manage a fleet of nearly six hundred and fifty vehicles, minus those that are currently within the fire department.

So that's vehicles across the entire organization.

We keep our emergency service vehicles in the police department up and running.

Our snow plows, every vehicle that you see, minus the red fire vehicles are currently under maintenance of seven full-time mechanics.

One of those mechanics is housed out of Wing Park, and he is our small engine mechanic.

He is responsible for all of the needs of our land management and parks and recreation division.

So that's lawnmowers, weed whackers, gators, everything to keep and ensure that Jen and her team can maintain and upkeep our parks.

So that leaves six mechanics responsible for 650 vehicles.

Uh, what we know as an industry standard for a municipal fleet is each mechanic should be responsible for between 35 and 50 vehicles.

Right.

We have six mechanics that are responsible for approximately 110 vehicles apiece.

And we've managed, right?

We're an internal service provider.

We don't hear noise from the PD, we don't hear noise from community development of where's our car?

We have a scrappy group of employees, but we are lean, right?

So when Chief Sogan came to the Department of Public Works and came to me last year and asked, you know, can we create a unified fleet services division?

What would it take?

Would you be able to uh onboard our 40 pieces of equipment?

That's engines, that's ambulances, that's their command staff vehicles.

We said absolutely.

If we get some additional staff, uh we could take on the work.

So the three additional staff are going to be housed initially at the fire station seven.

They're going to be provided with all of the additional training needs that are required.

And one thing that Chief Saga didn't talk about is you know, to the credit of our fire department since its inception in the 1800s, you know, there's been a lot of driveway mechanics.

But a lot of the work for transmission needs to be worked on.

If a flywheel goes bad on an ambulance, like Chief Chief Sagan shared with me today, happened over the weekend.

The current mechanics are not making those repairs, they're shipping them out for service.

And in those instances, when a fire department goes to Bensonville Fire Repair Incorporated, right?

That's a made-up family like the Gifford family councilman.

Um you're in line with 25 other fire departments who have shipped their trucks out for service.

So they're gonna go to St.

Charles, they're gonna fix St.

Charles trucks, Bensonville's trucks, right?

And then Elgin is just number 25.

When you bring in a professional fleet staff, we are going to increase the efficiency and the amount of time that these vehicles are in service.

I don't know much about them.

It's above my pay grade to talk about mutual aid, but if we have engines and ladder trucks up and running, our reliance on mutual aid at times when our trucks are down sitting at a mechanic uh facility, upwards of I think Chief, you said three to four months in some instances.

You know, a transmission repair at the public works department if one of our snow plows goes down today, we're back in service on Friday.

Right.

So we're gonna improve efficiencies, we're gonna save money that we're putting out to outside vendors, we're gonna bring in a professional staff.

Uh, and then ultimately fire station seven, which now just serves as a fire department fleet service center, may see squad cars, right?

We may see if we get a snowplow truck go down in winter on long common parkway, we're gonna pull a snow plow in there, right?

Um so all of these things are gonna bring us up to nine mechanics, still below the industry standard.

We're still gonna be a lean staff, but we believe in the long run, uh, this is in the best interest of the city.

And then one thing that that just to add is though we're adding or increasing three full-time positions, we will in 2027.

We have 2026 is gonna be a transition year from moving our fleet guys out and moving the the new ones in, but there's gonna have to be some crossover.

In 2027, we will see a reduction in our overtime expenses as it re relates to fleet work in the fire department.

Okay.

Questions for Chief and uh Aaron?

Mr.

Ortiz.

Appreciate you both, uh Mr.

New and Chief Sagan.

Uh I like the idea.

One because I was gonna ask a question about overtime, but you answered it, Chief, that's gonna bring overtime down.

In the in the long run, like years out, maybe we won't even know, but will that end up saving us money since our firefighters are not overtime doing this anymore?

Well, I think what it's gonna do is one, it's gonna let efficiency is gonna be gonna be much, much higher.

But I think with efficiency, you always make savings.

And the fact that less work is gonna be shipped out because we'll be able to do it in-house, should will absolutely save money because those numbers have kept going up and up and up to hire outside mechanics to to take care of our stuff.

So it will be a savings down the road.

How much that we can't say.

As long as it goes green somewhere down the road.

I like the idea.

And I think Mr.

Narack you are like it too.

Uh for the another question I was gonna ask which with Mr.

New already answered, is that when when you when your firefighters are doing good job and not crashing their trucks and breaking them, what are the mechanics gonna be doing at that time?

Well, that he mentioned that it would be we that facility is gonna be open to whatever they need.

So if the squad cars need to come in, if plow trucks need to come in, if any other city vehicle needs to come in, there's a downtime availability, and we won't know how this is all what all is going to be available until we get into this, because again, they'll be doing more work than what we are currently doing today in-house, but there'll be certainly the capacity at Station 7 to take on those additional responsibilities at from time to time.

All right, absolutely.

And then the last one's uh a comment from Mr.

Neal.

You like my suit, councilman?

Nah, I think I uh I think Milan got a better one last time.

Mr.

Malan, his is banging last week.

I don't know, man.

You gotta get your game work.

I have to do it, I'm sorry.

So uh I I've noticed that a lot of our cop cars are scratched.

Can we give our cops a driving course to stop side swiping everything?

No count.

No comment.

Uh there's sorry.

All right, that's it.

Thank you.

Cool.

Okay.

Ms.

Alfaro.

Thank you.

Um, so I'm sorry.

Um I missed the part where you said there was one in Wien Park, and what does that person do?

So he is he is an automotive mechanic, but he's our small engine mechanic.

So we have 76 parks and hundreds of acres of park space.

It takes resources, it takes people and it takes equipment.

So that employee is fixing lawnmowers, right?

The city has hundreds of lawnmowers, right?

He's doing all of that work to keep our park system going.

So whether it's lawnmowers, uh downtown in the in the in the winter months, you'll see the uh sidewalk clearers for snow and ice removal, those pieces of equipment, blowers, weed whackers, everything that would keep green space maintained, that's what that mechanic is doing.

And then I had a question just on on the fleet mechanics, because that is real pretty lean.

Yeah.

How many of them have expertise working in EV cars, given that we've been increasing the EV fleet?

Yeah, so currently we have no uh mechanics that are certified certified in EVs.

Uh last month I sat on a panel that was led by ECC District 300 uh and some other folks about a training curriculum that they are going to be putting together that they're going to be pushing down into high schools.

They were asking me from a municipal standpoint what do our mechanics need?

What does the greater you know world of mechanics need?

Uh currently our EVs are under warranty, right?

So we you know ship our Teslas out to Tesla.

We ship our Ford EVs back to Ford.

Uh but there is going to be a point in time where yes, EV certifications are going to be important.

But as a matter of scale, uh of the 700 vehicles when we take on the fire fleet, we have five EV vehicles in the fleet, right?

So we have to balance training needs versus you know how many vehicles are actually EVs.

Um if I remember correctly though, there are other EVs down the pipeline coming, right?

I know we have five in the fleet right now, but I think there's others coming down the pipeline.

So in thinking ahead, could we add in one of these descriptions that someone to have an EV certification?

Yeah, it's it's possible.

Um there are no proposed vehicle purchases in 2025 that are excuse me, 2026 that are specific to EVs.

If you recall, we did purchase and put in the service in 2025 nine hybrid vehicles, uh which our fleet mechanics are currently certified and do maintain, and there are no additional plans uh for EVP EV purchases.

While I understand uh the requirement, um, you know, you know, we can certainly do that, uh, but I think it may be better served at this time to ensure that mechanics are ASE certified, uh advanced uh service excellence certified.

Uh we have Ford master mechanics on our staff.

We have you know, so the the larger pool of general mechanic certifications, I think will be most beneficial at this time.

Correct.

And then so to Chief Sagan's point, there is going to be months of training that is specifically required for EV emergency vehicle, right?

So you need to be emergency vehicle certified to work on fire trucks.

There's pumps, there's ladders, though there's different certifications that we need to ensure that we can do that work.

And that's no different than our standard equipment or Lgin sweeper training where we have uh fleet mechanics are certified to repair our LGIN sweepers, uh our vector trucks, you know.

So there's a ton of certifications and specialty training that we do uh provide our staff.

Um EV is is currently not a requirement upon hire.

Thank you.

Okay, Miss Powell.

Thank you.

Um I've only been asking about this probably since I've been on the guys about combining the fleets together.

So I'm glad to see that this is finally happening happening.

It it makes sense.

Um question is is everyone still gonna be working on first shift, or are we instituting a second or a third shift for our mechanics?

Yeah, so at this time everyone is still gonna work on first shift.

So as we look at efficiencies, and and obviously our fire department is a 24 hour day operation and public services, depending on the time of the year.

Um well, your 24 hours a day as needed as well.

Um the other point that I've often made is um looking at the possibility of doing a first and second shift.

It's kind of hard to work on vehicles during first shift when they're out when people are out in the vehicles.

If there was a second shift where all the vehicles are available, I I think that would increase our efficiency.

I understand that there's um you know, supervisory needs, obviously, if you add a second shift, but I think I see something in here about a lead mechanic that you're looking to hire to kind of help with this additional um opportunity, you know, working over at the fire department.

Um I would really encourage us to look at you know how that could work to our benefit.

Um what percentage of our vehicles are diesel?

Would you say roughly that we're working on 28 percent, Council?

Okay.

So not as high as I thought it was.

No, I mean most of our vehicles are general purpose vehicles.

They're they're pickup trucks, they're SUVs.

Uh the police fleet, which houses 200 vehicles, um, those are all gas powered.

So when we talk about our large vehicles, our snowplows, our dump trucks, there's probably 120, 125 in our fleet across um all departments.

Okay.

And the only reason I I asked that, just being familiar with what's going on in the industry.

I know that there's a huge shortage of and challenge around getting diesel mechanics in particular.

Um I I know Councilwoman Alfaro was asking about uh like EV certifications, but when you look at where the bulk of our our vehicles are, what type of vehicles we have.

I I guess I was just more curious about, you know, are we looking to hire certified diesel mechanics?

Is that what the um where the gap is?

But it doesn't sound like our our fire engines do not run on diesel fuel, correct?

They do.

They do.

Oh, yeah.

These would be diesel mechanics.

Okay.

So that does answer that question.

Um so yeah, I'm I'm glad to see this finally happening.

Um maybe we'll actually you know take it even a step further and do two different shifts too.

I think we'd see some if we really want to see some efficiencies, I think that that's where we can see some efficiencies.

Yeah, I mean, one thing to know, Councilwoman, the city of Aurora, for instance, which is a little bit larger, but they have a fleet to similar size of ours.

They have 28 mechanics on staff in aurora, and they run dual shifts.

So you have 14 on during the day and 14 on at night.

Um currently, what we would do if we had three mechanics at fire station seven, you know, I you know it's one and a half during the day and one and a half during the night.

You I don't think we have enough staff at this time to successfully implement a dual shift program.

Uh what we do know is that there's a 20 percent absentee rate with employees having PTO and paid time off.

So if we had a shift with four employees and two people took off, now you have two people working the day shift, and we have to balance that.

So there is a time when I see our fleet division, fleet services division being at least two shifts.

Um I just don't know if we're at that point yet, but we will definitely consider it and look as we transition into now having 10 mechanics, what that looks like through 2026 and come back if need be.

Right.

Thank you.

That's all I have.

Okay.

Um Mr.

Thorne.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thanks, Aaron.

Uh nice suit.

Um taking the stuff.

It this is very enlightening.

And I I've learned a lot about this, and uh I think it's a great thing.

Um and I keep in my back pocket the added expense for EV when that comes up down the road.

Um curious with you talking about uh station seven and the the majority I'm sure of a lot of the service work is for actual vehicles broken down.

I mean you have breakdowns, you have general maintenance, you have obviously everything to oil changes that have to be done on every single vehicle.

And everything's on schedule.

But what happens when you have too many vehicles uh and you don't have the space uh for that at that facility?

Uh where's your overflow?

How is that handled?

Well, I mean, so to be clear, councilman, we have six hundred and fifty vehicles and pieces of equipment that are currently maintained out of 1900 homes road, and there are 40 or so pieces of equipment that are maintained out of station seven.

And that overflow doesn't exist currently.

Uh Chief Sagan and I spoke, he said over the last year or two PMs, uh preventive maintenance inspections and services have gone down to one once annually for our fire fleet when we should be doing them two or three times.

Having a professional mechanic staff at station seven will increase the preventive maintenance that we're doing over there.

So 2027, or excuse me, 2026 is going to be that exploratory year to see exactly what it means to make this transition.

We may find out at the end of 2026 that it only requires two full-time mechanics.

Well then we bring one mechanic back to public works to help offset that load.

We may find that the best way to service um fire vehicles is at our 1900 homes road facility, and we transition fire station seven into a small engine or a pickup truck and car type mechanic center.

So all of these things are going to be found during uh this transition in 2026.

Uh we expect it to be successful.

We expect to provide efficiencies, find efficiencies, and keep our fire apparatus on the street for Chief Sagan and the men and women of the fire department.

Great, thank you.

Thanks for all you do.

Thank you.

Anything else?

Okay.

Thank you.

Mr.

Manager, you promised us a break for 15 minutes.

I suggest we take that and we'll be back here at 7 o'clock.

Just really quick quickly, Mayor.

If you uh Chief Sagan has some information on the additional million dollars, while it's not a million dollars for training for paramedics.

He'll be able to wrap this up in a couple minutes, and then we might not have to hear from you again.

Well, not until later in the evening.

One more event later in the evening.

So though this isn't specific to put personnel issues, we this would be a good time to just clarify what we're doing.

So as Deb mentioned earlier, and I think I mentioned this briefly at our retreat at ECC a few months ago.

We've had a number of retirements over the last couple years, and when we take when we bring new people on, we do not require them to be a paramedic.

And we send them to Sherman Hospitals Paramedic Program that starts in August of every year and ends sometime in May or June of the following year.

And they run one class a year, but they're doing it for the entire Fox Valley region.

So they can't give us spots of 10, 15 at a time in each one of these classes.

So at the most, we get five, sometimes six spots a year.

So come January with all of these uh replacement hires as well as the nine new hires for our for the new ambulance that we'll be put putting in service.

We are gonna have approximately 23 EMTs, which is a basic level of medical training required, where all 23 of those members have to become paramedics at some point.

To go through that process with Sherman Hospital will take us approximately seven to eight years, and that's if we don't hire anybody else in that time, which isn't gonna happen.

So this is a perpetual problem that we have to figure out how to fix.

So what we decided to do was run in conjunction with Sherman Hospital, run our own paramedic class next year.

It's gonna be a condensed course.

So instead of meeting two days a week, we're gonna meet Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m.

to noon.

It's only gonna be the 23 Lgin fire department EMTs.

It's gonna be all Lgin Fire Department instructors.

The course is being worked with Sherman, but we are using their curriculum, but we are doing all the teaching.

And it will be held at one of the fire stations.

So what this will do is being in the condensed version of the paramedic program, we'll start in April, we'll be done before Thanksgiving of next year, have them take this the national registry test, hopefully early December, mid-December, have them most of them certified before the end of next year with the new ambulance going in service at Station 3 January of 2027.

But it'll be it just is a is the best way for us to be able to pull that band-aid off and get this situation, which we've never faced before, and we don't anticipate facing again, getting this situation rectified.

Okay.

Okay, Mr.

Ortiz.

I appreciate the explanation.

Um at a previous meeting, I don't remember if it was Mr.

Dixon or Mr.

Good.

Somebody had asked you if once we get this off the ground and get the curriculum set and who's gonna teach it, how it works out for us, if you're able to operate other departments to make like a revenue stream of them paying us to train their firefighters and become paramedics.

We have already been approached by Sherman for this, which is interesting because Sherman said this is gonna be a one-time deal.

We're gonna do you a favor and let you do this.

And then they've come to us now and they said, Hey, we like the idea.

Would you be interested in doing this some more?

To make this happen is gonna require some considerable discussions with the local.

And there's some contractual issues that we're gonna have to work through to try to do that.

So those conversations really have not started.

Um just it's something that I certainly want to have the conversations with union leadership about to see if it's something that we could we can make happen down the road.

We were a true it's there's no doubt that when you do that teaching, whether you're teaching a fire academy locally like we used to have years ago, or you're teaching this these paramedic products.

If you're doing the teaching, you're better.

You're better at what you do.

Yeah.

If I was in a member of uh 439, I would be on board, but I can't speak for them, but I think we'll put them on the map for being one of the best in the state like they already are, and now they're teaching everybody else their ways, uh Origin's so good.

But I appreciate it.

But we'll have those conversations.

And I appreciate that.

I don't know if it was one of the two gentlemen down here that brought it up.

I don't remember which one, but thanks.

Just one quick question.

Thank you, Mayor.

Um you also mentioned uh earlier, I think at ECC that something that's different with the fire um with the fire department is that aside from training them, they're gonna like maintain training.

Correct.

Can you just explain that a little bit just as a implementing and we just implemented about three weeks ago our standards of service program, which is designed to do annual evaluations of our knowledge base, both in the EMS world as well as in the fire world.

So we just rolled out the standards of service for EMS two weeks ago, which incorporates a written assessment on just basic knowledge of our standing medical orders that are provided by the hospital, as well as a practical skills evaluation that of I think there's twenty three skills that we had in there, and you randomly select some, so you never know what you're gonna get.

So we we implemented that this year, and then in the fall of next year, we will be doing the fire side of the of the standards of service for the first time.

And then in the spring of twenty twenty-seven, we'll do the EMS again, and that's what we'll do every year annually.

Yes, clear up with this.

Okay, I just want to make sure I heard that right.

And then the second, I think it was City Manager Colzel that said it's we're talking about a hit of a million dollars towards the budget to do this.

To do this class one time class, yes.

Yes, clear too.

Okay, that's all.

That's it.

Thank you.

No seats in school, you make your own.

So that's how I get the job done.

That's innovation, and it's particularly proud to have Rob in the organization figure out a way to provide that solution.

The other thing, I think Mr.

Neal was being Councilmember Alfaro was being more modest than he normally is in keeping track of the EV.

The EV market.

One of the primary vehicles.

We have two F one fifties.

Two electric F one fifties.

You may have seen that Ford has, yes, pun intended, pulled the plug on producing its electric pickups because there is not sufficient market demand for that.

And so no small part of the reason that we purchased hybrid vehicles rather than doubling down on the EV purchases, is that fluctuating market, and Aaron wanted to make sure that we weren't going to be stuck short with products that we wouldn't be able to service or might be getting into something that becomes outdated sooner rather than later.

How much time are you gonna give us, Mayor?

Ten fifteen minutes?

Thank you.

So we'll be back here at uh ten after seven.

Hey, Chief.

No, I didn't either, right?

Yes.

Okay, sorry.

Now does it work?

All right.

Okay.

All right.

So nobody heard what I said.

Okay.

Twelve more positions to twelve more positions that are being recommended as part of the proposed budget.

We'll go through those now.

But I want to warn everybody that that's not the end of the evening.

After we discussed the positions, the capital initiatives that staff is proposing, following the direction that's that the city council provided during the strategic planning session in August, coming through with thumbnail descriptions of the recommendations.

So without further ado, Mike Pubins, who's usually here to talk about building things.

Yes.

There it is, the 117 buildings in the skeleton crew.

48%.

There it is.

Exactly.

All yours, Mike.

There.

Thank you.

We're not building things with this one.

We're building people.

Thank you.

So I'll jump right into it if I may.

This position certainly doesn't have the shine and shimmer of the last ones, but I would argue of equal value to the to the city.

The position is a building operations worker, and it is intended to be a high-level technical position within the building maintenance department.

This position existed in 2018 when our current building superintendent Glenn Detman was promoted to assistant building superintendent.

And since that time, the position has been unfilled.

What that has created is a gap in technical knowledge and expertise between our the majority of our staff who does an excellent job of daily maintenance and upkeep of our systems and those higher level systems of which we're seeing more and more these days.

A good example is the building automation systems, right?

The computers and controls and switches and valves that manage all the heating and ventiling systems in the building.

So this position will fill that role.

It will allow us to minimize the number of calls we have to make to service providers.

Those could be contractors, such as train, who's a fine company and they do great work for us.

But we believe this will provide significant savings by eliminating a high percentage of those types of service calls.

But another benefit of this is having a person who is in this position and can focus on again these more complex higher technical need uh systems and units, we'll be able to provide some training to the rest of our staff.

They may not get to that same high level, but it will certainly make them more efficient and effective in their regular maintenance duties.

Any questions for Mike?

Happy to take any questions.

Thank you, Mayor.

Okay, Ms.

Alfaro.

Uh so if I understood you correctly, Mike, then this position was filled into 2018 and then it's just been vacant, so it's not even really a new position.

You're just asking for the position to be refilled.

Right?

Basically, whether it disappeared from the budget or not, I don't know, but it has existed in the past.

Okay, and we worked without it for some time.

And like many of the departments, right?

We've managed, we've talked about lean staffing, we've managed, but the recommendation is coming from a position we we feel this is provides a lot of value for quite honestly relatively small cost.

We hope to we'll look internally first to fill this.

We have some very talented people on staff and would love to do it that way.

Thank you.

Yeah, you're welcome.

Okay.

Thank you.

All right, thank you.

Come on.

Councilmember Alfaro, one of the things, oh, this it's okay.

With it as it relates to positions that there may be an opening for it, but not budgeted for every every summer, and we get the numbers locked in by October.

Deb Naraki and their staff make determinations on what the payroll projections are.

So while that position has remained vacant since 2018, and it may be in the pay plan, there is not money that is going through the budget during that time period for positions that we know are not expected to be filled in that budget year.

Yeah.

Amanda Harris, Cultural Arts and Special Events Director, has a recommendation for a new employee.

Your voice changed when you introduced me that one.

Good evening.

As the Department of Cultural Arts and Special Events has continued to grow and expand.

Part of what we uh went through with our uh strategic planning consultant a few years ago was a five-year plan outlook.

Uh knowing that we are about to lose uh due to retirement.

Um, the Hemans Cultural Center Director, um, we know we're gonna have a gap to fill.

Uh combining that with the growth of what we're doing and the facilities that we're overseeing, as well as the maintenance projects that are ongoing.

Um, this position is intended to kind of put all of those pieces together.

Um, and we would not backfill that Hemans Cultural Center um role.

Uh yeah, just to increase efficiency and make sure that there's a point person, which right now, most of the staff, myself, smooch, uh Medina, the technical manager at the Hemens, um, butch, all of us kind of you know, we rock paper scissors to see who is gonna be the lead for various maintenance projects, um, whose plate has some some room for that.

This will create that efficiency and make sure that there is oversight from start to finish, which we certainly need.

Okay.

Any questions?

Mr.

Ortiz.

Uh for it.

So the individual that's set to retire, are you gonna kill that job and replace it with this one?

Um it wouldn't be a replacement, but rather kind of a reorganization.

Okay.

Okay, so you won't come back and say that you want to throw that back.

No, that is not the plan.

Okay, all right.

So I don't see it as a new position since you're gonna disperse duties or out.

That's kind of how we looked at it too.

It is it's technically a new position.

Um, and for a portion of the year, we will have both of those positions because the the role that we're that we'll be essentially getting rid of.

I mean, he's been here for more than 30 years.

That's a huge depth of knowledge that we need to um try to get out.

And I can't find tape strong enough to hold him, so we have to well tell him to make a user manual for everything before he leaves.

Yes, definitely.

All right, thank you.

Okay, Miss Alfaro.

If I could just follow up on council member Ortiz's question, um, given that that position would not be filled, and this one is a new one.

How much money are we saving between the two positions?

That's a great question.

I don't have the numbers readily available, but I can get those to you.

That'd be great.

Um sorry, I'm just noting that down, and then I have another question.

Um why the reorganization?

Why not refill the Hemans position by this one?

Uh well, because the scope of the department has grown.

Um, you know, as we have added a few positions over the last few years, we added a programming manager.

That person is taking on a piece of what Butch has done, um, or the Hemans Director has done.

Um, Smooch Bedina, our technical manager has taken on uh a portion of what that is.

Selena Tappia, our D case uh manager has taken on a little bit.

So it it is I don't want to mischaracterize that we're we're sort of parceling out this position.

The operations manager would take on the the majority of that, but the job is bigger than the Hemans.

It is working at working with building maintenance and engineering and parks and rec and land management to make sure that the wing park band shell has everything it needs, and that the festival park has everything it needs because while the wing park band shell may be in wing park, we work really closely with parks and recreation to make sure that our things are aligned and our schedules are aligned, and that's really hard to do when you have so many people kind of rotating through.

Um whereas the Hemans Director is only for the Hemans.

Correct.

Okay, that makes more sense.

So and then the other question I had, and I don't I hope it's okay I asked this now.

Um it's not necessary to personnel, but it is something that councilwoman Powell mentioned at the retreat.

Are we gonna be able to get credit card service at the Hemans?

Like, you know, I knew that was gonna come up.

I really really did.

Um yes, we actually previewed that as a test case at the at the nightmare on Chicago Street.

Oh, and it worked really well.

Uh we wanted to kind of test to see how it would work out.

The the biggest um not even hurdle or concern, but the thing that we want to make sure that we get absolutely right is how the bartenders are gonna be tipped out.

In a typical restaurant and a typical bar, you're gonna take those tips that night.

But when people are paying with cards and how how employees are paid through the city, we aren't gonna have that ability.

So we just want to make sure we have all of that really lined up and and squared away before we we dial in on a system.

So we tested it at nightmare and it seemed to work really well.

Um, so we're moving forward with those next steps.

Okay, do you think we could have it in 2026 then?

Maybe oh, absolutely.

Okay, cool.

Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

We've already started.

Yeah, okay, perfect.

Thank you.

Anything else?

Mr.

Steph.

Yeah, I Amanda, thanks.

Thanks for coming.

Um, and I see it up on the screen, so I'm gonna ask a question.

Maybe I'm gonna play the role of a segue, but um, there's another position right below the one you've just described that has you and parks and rec D case and parks and recognition departments that are considering a volunteer coordinator.

Did you want to talk about that?

Or yeah, I definitely think that that's a Jen is gonna take the lead on on that.

She's got all of the information that you're gonna want.

She has a larger parks and rec presentation.

Okay.

Um, for personnel.

All right, I'll save it for that then.

That's all.

Okay.

Thank you, Amanda.

Not that Deb needs me to describe this.

This is an initiative, this uh accounting technician for the police and um finance department is another example of the collaboration that exists between the departments.

Uh Deb Naraki and Police Chief Annaly uh identified certain shortcomings or or needs in both of their departments.

They have the ability to talk to each other, and this proposal is what you're going to be hearing.

Okay.

The re um request for this position is for an accounting technician.

It's basically a clerical accounting type of a role.

And it's proposed, as Rick mentioned, to be a shared position between finance and the police department.

At the start of the budget process, the police department originally requested a part-time position to back up the police department's financial analyst.

Um that person in the police department is the only one that does their payroll processes or invoices and any number of other tasks.

Um this position would provide for cross-training for critical uh payroll duties and support other financial duties within the police department.

At the same time that this was occurring, the finance department was struggling with the need to expand our accounts payable efforts in an uh with a desire to pay our uh vendors on a more timely basis.

Right now we have one person for the entire city that processes the accounts payable, and she also does some payroll work.

And our plan would be to move the payroll work over to this new position if approved in the finance portion of it, and um expand the current um staff members' duties to to be all accounts payable and do more uh payouts instead of following the you know every other week schedule just to get our vendors paid a little bit quicker because we do run into some struggles with that.

So and knowing we didn't um what our need was didn't warrant a full-time position, um and also when the police department requested a part-time position, we all know that it's harder to retain employees with a part-time schedule, and the type of duties that this position would be doing take time to learn.

You know, the uh public safety payroll in the city is very complicated, and we don't want to have a lot of turnover in this job and constantly be retraining somebody on our payroll.

So uh Chief Lally and I uh talked about it, and we determined that you know we could um combine our efforts and meet the needs of both departments with one position.

Question is Alfaro.

I just want to say that I love that that cross-collaboration between offices and the chair position to make sure that someone does stay along, right?

From a part-time to a full-time, and so I really appreciate that.

In addition to now having a backup for accounts payable, right?

So the person that was doing accounts payable can now be a backup in the vet that the other person's on vacation or sick or something else.

Right, and we appreciate what is very important is getting a backup for the police department's financial analyst for payroll.

Yeah, so and I appreciate that you're working to pay vendors faster.

Um that would give us a great reputation for people to bid more to our RFPs and stuff.

So thank you.

Thanks.

Okay.

Mr.

Ortiz appreciate the overview, Ms.

Naraki.

For is the police department the only department we have that has their own finance person.

Or does the own payroll person, I guess.

Um, the other departments have people that process payroll, but the position in the police department is unique, and yeah, Chief Lally could probably speak to more to what this person does, but I know she pays their bills, manages their P cards, um, does payroll, which is quite complicated for the police department.

She also um works on you know, filing for their grants when we get audited for our grant programs.

She oversees that, and I'm I don't know if she's she sounds overworked, so that's she needs a backup.

Yeah, I like that she's a one-stop shop, so everything comes in and out of her.

So all right, thank you.

Sure, thanks.

Okay, is that it?

Thank you, Deb.

Okay.

Um City Manager Kozel had said that you know we had additional positions to go through, but um in his zeal to talk about positions, he skipped over um some other information we wanted to share ahead of Jen Hermanson um speaking about the uh recreation positions.

So if we can go back to under fund summary overview and special revenue.

I just want to talk briefly about what these special revenue funds are, and the recreation fund is a special revenue fund, so that'll tie it all together for us.

Currently, there's 13 special revenue funds in the city's budget.

Special revenue funds are designed and separately funded for specific purposes.

Many of these funds are governed by guidelines established by state or federal statutes.

The expenditures that are charged to these funds must follow those guidelines.

While there may be funding available in one of these funds, we can't use those funds outside of their intended purpose.

For example, the funding in TIFF districts can only be used for certain expenditures within the boundaries of the TIFF district.

The E911 fund can only be used for expenditures that have been approved by the ETSB board.

MFT funds are earmarked for road work and expenditures related to the city's roads, like the purchase of SALT and the annual pavement marking program.

As you will see later this evening during our review of 2026 capital projects, some of these funds do contribute to capital initiatives considering the purpose and restriction of the fund.

The recreation fund is treated as a special revenue fund as revenues they receive from programming is intended to cover the related expenses.

However, the fees generated from program revenue do not cover all the costs of running the city's recreation facilities.

There's no expectation that operating revenues will cover all expenses as required in an enterprise fund like the utility fund or the golf fund.

The recreation fund is more a subset of the city's general fund.

When expenditures increase in this fund, they can be covered by increased fees for programming or by increases in the annual transfer from the general fund.

If you want to follow along, if you expand the special revenue section, and scroll down to the recreation fund.

And again, I'm speaking from the comprehensive fund summary.

What is referred to here is charges for services, and these are fees paid for by patrons of the recreation facilities and their programs.

The largest category of revenue that the fund has are transfer from other funds, which are transfers from the general fund and the IMRF fund, and then smaller miscellaneous revenues.

The 2025 estimated revenue for the fund is 10.6 million dollars and is increasing to 11.3 million dollars in 2026, an increase of about 700,000.

That 11.3 million dollars in revenue is made up of 4.9 million dollars in charges for services, again, fees paid by patrons, $6 million in transfers, with $5.3 million of it coming from the general fund, and another $700,000 coming from the IMRF fund to cover IMRF and Social Security benefits for recreation staff, and then $400,000 for miscellaneous type expenditures.

The reason for the increase in the revenue in the 2026 budget is primarily related to the expansion of the sports complex.

The revenue revenue will come from additional programming, rentals, and sales of commodities.

The expenses in the recreation fund are estimated to be 11 and a half million dollars this year, increasing to 12.9 million dollars next year, an increase of 1.4 million or 12.2 percent.

The increase in expenditures is primarily in the earnings and benefits category, increasing expenditures in that category from 7.9 million to 9.1, a 1.2 million dollar increase.

The increase is due to again the collective bargaining agreement COLAS and the new management pay plan.

There will be nine new full-time employees added that Jen Hermanson will describe.

Six and a half of those come from the recreation fund, and two and a half of them come from the general fund.

There's one position that's shared accounting for the halves.

There's 13 part-time new positions.

And like the other funds, the medical insurance premiums are increasing by 11.2%.

In 2025, expenditures exceed revenues by a million dollars and reduce the fund balance to 5.4 million in 2026.

We again expect expenditures to exceed revenues by 1.5 million dollars, reducing that fund balance down to 3.8 million dollars.

As expenditures increase in this fund going forward, the fund balance is being depleted, and we would have to look to increasing program fees or increasing that transfer from the general fund to cover expenditures.

I see that the $18,500 stays static straight through all the way through 2025 and 2026.

I'm just curious of what that additional is as well.

Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you.

Anything else?

Okay.

Good evening, Jen.

How are you?

I'm good.

How are you?

Okay.

All right.

We will just start off with the land management maintenance tech.

We currently have two technicians that are responsible for all the splash pads, any of the water, three pools in our department.

And April through September, a minimum of one certified pool tech must be on call 24-7.

And they are responsible for all of the daily works, the monitoring, the balancing, the maintenance, and the repairs.

As you notice this year, we with our aging infrastructure, we have had some of our pools go down, and having the response time of being able to manage the all of the daily stuff that is needed for the pools and to create the repairs, maintain the repairs, and be have preventative maintenance is essential to making sure that our facilities are up and running.

In the off-season, what this position will do is not only the normal winterization, and then in the spring, the startup, but it will also assist with the equipment, the repairs, the inspections, and any really any of the other land management responsibilities.

As mentioned by the previous directors, our staff is fairly lean.

Um, realizing that we have 17, 1800 acres, and so having additional staff is key, but needing specialized staff is also key.

So if we can get specialized staff to also assist with other duties in land management, it's a win-win.

As our department is more complex because we oversee programs, services, special events, land management.

Uh, we have small equipment, parking decks, and a wide variety.

So this position, although we will be hiring it specifically with the certifications of pools, it will be assisting with all other responsibilities in land management when they have downtime.

Questions.

I will move on to the land management maintenance or um safety inspector.

With the 46 playgrounds that we currently have, it is an NRPA standard that we inspect the playgrounds at least once a month.

It is hard to do so, but we get it done with just having one certified um playground inspector.

The certified playground inspector, even though the title says inspector, it is actually responsible for inspecting, repairing, ordering equipment, and anything that is needed with the playground.

So if they find something wrong, they don't delegate it to someone else.

If a slide is broken, they are the ones that are actually ordering the equipment, repairing it, and doing all of the work.

They will also assist with everything else with land management.

Um, but this position won't have as much time as other positions to assist.

Um, another a major portion that they will help with though is because they will be in the playgrounds inspecting the playgrounds, they will be assisting with reporting and if they're able, storm damage and anything like that.

So this position unfortunately has to be certified, CPSI certified to do any work on the playgrounds and has to be CPSI certified to document everything that you might not think of of this gap is this big, that's a hazard for a kid's hand or anything like that.

They are trained to identify this has shifted, we need to fix that.

And having only one person for the 46 playgrounds is not uh efficient for when we need repairs or other damages that may occur.

Questions?

Mr.

Peace.

Good evening, Miss Hermanson.

Appreciate you being here.

Uh think of the playgrounds.

Do we have any wooden playgrounds or metal slides though?

We do have, I think, one wooden playground.

Uh that is the only one I can think of.

Okay, I remember growing up those things like death traps.

Yes.

So uh it's still in working condition, but that is on our list.

Uh for the certification, is that something that's a national level thing or like a local regional thing?

Nope, it's a national.

Okay.

I'm assuming this is a lot of criteria to be certified in it.

Yes, it's actually a very hard test.

Not everyone, the percentage rate of passing it is actually fairly low on the first time.

So there's courses NRPA and um IPRA offer classes, and we send people to classes to get the certification because it's fairly in-depth.

I'm just scratching the surface, and I'm not CPSI certified, I'm scratching the surface.

It is as tiny as you need to know this gap can only be one point one inch.

And so you have to have the correct tools and measurements in determining every gap and the hazards with that.

So it's very intense.

Okay.

Thank you.

So far.

Um, thank you.

I had a question.

So the other individual, do they do like the all-in-one as you're saying as well?

Is like they do the repairs, they're doing the inspection.

Okay, so this would be like a backup to that person in the bed.

That okay.

Yep.

Okay, thank you.

I was just curious, like if that test was so hard, right?

Yeah, uh, which is gonna be real hard to fill that position, like are people accustomed to doing that all-in-one kind of thing.

Okay, I would say uh if you have bigger agencies, like huge agencies, you might only have one or two safety playground safety inspectors, all they do is inspections and then push it through to a work order system, and then it magically gets completed.

Uh, whereas here it's all in one.

I will move on.

The next three, the land management groundworkers, the sports complex lead, and then the athletic manager are all based on the sports complex.

So just to put it in perspective and to answer earlier questions of is this a need, with these three positions with the land management ground workers has four.

But with these positions, just to start off the bat, if we don't hire all of these positions, then we wouldn't open up the sports complex expansion as intended, it would just sit there.

And in the capital plan, there's correlating equipment that is needed.

So we need the staff and the equipment since this is all new, and we basically opened or added 290 developed acres with the expansion of the sports complex and Jack Cook Park.

So could these positions be eliminated?

Yes, but then we wouldn't open the sports complex as intended.

So with the incredible investment that Lgin has made in the sports complex expansion and the development of Jack Cook Park, significant maintenance responsibilities and staffing responsibilities come with that.

With the land management groundworkers, the industry standard, as you'll hear a theme throughout everyone speaking tonight, is to maintain is it's currently double our staffing.

However, we are not recommending that at all.

We're asking for four additional groundworkers to ensure that we can meet the public expectations for the clean, safe, and well-maintained spaces year round, but including weekends and winter snow operations to so to answer the shift differentials earlier, we are planning on shifting, having a shifted workforce for some of these positions to cover nights and weekends because we're pretty much all around.

And then with the sports complex lead worker, we need an expertise to lead these maintenance people.

And with the dedicated maintenance lead, the city can protect these facilities and open them up as intended.

In addition, this person will work very closely with the current staff and the athletic manager that's being proposed to enhance and expand the athletic programs and service opportunities with the new developments.

And so I'm gonna just slide into athletic manager, and then since they're all within sports complex, and if you guys have any questions, we'll go from there.

So with the athletic manager, there's two specific strategic planning initiatives that directly tie to this position.

The partnering with the A EACVB to expand tournament opportunities at the sports complex and to develop the downtown marketing plan for the sports complex.

As stated you know previously, the city has made a huge investment in the Elgin Sports Complex.

The addition of the athletic manager, which this will be the City of Elgin's first athletic manager.

We have an athletic supervisor that oversees the sports.

But currently we have all the athletics are divided up by who can take this program.

Like our aquatics manager currently runs our entire basketball league program, in addition to the three pools and all of that.

So having this dedicated athletic manager is essential to maximizing the community's return on this investment, but it will also be the lead in completing the strategic initiatives that I mentioned, as well as overseeing athletic rentals, tournaments, programming, concessions across multiple athletic venues, even though the main focus is a sports complex, but ensuring the seamless seamless scheduling and customer service and operations.

So if I'm booking over here, I know that I'm not double booking somewhere else.

And with out having this dedicated person, the city does risk underutilizing these premier premier facilities that we just opened, losing revenue opportunities as current staff cannot take on the additional programming needs of these expanded facilities.

And then the athletics manager will also enhance the service quality and strengthen the partnerships with the local organizations.

So that's all sports complex questions.

Any questions?

Mr.

Grud.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you for the presentation or the overview.

Um so I guess it looks in here, you know, there's a tag for seasonal transitions under the land management maintenance technician.

Um just the general question is is there any seasonality involved in this?

Um and then my second question is um I know there was some discussion around the opening of the bike track for the public, and there I think there was some like feeling it out this season.

Will any of these positions kind of help deployment of that space?

So with seasonal, yes, as far as the maintenance side of it, they can help with winter, they can help with snow, they can help with all of those activities.

The athletic manager can help with managing all of the part-time staff, which we have included.

I'm not going to touch upon the part-time staff, but the all the part-time staff that is being requested is being funded by revenues.

The activity supervisor will help with those facilities, the seasonal, the opening up the bike track and all that, those positions will directly impact those.

Okay.

You're welcome.

Anything else?

Mr.

Ortiz.

I don't know if you're coming back at another meeting.

But I was looking in the budget for stuff like equipment that you're gonna be looking forward.

I didn't see anything in there for like resurfacing and maintaining the artificial turf, the new fields you have over at the sports complex.

Is that something that we already have, or is that like equipment you're gonna ask for later on?

That's I look in the wrong spot.

So there is some equipment, and uh I can bring that up when we go over to the capital request.

I'll pull that up on the side note and bring it.

But there are there's equipment that specifically will help with the maintenance of the turf.

Okay, sorry.

No, you're good.

Other questions okay, all right.

Mr.

Seth and this position is for you, the voluntary volunteer coordinator.

Uh so I I apologize for my long explanation of this, but I want to make sure that we have the full context.

Parks and recreation department's previous restitution coordinator was recently promoted to the artistic project manager in the cultural arts and special events department.

With that transition, the Parks and Rec department took the opportunity to evaluate the position and found that the two programs that this position currently oversees, the Elgin Allies and the Elgin Restitution Program, have grown immensely over the last five years.

As the previous coordinator was very successful, but was working equivalent to two positions.

Just a quick recap, just to give an overview of how successful the programs are.

I know high school national honor society, they have to meet a minimum volunteer hours.

Volunteer hours are a requirement of colleges now, and then you have the scouts and service organizations.

So we have an amazing community who want to volunteer.

We just need the person to be able to organize all of these volunteers.

And as I said, this small portion of cost to organize such a huge payback in volunteers pays for itself.

And to answer the question, could we eliminate this position?

Absolutely.

But then we would be essentially eliminating the Allies program, or we would need to hire additional full-time staff to perform those duties.

Questions?

Questions.

Ms.

Paul.

Thank you.

I remember this position from a while back in Parks and Rec.

And I a couple of different questions I have.

Do we keep track?

Does the this position or the person who was just recently promoted in this position?

Did we utilize this position to get volunteers for like Nightmare on Chicago Street?

As much as we could, because the previous position was a combination position.

They did all the restitution work and all the court, all the organizing of that, and then when they had time, the volunteer program would come.

So it was a dual role way back when, and again, I wasn't here, but based on what everyone's telling me, it was a part-time position in the parks and rec that grew into this restitution coordinator position.

Okay.

But so it would assist with what exactly what you're saying, yes.

Right.

And so it would still do community restitution and the Algin Allies, as well as it would still do it be a combination.

No, we would hire the restitution coordinator position as the restitution coordinator position, because we already have that in the budget.

This would be a new position to help grow the volunteer base between the two departments.

Just the volunteers.

Exactly.

Yep.

So common theme.

A lot of these positions that we eliminated probably back in 2008, 2009.

We're getting back again.

We we had a full-time restitution coordinator or manager, um, and they had at least one or two helpers because that program was so big at that time.

We eliminated that position or those positions.

Now, you know, we're we're seeing ourselves kind of going back full circle.

Um I've been around that long.

Um so I'm glad to see this.

One of the things I would really like to see this position potentially look at, there was um a resident, uh, Chrissy Palermo, um, came before us a couple of years ago and and talked about how a town that she came from in California had a very large festival like we have with Nightmare on Chicago Street, and instead of utilizing as many full-time personnel as we currently do for nightmare, because as you said, it be it becomes you know hard and difficult.

You get burnout, it's expensive, really being able to organize volunteers and volunteer organizations.

Um, if they provide so many volunteers, there's a donation that's made to that volunteer organization or or nonprofit agency.

Um, you know, I'd really like for us to really look at how we can expand, you know.

If we're gonna hire these positions, I want to see a that type of return on this investment because I think that there's uh a better way for us to help staff these large events, and um, I don't think we've actively pursued that option as much as I would like for us to 100% agree.

That's all I have.

That's that that would that's my my primary goal and feedback.

I would really like to see that person, the person in this position be able to accomplish.

Thank you.

Okay, Mr.

Good.

Thank you again.

Mine's more comment-based.

Um, I just want to say shout out to staff who's uh stood this program up and grown it.

Um, you know, these are the moments that I like to inject that uh I totally agree, you know, return on investment for all these positions, but this helps build our our social fabric, our social capital to your point.

Not having a place for volunteers to go sometimes is not ideal.

Um so I I know this program uh is really visual on the community.

Um it's really obvious once they pass through an area, uh, the difference in you know, a lot of times just picking up uh trash and litter.

Um but I've just as you lay out here the number of hours, what that translates into from economic value, but I just want to do a part of my colleagues the social value of it well as well.

Um so I'm excited to see this.

I know that was spread thin.

Um so I think it it does return its value, and um yeah, it's it's just nice to have this general capture for volunteers in addition to some of the more specialized ones that we have for because I've volunteered for nightmare before uh from the bar side um as well as kind of the set design side.

So um there's just a ton of uh great people in Algin that want to volunteer.

So I like this, it formalizes it more.

Thank you.

Okay.

So far.

Um would this volunteer coordinator have a uh bilingual component to it to increase um access to Spanish speakers who want to volunteer?

I you know, we haven't written the job description.

I think that that's an excellent um opportunity for us, and we definitely will uh explore that option because it it is a great opportunity.

Yeah, I think that would be great to uh be more inclusive and and and increase our volunteers here.

Yeah, thank you.

The nice thing is is we do have um uh clerical position that and we have three other people on staff that can assist if we can't find someone with the skill set because we do have that need, uh a very very large need in our department, and so we've been trying to beef up our um the people with the bilingual skills because we see that need.

So thank you.

That'd be great.

Uh especially because like the other positions, although they can help, they're not out in the field with them, right?

If they're organizing stuff, and so it makes it a little harder, and so if we could try to add a bilingual component to this one.

Thank you.

I have a couple questions.

Um, these are easy.

I'm Marshmallow guy.

Um about vehicles.

You know, I've been involved with this a number of times.

I in fact, I've uh uh been on the restitution program a number of times, and uh the the slowdown a lot of times is vehicles, and there are more people that um that can use the program, and I think now with the uh uh the court system and the way that uh uh the options and court systems are being expanded a little bit, uh, that this program I don't think it's the time to do it uh for this budget, but maybe for next year's budget, is to look at this and see how we can expand it to do that.

What would be the cost to do that to add more people and allow more people to participate in this?

Not just volunteers, but young people that uh will be given options as coming out of the court system.

And then my my time serving there, I've uh had uh um young people ask me, I will have a lunch with them, and they ask me, Well, you're kind of old for this.

What are you here for?

I never told them who I was.

And what they were they work hard and they uh but it it takes that they take some supervision because they had some problems and some issues.

Many of them are are teenagers, and I think that there may be some benefit here in a number of ways, socially and for the city because the payback is here for some of the labor that they do, and they do uh when they get to work and somebody's with them, they work hard.

Yep, absolutely.

Okay, anyway, just a thought for maybe next year's budget.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

Still trying to think what you were doing in the restitution program, but we'll talk about that outside outside this meeting.

So I also failed to cue the council that Deb is going to be providing an overview of the river boat fund.

Riverboat fund for anybody who was on the dice knows that that's a significant revenue stream to fund the city's capital projects.

We'll hear about the state of the river boat from Deb right now, and then we'll move into those nine individuals in the 75 recommended capital projects.

So, real really quick um city manager.

Um, will we can you send us a um like a schedule for the next couple of budget meetings?

Which funds we're going to I'll make it easy for you.

Yes, I was gonna do that at the end.

So, utility fund is is what's scheduled for the meeting on the 19th.

Okay.

So that's water sewer, all that.

Depending on what the mood is this evening, we could also move the discussion on the central area TIFF to that.

It's at the end of the program this evening, depending on what mood everybody's in, we would be able to switch it that way.

But the plan is to get through the majority this evening with those one or two exceptions.

Okay.

If I could just ask, are we not going through part-time?

We weren't planning to, but that's something that we have the capability of doing if you want to dive into that.

What was that?

Part-time discussion and part-time employees.

Given that earlier we were talking about um in the console or that on the diasp people were brainstorming different ideas of you know alternatives to the property tax and and personnel is the biggest thing.

Um I would like to hear a little bit more on the part-time if that's if everyone else agrees.

The majority of the you can do that, Jen, right?

I was just gonna say I can make a really simple all of the part-time positions we're requesting are not tied to the property taxes, they are revenue funded.

So if you took the position you know, if the positions weren't approved, the services would just be cut.

So our positions specifically, our part-time positions are all covered by revenue.

So all these positions are yours, right?

Correct.

So it's all covered by revenue.

Thank you.

Exactly.

Yep.

Okay.

Okay, before we move into the capital projects, we just wanted to provide an overview of the river boat since that is a capital project fund.

You're following along under the fund summaries, the river boats.

Okay.

Um taken the stance for many years that the riverboat fund is a capital improvement fund.

We don't um use it to fund operating expenses, salaries, those type of things, and um strictly capital.

The revenue in the river boat comes from six different sources, one of them being the casino admission tax, which is a dollar per person enjoying the riverboat.

Then the gate and the second one is the gaming proceeds.

Those two revenue streams together are currently at about 7.8 million dollars for this year, and they were less in 2024 as well, which has continued, it has eroded in 20 um 19.

We were at about 9 million dollars.

So we've we've come down about you know, 1.2 million dollars in revenue, and we seem to be kind of stabilizing at that point.

Um I think part of the reason that that's occurred is if we go back to 2020, there was 10 casinos in Illinois.

Today there's 17.

So a large increase in competition there.

Again, that's 7.8 million million of it coming from the admission tax and the gaming proceeds.

We also expect to receive 1.3 million dollars from the lease payment from the Grand Victoria.

That payment um is adjusted by the consumer price index each year, so it increases a little from year to year.

The fund also captures the video gaming um revenues.

It will um reflect any grants if there is a grant in a particular year, and also investment income.

In 2026, we do have two grants that are gonna flow through the river boat revenues.

One is a CMAC grant for the Kimball traffic signal improvements, and the for $600,000, and the other is an OsLAD grant for the wing park improvements, also $600,000.

In 2026, we're planning on capital investments of $14.5 million dollars.

These projects, which you're going to hear more about, include things like vehicles, portions of street resurfacing projects, the neighborhood sidewalk program, um, and other investments in city parks and facilities.

The one thing I want to um point out about the expenditures in the river boat is due to the decrease we've seen in revenue, we've had to take certain initiatives that have traditionally been budgeted for in the river boat and move them over to the general fund.

In the 2026 budget, we moved 1.7 million dollars of traditional revenue river boat um expenditures to the general fund.

Those um initiatives included tree service, the um PSA with the Lgin Development Group, funding for the Cultural Arts Commission, um, economic incentive payments for the Auto Mall, the funding for the PACE program, and IT capital replacements all moved out of River Boat into the general fund.

In 2026, we expect that expenditures are going to exceed revenues by 3.2 million dollars and leaving a fund balance of 4.7 million dollars to carry over into future budget years.

As we look to the out years of the plan, we're budgeting about 10 million dollars per year in capital investment.

This is pretty much equal to the annual revenues that we expect to receive as the fund balance is being depleted in this fund.

If you remember years back, we had fund balances of 15 to 20 million dollars in this fund, and as time has gone on, they have been drawn down and revenues have decreased.

So as we move forward, the annual budgets will be limited pretty much to current year revenue expectations.

Questions from Mr.

Rocky.

Mr.

Ortiz.

All right.

Uh for I think I asked it last year, but I hit my head one too many times, so I probably forgot it.

The video gaming revenue, that's the licenses the liquor commission gives out, right?

That's not okay.

The revenue.

I thought that number would be higher because we give those out like candy.

Everybody gets one.

Yeah.

So it's so for this year, it's only at 670,000 estimated.

Yes.

Oh, yeah, I thought it would have been a lot higher.

All right, that's it.

Thanks.

Okay.

Thank you, Deb.

An important point that Deb pointed out there again.

We've also been able to draw down on the savings, the reserves that existed in the river boat.

That's again part of the reason.

Did not put stress on the general fund like we're experiencing this year, so we could continue drawing with those capital improvements.

But at some point with the declining revenues, we don't have the ability to keep that balance.

And it's again another one of the factors that after that 11-year run, we need to go back and try to find additional revenue streams to maintain the core operations.

So we're going to start with capital improvements next.

And the easiest way to manage this is if you go to your online budget books, you scroll to the left side, you go to the capital improvement plan down towards the bottom, and you go to department requests, and that's where I can't click.

There we go.

And that's where you'll be able to scroll through if you want to follow through on the initiatives that the that the directors are going to be talking about, or as Karina showed a little bit earlier, you could click on any particular initiative to get more information.

We are not going ever through every single initiative in the capital improvement plan, though we are going through, like I said, about 75 of those, those that we think we've identified that are most important to the council.

So we'll begin this round of discussions once again with Jen Hermanson.

Parks and recreation has 14.7 million dollars in proposed capital improvements in 2026.

Wow, yeah, there it is.

And I am going to answer councilman Ortiz's question.

We did pull some small equipment from the capital budget because we came in under budget with a few projects, specifically the civic and the center painting deck.

Um so we were able to purchase a few small equipment.

However, we do have the trucks, the mowers, and we also have the sports complex utility vehicle that will also have a broom and a brush and stuff to pick up the magnetic to pick up stuff off the field.

Yeah, so as I asked the question, I found it on the next page.

I have to scroll one more.

You should have just stopped it.

Yeah, no, no, you're good, you're good.

Everybody else can look uh here it too.

All right.

So as city manager Kozel stated, we picked a few projects to highlight.

There we go.

As we have a lot of initiatives going on, the first one that I'm going to cover is the wing park renovation.

Biggest one.

All right.

So this is Wing Park, and the reason why I'm showing you the outline is if you see the words master plan.

We have a master plan for the passive recreation play, not a full comprehensive master plan that would include like the aquatics and all of that.

When we talk about the scope of the Wing Park Master Plan, this is the area that we are talking about that is highlighted in green.

And these are all of the initiatives that we want to accomplish with this renovation.

Sorry, trying to blow that up a little bit.

All right.

So Wing Park is $121 acre regional park and has, as all of you know, some of the most historic public spaces in the city.

With the age of Wing Park, it does have some deficiencies that of safety and accessibility and challenges for park users with the evolving needs of the community.

The city applied for and received a $600,000 open space and land acquisition development grant, which you guys will hear OSLAD a lot, which is a matching grant from IDNR to support the construction of the key components here.

The renovations to Wing Park include fully inclusive playground, improved trails, seating, accessible parking, bank shock play area, native plantings, and accessible picnic grove.

In addition to the grant funded improvements, when we looked at the master plan for the passive recreational play, we partnered with Upland Design to develop a comprehensive passive play plan addressing broader recreational needs of Wing Park and identified that through community surveys, public feedback, that there is a need for new pickleball courts, expanded parking, updated drinking fountains, seating areas, upgraded or new restrooms near the playground, enhance trail connectivity, restoration of key landscape areas, path accessibility improvements, and path accessibility improvements with Elgin Little League Classic.

These improvement improvements will not only preserve the park's legacy but also ensure that we continue to meet the recreational safety and accessibility needs of the Algin residents.

However, with those additional needs that we identified, the cost for those additional needs was about $3.55 million dollars.

So what we are presenting today is phase one, which would be the inclusive playground, some improved trails, accessible parking, bank shop play area, and then the other improvements we will represent to council in the following year in 2027 of approximately $3.55 million dollars.

Questions?

Questions, Mr.

Dixon.

Thank you for the presentation.

Um clarifying question for the that main park.

Well, the first park when you drive into Wing Park, um, there in the center, I think maybe about maybe about nine months ago, something like that.

I think we approved some work to be done.

Is this in addition to that?

No, the work that was identified to be done, the initial costs do not cover the whole scope of the work.

Okay.

So this is we still have not completed that original OzLID grant, and have identified the expanding needs of that project.

And the cost has significantly gone up since it was originally explored.

Okay.

All right, thank you.

Okay.

The athletic facility improvement funding is City of Elgin, we proudly support six community-based youth sports leagues by providing them athletic facilities at no cost.

These are all volunteer-led organizations, and not only maintain their facilities, but they also offer scholarships to ensure access for the underserved youth.

However, rising maintenance costs, infrastructure needs, and declining volunteer capacity have increasingly strained their ability to keep up with all of these facility needs.

Recognizing these challenges, the city increased the ongoing athletic facility capital improvement fund from $50,000 to $150,000 in 2024.

These enhanced fundings has allowed the city to begin addressing significant backlog of high priority repairs, improvements, and infrastructure needs.

While annual requests from the leagues consistently exceed 400,000, projects are evaluated and prioritized based on safety, urgency, and impact.

The oversight of this program is provided by the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board, which reviews each league's three-year capital plan during an annual presentation to ensure transparency and alignment with community goals.

Staff recommends maintaining the 150,000 funding level through 2026 to address the most pressing and deferred facility needs.

Sustaining this investment will ensure safe, high quality facilities for youth sports, support the longevity of volunteer driven community programs, preserve equitable recreation opportunities for Elgin families, and provide technical and material assistance for complex maintenance projects, which a lot of these volunteer organizations do not have the expertise to maintain these facilities and infrastructures.

This funding is critical to a critical partnership tool that helps maintain the infrastructure behind Elgin's vibrant inclusive sports system.

Questions?

Okay.

We'll move on to Channing Park Refurbishment.

Channing Park is community located adjacent to Channing Memorial Elementary School on the east side of Elgin and requires significant updates.

The current 17-year-old playground has exceeded its recommended lifespan and other amenities such as walking past parking and sports play surfaces that need improvement.

The parks and recreation department applied for a 2026 OSLEDA grant in the amount of $600,000 for this project to add new amenities, update the outdated playground equipment, enhance community access, as well as accessibility throughout the park.

We are expected to hear if we receive this grant in 2025, or if we receive this grant in December of 2025 or early 2026, and the requested amount for the 2026 budget is for the engineering and designing costs of the project.

Questions.

Sorry.

Oh, just real quick.

I had a question.

So I see that it's a 17-year-old playground.

What is the recommended best practice of the lifespan of the playground?

So it depends on how heavily used the playground is.

It depends on the location, and it also depends on the quality of equipment.

Since I've been in the field for about 20 years, there are some playground equipment that might not even last 10 years, and we stay away from those manufacturers, and then there's some that in a certain neighborhood you could get 20 years out of it.

The national NRPA standards are 12 to 15 years, depending on the use.

So 17 years is above the even max of what they recommend.

School playgrounds are usually less, more towards that 12-year playgrounds are expensive.

They are, yes.

And every community wants them.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yes.

Mr.

Dixon.

Thank you.

Um circling back around, following up to that.

What was the difference between the um the Oswald Allswalt grant and what it ultimately required in order to get that work done?

So the OSI grant is a matching fund.

So $600,000 is the max of what we can apply for, and all of our playgrounds are at least $600,000 because we have other amenities in the park.

With the Ozai grant also, it can't be just a playground renovation.

There has to be at least five recreational components of $5,000 or more.

And it also depends on how many of those amenities you have throughout the system.

So it's a complicated point system and matching up what do we need, what does the community need, how many additional recreation amenities are you applying for?

And with this specific playground, I feel like it's probably about 1.3.

I just have to look up exactly what the total estimated cost is.

With this funding, if we did not get the grant, we would not pursue this.

We would come back to council and say we did not get the grant.

Instead of the 232,000 dollars, we would need 1.4 or 1.5 because we didn't get the grant.

So this money, excellent question, is contingent on getting the grant.

If we didn't, we'd have to come back to council.

Gotcha.

Thank you.

Yep, thank you.

Anything else?

Okay.

We'll move on to the Edward Shock Center of Elgin off the old Sherman space renovation.

With the Parks and Recreations Department's growth, existing programming and office space at the center is at capacity.

To meet the increasing program services and staffing needs, staff is proposing repurposing the underutilized old Sherman space area into program services enrichment programs for early childhood, along with much needed additional office space.

We'll be updating the space to bring it up to code along with replacing and updating installing electrical, eliminating lines and equipment no longer needed.

We'll be also updating the HVAC system plugging, cabinets, doors, addressing the leaks around the window and the masonry on the south walls and more.

The exciting part of this project is we have a great opportunity to expand our program and services and enrichment offerings for the children of our community.

We currently serve about approximately 180 students and over 400 children in our preschool enrichment programs and over 200 children in our preschool camps.

Although those are impressive numbers, we are always striving to provide more comprehensive early childhood programs and services for our community and the youth in this community.

However, we have very limited space.

Providing early childhood programs, as Councilmember Good mentioned earlier with the volunteer programs, offer significant benefits for children.

Just a few examples improves academic and cognitive development, social and emotional growth skills, and the long-term benefits for children, such as higher graduation rates, better health outcomes, and benefits to the community of building a more inclusive society, strengthening families, and building stronger community bonds.

Our programs, even at an early age, focus on the foundations of STEM, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and we would like to continue to grow these programs and services as we are currently maxed out with what we can offer.

This project also coincides with the strategic initiative of ongoing collaboration of engaging families and community partners in everyday settings such as local businesses, parks, and events to support children ages zero to five and ensure school readiness.

Questions?

Okay, I'm not sorry.

And let's see.

So if that initiative, the renovation of the old Sherman space is approved, we would need to provide all of the amenities for those the spaces.

So we would need to furnish the classrooms with new equipment, including tables, chairs, shelving, storage units, supplies, STEM kits, magnetic tiles, and all of the things that go along with the enrichment program and the expansion of the program programming areas.

That brings us to the Edward Shock Center of Elgin's streetscape design.

So the streetscape surrounding the Edward Shock Center of Elgin and the adjacent civic parking lot deck was constructed over 20 years ago with the original development of the center.

This area includes sidewalks along Symphony Way, North Grove Avenue, which serve as vital pedestrian routes for the center patrons, Hemans Cultural Visitors, parking deck users, and downtown Elgin pedestrians.

After more than two decades of exposed to the elements, heavy foot foot traffic sidewalks surrounding the infrastructure have significantly deteriorated and have now exceeded their useful life.

The original brick pavers are no longer manufactured or commercially available, making repairs and replacements almost impossible.

Additionally, many of the direct decorative iron railings around the raised planters and Syphony Way and North Grove Avenue are rusted and deteriorating, posing both aesthetic and safety concerns.

We recognize the growing need for the reinvesting in this high visible area.

However, we were waiting to present this to council for the construction of Hemons to be completed because we didn't want to duplicate any efforts of construction traffic or anything damaging it.

And now that that is completed, we are bringing this initiative to council as we will be updating and renovating the space to match and complement the rest of the surrounding civic and arts institutions, enhancing the aesthetics outside the newly renovated Hemans.

I believe this is the last part of our little area that needs to be updated.

Questions?

All right.

We have the Elgin Sports Complex field renovations.

This is year three out of four.

So the Parks and Recreation Department operates a large youth soccer program with eight to 900 participants in the spring, and another 700 to 800 participants in the fall.

With that many participants, the demand for the 10 soccer fields at the sports complex, including the four lighted fields, remains at an all-time high for both recreational and tournament purposes.

With that being said, with all of that use, the fields receive significant wear and tear, and that compounds over years.

To address the wear and tear, the drainage issues with the heavy annual use.

We have been re the city has been re renovating one lighted field per year over the past two years.

This field renovation includes removing existing turf, improving drainage, regrading, and installing new SOD.

These renovations are critical to supporting the city's popular youth soccer program and hosting tournaments that drive economic activity.

Questions?

I promise I'm almost done.

Well, maybe not.

Okay.

So the Fulton parking deck, this is pretty painting.

This is pretty oh, I'm so sorry.

Yes.

Thank you.

I do have a quick question.

And I don't know that we're pretty early in this process, and we're hoping that we get, you know, and we should get many tournaments to come out there to the field.

Do we have an estimate of how much revenue that the addition will be generating?

It's really hard to generate that.

I mean a very very, very, very, very, very low ball number.

My guess would be at least 100 to 110,000.

I would hope with the a new athletic manager who can focus on that portion, could increase that.

I just don't want to throw out a number that be like Jen said, we're gonna hit this number.

But my goal would be to increase that year over year once we get our bearings and get a plan in place.

Yeah, okay.

All right, and I ask that because you know, looking at the capital costs of it is not cheap.

Yeah, you know, to maintain that much acreage and especially uh the turf.

And so, you know, thinking about raising revenue because we have this great new asset, you know, it's nothing um that we can't think we can't think enough about it.

We we need to figure it out figure it out.

So all right, thank you.

And you are absolutely correct, and that's where like a business plan and a marketing plan of how we're going to utilize the facility will come into play with the new athletic manager position.

Right.

Okay, thank you.

So far.

Thank you, Mayor.

Um, just I was quickly going through all the ones for the sports complex.

One of the things I saw was uh the food prep.

Um, so one of the things to consider in the future is um including more uh cultural food.

Like I eat the malas every it doesn't matter the time of year, right?

And so and that's easy.

You it's prepped somewhere else, it comes, you just keep them heated, right?

Or other things that you could um entice people beyond the the pretzels and the naturals kind of thing.

Thank you.

I will pass that feed back along.

Okay.

Other questions.

All right.

All right.

The Fulton parking deck painting is pretty straightforward.

The city's um parking decks range anywhere from 17 to 50 years old.

It is recommended that routine interior painting every four to five years, which enhances visibility, promotes safety, and contributes to a clean, welcoming environment.

Obviously, if you've seen some of the little bit of the painting that's going on now, just refreshing and painting improves visibility for both drivers, pedestrians, reinforces sense of safety, care in the spaces, supports the downtown revitalation efforts, and extends the useful life of the structure and the surface materials.

Questions.

The media upgrade for the center ballroom and the meeting rooms.

This is the last component for the upgrades for the ballroom.

The audio and visual video equipment in the heritage ballroom is original, so it's approximately 23 years old.

Despite the occasional updates, the existing projector screen sound system are outdated, unreliable, and incompatible with modern technologies.

We do receive complaints from renters that we need to upgrade all of these systems.

And so, as part of the recent renovations that were completed in the past, this is the final step to modernize that.

We are also recommending the audio visual upgrades in the West Conference Room, the Arts and Craft Studio, which will also be part of additional revenue that we can rent out.

And then these updates will prepare the studios for that additional revenue, but we need the up media upgrades before we do that.

And the investment will ensure that all upgraded rooms offer professional reliable multimedia media capabilities, enhancing the overall user experience and cream increasing the competitiveness of the center as a rental programming destination.

Questions?

The Walton Island and Bike Path plank replacement is pretty straightforward.

It's exactly that.

The planks are outdated, warping, splintered, and to provide a safe environment for such a heavy traffic area.

We need to upgrade those.

If we need to upgrade them with the same material that's currently there without completely rehabbing all of those bridges.

So the material the alternate material sizes would compromise both the function and the original design of the bridge and also increase the cost significantly.

So we are looking to replace all of those and ensure the pathways, the critical pathways that our pedestrians use are updated with and do not provide a safety concern.

Questions.

The tennis court repairs again are pretty straightforward.

We maintain about 10 20 tennis courts and 13 currently need maintenance due to freeze and thaw damage and just normal wear and tear.

To prevent full court failures, we are requesting this fund or these funds so that we can crack fill, we can do preventative maintenance.

Otherwise, if we don't do the preventative maintenance, we would have to do potentially a full court replacement, would which could cost up to 250,000 dollars.

So this is a preventative mid measure so that we don't have to do a full court replacement.

Questions.

So this will provide all of the interior stuff for the new clubhouse.

Move on to Bose Creek shore stabilization.

Several ponds, and this is has been an ongoing project.

Several ponds at Bows Creek.

Maintenance staff have completed the work along holes three and six, and the stabilization of hole one and a partial section along hole 18.

Work planned for 2026.

Anything we didn't get completed will carry over, or in 2025 will carry over to 2026 if needed, and we want to continue to invest in the shoreline stabilization to preserve the course integrity, protect water quality, and reduce the long-term maintenance needs needs.

Allowing golf operations to reuse what might have been disposed of instead of traditioning traditionally building structures.

This option is less expensive than your standard brick and mortar solution, and it aligns with the sustainability initiatives and also get allows the golf operations to explore new and innovative revenue up revenue opportunities while still allowing ADA access on the lower level, which currently is exists as an undercover undercovered range.

The upper level will have simulator rooms, which can be open to the outside for shop shot making in better weather.

And the CDGA has expressed interest in having a satellite office at this site and potentially fund providing some funding or naming rights, let trying to leverage their reach of over 100,000 local golfers.

The total current estimate for the total project would be about 1.3 million, with additional funding requests being presented to council in fiscal years 2027-2028 after the initial exploration of the design phase has been completed.

So again, these funds are being requested to explore this new rubber revenue generating opportunity.

Questions?

Mr.

Thorne.

For those that don't know, the CDGA stands for the Chicago District Golf Association, of which there are thousands and thousands of members, and they have their own publication.

So that means that their magazine that would go out would show this location as a as an office site, and hence the Highlands advertises in that magazine already.

And I think it would be it would it could only boost our awareness and the notability of the Highlands.

So I think this is great.

Thank you for that.

Okay.

Ms.

Powell.

Is this your last one or you've got it's my last one?

Uh oh, does that mean more questions?

No.

Um actually no, I didn't have a question about this one.

Um I know we've gotten several emails about the Lores Park Lagoons.

I didn't see anything on here regarding any capital or dredging related to the lagoons.

Can you kind of speak to that and where we are in that process?

So we are proposing a comprehensive well, we will be proposing a comprehensive master plan for Lord's Park in 2027, just like we did for Wing Park.

Because there's also additional needs, and we will include that in the 2027 budget.

Okay.

That's all I have.

Okay, thank you.

Stephen.

I just want question, Jen.

Uh, the last several projects you took us through are all in the golf fund.

And that means that they are funded from that enterprise fund.

This is money that is generated from golf fees and that's kind of all kept in that cycle.

Okay.

I just wanted to make sure I understood that.

Okay, thank you.

Yep.

Okay.

Anything else?

Mr.

Dixon.

Uh yes, I I just want to follow up to um follow up with the councilwoman, uh, councilwoman's comments uh concerning the lagoon.

Uh first, thank you for looking into that.

I I you know I got plenty of emails that I forwarded to you and and to City Manager Cozel, and and actually um, I think it was maybe a within the last week or two, you guys actually sent back a not a full report, but you look really looked deeply into it.

And and so um, you know, to if there's you know anybody listening at this point to this meeting, I you just want you to just want you to know if you're concerned with the uh with the lagoons.

The die-off that is that's happened sometimes does happen as my understanding.

Um, but it should not persist for year after year after year, and that's why you can say in 2027, you know, we're gonna continue to look after this, we'll come up with the plan, and then we'll execute when we get there.

And so I just wanted to give that give that background because you know it's not like it's a problem and this is going to stay a problem, and we're just deciding not to do anything with it.

This is a part of the season of life, I'm going to say, when it comes to lagoons.

Is that correct?

Correct.

And in case anyone is listening, there have been improvements that we have made over the last two years with these lagoons, such as the aeration.

We replaced the aerators to get better water flow.

You know, we've added nutrition to it, and so there has been numerous um things that we have enhanced over the last two years.

And all I can say is if anyone's watching, please just let us know if there is garbage in the lagoons.

We could go and pick up, leave, and 10 minutes later, something is blown in there.

So if you see something, say something.

Okay, and that goes for anything.

Anything, not just garbage, but correct carcasses.

Okay.

Yes.

All right.

Thank you.

Okay.

All right, thank you.

Thank you.

Public services director, Mike Pubin's always on the Capital Improvement Project Leader Board, no exception this year.

Well, I guess Nora actually is on the top, but she has an enterprise fund, so that doesn't that doesn't count.

All right, Mike has 20 initiatives that he's going to go through.

But the good news is he said by the time that we leave, the Kimball Street Bridge will have been replaced.

So we're ready to go.

All right.

Quality over quantity manager Cozell.

Thank you, Council.

I'm going to hit some highlights on our uh projects in our engineering capital improvement budget this year.

Uh you'll see in the budget both our annual collector street and neighborhood street resurfacing.

The collector street is uh budgeted at $3 million.

The neighborhood is five and a half million dollars.

Those are our uh typical annual programs where we address just what it says.

Neighborhood and collectors are the larger streets uh throughout the community.

Uh we'll continue our alley and parking lot rehabilitation uh program.

We're requesting half a million five hundred thousand dollars to do that.

This is the sixth year of that program, it's been very successful.

Uh we've eliminated quite honestly uh all the of the worst alleys, and we've knocked off quite a few of the city parking, both public parking lots and facility parking lots, fire stations, police department, etc.

Uh pavement and inventory and rating services.

Uh we the last time we did a pavement inventory was 2019, so it'll be six to seven years old.

So best practices probably a little sooner than that, but we'd like to update that, and that'll give us one of the outcomes is a condition ranking, and we use that to inform our our resurfacing and our uh our request for STP funding.

Uh engineering design fees 680,000.

That supports the neighborhood and collector street resurfacing as well as some other engineering design work that we do.

Uh, you'll see Dundee Avenue reconstruction at 7.6 million.

That is for the construction.

Uh that the start of that project was delayed this year.

Uh we had significant delays for other utility relocations, but it is underway.

The contractor is working now and it's gonna work into the winter as long as they can.

Uh, we think a couple months, and then they'll close up for the winter, and we're still on target to complete that project by next fall, which was our original completion date.

Uh Dundee Avenue, Center Street, and the Villa Street corridor improvements, uh, six hundred thousand dollars.

That is to reconstruct Summit to Gifford.

So we did the summit and Dundee intersection a couple years ago.

Now we're doing Dundee Avenue North.

This will take it south all the way down to Gifford.

Uh, part of which was uh done several years ago it had a road diet.

We're gonna resurface down to the signals at Gifford.

So the money in this year is for phase two design and possibly some right-of-way acquisition.

Uh we hope to construct that in 2027.

Uh national street reconstruction.

Uh this is just over a million dollars.

Again, we're in phase two for that, which is the final design process, and again, hope to construct in 2027.

Uh both Dundee Center Villa and National Street uh have received uh STP funding.

So we're getting some assistance.

The U.S.

Route 20 widening, uh long common parkway to Coombs Road, phase two design.

Uh that was a project initiated uh cooperatively between myself and Mr.

Millot in community development, and uh we're working with a consultant on the phase one, which is preliminary design, environmental review, etc.

This will be phase two.

Uh, we don't have a construction date for that yet, it's uh pending funding, but there is a call for projects right now through the council of mayors.

So we'll be submitting this project for future funding.

Uh the earliest we would get is 2030 or 2031.

So we'll see how that goes, but we'll continue with the design work.

Um see Highland Avenue and Lyle Avenue intersection roundabout.

Uh that's a capital improvement project that's really been several years in the making.

It started with our uh parking and traffic committee, which Mr.

Neal uh sits on.

Uh there was a concern due to a high number of left turn accidents and uh a few serious, but um it's an indicator that you have problems with the existing four-way stop.

So that over time has grown into this concept of doing a uh uh local roundabout.

As many of you know, we've done we recently tore out two roundabouts, traffic circles, etc.

So we're being very, very careful to make sure this is designed properly, and we went so far as to have our consultant actually paint the limits of the roundabout out.

Uh there's a cul-de-sac at the end of Homes Road down by public services.

So if you want to come and drive it, you gotta look for the paint marks on the roadway.

But we've driven it with cars, we've run snow plows through there.

Uh Chief Sogan was kind enough to have his crew bring out a fire truck.

Uh we've had some concerns from the public over the size of it and it being too small.

Uh, we're confident that it's well designed and will work properly.

So our intent is to construct that in 2026.

The Larkin Avenue and airlight intersection improvements, uh, 300,000.

That is to begin the phase one process.

Again, that's preliminary engineering and environmental studies, etc.

It's kind of the clearance.

Uh that one is uh does have STP funding attached to it.

The soonest we would start that construction would be 2029.

So that's the multi-legged intersection and the frontage road comes into it.

So we're looking at a roundabout project there as well.

We think actually that location is ideal for a roundabout.

It's a little trickier, there's a lot of traffic movements, but we think that'll that will work.

Uh let's see.

McLean Boulevard and Spartan Drive intersection improvements.

Now that is underway.

We hope to complete phase two in 2026.

That is to add a southbound turn lane from McLean onto Spartan Drive.

That's right on my paper here.

Uh, in anticipation of the construction work that's going on for the technology center at ECC.

There was a somewhat of a need for it prior to that, but we think the two projects uh work well together.

So we are we do have contingency funding, uh promise of contingency funding, which means through the council of mayors, that if there is money left over from other projects, it may be uh provided to this.

So it's not finally secured yet, but we're gonna continue to pursue that.

So real real quick, Mike.

Yes, just clarification.

You said so that would be southbound on the clean a right.

Make it a right turn into ECC into ECC.

That would help a lot.

Yeah.

Um then with a local driver suggests that to us who's sitting two seats away from you.

I take that.

You don't even have to look, do you?

Yeah, I'd be I take that route a lot, so uh that makes it makes a lot of sense.

Um, and then going back to there were two roundabouts.

There was the one at Highland and Lyle, and then is there another one at Larkin and Airlight?

I think you said that's correct.

So Highland and Lyle were moving forward with the construction.

It'll be a typical single-lane roundabout, it's replacing a four-way stop that's currently there.

And again, that was driven by a high accident history, which roundabouts are very effective at eliminating because they they remove those those crossing conflicts with cars.

So the second one is Larkin Avenue and Airlight, which is your heading west on Larkin, just before you get on the 20, it's the last signal right there.

So we we've requested funding through the council mayors for service transportation funding, that's federal money, and have received it, and our our pursuit right now is to look at a roundabout for that location.

So that's not close to being finalized yet, but that's our initial emphasis of our design focus.

How is that gonna work with that traffic coming off a foothill though?

Because that's a really weird inner section.

If you give me 300,000 for phase one design, I'll tell you.

You'll tell me that's what we're looking at, right?

That's certainly one of the challenges with that intersection because it comes in just north of the signal, yeah.

Which has it has a pretty unique signal phasing there, right?

You've got to wait.

Yeah, right.

Some of it's got to clear, they gotta let foothill out.

So it could mean that foothill comes in at a different location.

There's multiple ways, and we're not that we're we're just not far enough along in the detailed studies to say here's exactly what it's gonna look like.

It should be one of the world's ugliest books of uh intersections.

Should be the number one page.

So in terms of the roundabout that's being proposed or built at Highland and Lyle, because I know some of us have gotten emails about it, and it just very ironic that we just like you said, we did take out some roundabouts that weren't functioning well.

Where is the guarantee that this roundabout is not gonna be like the roundabouts that we just took out, like the one at Gifford and the one at College Green.

How is this roundabout going to be designed differently and function differently than those?

Right.

So I I wasn't, I didn't work for the city, and I wasn't part of the process, but I my best guess is that when those two roundabouts were put in or mini traffic circles, they were they were well intended, but put in for the wrong purposes.

Roundabouts are not suited for controlling truck traffic.

I mean, they will, right?

You can't get a trucker on them.

They're not really meant to be speed control.

Their primary benefit is traffic accident reduction.

And and quite honestly, pedestrian benefits that moves pedestrians away.

So I think the intent was was good.

My understanding on Gifford, especially when Gifford used to connect up to Summit, trucks would cut through there.

And I was told by some of the neighbors that they feel that's why that was put in.

And rather than it was quite honestly, it was early in the in the movement towards roundabouts or traffic circles.

So perhaps the level of design wasn't quite as uh as well defined.

I think what happened is they fit in there what they could.

And unfortunately, it didn't take into account the width of snow plows and school buses and fire engines, and um so again, good intentions, but just didn't quite work.

So the guarantee, and I I right to get the guarantee is that this is going to be designed to current standards using FHWA models for the diameter of the outer curves of the inner curves.

It is going to have a mountable center, so there will be vehicles that go through that do have to, the back tires may have to come up on that center median, but it won't be landscaped, there won't be planters in there.

But that's that's by design, and it's held up by some as is a failure of the intersection.

But it's not quite honestly, it's a trade-off that because we have such such a small number of large vehicles that will have to do that.

That's the trade-off between the increased safety that you get for the 99% of the other cars that go through there because you've got a relatively higher speed road in Highland and a low speed road in Lyle, four-way stop.

And typically you see those, so these are T-bone types of crashes where somebody's running our stop sign, not stopping, speeding through, etc.

These all produce that.

So some of the concerns were it's going to encroach on the properties.

We can build this all within the existing right-of-way, two design standards.

We're not we're not squeezing it in, you know, we're not pulling in the curbs, so we don't have to get right-of-way.

We're gonna add sidewalk to it that'll help us start to make the connection east towards McLean.

We're not gonna get all the way there with this project, but we'll make some connections that way.

It may it may eliminate a little bit of parking on Lyle south of the intersection.

But again, I think any of these projects, there's always some trade-offs.

Okay.

Did I answer your question?

I think so.

Um the roundabout that I'm thinking about out west off of, I think it's South Street and Longcommon functions really well.

But it's it's it's a big it's it's a big roundabout.

But those are a little different style of roundabout, yeah.

They're you actually come in on the on the very edge of the road, and you don't know quite where you come in the center.

Okay, okay.

Thanks, Mike.

Yeah, you're welcome.

I've got a few others.

I'll go through those and any questions, please let me know.

Uh, we've got the Fox River Bridge replacements, we're continuing on that project.

Uh, we're asking for 3.2 million.

Uh that is for the phase two process for both bridges, and again, that's final design.

So we're working through phase one.

We hope to get design approval from IDOT.

We have to get all of our all these documents that have to be approved by the state.

So we have to get uh design approval late this year, it's probably gonna be early next year, but we'll start phase two in 2026, it'll go into 2027, and then tentatively construction of those two bridges will be 28, 29, and maybe in 30.

So we're still at a point where we can't say for certain which one will go first because we're still allowing them to proceed independently, and whichever one, quite honestly, whichever one is ready, I think is the one that we move forward on.

Uh the next two items I'm gonna talk about.

We have a bridge inspection program and a bridge rehabilitation and replacement program.

Uh those of you that have looked at the budget in the past may recall those used to be combined, and what we found out is those two functions are distinct enough and have a great enough need that they really are better off separate.

So the bridge inspection program will be monies that are used to inspect all the larger structures that are on the national bridge inventory system, the NBIS.

Those are the ones over 20 feet, et cetera, that have to be inspected every two to four years, depending on their condition.

You may remember a few years ago there was a culvert on Laurel Street that collapsed unexpectedly, and the process of acquiring a few feet of right-of-way and getting through the design and permitting process took us easily six to eight months, so Laurel was closed.

So coming out of that, we decided to do an inventory of all of our culverts, uh smaller, medium to smaller culverts down to I think one foot in diameter.

So we now have an inventory of about 150 additional culverts, small bridges, box culverts that we would like to add to that inventory process.

It won't be as rigorous, it won't be that every 48 months or 24.

But we want to get it into a regular planning process and work with our finance director to start a regular program of maintaining these.

So we don't have these surprise collapses.

The bridge rehab uh program is we're asking for 4.5 million this year, which is a lot more than we typically do.

Uh, unfortunately, National Street Bridge is uh it is still safe to drive on, it's still safe to walk on, but we don't think that it is going to make it through the process of applying for federal funding and getting through the phase one, two into construction process in time without doing some sort of rehabilitation on it.

So we're requesting money to do some construction work on that to support it for another 10 years or 10 to 15 years.

Okay, Mr.

Ortiz.

Yeah, I was gonna ask a question about the two bridges between uh Kimball and Chicago.

Uh we're going first with Kimball, correct?

I think with your overall plan if we do Kimball first.

I'd like to, but again, if if we get held up on Kimball and Chicago is ready, I would probably come to you and recommend that we do Chicago first.

Okay.

It seemed to me like not knowing engineering or anything about that.

That that one's deteriorating faster than the Kimball Street, because that one doesn't have a weight limit yet.

I I don't know.

I so it's certainly it having the weight limit does right raise the risk a little bit.

I don't think the rate of deterioration is so fast that we're gonna see it decline so quickly in two or three years that it's gonna go from I believe it's 19 tons now down to 12 or five or something.

So right now we don't have to reroute most of any traffic, only the heaviest vehicles can't use it.

School buses can still use it, pace can still use it, delivery trucks can still use it.

So I I understand the concern.

I and we can I'll I'll discuss this with our engineers and one because we'll be inspecting it again as part of our our program, and we'll see what the new inspection says.

And if it's deteriorated faster than we think it has, then that might be cause to move it up on the schedule.

Yeah, now I trust you guys whatever you want to do, but I'm just curious because I'm not an engineer, I don't know anything, so neither am I.

So thanks.

No, I'm kidding.

Uh we have a oh, I'm sorry.

No, uh I didn't know if you were done or not, Mike, but um just because it's on the bridge rehab project you mentioned.

The fourth project that's listed in the rec for the request for next year is North State Street and Fox River Trail.

That's a typo that I did not correct.

Okay, because I'll just trying to find this Wellington.

Yeah, that's on the south side.

I'll clarify that for our next meeting.

Is that Davis Road by Judson?

Is that the underpass by turning?

No, I believe it's down by Wellington somewhere, but okay.

So it is okay.

It's not North State Street.

That's the title.

Okay.

I don't think those coordinates actually cross the ones I put in my request.

So my apologies for that, but good catch.

That's why I couldn't find it.

Got it.

That's it.

I've got just a few more.

We have a city hall parking lot, sustainable design.

We were successful in getting an EPA grant uh for stormwater management that's gonna cover about 40% of the cost.

Uh use some permeable pavers, some naturalized plantings, a grit separator that collects the water and pulls the grit solids out of it.

Uh downtown streetscape maintenance.

This is our second year of that.

Uh we didn't didn't get as much done last year as we wanted, so uh, but we've got a process.

We're gonna try to go block by block in the downtown and just fix crosswalks, fix broken sidewalks, fix tree grates that aren't there, those types of things.

Uh Douglas Avenue reconstruction.

Uh, this would be to begin the phase one process.

Uh, this project we don't have a construction date for, it's as yet unfunded.

We are again on that contingency list for funding through the council mayors.

Um, but that's uh from uh Campbell Street to Lincoln.

Uh retaining wall repairs you'll see in there uh over the past year, the retaining wall that uh on East Chicago and North Grove.

It's between the lower parking lots.

I think they might have been called the bank lots at one time, and Grove Street.

Uh there was some gaps in it that have started to get bigger and bigger.

We had our public work staff go out there and patch the largest of them.

I had a structural engineer come in and give us a an analysis.

We don't think the entire wall needs to be torn down and come out, but it does need some structural repairs.

So that would be our goal.

And then lastly, uh, we hope to get started on the construction work for our neighborhood street flooding mitigation.

Uh we have several areas in town that have had chronic street flooding at heavy rains.

Uh the 1.8 million that we have in here now will not address all of them, but we hope to knock out one of the projects uh, primarily at Lincoln and Logan, that intersection.

Any questions?

Thank you.

Thank you.

Get back up there.

Building maintenance.

Oh my gosh, yes.

Uh I exhaled now.

I gotta suck it in again.

Oh my gosh.

Thank you.

I'll jump right into building maintenance.

So I've had the pleasure of working with Glenn Detman and the crew in the building maintenance staff for not quite a year yet, but um so we have some a few building maintenance items that I'd like to highlight to you.

And um, I think a good way to think of these is and and Glenn and his team have done an excellent job of of trying to program uh high cost, quite honestly, uh, equipment replacements based on not end of life, but end of useful life.

Sometimes we come before you and say we're at the absolute end of life.

The roof is leaking, the furnace doesn't work, the AC is out, you know.

So we're trying to go end of useful life, and that's what most of these are.

So, first what you're seeing there's general building repairs and improvements, that's 1.25 million.

That's the big fund that covers our day-to-day stuff, and seems like a lot of money, but that's any electrical plumbing, uh, HVAC work that we do.

It purchases supplies and equipment for us, so it covers a myriad of uh maintenance items.

Uh but one of the the bigger projects is the airlight water treatment plant boiler, 750,000.

Again, end of useful life.

The Highlands Golf Course Clubhouse HVAC system.

Um, again, just trying to keep these on a regular replacement basis.

Uh public works facility lighting updates.

This is outdoor parking lot.

So the lights there now are 20 years old.

We're looking to do uh an LED type of light.

Uh we haven't security yet, but we're gonna try to get some energy savings funding through Comed programs.

We'll see how we do on that.

Uh we're going to uh do renovations to the city clerk's office and to the state's attorney's room on this floor.

Similar, I don't know if you saw the improvements that we did that were done in HR last year.

So new counter, a more secure entry, right?

You remember going into HR.

I couldn't jump over the counter, but some people in this room could.

But yeah, maybe if you boosted me or I boosted you, we could have got over.

But so we want to provide uh one, just an updated because they're kind of worn out, but a higher level of security for the clerk's office as well as the state's attorney's room over here, and then city hall roof replacement.

So there are no buckets out here in the room yet.

We'd like to keep that from happening.

So again, hats off to Glenn and his crew and and follow picking up on the work that Rich Hope did for so many years.

Uh we think it's a pretty sound program.

We hope we can continue it.

So does the state's attorney's office help fund the approvements that are taking place in their area?

It's just right over here.

That there's a window right here.

It's just again to secure that.

It's pretty minimal right now, and unfortunately.

But an easy fix, so it's still not technically ours, though.

I mean, I mean it's our building, but I mean, do we get any rent from them or anything?

I'm I'm looking for funds.

We have money.

The primary benefit is having the branch court here.

We don't have to send police officers on the road to go to other locations.

So that's right.

We recognize the the funding problems that Kane County has, and as Mike pointed out, it's a small initiative.

Figure just get it moved quick sooner rather than later, particularly because they had some incidents that suggested we needed to move on this.

Anything else for Mike?

You look good, man.

Off the rack, brother.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you, Mike.

Unless we got time.

Okay.

We can be done by 10 o'clock listening to everybody.

How many more what's next if we so we have uh Aaron Neal, 3.7 million dollars in initiatives with public works.

Mark Millot will talk for 90 seconds if even that.

If even that.

Um there's a handful of initiatives from police and fire.

But if you do want to hear what we do need to spend time with talking about, I think, is cultural arts and special events.

So are you interested in hearing more about the annual sidewalk repair program, street light, uh street sweep replacements, kind of run of the mill.

Okay, we're seeing no.

I'm not trying to pull the hook on you guys, but it's uh you got your guys'.

And you can look you can look in the budget book, and if there's something there you guys see that you want to talk about, we can bring it back again.

All right, that's fine.

Mark was going to talk about the continuation of the exterior pay program and the Elgin National Historic Watch.

That's fine.

Architecture rehab group.

Amanda Harris, she'll magically appear through those doors and we'll begin working out through Culture Arts and Special Events.

In the interim, Karina, do you mind talking about the handful of initiatives from the city manager's office, city clerk, and HR departments?

Thank you.

Do you want me to go at that speed too?

That you just did fast forward.

All right.

So a few initiatives um out of the city manager's office communications, city clerk, and human resources departments.

Uh first up, we've got two surveys being proposed.

So the first one is a 2026 community survey.

Some of you might remember our last survey was in 2021, and ICMA recommends that we do a survey every four to five years.

So we're right at that end there.

Um, and so this would help us measure progress from our last community survey and also see where you know there might be some work to do.

Um, so the second survey that's being proposed is the employee engagement survey.

And this one, um, I think Tim mentioned it last time he was up here um talking about the um the uh management pay plan.

But the survey is designed to be internal and to gather feedback uh on how staff feel about work, uh their teams and the organization as a whole, and the goal is to strengthen the workplace culture, morale and retention and supporting a more engaged and inclusive workforce.

Any questions on the surveys okay?

Um changing gears a bit to some sustainability initiatives.

This summer you might remember you approved the climate action and resiliency plan, and so funding um is being recommended so that we can update the greenhouse gas inventory and do a municipal energy consumption inventory as well as a solar feasibility study so we can get rolling on implementing that uh climate action plan.

And the other initiative it has to do with the active mobility plan, which will be coming to you probably mid-2026 for adoption, but that way we don't have to wait a whole year to start implementing it.

We can start implementing it once it gets approved.

Um so it's just um a smaller amount of money than the climate action plan, but that way we can get the ball rolling on on the active mobile mobility plan.

Um and then lastly, uh the electronic voting and agenda management system.

Um this one came about um because the council's interest in alternatives to the standard roll roll call process.

So uh the new system would include electronic voting, speaker cues, and public comment sign-ups, along with real-time public displays of motions and vote voting results.

It also stream streamlines the agenda preparation by automating workflows, approvals and reminders, making meetings hopefully more efficient, uh transparent, and easier to manage.

So that's kind of the the goal of that one.

Okay, questions for Corina.

I'm gonna start uh Alfaro.

Thank you.

Um first question on the on the climate action.

I see that money is only proposed for physical year 2026, and nothing's proposed for 27, 28, etc.

Is there a reason why given that plan goes out a little further?

I think we're just taking it year by year to see um how uh uh 2026 goes and what we find in the greenhouse gas inventory, because that could also help you know, um, inform uh the years uh to come is along with the municipal energy energy consumption inventory.

These are really it's uh like a foundational year um since we're just starting to implement it.

Okay.

So my guess is in 27, 28 you'll see more of those uh longer term uh projects.

Should we should until okay?

I just wanted to make sure because I was like, I don't think 85,000 dollars is gonna fix everything.

That's the plan.

No, we're just getting started.

Okay, cool.

Um, and then the electrical voting, I think that's a great idea, but given that what we're proposing right now is a property tax increase.

I think that's something that we could hold off for another year or two.

Uh I don't know how everyone else feels on on the dais, but I think that's something that I would be willing to hold off just in in thinking of ways of how we can save money in order not to increase property taxes.

Agree.

Ms.

Powell.

Yes, thank you.

Um, thanks for the update, Karina.

Um, I I agree with um Councilman Alfaro on the electronic voting.

Um, I remember having this discussion, and um the way that conversation would I'm I don't think you know, at this point, we really probably we could probably do without that.

A question I do have regarding some of the sustainability initiatives.

Um it's my understanding, if I recall our new contract with LRS, they were are giving us 20 or 25,000 a year towards sustainability initiatives.

Are how was that money going to be programmed into the budget?

Is that money going to help perhaps offset some of these costs?

I don't know if Aaron left.

Yeah, we'll we'll follow up on that.

I know that our um Kristen um and Jess are working closely with Aaron and Jenny on that.

Yeah, yeah, I I'd specifically want to know how we're using that money.

Thank you.

Okay.

Okay, thank you.

Good evening.

All right.

Um, so I have this kind of broken down into sort of three different areas, so I will still try to go through them with with some expediency.

Uh, the first one that we're going to talk about is the Hemans Interior Update.

As council is well aware, and as is the community, um, the city just spent uh and invested in the future of the arts and the culture scene here in Elgin with the Hemans renovation.

Um, in order to continue that and make sure that the rest of the building is consistent with what is existing in the new location as well as replace some very outdated and past the end of life things.

Uh the Hemans Lobby renovation will be the next thing that is needed.

Um, it's really comprehensive in that it uh takes a renovation of the carpet, the paint, uh including that that great big wall in the lobby, which is by far the most complicated thing to do.

Um the other piece is it will take the existing box office in the building, repurpose that into a tech booth, which is something that is very attractive not only to staff and acquiring talent, but also to many of the the tourists and uh artists that are coming in, they're very excited about stuff like that.

Um, the other side of that will be a bar that we build into there instead of the rolling ones that come up, which we're all very excited about.

Um be able to take credit.

Yes, yes, we sure will.

We will we'll make sure that we take credit cards day one at that bar.

Um, so that is the interior update.

Like I said, it is really comprehensive and will really bring the addition out into the existing building.

Uh, the next piece is the wing park electrical discovery and upgrade.

We've talked about how arts and culture are expanding.

The band shell is absolutely growing in use and how people are using it.

Uh, in order to better suit uh better serve those people, we need to ensure that we have what is necessary out there.

The first step in doing that is doing a study into what electric exists and then potentially upgrading that.

This is something that we're doing in collaboration with public safety as well as you know, we have the mobile command unit.

Um, there's some power needs that associate with that, so we're working interdepartmentally to make sure that if we host a large event out there, we're able to do as much as we need.

So it is a long-term planning um as well.

Um, we don't know if we'll need to upgrade that power.

That's something that we'll have to see as we get into it.

Uh, and this would be the start of what the band shell could potentially draw, which we're all really excited about.

As you know, concerts and movies in the park have continued to grow exponentially in attendance.

Uh, and in order to continue to meet that need and continue to draw the artists that we want to, we have to be able to provide uh the services that they need in those venues.

Uh the next is the City of Elgin marquee replacement.

Um may not know.

There's actually a Hemans Marquee.

It's hidden under some trees.

It's you know, 70, 80, 90 years old.

Um so we we wanted to get that replaced uh and bring it into the new era and in communication with again the rest of the departments.

Uh the best way to do that is to instead of make it Heman specific, really embrace the entire city as an organization and be holistic.

Uh so we had intended to do this project this year, but as we spent more time thinking about it, identifying intentions, um, and being sure that we were thinking about the long term, we decided to put a pin in it, as we like to say, and make sure that we weren't doing work just to come back and do it again in two years.

Um so this will be relocated.

Um ideally there at Grove and Highland in a very high profile area and will not just display things related to the Hemans, but also the city of Elgin as a whole.

I got a question about that, Miss Harris.

Yes, that was scary.

Mr.

Ortiz, we budgeted for this last year.

So you already have the money for it.

So you just asking to keep that money, you're asking for additional money on top of what we gave you last year.

We did add a uh an additional percentage onto it just with the expectation that it will slight it, you know, cost increase.

Uh we last year when it was approved, I believe it was 30,000 and this year it's 33.

Yeah, I'm looking at last year's as 30,000, what you asked for.

Yeah, and now it's 33.

That is correct.

So you're only asking pretty much about three thousand dollar increase.

That's correct.

It's more highlighted to show right what the larger impact is gonna be.

I think the thing that you've seen throughout the night, if you don't you don't mind me saying is that all of the departments are really working together to make sure that we're spending money thoughtfully, uh, because none of us take any of this very lightly.

So making sure that we're doing this at that new location.

That's that's definitely the most important part.

I think that's why we wanted to make sure that it was brought to council's attention.

But it is theoretically only a three thousand dollar increase, yes.

Okay, and then uh one from last year's budget.

Do you ever get your garbage picker up here yet?

We did.

It's amazing.

It's amazing.

Have you driven it?

I can drive it, you don't need any special licensing.

I asked, and it does have a seatbelt.

All right, cool.

That was it.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Mr.

Thorne.

Thanks.

Uh about the marquee, is it going to actually just replace the one that's there on the uh the southeast corner?

Uh southeast corner.

You mean where the the current Hemans one is?

No, we're looking to relocate, so this would be at the corner of Grove and Highland.

So much more um instead of like by where the library is, it would be on the on the more popular corner where that stoplight is at Highland and Grove instead of not Grove, Douglas, excuse me.

Oh, that's what was throwing here.

Yeah, sorry.

I was saying that is Grove and I'm not.

I know it's late.

I apologize.

Douglas.

That's where we're hoping to relocate it.

If we can't, we'll certainly use the existing location, but just make sure that it is angled and appropriately and appropriately placed.

So that it is.

So if it's at Dougland, Douglas and Highland, it would have to be on the city center corner.

That would be correct.

And if that location doesn't work, we'll certainly open to other locations, including the entrance to the parking lot of City Hall, and that's that's okay.

Okay.

Mr.

Dixon.

Thank you.

I have a certain appreciation for these signs.

I'm gonna tell you a little story.

About 13 years ago, I was sitting on the image advisory commission.

And the image advisory commission would sometimes get project directions from city staff, and one of those directions were at the time, create a series of entryway signs.

And I was really excited because I had never really worked on anything like that for the city before.

This is way before I was ever thinking about becoming a member of City Council, right?

And we worked on that project for probably about two years, maybe three years.

And we got all done, we packaged it all up, sent it to city staff.

I think it was the city manager's office, as a matter of fact.

And they came back and they said, eh, we're gonna go in a different direction.

We're not gonna do this.

And so, but my my point is not the length of time or that it was rejected.

I just have a certain appreciation for because it's a lot that goes into sinus as a um uh way for to not do it right or correctly can be a disaster if you have to do it again, which is the point that you made earlier.

So, yes, do it right, a 10% increase in a in a great position, especially when we have the the entire thing nearly remodeled, is wonderful.

So, best of luck to you on getting that project done.

Thank you.

But I can guarantee you we won't reject it.

Okay, I hope so.

Okay.

Hey, anything else?

Okay, thank you.

Oh, Ms.

Paul.

Um, you didn't highlight these in your comments, but uh I did see a couple things on here that piqued my interest.

I still have more.

Oh go ahead.

Okay.

All right.

So um I'll just keep going.

Uh and but please feel free to interrupt.

Um, the the next one that we'll talk about is the inventory control and management.

Um, this sounds silly, but I'll give you an example.

Um, tables and chairs often get lost, but what's easier to lose are the small mic uh mic packs.

Um we lose them all the time.

They get lost performers put them down, those types of things.

What we are looking to implement would be a tracking system so that you can scan things in and scan things out.

We will theoretically know where everything is at any moment on any day.

Um the the dual purpose of this is because we're doing more things in multiple locations.

Sometimes we run into the challenge of oh no, I had that earmarked for this location, but you need it for that location, and we didn't communicate well enough about that.

This will solve that problem as well.

It also helps us keep track of end of life uh needs, so we're able to better plan what that expectation is gonna be.

Um, and then the storage itself is a big is a big issue.

Uh, we with the expansion of the Hemons have a much larger space downstairs, um, but it is just a big room, right?

When you build the room, you still have to add in the the pallet racking and all of those kinds of things.

So by adding these pieces in, we are deepening how we can store things and create efficiencies in how we are pulling equipment and putting equipment back.

We are all very, very excited about this because we're giant spreadsheet nerds.

So that is the inventory piece, and it will translate to other uh facilities as well.

So we're really excited about the if that needs to move along, we can.

So when we need to track things at the showcase, this applies to that as well.

Uh the next one on my list is the pickup truck.

As I've said, we haul a lot of stuff all the time, every day forever.

So a pickup truck um solves a lot of our needs.

Uh, you can ask pretty much any department within the organization how often we are calling them and asking them for help.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.

My department, our department doesn't operate in a silo.

We work with every department, and what we do is not possible without those other folks.

Um, so most of the time they pick up, which is helpful.

Uh, but they would be very happy if we have our own equipment so that we can be much more efficient in moving those things to uh one from one place to another.

Uh the other piece of that is with the creation of the artistic project manager.

Um, that one in particular hauls a lot of stuff.

If you've seen the things that we bring to the Fourth of July parade, they're large and are built for pickup trucks.

Um next is the drop deck trailer.

I'm sorry, did you have your hand up?

I'm sorry.

I I did.

I got I think I came to the conclusion, the the answer on my own, but I'll just ask anyways now.

Um this would be a part of the fleet management that was being discussed earlier if we were to approve this.

Yes, fleet would oversee this vehicle, yes.

Okay, all right, that's all.

Thank you.

Um next on the list is the drop deck trailer.

Um, this is something that helps us move enormous equipment that weighs a whole lot.

Uh it makes things easier so that we for for moving from with a forklift.

Uh, we have one of these that we use with our meridian barriers that public works uh facilitates for us.

Um, this year for the end of summer bash, we had an enormous several thousand pound dinosaur.

Um, and we had no way to really facilitate moving this.

So Public Works lovingly brought over a the one of those drop deck trailers, loaded it up, and it facilitated this event.

This helps us do things like that as well as makes it easy and possible for us to take these types of programs to other places outside of the downtown.

We can't do that right now, especially when we talk about heavy equipment.

We don't have the ability to move any of that.

Um, when we don't need to drop it down, it still serves its purpose as a regular trailer.

So it really is kind of a two-for-one um situation.

Next on the list is Santa's workshop or the Santa House.

Um as some of you know, last year's uh tree lighting was uh significantly bigger um than has been in the past because we used a real tree.

Uh we're really excited about it.

This year will be the same.

Uh we did also include a tiny village for the kids with those houses.

Uh we are expanding upon that this year.

We're really excited to see what that looks like.

Um, in order to continue that growth, uh, what we would like to do is invest in a Santa house, essentially, uh, where people could come, they can take pictures with Santa.

Uh, what we would like to do is invest in a Santa house, essentially, uh, where people could come, they can take pictures with Santa.

Um, this would be another one of those things that the drop deck trailer essentially you load it on, you drove it over, and you drop it off, significantly cutting down staff time.

Um, it is something that really doesn't exist anywhere around here.

Most of the time you go into a facility to visit Santa.

This is a Santa's house kind of thing, which we're really excited about the opportunity.

Yeah.

Mr.

Ortiz.

So I don't know if you've noticed that Mr.

Thorne's been growing his hair out.

So maybe he could volunteer to be our Santa this year since we're looking for volunteers.

We are always looking for volunteers.

I've actually been the Elgin City Santa for 18 years.

Yes.

Oh, all right.

We're a wig.

I'm gonna keep that picture.

And I did have Miss Powell sit on my lap one year.

All right.

I look forward to seeing that.

Got a girl.

Uh okay.

Next is the 250th decorate declaration of independence anniversary.

Uh this is a nationwide uh movement to celebrate the 250th signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Um for a few months we have been working with several uh community organizations, including um Elgin Community College, the Chamber, the DNA, the CDB, all of these kinds of organizations to make sure that we are communicating about how Elgin is going to celebrate and what that would look like.

Um we're also going to be tapping into the Illinois celebration to make sure that we are on that map.

So this is really about just driving tourism.

Um the way that this this funding would be spent is is one-time support funding.

Um and it's really about marketing dollars uh and our involvement in terms of programming is how we will end the celebration, which is the culmination of the Fourth of July parade and fireworks display.

Um next is the Angel of Independence.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Okay.

Okay, Mr.

Faro.

Um I I think I uh if I remember correctly, I mentioned this at the retreat, but given everything that's happening in the federal climate and the world that we live in right now, um many feel excluded, although that declaration says it's for all of us.

And so can the committee that's looking into this also have a culture sensitivity lens to it, right?

As they're planning to ensure that people do feel included, although um the current climate that we live in.

Yes, that's something that has been brought up multiple times.

That's something I just returned from a conference, a statewide conference.

Um, and one of the main topics was this event and what that looks like and how um art and culture can be a part of creating that lens with with you know gentle hands.

Um, and so they have many resources and we'll be able to tap into those and provide those to the committee and make sure that we reinforce that information as well.

Thank you.

Next is the Angel of Independence prop base.

If you have been to La Fiesta Elgin, you know that we have a replica of the Angel of Independence, which we're all very excited about.

Um, I love it very much.

Um when we built the Angel of Independence, we were not able to build the base that it sits on.

The Angel of Independence sits in the center center of Mexico City, um, and it celebrates exactly what it sounds like the independence of Mexico.

Uh, when we built the the tower, essentially, like I said, we couldn't build the base.

So this uh initiative uh sets forth the funding to build that base to continue to grow that event.

It is one of the most popular events that we have here in Elgin with a huge attendance.

Um the angel itself uh did go uh viral actually in Mexico, which was kind of exciting and very interesting.

So uh this would be another way to continue that trajectory.

Uh right.

Mr.

Powell.

Oh, uh thank you.

Um I think that's great.

I really like that.

Um we permanently gonna put it somewhere now that we'll have the base and everything, or are we just gonna have it out during Hispanic Heritage Month?

Just Hispanic Heritage Month.

The way that we're able to do this is it's actually created out of out of a foam material.

Um local artists uh essentially use a 3D modeling to to cut and print and do all the things.

Um, and then it's hard coded to make it weather resistant.

So they paint it, they hard coat it, and then they hard coat it again.

Um, if we were to put it out permanently, it would be seven or eight times this cost, uh, just because we would have to have a different material.

So it would still only be out for the month, um, and it is still that replica size.

And then just and I uh in the future, I know a piece is very popular, but Hispanic Heritage Month includes more than just Mexico, and I say that as a Mexican.

And so if we could find a way to be more inclusive during that fiesta, and to include more salsa, vegetón, merengue and stuff.

Um bachata would greatly appreciate if we could include somehow that gumbia.

Yeah, I love cumbia too.

Um that would be that would be great.

Okay.

All right.

Um next on the list is the Nightmare Friday concert.

Um so I'll talk a little bit about this and then I have kind of a bigger conversation just to put here just to talk to provide some scope.

Um, so nightmare has continued to grow, but we all know that essentially it can't really grow outside of the footprint that it is in.

Uh last year we sold the event out.

This year we had what we would call a functional sellout, uh, which we're really excited about.

We were very close to selling out.

Um we're at this point where it can we're we're focusing music or the other artistry and that type of thing.

And working with our major events coordinator um and with our artistic project manager and our programming manager, they cooked up this idea for a Friday concert.

This would take place on the Friday before, only on Chicago Street.

If you're familiar with the event, the main stage sits at Chicago and Riverside, kind of right in that block area.

Um all of our equipment for something like this would largely already be there, meaning the cost is quite minimal in terms of production.

Usually in an event like this, production is gonna by far be your highest cost.

Bringing stuff like that in is incredibly expensive.

Um, but we're already gonna have it.

So really what we're talking about is extending that rental period slightly at most, um, and some staffing cost.

The the major expense for this is gonna be the artistry because the focus of this one is the live music.

We would want to bring in a name, somebody that people know and focus on the music, while nightmare is more the immersive experience.

We anticipate that this would bring in well over 300,000 in ticket sales, um, more than covering the cost itself.

Um we're also exploring other ways to communicate the event to the public that don't involve necessarily having to be there on site, which is really exciting.

Um, and we'll see where that kind of goes.

Uh but like I said, it would just be Chicago Street.

We're anticipating probably 5,000 people.

We're still fiddling with the numbers a little bit, um, and a lot has to do with what we're able to do in terms of the production and working with public safety and our other teams.

Um, but we're already there, we're already doing the thing.

The businesses are all very pro something like this.

Um I think that we've found ourselves in a good groove, knock on the wood, um, and we're ready to take this next step into a two-day um event.

And so moving into next year, we would be applying for um uh grant for this.

We were able to apply for it this year just because of the way the dates fell, um, but we'd be able to apply for a tourism grant because now we'd be officially be a two-day event, uh, which we're excited about.

So that is the Friday concert.

Um the last thing to Mr.

Steph.

Just two things on that, Amanda.

So just so I'm clear, I read the description and listened to what you just said.

So the intent is to block off Chicago Street, so the traffic is gonna be blocked off starting Friday and presumably all the way through till Sunday.

So that's one thing I wanted to make sure that.

And then because you're you're talking about selling tickets, you're gonna have to have some kind of fencing and gatekeeping and a security and entry.

I love these questions.

Actually, the streets close on Friday to vehicles that morning.

So that's already being done, and fencing goes up Friday morning too.

So again, we're we're paying for this cost.

The the streets were already closed.

Now we're just gonna close a section of it to you know, people, right?

Pedestrian traffic too.

We'll probably need to get some additional fencing just you know for the blockage to make sure that people can't see in if they didn't buy the ticket and these kinds of things.

Um all of those things are kind of already in place.

So we're really trying to make the bang for the buck.

That's what this one is.

And last question will the other the other Friday evening functions like bringing the axe out and having them play at different venues for families and people that's that aren't gonna want to go or can't go to the main event.

That's all gonna still happen, union parking lot, all that stuff.

We haven't quite figured that piece out yet, but to your point, we did expand that this year, and people they love it, they love it.

Um so we're thinking maybe that moves to I don't know.

So, but we all we do want to keep a piece of that because there's a lovely community piece.

Okay, got it.

Got it.

Ms.

Faro.

Uh so with that, it made me think about are so are we also gonna have vendors in there selling liquor and other things, food in that space as well.

And it open it up to businesses to do a two-day boothing if they wanted to.

Uh we haven't nailed all those down and as to the how, but yes, we would absolutely need to provide um drinks and food.

As far as retail, probably not, but drinks and food, yes.

Okay.

You have it listed as the tickets between oh sorry.

Well, welcome back, Miss Harris.

You have tickets listed between 50 and 75 dollars.

Are you gonna have early word?

How do you do for the nightmare event, the main event where you could buy them in like April or April April or May and get it cheaper?

Or is it is it gonna be this that range no matter what?

Some of that depends on the artist we get.

Um, so a lot of times the artist is going to set some stipulation as to when and how we can sell a ticket, especially when you start talking about a named artist.

Um so we're already having negotiations with some folks.

I can't name any names, but they're really good, so we can talk about it later.

Uh so some, like I said, some of that depends on them.

If we can, we will.

Uh one thing that we got from the community, actually, um, in a really great way was uh it would be cool if they if we could sell tickets right now for next year so people could give them as Christmas gifts.

So we're working on that right now.

So there's an early bird special making like 15 bucks on a bunch.

No.

We need but um, yeah, so I was like, that's a great suggestion.

So we're working with our ticketing partner to see if we can get something set up to do that.

Cool.

I think buying Marine is a good investment because I buy them in April with like 25 bucks and buy a bunch, and then people complain later they're paying 60 and like buying them in April, it's an investment for later.

It's 40, but okay.

Okay, um, the last thing uh just to talk about, and it is again just a kind of kind of level set here.

Um, as we talk about how cultural arts and special events moves into the next year, one thing that we do every year is sit down and figure out what are we doing that's effective, what are we doing that's not effective?

Um this was our third or fourth year, I can't remember because it doesn't stick uh for the into summer bash.

Um if you did not go this year, it was really fun.

It nearly put us in the ground, it was a lot.

We built Jurassic Park, it was amazing.

Um attendance has continued to grow, but what we also saw this year, um, and what we're seeing across the state and other communities is that at smaller events like movies in the park and concerts in the park, attendance is through the roof.

So much so that we are getting comments from other communities asking us how we're doing what we're doing, not about the big things, but about the smaller things.

So, what we are proposing to do this year is to repurpose into Summer Bash and instead just have two large events down at Festival Park, so the 4th of July, where we would have the fireworks and we would also incorporate drums into that show, so it'd be a two-for-one, which is pretty fun and weird and unique, like Elgin.

Um, and then Fiesta.

The rest of the programming that we would do would be in those smaller communities, really just turning up the volume on those movies and concerts in the park.

Not necessarily doing more of them, but bringing additional programming to them.

That's something that we do that other communities don't.

Typically, you go to a movie in a park, there may be a food truck and there's a movie and you sit down and you watch it.

We do things a little different.

We partner with our nonprofits, we bring face painters, we do crafts, that kind of thing.

What we would like to do is instead of doing one big Jurassic Park, do 10 small ones and bring them to the communities, to the neighborhoods where people are.

Uh we are seeing this across the nation.

Uh we're seeing this across the state.

People are doing more and more of this intentional programming, um, and that is the intention for uh cultural arts and special events this year.

Um, in addition to that, we would be reprogramming a little bit some of the other programs that we have just to make things a little bit more accessible.

So, how are things that we're doing right now not accessible to people?

Because I guess my issue for years is that we had a festival park where we didn't have festivals, and I'm excited now that we have a festival park that actually has festivals.

But if I'm hearing you right, it seems like we're going backwards.

But I just want to make sure I'm not hearing you.

I appreciate that clarification.

It's certainly not that we're not accessible.

I suppose what I mean is, for example, the co-sponsorship program and some of our permitting programs, we're looking at how we can remove some of those barriers that we hear people talk about.

That's what I was referring to, right?

Um, and by not doing things in Festival Park, that doesn't mean we're not utilizing that space.

That means we're opening up a date for an outside performer and outside producer that we want to lure here to provide their programming that we don't have to pay for, we don't have to program, we don't have to be the bosses of to produce their event here.

Um and instead investing smaller in those smaller communities.

Um Festival Park is booked in June, there there are no dates.

That it's it's incredibly hard to find dates for Festival Park because there is such a demand.

Um so we're really only talking about one day that would be giving up.

Um and I have no doubt that it will be snapped up.

So you're looking to kind of take the show on the road to some of the neighborhood parks or the other regional parks that we have with some of the programming.

Yeah, exactly.

Got it.

You saw far off.

You mentioned moving things around, so like Fiesta and the Fourth of July would be like the bigger ones beyond uh nightmare, right?

Nightmare is another thing.

Um and reallocating things.

So how would you reallocate to well this one's a brand new, but so fiesta specifically?

So one of the biggest things that Fiesta has going for it is the artists that it brings in.

The the musical acts, people come for the music.

Uh whereas the Fourth of July, people come for the experience and for the fireworks.

That's the biggest draw.

We're also one of the largest Fourth of July events in the area.

Um and so what we would do is take that into summer bash allocation and split it up into those areas so that we could again just kind of turn that volume up in the places that we feel like it needs it.

Um so for Fiesta, it would be a little bit to the props because people love those for Fiesta.

That doesn't really exist for uh the Fourth of July, but instead we have all of those games that the kids play and they go banana sandwiches, so we want to increase that a little bit.

Um it's it's putting money intentionally into the the smaller pieces of the programming that are working really well instead of doing a giant program that's gonna bring a couple thousand people.

Since we're turning it up, I'm just gonna state again that we can try to make it more inclusive with a diverse obstacle managing, cumbia, etc.

That we'd be greatly appreciated and encompass Hispanic Heritage Month of all Latinos versus just one specific group.

Miss Martinez.

Thank you, Mayor.

I don't know if it was my imagination or not, but um when you did Fiesta, I think one of the first groups it was cumbia, wasn't it?

And that was like very successful.

It was.

That's one.

The other one is uh normally we look at what the population uh is in uh uh Algin as far as the Hispanic community, and I think I brought it up that um 48,000 are Mexicans, I think 3,000 are Puerto Rican and 200 are Cuban.

And I think that's kind of like what we base it on.

Um but the variety of the music, um I'll be honest, like maybe banda is not my thing.

It's too hard on the knees, but uh cumbia is you know, so thank you for that variety.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, we always review, right?

And we bring in different things.

The other piece that we have to work carefully with is because of the date that we produce this event, um we are fighting other communities, but more than anything, we're fighting um with Mexico and Central America, right?

We're we're fighting with all of those, all of those communities who are also having events.

Um, and so it's making sure that we are competitive and we are as close to a route for them as we can get.

Um I can tell you that uh two years ago I spent uh and and Gio who is not here anymore, um, spent hours on the phone trying to entice groups to come here.

But now uh you know, a lot of these artists understand oh, they can they can say it, they can do what they say.

Uh and so we're able to to continue to turn that up.

So I heard we will continue to move in that direction.

Okay.

Miss Powell.

Um, just as a quick follow-up to something that uh Councilwoman Alfaro said, um, as we look at cultural arts, and I know we've had this conversation just um as a um a board and commission, um, I'd like to see us do more culturally with the different cultures um that exist within the community.

As we look at cultural arts and I know we've had this conversation just um as a um a board and commission um I'd like to see us do more culturally with the different cultures um that exist within the community um lately a lot of our our cultural events have centered around um our Latin population which is important but I also want to make sure that we're exploring and celebrating um some of the other cultural um the other folks that live in this community as well so um as as we look to expand and do some of the things perhaps maybe even the artists that we bring in for uh the Friday concert on nightmare on Chicago Street um let's let's be a little open around who we're looking at like I would love to see Chris Brown but anyway um you know yeah I mean I I hear what you say I totally agree this year we did do um a Juneteenth collaboration because our movie and concert happened to fall on those dates and so we we turned that up and it was it was lovely and it was beautiful at the library with uh the symphony that was their program we did stuff at Wing Park yes and it was it was wonderful it was it was welcoming and it was it was just really gentle um and and low key and people felt we got a lot of a lot of community members coming up and saying how joyful they felt um so I know that our community events coordinator Chris Holling is really excited to do exactly what you're saying um and again turn up that volume expand and contract where it makes the most sense right okay anything else I just want to say like um and thank you to council member martinez for sharing this the stats uh but like as she's mentioned like even those in the that demographic don't always listen to that music right and so just emphasizing on that and as we are thinking in the future we just was it last meeting or two meetings ago we had approved a DEI right the internal as we're considering the DEI is how do we make sure that these events tie in back to council member um Powell's point is like how are we tying it back to DEI too right how are we tying it back to the inclusivity and the diversity and that in that sense to all that service okay Mr.

Ortiz I'll be quick yeah I've been uh with the Hispanic well that's a the Mexican uh independence thing since it started in 2020 when I was at war with the city manager's office I was the one selling in to get fired and all kinds of stuff because we just didn't agree on policy but since then you and your team over the past three years starting with Captacurguy going to uh Fiesta 1.0 and our 2.0 because we changed the logo that I think we're going in the right direction how we're going because more people are showing up it's one of the bigger selling sellouts besides nightmare maybe the fourth of July or maybe could be competing with the fourth of July by now.

I think you and your staff are going the right direction in the way you've been planning it and if we make a left turn or right turn somewhere a tenants could fall or like you said Aurora could pick up the people Chicago pick up the people and we're already battling Carpentersville because they refuse to move days or collaborate with us.

So with us competing these other municipalities especially with SIVO being on the same day as us the past three years if we move something or tweak something that's been working then them the our our participants can go up north to Carpentersville and patronize their them and get their sales and get their uh revenues up there instead of coming here to OG and so I appreciate what you've been doing I appreciate how it's been working and me and you always I'm in the community with you I we don't see eye to eye sometimes on how it's going but you're the professional you know how it's going and it's been working so I appreciate what you've been doing.

If I could just respond to that mayor I'll make it real quick.

There's a difference between Hispanic Heritage Month and Mexican Independence Day right if we're if we're actively marketing it as part of our Hispanic Heritage Month program that it needs to be inclusive to all Hispanics.

If we're gonna call it just a Mexican Fest well then rebrand it and call it just a Mexican Fest because right now I've gotten a lot of complaints from uh individuals in the community who are like it says Hispanic Heritage Month and it's not inclusive there's like one group the Colombian group was excellent.

I love them I've been a big fan of them for really long time so I was I actually got there early to see them but like if we're truly gonna make it part of our Hispanic heritage month then it needs to be inclusive to everyone in the Hispanic community or as much as possible otherwise rebrand it and call it a Mexican Fest.

I do think that we'll absolutely take a look at all those things I believe that this year we did try to do a lot of that and changed it because we got a lot of feedback too you know and we have if there's anything you know about me it's I'm responsive to what people say.

So we instead of saying that this is all about Hispanic Heritage Month we're saying this kicks off Hispanic Heritage Month with a Mexican Independence Day celebration.

Um so I will absolutely go back and keep looking at things.

Um to your comment about the bandas this year.

We turned on the bat the bandas and brought in different music.

So we'll we're responsive to stuff, um, and we'll absolutely keep doing things, and that's why we have partners like Centro and like Casami Shukan and like the library to make sure that we're as inclusive as we can be not just with the the demographic information but also with accessibility.

Um so making sure one thing we're really looking at this year is um ASL interpretation and screens and that type of stuff too.

So yeah, I I would just recommend that we also add the other Latino groups.

There's a Puerto Rican Domino Club, there's a new Algin Puerto Rican organization in town.

If we could be inclusive and have those other groups too as you're having discussions.

Okay, Miss Martinez.

Thank you.

I kind of remember the first time that we did that in Festival Park, maybe like three years ago.

Yeah, contact yeah, we kind of uh went ahead and catered to everybody and um we noticed too that there was like a low when I appreciate that you've been changing it up, and um I think was kind of uh successful.

What I liked about that at that time was that um like councilwoman was saying is you know, like we had things um happening during that time.