Welcome everyone.

I'd like to call the regular meeting for March sixteenth, two thousand and twenty-six to order and ask Council Member Tony Bishop if he'd lead us in the invitation, please.

Father, we thank you for another wonderful day.

We know it's a little cool outside, but uh the wind and everything, I just thank you that no one was hurt, and that we was able to get through another rough evening.

Bless his blessings upon this community, and lead us and guidance and direct us in your son's name we pray.

Amen.

And if you join us in the Pledge of Allegiance, I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

And to the republic for which it stands one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all Mrs.

Graham, when you're ready, if you would please call the role.

Jones.

Here.

Springsteen.

Here.

Tyler.

Here.

You have a quorum, Mayor.

Thank you, ma'am.

In that case, we will ask for approval of minutes from March 9th, 2026.

If I can get a motion.

All in favor?

Aye.

Opposed.

Seeing none, motion carries.

I want to bring you to everyone's attention real quick.

A lot of people worked really hard to do our annual report for 2025.

And uh it's we've done this for the last three or four years, talked about some of the highlights and some of the good works that we've done in the city in the previous year.

And so a couple of them that I wanted to touch on.

Uh City Council lowered lowered property taxes.

We often get accused, especially because uh PVA goes in and does property assessments that raise people's property value, which causes their tax payment to go up.

That we get accused of raising taxes, but and the truth is we have lowered property taxes.

Uh this honorable body has.

Also, another stat that I'd like to share with everyone in the last three years, our overall crime rate has dropped by 23.7 percent.

I think that's quite an accomplishment, especially that we're growing like we are.

Uh public works picked up uh 952 cubic yards of debris on the side of the road and different places across town, which is equal to 50 full dump truckloads.

I thought that that was pretty interesting.

So they're getting out and doing a great job of keeping our community clean.

Uh, another thing that uh we often get criticized over is the condition of our roads, which I think are fantastic.

Uh of course we're gonna have a pothole or two after we have a freeze like we did, but uh our street street operations crew uh coordinated the paving of 11.2 miles of city streets at the cost of about a million 2.65 million dollars last fiscal year, and uh that's generally what we spend annually anywhere between uh 11 and 15 miles we'll pave.

And uh I think our city streets are in in really good shape.

A lot of people get that confused, and I'm not picking on anybody else, the county or the state, but we get uh the credit or the blame, whichever you like to call it sometimes for a lot of arterial state roads that run through the middle of Elizabethtown, and those aren't ours to build, to design, to maintain, like North Mulberry and Ring Road and 31W and St.

John Road and the bypass, none of those are our streets, so uh we don't maintain or or build those roads, but a lot of times people get confused because they run right through the middle of the city.

Uh another interesting stat I thought from last year is in 2025, overall traffic collisions decreased by 5.7 percent.

I think that's the uh the outcome of some really good police efforts.

It's the outcome of some good safe design in our road networks, but uh we're seeing that accident number go down, which is always a great thing, especially as everybody can tell.

We have more traffic on the road than we ever have and have had in Elizabethtown, so that's quite an accomplishment.

And then another thing and last one, I won't read the whole report to you, but one that I thought uh deserves some mention was in in engineering the city constructed more than 2,000 feet of sidewalk improvements in several areas of town and completed the Hump Street and Terry Court Street sidewalk and drainage improvement project.

So 2,000 feet of sidewalks.

Uh we we've been budgeting $350,000 a year to build sidewalks in parts of town that don't have them.

Uh we've been budgeting that same money to restore sidewalks in the older parts of town, and then there's uh you'd be surprised there's certain neighborhoods and areas of town that have gaps where uh there were sidewalks built years ago, and then there's a lot or two that don't have sidewalks in front of them, and then there's another run of sidewalks, and we've been working to fill those gaps.

So just a few things from the annual report.

Uh we'll have these at City Hall if anybody's interested in grabbing one and looking at it, uh, or several other places around the city, we'll be distributing these, but we wanted to show the council first and then we'll start getting those out.

Name you'll post them on uh social media here shortly, I'm sure.

So with that, we will move on unless you all have a comment.

We will move on to board appointments and airport board reappointments of Willie Wood and Glenn Deaton to serve a term to end March 5th, 2030.

Both of them have done a great job.

Willie's former councilman, retired fireman, uh been on the airport board a long time.

I don't even know.

And Glee Glenn Deaton has been on for one term, and Glenn Course is a pilot, and he's done a tremendous job on that board, so we're glad to welcome them back.

Uh, we're also glad to welcome back Pat Clark and Todd Davis to the Elizabethtown Tourism Commission for reappointment uh for a term to end March 15th and March 15th of 2029, and both of them have been on a long time on the tourism board and really understand that and uh understand the direction that tourism is heading and what it's supposed to accomplish for our city, and so we appreciate uh the service for both of them.

And with that, unless you all have comments, Judge Howard, we will start reading motions and ordinances and everything else.