All right, so on to finance.

Uh starting on page 28.

Basically, the directors only uh the there's no operating budget for the director, so any um increases all salary and uh that's it.

Uh the next page, page 29 is uh Department of Finance and Administration.

That's the um accounting and all of the finance people.

Um we've kept the same operating budget on that too.

So the only thing we have are increases, salary increases, and there are some uh actual salary increases in here.

Some of my salaried staff, and the the idea is to bring the salaried staff up to the level of to where they're uh commensurate with the non-salaried staff that they're whose work they're reviewing and who they're working with.

And um I've got I've got a pretty new staff, but uh they're all uh I've had a lot of I've had turnover in the last few years, and many of my people left do for better salaries.

Um I'm trying to hang on to this new staff.

I've got a new staff, and they're all really good, they're doing a great job.

There they are, they're the only ones in this room other than us.

Well, you know, I think we have to start thinking about the competition.

Right.

In order to keep the people whatever that quote reason and that new way of things would we have to stay at our salary level increase to keep good people here to do good jobs.

Right.

If you don't get people that can't do the job, we fill them a position.

That's what we don't want.

Well, and yeah, you lose institutional knowledge every time somebody leaves.

Somebody else has to come in completely from scratch and learn governmental accounting.

So governmental accounting, I think.

And uh our grant accountant is handling um, he came in here thinking he was gonna handle about 1520 grants and the ARP grant, and he's got um well.

Let's see.

And he's handling a hundred million in grant in grant revenues right now.

So he's doing a lot more than he expected to be doing.

Thank you.

Mark's back there, Mark Matlock.

Uh other than that, uh, any questions on finance?

Next page, yeah.

Payroll.

Payroll is the next page.

Um we're just the only thing that's different on the payroll page is we added about $500 for more training, and you see we didn't use this year's training.

Uh that's because we've been short staffed pretty much the whole year, and uh we finally got three people on staff, and uh we're trying to encourage them all to get certified and uh to just continue their education and training, and uh we also need some money in there for just keeping up with law changes and things like that.

So that's the only change to the payroll budget.

You want to show you the graph?

Okay.

Uh looks on the graph, it looks like we're pretty much level, and most of that is because of gaps in staffing, you know.

So we spent less money this year than we sh thought we would because we had some openings during the year in a few of the positions, so uh across the payroll and finance.

Next we have the purchasing department.

Uh I thought I'd call Jeannie Ardillo up for the purchasing department.

She can talk about some of the things she's doing.

Hello.

This was one of the positions that was vacant.

Lisa said it was vacant until about the middle of April.

So I came from a government background, government accounting background too.

So the position interests me because it needed a lot of changes and upgrades.

So some of the things that started was a process analysis, and we moved towards electronic record management and contract management.

This is obviously with the directness and guidance of Theresa's help me, Lisa's help me, everybody's helped me.

And we're just we updated the purchasing thresholds, which gave way to a lot of efficiency and paper and time for the staff and brought us up to parallel third-class cities.

Sorry, I'm nervous.

I never come up here.

And I am very nervous.

I don't want to forget anything because there's been so much.

We started the utilization of a pen mid platform, which gives us access to a lot of vendors and helps open up more competitive bidding.

Let's see, the pen record management, and we also are awaiting an update or in the process of updating our finance plus accounting system so that the current purchase order system can tie into our accounting system giving us tighter internal controls over purchasing as well.

So and I want to get so I can analyze some commodities and work on bulk pricing and some piggyback pricing with maybe some other nonprofit organizations that are close to us.

So there's lots of work and lots of updates that can be done to this position in this department, which is me.

Okay, so the next department is.

Right.

So yeah, hopefully, you know, we just put a little bit of extra in this budget for things that might occur.

Seasonal, uh let's see, we've got unemployment.

Um that's just uh an estimate based on prior experience.

Um professional services.

We've got audit fees, Birkheimer, employee and place services, legal services, uh, the solicitor office is paid out of here, or the solicitor's salary.

Oh, I don't know.

Yeah, forever.

Yeah.

No.

No, they're they're pretty much got they've got it down.

They've got all the townships and cities in Western Pennsylvania that I know of.

I I don't know how far their reach is, but yeah, they're the experts on that.

Um, the the solicitors um salary is paid out of uh the legal services in the general government.

Uh just securities paid out of here.

Um we have to do a uh industrial appraisal inventory this year.

And the housing study is still in here.

Um education and training.

Um this is um used for all the departments uh if they if they exceed their education and training budget or if we have something that's citywide that needs to be done.

Um I know we're gonna be doing a little bit of training with uh the new software once it's up and running.

Um then we've got 4059 other services and charges.

We've got our bond fees, our um, our security software, um bank fees, miscellaneous uh legal and audit fees that come through, uh PA League of Cities, um, the public Wi-Fi, Quantela, US U.S.

Conference of Mayors, Emerging Care, you wanna, and then uh we've got our risk management.

This is the amount that the general fund pays the risk fund for all the liability insurance, all the items in the liability insurance section.

Um that's for salary increases because we don't know what they're gonna look for, and just anything else else on expected that might pop up.

Fair housing, 15,000, EMTA, uh cable access, CAM, uh the Erizu Gas is in here still, and we discussed that.

We don't know what's going on with the zoo, so we put their entire budget in there, and we're also paying their uh insurance out of the risk fund.

So those two items might not have not be spent next year, depending on what goes on with the zoo properties.

They claim that you know our thing is just a rubber stamp when we come in, but kind of silly for us to pass a little over their heads before they tell us to keep that's basically telling us.

Okay.

Uh the regional chamber?

Oh, with the regional chamber, it's 50,000 this year.

It's 25.

Last year there was 25 in the uh general government and 25 in the uh economic development budget, and we moved moved it all into one budget.

Um You don't happen to know how much Erie County has to pay, do you?

Ery County Well, the like for the regional?

No, I don't.

I thought EMT got a lot of state and federal rents.

We still do that kind of money.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

Well, their operating budget keeps going up like ours does.

Can you scroll up, please?

Okay.

Is that it?

The next page.

Oh.

Okay, that's everything.

Um the League of Cities for uh membership or just traveling to and from when they have functions.

That's just the membership.

Okay.

Yes.

Do we utilize that very much?

Well, we try to.

I mean, they they've just got an education platform up and running that we're looking at being able to log on and do classes and things like that.

And uh, we just hosted the conference here, and we uh a whole bunch of us went.

I've I've been to like at least we just went to event two years ago.

I've been at least three or four of their events, it's really really helpful.

And uh John, the president of it, like I was cell phone number.

I asked him like personal questions.

Not personal.

I personally ask him questions.

They also get into it.

They also send us emails with new developments and um legislation that we need to maybe chime in on.

Yeah, they're really important.

Things like that.

Any questions on general government?

Okay, capital.

The capital budget is on page 86, and I brought I brought handouts.

Because we actually had our budget meeting, our capital budget meeting on the 12th of November, which was after the budget was done.

Kathy.

There's two.

One thing you want to come back.

So the first the first column with all the orange highlights on it is 2025, and all the orange highlighted things are already spent.

Or I just noticed I had some blank columns highlighted too, but uh all the orange highlighted columns are spent, and the peach highlighted columns are in process.

And uh I think after we did this, the uh interceptors, the five interceptors were um ordered.

So all of all of this is happening in 25.

The 2.189.

Those two police cars.

Five.

Three got wrecked up.

Well, I think at least one of the ones that got wrecked will get replaced out of the risk fund because we'll be you know getting insurance money for the per person that was responsible for the accident.

But uh yes.

So the next column's 2026.

Um big big ticket item is uh probably about eight lines down, it's the rescue pumper, 1.6 million.

That will be coming in next year.

We ordered it several years ago, and uh pretty much takes up our entire budget.

Um if we take if we take the uh water reserve money that we didn't take in 2022, 2023, and take the amount that we're eligible for in 26.

If you look at the bottom of this, those top three numbers add up to uh 1.794 million, what almost 1.8 million, and that would take care of um that's that's what we thought we could use for but for um capital this year.

Umce we had our meeting, we found out that our needs are more uh like 3.6 million, which is the total of the 2026 column.

Um so we have the rescue pumper, we we need uh a tow truck and uh in the for the garage uh parks, needs a skid stick uh skid loader, um the police locker room project, which we've been moving to the next year for the as long as I've been doing the capital budget, we just keep moving it off.

Uh we're we really want to get it started next year.

Um every year we need to buy five interceptors for the police.

The those are the frontline patrol cars, and those are on 247, 365, so the uh life on those isn't as long as a standard car.

Uh let's see, we've got building maintenance, we put 150 in there.

Don't know what that is yet, but something always comes up the elevator.

I saw the one of the elevators is down right now, and the uh the boiler and associated other things.

We've got some uh anyone ever considered redoing the heating air conditioning system for chambers, sometimes is freezing here, sometimes is hot today, is perfect.

Well, that's the entire building.

When when you're um when it was so hot down here, it was really cold upstairs.

So um it's a building.

Yeah, it's it's the whole building.

Okay, and I I thought they I thought they rehabbed it a couple years ago in 2020.

In 2020.

They they took it down and did a major overhaul to it.

Yeah.

Okay.

But obviously there's still more work to be done.

I just want to know what days the visit.

Yeah, we should have a website with the uh temperatures and all the different offices.

So okay, we've got the associated the booting maintenance.

Um we we've had this next one, City Hall Gates and EPD fencing improvement project.

We've had that in the budget for several years now, and we keep moving it to the next year.

So my time.

Yeah.

Um let's see, a utility truck for public works.

We pretty much need one of those every year.

Um just do the wear and tear.

And the same thing with the tandem trucks and the uh single axle trucks.

Those are just wear and tear on the um streets vehicles, you know, the the plow trucks, the dump trucks, all of those.

And uh in order to keep a fleet running, we we just thought it uh we we like the idea of just buying them every year.

We're talking about leasing them and getting them all at once and doing lease payments on them that way that way we know it's coming.

So the whole budget comes up to three point six million, and if you look down below, we've got estimated at the end of the year an additional 740 uh the first three items I already talked to you about from the uh water reserve fund that is allotted to capital by ordinance.

Um the ARP interest is uh that'll be remaining in the account maybe by the end of the year it'll be about 742,000, so we can use that and um at since we did the bond bond issue, we could we can pay for the mayor brother Miller Brothers roof out of the bond issue now and uh channel that money into the capital budget that'll give us 3.6 million, which is what we need to fund this budget.

The bond no the uh by moving the Miller Brothers roof and paying for it out of the bond instead of paying for it out of capital.

Yeah, I think that's real obvious.

Like we should definitely do that like next meeting if we can.

Yeah.

So we we did a resolution.

We already did that.

We did a resolution to pay for it out of uh capital.

Oh, we should change that next meeting, right?

We already moved the money into capital to pay for it out of capital, but uh yeah, we could just do a uh transfer resolution.

Yeah, if we could next meeting, that'd be good.

Okay.

So any other questions about capital no that that was our last budget.

All right, good game everyone.

And uh seeing that we didn't have any changes, well, we had two changes, one for two thousand dollars taken out of the uh council because we had uh Mel's we had the president's raise in there twice, and then we missed a for next year for next year, not not back pay sorry so uh we did that, but we also uh forgot to put a $2,000 raise into the economic development department, so uh we thought to just transfer that and call it a wash.

Yeah.

So in the economic development department, is that where Chris Grohner was?

No, that's where Debbie is.

Yeah, and that was one of her people that's already um in the budget.

Okay, all right.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Thank you.