The city council held an agenda session on September 9, 2025, to finalize upcoming meeting agendas and receive presentations. No votes were taken. Items discussed include consent agenda approvals, budget adjustments, a new aquatic feasibility study, and updates on the SWEPCO rate case and climate action plan.
All right. This, as you all know, is a is the agenda session. So it is not a business meeting. We will not be voting. We will be finalizing our agendas and having some presentations. So the first up next week we'll have a nominating committee report, which I believe Stafford, you chair that committee, so you'll be delivering that report next week. I hope so. Okay. Um and then we move into consent. Um we have several um staff members here that are, you know, you've received information about all of these items that were placing on consent in your packet. We also may give you the opportunity to talk about them more. So if you want to go into more detail about any of them, we have people here who are ready to present. So just say the word and don't be shy. Um after we approve the meeting minutes, the next item will be a resolution to award an RIP to approve a contract with partwise. It's in the amount of $125,000 to commission artist David Eaton to create the sculpture in Brock Depth for the upper ramble and to approve the related budget adjustment. And Joanna, because we've already gotten some questions from council members. Can you give us a refresher in this funding and how it came about? Or this plan and this piece. So this piece um tent was to be an interactive um playable art structure in the upper ramble, uh, in the sort of art garden area of the upper ramble. Um and the idea is that we sought a national sort of we we went on a national search for an artist who would be capable of making a piece that was both durable to be interactive in our space in one of the most sort of public facing areas of our city. Um so this is generally associated with the upper ramble project. Okay. Thanks. Okay. Yes, I my question is this is this something that was on the budget. Uh yes, this um is coming. Um, the budget adjustment is because the project funds weren't quite sufficient enough to cover in it in the sculpture in its entirety. So we are bringing funds from uh HMR reserves to cover the rest of the cost required. What was the total cost? Is the total cost 125? Okay. What was budgeted and what are you bringing in? I guess. Um, it was entirely budgeted as part of the upper ramble project, though some of those there were cost overruns elsewhere in the project by the time we got to the art commission. And I think I think her question is something we can try to find out. Um is the the additional amount, the overage amount. Yeah, so the this piece was always envisioned to be 125,000. However, the project ran out of funds before the art was able to be purchased. There wasn't an overage in the art project. There was an overage in the project as a whole, not leaving enough for the budgeted art. Correct. And I just want to double check the uh RFP one out and local artists had as much opportunity to uh apply or correct. Despite as non-local. So the project went through the RFP process, so it was publicized on all of the regular city channels, but then we specifically publicized it in additional places, including Americans for the arts, uh, Coda Works, which is a public art commissioning website, uh, and uh Creative West, which is another public art commissioning website. So it was in all of the places where a firm uh capable of doing this scope of work would be able to see it. And we did have uh applications from local firms as well as national firms. And I'll just say that was on the selection committee, and um I believe this was a unanimous uh decision. We were very excited about this particular piece. Thanks, Joanne. Great.