That's very slow tonight.

Thank you, Mayor.

We're recording.

All right.

I'd just like to call this meeting of the John Spree City Council work session to order this December 8th at 5.02 p.m.

Thank you.

If you could lead the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance.

Mayor's remarks.

None, thank you.

Thank you.

The first item under ongoing projects is the stormwater utility ordinance and resolution amendments.

We have Assistant City Manager Love for presentation.

Good afternoon.

This item before you is a collaboration across multiple departments of the city.

We have a stormwater utility coordination team that meets every two weeks to coordinate on all the activities going on with the stormwater utility projects as well as the administration of the utility, collections, accounts receivable, all of those things.

And out of that have come a few items that we're here to ask for your feedback and guidance on.

The first one is related to some ordinance changes that would improve our building administration and enhance customer service.

The second one is an inflationary increase should one be implemented or not.

And the third is an inflationary index, should that be incorporated to support our ongoing repairs and maintenance of the stormwater system.

In the memo that's in your packet, there's the background about the utility, as you know, the utility commenced in 2021.

And since that time, the city has made a couple of changes.

Uh minor revisions to the ordinance for improvements related to the utility itself.

For example, in 2025 in the spring, the council amended the ordinance to allow for the halting of interest on delinquent accounts of $1,000 or more when that particular account had entered into a payment plan.

As well in March of 2025, the council created the storm on a grant program.

It was funded with 250,000 dollars.

We got 42 applications, and there were 13 eligible projects identified, ranked in the top tier, and those have been approved for funding, and that work uh is being undertaken in conjunction with homeowners and our design building contractors meetings.

We expect some of that work could continue, I mean could begin in December, and then meetings and those engineering solutions will continue through any required permitting.

The first item related to the ordinance improvements.

There's a red line version of the ordinance in your packet.

Won't read through all those, but there are three that I like to highlight.

The first one is using postmarks instead of uh fiscally received.

The language in the ordinance is silent to that specific item.

And we've had instances where the stormwater utility bill is due on August the 31st, a person may have mailed it.

It may be postmarked before the 31st, but we're not getting it until the second, third, fourth, whenever that might be.

But yet the ordinance doesn't allow us any provision to accommodate that.

So this would clear up that language and that if an uh if it is postmarked by the due date or electronically received, then it would be considered on time.

The second ordinance improvement is allowing for interest and penalty waivers under certain circumstances.

And these additional revisions would allow these to be waived, providing giving flexibility to the staff if the payment can be demonstrated to not be the customer's fault.

And that could be a variety of things of the mail, a system went down or something in the event that any of those things happen currently.

There's no um flexibility on the part of staff to be able to accommodate that from a customer service standpoint.

The last item ordinance approvement is what we're calling orphan properly property, and we're recommending establishing a definition of orphan property, recognizing that some parcels of property have no identifiable owner of record, such it might be a right-of-way alignment, a plat era, historical subdivision, so forth, and this would clarify that if no owner can be identified, then the city may choose not to assess that orphaned property.

So in that particular one, the recommendation would be consideration of those red line changes in the ordinance.

Mr.

Mayor, you want to stop here and take questions on this one, or you want to move through all the Yeah, why don't we stop at this point?

Let's I mean, is every I don't know.

Do we have folks that are opposed to these changes?

I don't know.

A B and C update one A B and C.

What are your thoughts, Larry?

I'm fine with them.

Thank you.

Just a quick question on the orphan properties.

Any idea how many we have in the city and were they typically because of right-of-way acquisitions and what is left over, sometimes are just unusable pieces of property, or are they parts of developments subdivisions that are so cost prohibitive to develop because it could be on a cliff, a hill, that the cost of building is so high that they never were built upon?

Yes, sir.

Some of some of all of that, there's some that were related to an easement that we might have had with the county, and the county says it is ours, and we said it is theirs, and figuring all of that out.

It might be a little remnant piece.

In one instance, we have one where it was a common property of an HOA, but the HOA has been dissolved and just trying to figure out where that ownership lies.

We have identified about a dozen.

There, not that that might be all of them, but those are the ones that have come up through the billing process, or those as we are looking at outstanding bills or what might not have been billed, but we don't anticipate that it would be a large number of properties.