The Joplin City Council held an informal meeting on March 3, 2025. The meeting included a financial update from the finance director, a presentation from the fire department chief, and appointments to various boards and commissions.
Welcome to the informal meeting of the Joplin City Council. We're gonna kick this thing off with a financial information update. Good evening, Mrs. Hawts. Good evening, Mayor, Council. So this is what I should have presented to you last month. We'll have another update at the next meeting. So this is February information, February sales tax. So this is essentially our Christmas sales. So you can see we were up uh 1.43% in sales tax. But if you look at 2024, February of 2024 was a really big month. So given that we were still up, I still think it was a good shopping season. Essentially that brings us to uh right to our budget uh through February, and then on use tax, we're actually down 2.8 percent, which brings us to 2% uh for the year, and then marijuana that's pretty much in line with what we were seeing for uh each month uh before the timing issue. Still can't go by the percentages because last year was not a full year. Um the general fund operating revenue and expenditures. Um for 2024, hopefully this is complete, although we're still in the middle of our audit. But you can see our total operating revenue almost 36 million, total operating expenditures just over 35 million. So our net operating gain uh 680,000. Then we had one-time revenue of five million dollars and one-time expenditures of four point nine million dollars. So our overall uh net gain eight just over eight hundred and ten thousand dollars. You can see our ending fund balance, unrestricted fund balance. Uh but what's not shown on here is at the end of the fiscal year we had 3.8 million dollars in purchase or open purchase orders. So if not for timing issues, if we had uh paid for all of those things in 2024, our unrestricted fund balance would be 18.1 million dollars, and then if you look at 2025 year to date actual, um our total operating revenue uh 8.4 million dollars, which is a little bit less than budget. Our um operating expenditures uh just over 8.3 million dollars, again a little bit less than budget, and then our one-time revenue 725,000, our one-time expenditures 660, 676,000. So we have a total net gain at the end of January of a hundred almost 120,000 dollars, and then you can see the graph with the future projections. Uh so our operating revenue and expenditures, we are projecting that our revenue is not gonna keep pace with our expenditures. With that, I'd be happy to answer any questions. Council, any questions for Leslie? Thank you. Fire department update, Chief Isabel, good evening. Good evening, Mayor and Council. Uh just gonna give you a little bit of an update for the fire department where we're at right now. Um technology. Uh so the fire department's been in operations in eight since 1882. Uh most everybody knows that. If you look at our patch, we carry that on our shoulder. Uh day in, day out. We strive to provide compassionate customer service. I mean, those three words say it in a nutshell. That's what we do on a day in, day out basis. Uh we protect you from fire, we take care of you if you have a medical emergency. We also deal with special operations, which uh swift water high angle, confined space, and we also do hazardo materials here in the city. So we have a staffing level, 30 personnel every day. That's a minimum staffing for us. We have seven administrative chiefs that are on during the daytime. We operate out of the seven fire stations, as you know. Okay, so the fire prevention bureau has two personnel. We have the fire marshal and deputy fire marshal. As you can see, these guys get a lot of work done. 1836 fire protection related inspections in Joplin over the year, about almost 88% compliance.