The Joplin City Council held an informal meeting on August 18, 2025, to discuss two agenda items: a finance update from the finance director and a presentation on the deteriorating condition of the Little League North Fields at Landwork Park. Council members discussed the city's revenue and expenditure trends and debated the future of the little league fields, ultimately directing the city manager to arrange meetings with stakeholders to explore preservation options.
Finance Update (Mrs. Haas):
Little League Fields Update (Paul Bloomberg, Parks Director):
Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Joplin City Council informal meeting for Monday, August the 18th, 2025. Two items on the agenda. Item number one is finance update. Good evening, Mrs. Haas. Good evening, Mayor. Council. Tonight I will present to you the August sales use tax and marijuana sales tax. For regular sales tax, we're up about one percent from August of last year, which brings us just about flat on collections compared to last year. You can see we're still running under budget, uh, just a little bit uh with just two months remaining. Use tax. Uh August was down 12% uh from August of last year, so we're up 4.2% for the year. And marijuana uh does it did seem to be a timing issue from last month. Uh so we're back up where we would anticipate collections. Any questions on sales and use tax? Council. If not, I'll look at the general fund operating um revenues and expenditures. Uh so this is through July 31st, so nine months, uh, 75% of the year. We are running on operating revenue where we've collected more than what we budgeted uh by 785,000 dollars. On operating expenditures, we've spent less than what we budgeted by uh just over 1.8 million dollars. Some of that's timing of capital expenditures. Uh the fire trucks are still still on order. Uh one-time revenue, we're just about on budget. One time expenditures, uh we are below budget. Uh actually, that's the capital. And then you'll see our our total net gain or loss. We're doing better than what we budgeted at this point in time. And then the graph, I have updated that for uh what is reflected in our 2026 proposed budget, and then revised the projections, especially for sales tax. So with that, I would be happy to answer any questions. Council, Mrs. Carlin. On this last slide, Leslie. So spending more than we're bringing in projected is if sales tax diminish. Is that correct? Am I understanding that correctly? Uh it's is let me see what I revised that to. If we stayed the same, so that's decreasing. So I was using a two percent increase in sales tax assumption. I decreased that to one and a half percent. So that's if sales tax increases one and a half percent. Uh so essentially what this graph tells you is if um our projections are correct, we will need our one-time revenue in order to balance our budget. The expenses are gonna grow faster than that 1.5 percent intake. Lizzie, I you you said fire trucks on order. How many do we have total on order? Do is it two? I think it's two right now. About a million each. Higher than that, maybe maybe 1.2 million each. No. Okay, thank you.