The Joplin City Council held an informal meeting on Monday, September 15, 2025, at 11:15 AM, receiving updates on the city's financial status, progress on a new time and attendance system, and a comprehensive review of challenges and proposed solutions for the 911 dispatch center.
Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the informal meeting of the Joplin City Council for this Monday, September the 15th, 2025. We have three items on our agenda this evening, and we just got our video back in the nick of time. So let's begin with the finance information update. Good evening, Mrs. Hawes. Good evening, Mayor Council. Tonight I'm going to present the September sales tax, use tax of marijuana. For September, we are essentially flat, almost identical to what we collected for September of 2024. So for the year, we're up about a half percent. We are still running below budget with one month left by about 38,000. But all in all, we're we're running pretty close to budget on use tax for September we're up 20 percent uh compared to September of last year. But um if you'll remember, if you'll look uh August was down 12 percent uh for from August of last year, so some of that probably was timing. Uh so for the year we're up by point six percent, uh which is just about on budget. And then marijuana sales tax is down again like it was in July, but then August was a bigger month, so I think this is just timing of when uh some businesses are remiting. Uh but you can see we've already collected more than what we budgeted. We've collected 746,564 dollars, and we budgeted 721,000. So uh revenue, so that's the revenue picture. Then for the general fund uh financials and forecast for 2025, uh the year to date actual 2025, um, you can see the operating revenue uh we're coming in uh over budget, uh operating expenditures were cutting coming in under budget. Uh so right now we have a net operating gain. One time revenue is more than what we have budgeted for 10 months, and that this is just through August, and then one time expenditures uh below budget. Uh so you can see our overall total net gain of 1.4 million, but I've added a new line, which is outstanding encumbrances as as of August 31st. Um this I had mentioned adding this line, and then uh we've been meeting with the finance committee, and they requested this information. But at the end of August, we have outstanding encumbrances of just over four million dollars. So if we had paid out all of those obligations, we would be at uh a negative almost 2.6 million dollars compared to uh the budgeted amount of uh negative four million dollars. So that's mostly due to the fire trucks, um, some storm sirens, some equipment in the police department, and the elevators in City Hall. Any questions? And then we've got the graph uh which shows uh what we're projecting for 27, 28, and 29. Any questions on uh the general fund financials? Council. Mrs. Carlin. Leslie, and looking these over, it's pretty pretty consistent straight across the board. Would this not be an indicator that perhaps we should budget according to what we actually received last year? Yes, so for 2026, we are not budgeting any increase in sales tax because all in the indicators are showing that next year is gonna be pretty flat. Yep. I see nothing else, Leslie. Okay, okay. I last gave an update on time in attendance on our progress on May 5th and wanted to give another update. We've made it made a lot of progress since uh May. I'm using the same presentation as before in case uh there are questions, but I've I've put the updates in in red, but before we get there, uh I want to kind of talk about how our training uh actually is working. Uh so I have I've put together a team of my staff that's doing the training. So Chelsea Rives is doing the employee portion of the training. Uh Hillary Corey is doing the supervisor portion of the training, and then Jennifer Wagler, myself, and AJ Whistler. Uh we all make up the team that's that's working on the training. Our class sizes are we have found that really we need to limit the class size to 15. Um we believe that it's really important uh to train every employee. Um we want to make sure that they know how to use it, use the system and use it well. Um so we we had videos that we started with, and I think the consistent consensus has been that uh the training, the live training is is better than the videos. So uh that's kind of where how the training is going. The employee training takes an hour and a half uh exempt supervisor training, and we we try to keep the groups together because the training makes a lot more sense.