Alright, good evening, everyone.

It's six o'clock.

So I want to respect everybody's time.

Thank you for joining us for first of three formal conversations, but I'm sure many months of ongoing conversations.

My name is Katie Doling.

I am the city manager here at Lafayette.

And I just want to introduce some colleagues that I'm joined here with who will be giving the majority of the presentation.

I'm here with Megan Davis, who is the deputy city administrator, Alex Nelson, who is the assistant to the city manager.

Also joined with community services director Melissa Heisel, communications manager Debbie Wilmot, or communications director, communications manager, Natalie Miller.

So we're all here to help support and answer any questions that you have.

Tonight's presentation, we hope to be about 45 minutes with opportunity to go into the lobby and share some feedback and comments.

There will be opportunities for questions throughout, but really want to structure this meeting in particular for kind of how did we get here for some of the capital projects that we're looking forward to and really provide an overview of three major projects and then very um briefly touch on some of the project costs and financing overview.

That will be the second meeting here at the end of this month, and then some question answers and wrap up.

I do want to note that this meeting is being recorded, and so we will have those questions being live streamed and posted on the website.

If you don't feel comfortable asking your questions in public, you can always we can have a piece of paper, you can write them down and we can ask them for you as well.

So with that, I will turn it over to Deputy City Manager Megan Davis.

Okay, thanks everyone for joining us.

As uh City Manager Doling mentioned, tonight's program is going to be specifically focused on quality services and amenities.

And so tonight we're going to be talking about the projects, again, kind of how we got here, and a little bit less about some of the other components like the financial uh stewardship and about sustainability.

Those will be at the second and third meeting.

So we invite you to come back for those meetings as well, and or they'll all be posted online, and you'll be able to watch them at that time.

Okay, just to start kind of at the high level, the city uh manages numerous capital assets as you can imagine.

Everything from buildings to vehicles, police cars, fire trucks, um, everyday vehicles that people use, just okay.

All right, let me try it again.

Um, so our fleet of vehicles, streets, sidewalks, bikeways, those are all considered capital assets, um, signage, all the signage around town, entryway signage, lighting poles, utility infrastructure, which is everything from water, water treatment plants, water collection facilities, steward storm water, and then technology.

So this might be things you don't see underground in terms of communication technology, as well as potentially towers, parks, playgrounds, trails, everything that comes along with it.

So picnic tables, um, shelters, all that type of thing, and then property, um, open space, other open lands that the city might own for other purposes.

So we really have a great um kind of breadth and depth of capital assets, all of which um we are stewards of for the people of Lafayette, and that we work hard to maintain and sustain at the highest level that we possibly can.

We're gonna focus um tonight and through this project.

We're really focusing on the city facilities that are more of what you would consider kind of city buildings and public-facing city facilities that you as residents might access.

We have over 30 facilities of this nature, and it's everything from community spaces, public safety utilities like the police department, the fire, our two fire departments or our two fire stations, um, all the water treatment infrastructure that I talked about, but also the treatment plants and the collection facilities, and then more of the operations and administrative support services.

So that would be you know, places like City Hall and other facilities where we have staff kind of working in and out of.

We these are primarily maintained by our facilities division, which is a department of four.

So it's a a lot of facilities for a small number of people to maintain.

Um these facilities, the the value of these assets is um over a seven, over a hundred and seventy-five million in that's insured value.

So you know that's not doesn't necessarily capture the contents and the entirety of the of the value of those properties, but it's quite significant.

So once again, really valuable assets that we you know work hard to maintain as best we can.

And so kind of two of the primary ones that we're looking at or talking about tonight are around excellent city services and infrastructure as well as quality community amenities.

Through this project, though, these strategic outcomes are really all of them are kind of present in some way.

All these facilities, we intend to be a safe, welcoming and inclusive place for all residents to access.

Create a sense of place, so really kind of align and be consistent with what we as a community consider as part of our identity.

And then, of course, fiscal responsibility, environmental stewardship, and these other outcomes.

I'm gonna let Alex talk a little bit about the budget.

Thank you, May again, and good evening, everyone.

Thank you for joining us.

My name is Alex, and I'll begin by talking a bit about our city budget.

So for context, uh in 2025, our city's budget was around 121 million dollars, and it's broken up here on the on the screen.

You can see we we break it up into operating expenses, salaries and benefits, debt, and then capital.

And so our capital expenses are about a quarter of the budget, roughly 23%.

Um, however, when we dig a little deeper into that, we'll see that about 84% of those capital funds are uh actually already dedicated or serving or coming from an enterprise fund, meaning the money is collected to go to specific service or specific type of infrastructure, such as water, our parks maintenance, um, or fleet replacement.

So that would be replacing our police vehicles, fire trucks, ambulances, things like that.

Um, there's a remaining portion that is largely spent on transportation projects, so we run some annual maintenance programs for our streets and sidewalks, as well as fund some larger one-time projects like a bridge replacement that's happening this year on 120th Street over Coal Creek.

And so that leaves about 2% of our capital budget for actual facility maintenance.

And historically, the city has uh spent around or budgeted around 200,000 to 650,000 per year on these maintenance activities, and that's really because to be to be consistent with some uh budgeting best practices, there are some other items we need to cover first, such as debt service, uh operating costs to make sure we can continue providing the services that our residents rely on, and so whatever's left can kind of be used to support these projects.

Um that means that a lot of these funds are used to support generally routine maintenance, some replacement of failing equipment, and then when we can uh doing proactive maintenance, and that's all to say that really our current revenue streams and funding sources don't really provide enough to address some of the larger uh projects and needs that we know need to happen for these facilities.

So, for some additional information, um, here's what we've funded in the 2025 budget in terms of facility maintenance.

You can see it's largely again equipment replacement or addressing some uh trying to be proactive and address some facility um deficiencies.

So the first is replacement of our HVAC or heating and cooling system for the library.

That's in the photo on the right.

You can see we had to bring in a big crane to lift the heavy piece of equipment onto the roof of the library, as well as refurbishing the elevator at the library to make sure that the building is as accessible as possible to patrons.