Hey, how's it going?

Good.

We can probably get started.

Sure.

Yeah.

All right.

Sounds good.

Um, welcome everyone to the March ninth, twenty twenty-six.

Um, Lafayette Downtown Development Authority meeting.

Executive Director Keating, do we have a roll call though?

Director Barnes, Director Kagan.

Here, Director Harty.

Here, Director Hubberg.

Here, Director Laco.

Here, Director Mundy.

Director Rogers.

Here, first on the agenda is public input.

If any member of the public wishes to speak, please state your name, and you'll have five minutes to speak.

Okay, seeing no members of the public wish to speak, I'll now close public input.

We'll now move on to approval of the February ninth, twenty twenty-six meeting minutes.

Any corrections like to make a motion?

Move to approval minutes.

Is there a second?

All in favor, please say aye.

Any opposed?

All right, that passes.

Moving on to regular business, the first agenda item is approval of the fiscal year twenty twenty-six budget amendments and carry-forward appropriations for the Lafayette Downtown Development Authority.

I'll turn it over to Executive Director.

Um, this is because we are gonna do a carry forward of unspent funds and bring it forward into 2026.

And so I'll go through what that process is.

Um, and feel free to just stop me and ask questions through audit, um, and then we'll do questions, discussion, and a motion.

And then within this agenda item, we also have another opportunity to allocate additional funding for the downtown improvement grant dig.

And so after we approve that carry forward, if you guys do do that, um, then we can discuss options about if we want to allocate additional funds to this program, which has been super successful, and we're already seeing that we're gonna be tapping out soon.

Um, and so then we'll go through discussions and question and motion and next steps.

So a one-two.

Um, as a reminder, um, each year we're gonna be setting a budget, and that process actually kind of happens pretty mid-year.

Um, as a reminder for 2026, we did a work planning um uh workshop where we looked at prioritization of just our different goals, and we developed that work plan and um we uh did that in July, and then I introduced a budget that uh complemented that in August.

Um, with that feedback, we put together a budget that you all recommended for approval in September.

Since we are governed by the state statute for DDAs, our governing body actually approves our budget, and so that's city council.

And so we took that budget and introduced it to council in October, and then they approved it in uh the end of October.

And um, one thing to note is that uh they approve it through a resolution, and uh any time that we want to change our budget, we kind of have to go back through the whole dog and pony show.

Um, and we will follow the city's budget process each year.

So they throughout the year have opportunities to do supplementals where if they need to add additional funds to something or they need to amend their budget, they call for all city departments to kind of put forward what they need, and the city manager reviews it and then it gets brought to council.

We'll follow that same cadence, and so um if we ever need to amend our budget, we will just tap into the flow of what's already established through the city's process.

So a budget amendment and carry forward.

Um so, like I just described each year, city council will adopt their budget, but as we know, things pop up throughout the year where financial circumstances change, and that's where the budget amendment comes through.

And so this allows governments and uh special districts like ourselves to adjust appropriations and maintain appropriate spending authority.

So we are um bringing forward an amendment for you all to approve and then go to council.

Um, and so if we decide to approve the budget uh amendment tonight, I would be going to council on April 7th to introduce it.

That's when they're introducing all supplemental um uh items to city council, and then they would approve it on the 21st of April.

So a budget carry forward.

Um, as you know, last November we launched one of our first uh grant programs, DIG, uh, which is a matching grant initiative up to 2500 for interior and exterior capital improvements.

We put that funding in the downtown development line, and in 2025, we allocated $50,000 for the program to use, and then in 2026, we did 100,000.

A budget carry forward is a term that's used in just municipal uh governments and just uh these sort of accounting practices when you take unspent funds from one year and you carry forward it to the next year.

So in our case, we're taking unspent 2025 funds and bringing it over to 2026.

Um we allocated 50,000 to DIG and a total of 41,000 was awarded across three projects.

So the first one is at the Lafayette Lumber Yards.

This was around $7,000, and that was the work was completed, it was reimbursed and reflected the actual expenditures.

So that's not part of the carry forward, but just to note that we spent around $7,000 for that program.

The next two ones are in different stages, and so for ventry, we helped with the patio winterization.