During the August 11, 2026 work session, the Manhattan City Commission reviewed the proposed 2027 budget, discussed a new street maintenance sales tax proposal, and considered updates to housing policies. The meeting began at 6:00 PM with all five commissioners present. Key outcomes included direction to publish a mill levy of 52.8 (down from 54.5), to pursue a half-cent sales tax for street maintenance for 10 years, and to finalize housing policy revisions.
Good evening. It is now six o'clock, and I hereby call the uh what is it? August eleventh meeting of the city commission to order. Jared, will you please call the roll? Mayor Adam Jack. I'm here. Commissioner McCullough. Commissioner Fox here. Commissioner Morrison. Here, Commissioner Von Lennon. Here. Mayor, we have five commissioners present. The quorum of three is met. Will you please rise and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance? I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands. One nation under God with liberty and justice for all. All right. We did receive, as you're all aware, we had a very uh complex and extended set of activities over the last several months with cleaning up debris from the several large windstorms we had. We received a letter from a local citizen who specifically requested that we extend our appreciation to Tyler, Jalen, and Ryan from the Forestry Department who worked very hard in the area of Colorado Street and Eighth Avenue and or 8th Street. So thank you to them. Please extend our appreciation. I would like to note that we've had several new roles in our organization. Chelsea Johnson, who you are accustomed to seeing over here has been promoted to city clerk. Lauren Page, who is also in the city manager's office, is now the legislative and executive services coordinator, and our new uh chief financial officer, which is a new position, will begin. Uh Amy Lang will begin on September 1st. So we look forward to welcoming her. Finally, I will just note that we did not have a proclamation, but um last week, Governor Kelly issued a proclamation recognizing August 7th as Kansas Purple Heart Day, honoring service members who were wounded or killed in combat. And this marks Kansas inaugural observance as an officially designated Purple Heart State and reaffirmed our commitment to approximately 2,500 living Purple Heart recipients across Kansas. So I would just like to recognize and endorse Governor Kelly's action on that front. Thank you very much. And we will now begin our first item on the agenda. Yeah, thank you, Mayor and City Commissioners, um, for the opportunity to uh do our our third iteration of our proposed budget. Um, as always, I like to start off with reminding the commission what our goals were in 2026, and that number one goal being to stabilize the budget and talk about sales tax renewals. Uh also housing and development. So we'll be checking three of those goals and making progress on those this evening. Budget strategy again for 2027 was to develop a budget that was structurally balanced to have mill levy stability, um, maintain service level, address debt issue that we knew was up, and then also include salaries, equipment, and vehicle needs. Uh, as we are progressing through our budget calendar, we are on our third work session. Um, and uh just a reminder that on August 20th, with it, which is next Thursday, uh, we will have our another third Thursday event where we have all of our um departments out third Thursdays downtown who are just really being present and engaging with our community. We've had a lot of really good feedback of those, um, and we know that our staff really enjoy going to them as well. Kind of launching into the revenue assumptions that we continue to work with for this budget development season. Uh no change in wastewater rates, a three percent increase in water rate, four percent increase in our stormwater rate. Uh we are renegotiating our franchise fee agreements with our utility companies for the first time in 20 years, and so we are proposing a 2% increase in franchise fees. We are also projecting a 1.75% growth in our sales tax revenues. Um, after a little uh bit of adjustment uh with the county, we have determined that our mill is worth 780,986. After our last work session on July 14th, uh we took the feedback that was given from the commissioners, and we've made several changes uh to that budget. Those changes were distributed to the commission on July 30th, and I have not heard uh any uh individual comments from any individual commissioners uh regarding line items or any specific department uh budgets. So I wanted to run through very quickly uh what some of these changes that were made based on feedback on the July 14th meeting and conversations that we've had over the last couple weeks with you all one on one. So we have decreased the total mill levy to 52.8. Uh we have a library total mill was held flat. We have a library total mill was held flat.