Thank you very much.

Almighty God, we have the high honor and the serious duty of managing the affairs of our beloved city.

Fellow Soul God with the spirit of unity and understanding, which enables us to face our multiple problems with a serene mind with justice and charity for all.

So that any and all decisions made by us will always be for the betterment and greater happiness of all our fellow citizens.

So help us God.

Amen.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

And to the Republic for which it stands.

With liberty and justice for all the meeting by taking a roll call attendance, please.

Alderman Clement.

Here.

Here.

Alderman Down.

Present.

Alderman Sullivan.

Alderman Senate.

Here.

Alderman Johnson.

Present.

Otherwoman Kelly.

Alderman Morgan.

Here.

Alderman Lopez.

And President Wilshire.

Here.

You have two, three, four, five.

Ten members present.

Thank you very much.

Um as is customary.

I will turn this meeting over to uh for the public hearing to uh present chairman down.

All right, this evening we have a public hearing on R26053, amending the special revenue fund for the road and highway expenditures by increasing the annual funding amount from motor vehicle permit fees from one million to two million dollars.

Yes, thank you.

For the record, Tim Cummings, Director of Administrative Services.

Uh I am here this evening, uh pinch hitting, if you will, for CFO Enright, who uh is on vacation this evening, so I'll start uh off by saying that I may not have all the answers, and it's certainly if that's the case, I will uh circle back to you with them at at a later date, but I do know uh enough about this topic to be dangerous, so that's why they created me out here this evening.

Um Mr.

Chairman, the legislation before you this evening is relatively straightforward and simple in the sense that what it does do is it increases the uh local revenue that we originally allocated uh to this special revenue fund from one million dollars to two million, so a one million dollar addition.

Um and that's all this legislation does, but to provide a uh additional context.

The special revenue fund that this money would would go into uh pays for uh the paving program that the city currently uh undertakes.

Uh and what uh this specific uh um exercise is going to allow us to do is to continue paying the existing uh debt service that has been authorized and uh bond authorization that has been made.

And so there shouldn't be any surprises here.

Um this is something that was going to be necessary at a certain point of time.

If you recall, we instituted this paving program.

I'm gonna say 10, eight to ten years ago now.

Um, and so we are actually coming to the end of the existing authorization.

Um, and we're probably gonna need to talk about what we're gonna want to do in the future, which is what the ad hoc was all about uh that we just went through.

Um but this this legislation before you is something that we're hoping to get your approval on so we can start an FY uh 28 putting some additional monies into the special revenue fund to pay the principal and interest on the on the debt service for our paving program.

Thank you, Mr.

Jim.

Any clarifying questions from Alderman Gregg?

Now, is this part of the money that we talked because we talked about this at um during the budget meetings?

Is this part of the money that was going to be used to pay down uh debt service?

Or is this different?

Uh if it's yes, go ahead, Director Cummings.

Thank you.

So um the answer to that question is is and and certainly can answer this during the um uh committee meeting as well, if we get into if you want to get into a little bit more details on this, but to answer your very specific question, I'm gonna answer it by saying it is not part of the money.

However, what we all kind of understand and recognize is our local uh revenues from motor vehicles is budgeted in a certain way that we often tend to look at it as one of the major factors to our surplus at the end of the year.

So um I think what is fair to say is surplus would be reduced in coming years.

Whether that surplus is reduced directly from this, certainly understood you could tie it to that, but it's overall, because another area where we also see some some uh surplus traditionally year over year uh is benefits.

Um and um another one that we have been seeing over the last few years is um interest income that comes in.

And so though those are various sources that we get that contribute to our surplus.