The Norman City Council held a special meeting on Tuesday, May 5, 2026, at 5:00 PM to discuss four agenda items. The meeting focused on the Fiscal Year Ending (FYE) 2026 capital improvements budget and FYE 2028-2031 capital improvements plan, a proposed ordinance to establish a process for evaluating Tax Increment Financing (TIF) districts, and the status of the Rock Creek Entertainment District TIF project. The council also voted to enter executive session to discuss a pending tort claim.
FYE 2026 Capital Improvements Program Budget and FYE 2028-2031 Capital Improvements Plan
Proposed Ordinance for TIF District Application and Evaluation
Rock Creek Entertainment District and Associated TIF District
All right, everybody, it's five o'clock and pretty much everybody's here. So we'll go ahead and get started with the city council special meeting for Tuesday, May 5th, 2026. We have four items on the agenda. The first one is a discussion regarding the FYE 2026 capital improvements program budget and FYE 2028 through 2031 capital improvements plan. And we have city staff here to discuss that with us. Thank you, Marion Council. I'm name is Jacob Huckabee. I'm a budget analyst in the finance department. I joined with our finance director Clint Mercer to talk about the fiscal year ending 2026 and 27 capital improvements projects proposed budget. So basically just going over everything that you'll be considering for adoption when that comes to you in June for the adoption meeting. So first, just kind of talking about the book itself. So not every single city fund is going to be in the capital budget. As you can see here, the list mainly gonna be those that are not the general fund that have their own revenue sources for these capital projects. And there's also in the books some project requests out of the utility funds, but those are gonna have their own meeting on May 19th to go over those funds and the projects uh in more detail with utility staff as well. Um so just a brief overview of what the book looks like look like. It's a little bit different than the big budget book. Um so it starts off with an executive summary, just going over as you read through by fund what's in those funds, uh, the project appropriations, and then it gives an overview of the capital improvements plan, just talking about uh where we uh get a lot of these projects from, how the process works, why the book is structured the way it's structured, um, and then it gets into the funds and the project detail. So each of the tabs is gonna be for an individual fund. In those funds, you're gonna have your fund summary, which is just the overall how we get to those fund balances at the end of each year and projecting it out five years. Then you get into the project tables, which is gonna be a list of every active project in that fund, as well as the uh request in FYE 27, and then um some project schedules projecting out through FYE 28 and 31. Um, and then each of those requests in FYE 27. If you go through the book, are gonna have a project sheet, which uh it's gonna contain a description, gonna contain some more details on uh what those funds, if it's gonna be for design, construction, things like that in those projects. And then um it just ends off with the uh the glossary and some maps whenever that final budget is printed. Um starting off, we uh have the largest in the book. It's gonna be capital sales tax fund. Um so this is gonna be the sales tax portion. Um so this expenditure graph is gonna be based off of um we've talked about in a few of the previous meetings, the guidelines. These are the kind of main categories that we look at um where we want to put these sales tax funds, what are kind of the key areas that council has previously outlined as like high priorities for the capital sales tax. Um so as you can see, the highest one is gonna be the other projects and debt service at 32 percent. And there are some questions at the last meeting about whether or not there is any how much of that was debt service. And um right now in this um fiscal year, all that's gonna be in projects. Um we haven't had any debt service in the capital fund for a few years. Um, all the line items in the fund summary are just gonna be those expenditures for the projects and not paying off the debt service within the fund. That 32% right now is not any debt service. Yes, it is all projects, yes. We have a debt service fund and we pay for those. And when or at some point there probably will be some debt service. Um I think I might have asked if we could have that be a its own piece of that pie chart so council can see, if the public can see, everybody can see. Uh, whenever there is debt service, exactly how much we think that you did you mention that might have been there might have been some complication exactly parsing it out. I'm not sure. We have a debt service fund that the the governmental debts paid out of. Sometimes we have some smaller things like um we had some lease stuff, uh, we had some uh um some other small items that that came out of here, but that we haven't had that in a while. So perfect. Okay. And then the next largest one is gonna be the capital outlay or the capital equipment, and then street maintenance at 21%. So everything is pretty close to where the guidelines within one percent um where we want to be. I think the main difference is gonna be in information technology, those are the where we set aside the amount for the the software and hardware infrastructure updates, some of those big costs. Um that's a little bit higher this year because we did uh include, as we'll talk about later, the uh radio maintenance contract for the city's radio system and IT in that. So that's that looks a little bit off compared to the guidelines, but um everything else is pretty much right where we want it to be. And so in total, the projected capital sales tax revenue is 17,633,956, and the proposed capital sales tax expenditures are 17,524,617.