Regular meeting of the Olatha City Council for two nation under God.

We're also celebrating forward infrastructure staff to accept the environmental services.

Tony Golden Infrastructure staff operate facilities.

That it must be safe, reliable, efficient, and sustainable to ensure a high quality of life for our residents both today and in the future.

And where it is in the public's interest for Alatha citizens, civic leaders and children to learn about our community's public works and infrastructure and their important well-being.

Now therefore, I John Bacon, mayor of the City of Alatha, do hereby proclaim May eighteenth through the twenty-fourth, twenty twenty-five as public works week, urging all citizens to celebrate our infrastructure professionals, engineers, managers, and employees, and to recognize the substantial contributions they make to protect safety and quality of life.

So anyway, so I appreciate uh the opportunity to be here.

Thank you for your patience.

So anyway, uh good evening.

Again, my name's Joe Johnson.

Uh thank you, Mayor and Council members for allowing me to be here today to help in the celebration.

Uh reaccreditation for your infrastructure department.

As I said, I'm the region six director on the National Board for APWA.

I'm also the public works director in the city and general for thirty-five years uh serving public agencies.

And so this is a a milestone for an agency to uh be a report is a really good honor uh as regional directors to travel the eight states and a province in Canada in my region to be able to help celebrate.

So tonight it's my honor to be here to help celebrate the achievement of your department of infrastructure.

Uh your infrastructure department received its first department is the first accredited agency within the state of Kansas.

So that is amazing.

Um as you know, your infrastructure department plays a vital role's infrastructure with a variety of different services they provide from maintenance, from street maintenance, traffic signals, public facilities, park maintenance, software.

Through their diligent efforts, the infrastructure department enhances the quality of life in Olathe and upholds the city's commitment to excellence in public service.

Now accreditation is a marked professionalism indicating a public works agency has made the commitment to continue operations and services.

Determined to be appropriate for that agency.

Following the evaluations team's recommendation, the accredited the accreditation council's APWA grant full accreditation.

So on half of the board of directors, I would like now to present.

Congratulations to Director Mary Yeager, accreditation manager, Zach Hardy, and to the mayor and council for uh a job well done to be able to go through this process to be a credit agency.

So gratulations to the city and department of infrastructure.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Good evening, Mayor and Council.

My name is Michael Wilkes.

I'm the city manager, and uh have some exciting stuff to do tonight.

We get to do this one recently at the last council meeting.

We proclaimed May the 5th through the 9th as public service recognition week.

Now, this is not just I would argue that we do it better than most people do it.

And uh we take a little bit thanks to the council.

We take a little bit more of a pause to celebrate we really appreciate that.

But all across America, it's recognized as public service recognition week.

And so once again, we've had the opportunity to sell.

We also use this started back a few years ago.

We used this as an opportunity to do our annual awards for our employees.

So in about two weeks ago on uh Monday the fifth, we had our employee breakfast where we recognized uh all the award winners 70 nominations for our various awards that we have.

All these award nominations come from their peers.

They're they're not from Department of But they're from their peers, and uh so this is peer recognition uh and really recognizes our folks for the great great work.

Uh let's see.

So what we're gonna do tonight is something a little bit different, and we'll I'll talk about each award and uh we'll uh recognize the year.

We're gonna have them kind of if you guys will come up when I call your name, just kind of spread across the front, and then when we're finished, we'll get a big group uh photo of every uh so first let's see, I can look at over here.

So our first award is our Innovation Through Excellence Award Innovation through excellence award.

This category is reserved for those who have brought forth and implemented an innovative process program to keep Olatha setting the standard for excellence in public service.

Our aquatics team this year of Lindsay Williams, Kat Eckert implemented amazing changes to our swim lessons programs, and it's really paid great dividends for the city.

So if you guys would have been a little bit more than a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of our second award is our 2040 Future Ready Award.

Okay.

This really is probably it is not given out every year.

As a matter of fact, we haven't given it out the last couple of years, but we did this year.

Oh, did I oh I missed one.

Shoot.

Thank you.

Cody should have come up here and said, Jim.

Leadership philosophy award, sorry.

Our leadership philosophy are teams that reflect passion, collaboration, stewardship, leadership development, celebration, and measurement in all that they went above and beyond in leading their teams.

Let's hear it.