The Payson Town Council held a work study session on May 8, 2024, to discuss the Town Manager's Draft Budget for fiscal year 2024-2025. The meeting focused on personnel requests, capital improvement projects, and various operational enhancements. The Council provided direction on balancing the budget and setting priorities but took no formal action, as work sessions are intended for discussion only.
Part two of the uh work study session continuation from Front. I'm gonna have to go back and forth because I need to toggle around in the presentation, so I'll just stand up here for a moment. Uh, one thing that I wanted to start uh by getting some feedback from council right now. Your calendar reflects that we have a work session on June the fourth, and that work session um was put on there in the event we needed it for the budget process. We don't have any other items prepared. Staff's been busy working on the budget, and we will continue to be busy making adjustments based on your feedback. My recommendation to you is that we cancel that work study, and I know we have council members who also won't be present during that time. Um so if you all are good with that, uh I will cancel the June 4th work session. All right. Okay, so yesterday, just a quick recap. Um we skipped over the wellness section, prosecution services, water budget, their operational budget. I did cover their personnel. Uh we skipped over CIP, employee housing, and uh and the airplane portion of the project, and you wanted to return to the discussion about personnel with the economic development manager's permit tech. This is a combination of the increases that you authorized last night. The bottom three you just approved in the previous meeting. So those are already authorized, but those were not in the budget because they were marked as maybes, not knowing if you were going to approve them or not. So the total of the things that you changed last night and authorized was 339,98. Okay. So just give you kind of a midway point. That's what you added to the budget so far. So I thought we would come back here first. We had a discussion about personnel, and you had a presentation on the permit technician and economic development manager. We talked about levels of service. Um, we had a long discussion about it, and your desire was to set it aside and return to the discussion this evening. Um this is all the stuff that's on your spreadsheet, but what we did was just kind of total it up for you. The parks operation foreman. I told you we would say no to the community service officer, we would say no to, and the community risk reduction specialist requests to go from part-time to full-time. I would have to say no to. Um, and so those are those dollar amounts that are up there. But I want you to understand out of our budget, the only one of those I had said yes to is the community service officer. So the 79,000 dollars is in the budget that we have that we're talking about tonight. Those other two positions were not approved as yeses by me, and they that funding isn't in the budget. So this is a it's a value exchange, if you will, but it's not in the budget. Only the community service officer salary is that makes okay. So uh with that said, Mayor, I'll just turn it over to you to facilitate more discussion. I'm here to answer questions if you have them relative to the proposal about adding those two positions. All right, um, I'll start off the uh still feel the same way that I think the economic development manager position is important based on feedback from edac and talking to small businesses that uh come through uh development process. Um also that has the opportunity to generate revenue that could possibly in next year's budget fund those other positions. So I'm for the uh permit tech and uh economic development manager at it. So thoughts from others think differently on that in Matt's if we add the permit tech again to your issues of working with small business and those issues that we've had in development. It seems to me adding a permit tech. You talked about um the hybrid position of the project manager taking the load off. Uh how did you describe that position again? Oh, yeah, yeah. So we've hired on a contract in the last week, um, and I sent you all notification of this, but through uh a contract service provider, we hired a project administrator, and he has lots of experience, you know, communicating with vendors at uh looking over the schedule and helping keep things moving. He's not an engineer, um, and that's not what we were seeking. So it's it's assistance in the engineering division at um a project administrator uh level, which includes those functions communication schedule, monitoring, um I would say completing documents, documentation, putting things into the software so that Larry knows where the projects at and he doesn't have to go hunt down where we're at, those kind of functions are what he's primarily focusing on. Then I talked to you a little bit about you're gonna have a presentation on the in the council meeting on the 22nd about the structure of the program management office and the design that we have come up with for managing our CIP uh program out of that office. So it's more than the bond projects. Larry will play a part in that, and you'll see more detail about it on the 22nd.