Welcome to our uh September, is it September 29th study session?

And we've got um two topics on our study session, and we're gonna start with a report on uh our city sales tax projects, and uh Mr.

Neemeyer is gonna start us off and uh hand it over to Ms.

Woodward at some point.

So that's correct.

Okay, and just so our our other topic is RPU and uh Mr.

McCullough just walked in.

So thank you, Council President.

Good afternoon, council, council president and mayor, uh Tyler New Meyer, Public Works Director, Community Development Director Irene Woodward is here as well to give you all an update on local sales tax.

So as a reminder to the public, uh the sales tax approval uh most recently involved uh four projects, uh, three of which we're gonna focus on with this presentation, those being the economic vitality projects, street reconstruction, um, flood control and water quality.

The regional sports complex has been discussed in other presentations and uh won't be included in the comments tonight.

So, as a reminder, the first five years of our local sales tax spending, uh the plan was to front load the economic vitality spending uh to be able to uh forward some of the initiatives within economic vitality uh by front loading that, we think those investments can really uh begin to bear fruit quickly uh by front loading that investment and backing off on investments in the other two areas.

However, that doesn't mean that those two areas aren't seeing spending as well, and we'll we'll walk through that here this afternoon.

And we'll start with street reconstruction.

So the first five years of street reconstruction, uh the plan is to go out and attack some of those streets that have been neglected as the council knows and has been discussed.

Uh 2019 uh report on our streets concluded that we were um facing a 16 to 20 million dollar annual funding shortfall and rehabilitating our city streets.

The goal of our payment management program is to maintain uh payment condition index of 80 over the anticipated 50 year life cycle of payments, and in a lot of areas we're falling pretty well short of that.

However, uh the sales tax approval and the street reconstruction project within that does help close a portion of that gap.

So this slide will probably look familiar as well.

These were the first five projects, the first five years of the street reconstruction project in local sales tax.

Uh at this point, we've completed andor um nearly complete with a second project on this map.

But one thing you'll notice about these corridors that are highlighted here, they are more major thoroughfares, major streets in town because they need to meet that regional significance criteria for uh that streets project and the legislation.

So, what's been done to date within streets?

Our first project completed in 2024 was just over half a million dollars worth of work out on 48th Street Southwest.

This connected with the new roundabout at 48th Street Southwest and Commercial Drive.

Um, that project is complete.

Um, and you can see that out there today.

And uh we'll get to uh how we're gonna label that um a little bit later in the presentation.

Uh this year we're working on 50th Avenue Northwest.

This is phase one of that project.

It's immediately adjacent to the Prairie Ridge uh development over on the west side of town.

Like I said, construction is ongoing.

This is 2.3 million dollars worth of spending, and we anticipate that it'll be complete by the end of October.

And here you'll see a list of the projects that came in the next six-year CIP that was part of the 2026 proposed budget.

I'm not gonna read through each one of these, but you will note uh some of these projects later in the outliers here do look a little bit bigger in nature, um, and that just reflects pivoting some of the funding back into the streets reconstruction uh project after that initial prioritization of economic vitality.

Getting into flood control and water quality, a little bit less to show you here because we haven't really started any of the spending underneath the latest approval of flood control.

As we discussed earlier, the first five years of this collection, we're really going to be spent managing the previous approvals, the remaining money from the previous sales tax approvals and start uh building up funds for uh future uh projects and maintenance of the flood control system.

So in 2025, we added a million dollars to the land acquisition share of the flood control dollars, and we anticipate adding another 17.3 million dollars of funding uh between now and the end of uh the next CIP for future projects and maintenance of the system.

And we will begin or anticipated begin project expenditures with the latest approval of flood control dollars in 2028.

Again, that's just uh as we work to utilize the remaining funds in the previous sales tax approval for flood control.

And Irene's up next.

All right, as a reminder for economic vitality, we're really looking at how do we create housing, how do we preserve housing, and then really looking at workforce development and entrepreneurship.

I think you've seen this slide a few times.

It's kind of that high-level overview.

Um, kind of wanted to dive in a little bit more into what has been done or what's kind of coming.

Um, we're really looking for those first five years, as Tyler mentioned, of kind of front loading, continuing with that homeownership creation program.

Um, and I have another slide on that, really looking at how do we support some other nonprofit organizations to continue some of those housing needs.

Um, and then also really looking at how do we better align for our economic development piece.

Um, so first and foremost, I'll start with homeownership creation program, which the council has seen a little bit so far and um we have about 450 units to date that have been approved as part of this.

As a reminder, this is really looking at the scale.

How do we really increase the scale of housing?

And you saw that through Prairie Ridge and Westbury in terms of the number of units that we're seeing.

In addition, we have an additional 320 housing units that are kind of in application process that at some point will come before uh city council as we're working through those applications and making sure that they align with the program in terms of the percent of units that are supporting um up to 120% AMI and also really looking at that scale.

The other piece to the homeownership creation program is for those smaller units or smaller projects is that fee reimbursement program, which still exists, and that kind of comes after the fact of reimbursing for those fees.

So if they're not quite meeting that scale, there's also an opportunity to also support housing in that way.

Um so generally what we're seeing with this is able to also leverage our funding with other funding from the coalition as well.

So we're trying to leverage as as many funding sources as possible with our homeownership creation program and has seen some really good success there with more to come.

Um, the other two that I wanted to mention are possible contributions.

These have not come before city council yet.

Um, these are kind of one is uh the coalition for Rochester Area Housing.