Uh for you for those of you that don't know me, my name is Tyler Richards.

I'm the city manager here for City of Texas County, Arkansas.

As you all well know, we're here to talk about this street and drainage bond proposal.

The purpose of these town hall meetings, the most important goal to us as the city is that you voters be fully informed on this proposal, fully informed of the issues at hand that are prompting this.

We want our citizens to fully understand the issues that we're facing, the the funding that's coming into the city, where those funds currently go, and what it's going to take for us to address the our infrastructure needs.

Some of this information may be redundant, may not apply to you, but in an effort to be fully transparent, we wanted to include everything.

But I'll try my hardest to go through this presentation as quickly as possible while being thorough.

If we run out of time, you've still got questions.

Tracy Lee, our public works director, is here.

So if you could, if you think of a question while I'm going through this presentation, try to write it down or remember it so that you can ask that at the end.

Oh, I guess I gotta turn this on.

Okay.

So for those of you that don't know, um a bond is to put it in simple terminology, it's it's a form of debt.

Municipal bonds are typically uh a low interest form of debt that allows for cities to get a uh to fund large projects that normally they wouldn't be able to with the the funds that they currently

have.

Uh bonds are normally supported by some guaranteed form of revenue.

Um in our case here, what we're proposing is is a property tax.

Um so the the improvements uh for this bond include street rehabilitation, of course.

With that street rehab, um you could see it's gonna depend on the road, of course, but you could see some some safety upgrades, whether that be signals, lighting, sidewalks, um, that sort of thing.

Um also with this, you'll see a third question on the ballot that is a drainage bond.

With that, that will contain some creek cleaning or clearing and and dredging of of those creeks.

So the necessity of the bond, um, like I said, this this bond will provide upfront funding that normally would take us approximately 20 years to complete all these projects on the list.

Um we proposing this because the the city's facing some some revenue constraints.

We don't foresee any increase in the revenues that we're bringing in in the near future.

And uh these these projects were needed long ago.

Uh you all drive our streets, you all see our our drainage infrastructure, um, some of the flooding that we

have.

Um I would label our revenue constraints as it pertains to street and drainage infrastructure to to be a twofold issue.

Number one, we have the problem of a sustainable revenue uh source.

For many decades now, we've been underfunded.

Uh the property taxes you paid for towards streets were very, very little, and that has put us well behind in our infrastructure needs.

So we've got the sustainable revenue issue, but we're so far behind behind now that we need a large influx of capital in order to catch back up.

Um if you hear me talk about a sustainable resource, that's money that we have uh guaranteed coming in each year, um, and then the the large capital influx would be addressed with with this bond.

So

I know question on many of your minds were um where are my current taxes going.

I'm trying to break this down for you as best possible.

In order to understand where your taxes go, it'd be helpful to know where all of our revenue comes from first.

So you see a pie chart there.

The the majority of our revenue comes from sales tax.

And I'll I'll go into more detail on some of these in the next couple of slides.

But please keep in mind, these are round numbers, they're they're close, but they're they're not exact.

Um I didn't figure there was any need in putting down to the exact dollar on here to confuse things.

But if you are ever interested in those exact numbers, I'm more than happy to sit down or have phone conversation and go through some exact numbers and some exact line items.

But our largest contributor, the the sales tax, um, it's accounts for about 39% of our revenue at $13.5 million, and then refuse at 17%.

Refuse is what you pay or your that's your trash bill.

Um that accounts for $5.8 million.

The property tax that we're that we're talking about today is 12% of $4.1 million.

Uh state turn back, these are funds that we get from the state, um, whether that be strictly for roads or or or other things, that's 11%, 3.9 franchise receipts at 10%, and franchiser seats are uh fees that the utility companies have to pay the city in order to use their their right-of-way to install those utilities.

So in just a quick note on that refuse item, um it looks like we're bringing in a good amount from that trash bill, but 4.7 of that immediately goes back out to pay the waste haulers that we have under contract, and also to pay the landfill fees.

So there's not much on top of there to fund additional things there and public works.

So to talk a little bit about our largest contributor sales tax, um, it's distributed to three entities.

The the 10.25% goes to the majority goes to the state, and then county and city.

Uh our portion at the city is 1.5% of that 10.25.

And I'm sure you're all familiar with the state income tax exemption.

Um our sales tax is already uh it's two percent higher than our neighbor there on the Texas side, and it can make retail development difficult and other things, but in order for you all to and myself as well to receive that exemption, an additional sales tax amount has to go to the state.

So the states implemented um additional percentage on top of what they normally would collect in order to try to recoup some of those funds that they lose in the income tax exemption.

So it in all for sales tax, the city collects about $13.5 million a year, and just to put that into perspective on how far that goes, the combined police and fire budget is about $16.4 million.

So we need the entire sales tax amount plus an additional about $3 million just to fund police and fire, and that doesn't even account for public works, finance, animal control, all the other departments we need.

And that's not necessarily how it's broken out and where the money goes to or anything.

That's just to put it into perspective for you.