I call this a regular meeting of the beautification commission to order at uh 5.04 p.m.

Uh present in the room are commission commissioner Neelson, Commissioner Weaver, okay, and minor online.

And Commissioner Lane is absent and excuse.

There are three sets of minutes for approval this evening.

Um May 5th 2025, November 11, 2023.

Is that correct?

Oh and January 26, 2023.

Are there any corrections or objections?

Move to approve.

And say a lump.

Okay.

Uh the minutes and approved.

Right.

Um we can just do it like a consent.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Um, this is the time for members of the public to address the commission on non-agenda items.

Is there any public business?

All right.

New business.

Uh we have three discussion items under new business this evening.

We will start by discussing how to move uh commission commission priorities forward.

Um for our first item, we have city manager Nate Duval present to participate in the discussion and give an overview of the city projects process.

All right.

Good evening, good afternoon, state to all city manager.

Uh so Elise had asked me to kind of outline the current CIP process.

Um it's fairly similar to what it's been in the past.

Uh it's got a few modifications.

Um it's actually fairly different.

Anyhow, so we have we've evolved to we now include the capital budget, the capital projects within the uh within the city's annual budget, and so the timeline has shifted uh somewhat.

Most of that is because in the past we had more money.

Uh we had were able to get projects completed on a faster timeline, and so we would appropriate projects, get them out to bid, and go to work.

Uh we now require a longer timeline, so it really doesn't matter when it's less impactful to have the appropriations done in the springtime.

Uh so now we just appropriate uh the funds with the annual budget in the the January 1 money is available for projects, and we start a design process, uh, etc.

So big picture working backwards from that.

Uh what I do, well, I guess it's not me, what the future Cap facilities director will do, probably me until we have one, is we're gonna we send out we've we decided to use a new program called ClearGov.

Uh the project list used to be a spreadsheet that lived on my uh share drive at capital facilities.

Uh so now we're gonna use clear gov.

That's uh cloud-based software where everybody could have access to the capital projects list.

We send that out to stakeholders, uh, those are all the departments in the city.

Those are all the um, I guess I don't know what I call them, the stakeholder groups mean schools, hospitals, senior center, museum.

We send it to them, we send it to all the boards and commissions as well for input.

Um all new project requests are gonna be put into that system.

Uh it requires require.

We asked for a little bit more information if there are photos or brief project description.

Uh it saves all that information in a much cleaner format than what it was on just my little spreadsheet.

Um there's still a scoring matrix.

We had to adjust the scoring based on what the capabilities of the software program were.

So everybody applies for their project or puts a recommendation for a project in it goes through the process of being scored and evaluated.

We put a dollar figure to it.

The ranking system is still holds true where the highest ranking projects have the most release points, depending on how we've we've set it up.

And then from there, we we take how much money council has available.

What we've done in the past is we've taken what was called the carry forward money, the money that wasn't expended in the prior year's budget.

We put that into the CIP planning reserve, and that's the basis for funds available for project work moving forward.

And so essentially that money sits in the bank for about six months or so while we do this process, and then those funds in the planning reserve get appropriate to specific projects with the January budget.

So all that occurs uh should be occurring now, it will be occurring soon where we solicit projects from everybody, we'll get the list built, and then as we go through budget work sessions, one of the work sessions will be about projects, uh, one or two perhaps, uh, and then we'll appropriate funds to various projects.

Uh we've been looking at a model projects have just cost more in the past, and we've tried to go after some grants.

Um that's been a little bit more difficult.

Uh a lot of grant programs are very specific as to what types of projects are eligible, and we have a lot of uh square pegs for round holes for a core analogy, but a lot of our project needs and scopes just really don't fit the grant programs as we found over the course of these last couple years chasing projects.

So a number of projects have been deferred to try to get them funded with grant funds.