Meeting discussionsStart with a topic.

And then for parks, and I will note for all these in the bottom right, you'll see the page in the budget book which is posted online. It's in the library as well as the city clerk's office. It's available for citizens to view um and staff alike. So for parks and wreck, we did undergo a financial sustainability study and created a plan within the past year. Uh this included a cost of service analysis. Uh the company did a very good job going through everything with us. So parks is revamping their fee schedule to reflect the results of that study. um too many to list them all here, but I would refer you to the budget book if you want to look over those more closely. We did speak about the water sewer fee changes. They have a few other changes, mostly uh increases just to keep up with the cost of materials that we're paying. Also, they just try to simplify their fee schedule a lot this year. They realized that a lot of developers are having trouble uh reading that schedule and knowing what they need to pay. So, they they're making effort to simplify that. for our water for our storm water utility. We are increasing that from about $3.80 to $387. Uh so it's we've been increasing that seven cents a year to try to cover um our storm water work that we need to do. Um we're hoping that is sufficient for this year. Uh we are kind of evaluating how we collect some of those things. Going next here to our new personnel requests that are recommended. We have two new personnel requests uh for 146,000 about the these two are in the human resources department. It's HR and risk management specialist. This is the second year they've requested this position.

We're hoping that it helps the department with the workload that they're currently experiencing which is quite heavy for for all of them. and then to help the department just become more efficient in handling these uh risk management things which have become uh more and more and just to kind of coordinate those things uh and improve improve those processes for them. And then for parts facility we are recommending a parts maintenance tech one. This is mostly going to be situated downtown to help we're adding a bathroom. We're adding more things. We need to make sure that we're keeping that area clean for our citizens that come and want to enjoy our downtown area. So that's what that position will be mainly focused on. And then in times when the downtown isn't as occupied, they'll be helping in the community center, keep that clean, help however they need to, whatever they need to do there. We did have five other full-time positions and one part-time position that were requested but are not recommended for this year. Those total about 453,000 for annual impact. We have about 10 reclassifications uh that we are recommending as well. As we go down uh quickly here, I'll read them off. I won't spend too much time on them. For community development, we are recommending that we reclassed planner one to a land development services coordinator. This was really meant to be an entry- level position. It's progressed far beyond that. So, we're reclassing that position. And you'll see some of these to the right for the budget impact have no budget impact. They're really just title changes. That's the case for two of our engineering positions for traffic signal tech to traffic signal tech three, two, and one. This is really just reorganizing the department to make sure that these employees have a way to progress in their career as they're moving up, getting more training, more education.

We want them to have something to work to to to progress and to create it more of a hierarchy in the department. Fire has two as well. We have admin coordinator to certification manager and admin assistant to admin coordinator. Once again, these are positions that have far outperformed their job duties and are doing a lot for the department. The admin coordinator is currently already serving as a certification manager and handling all the certifications for all the departments which go far beyond what a typical admin coordinator does. And then for admin assistant, we're reclassing that through an admin coordinator. That job was initially just meant to help one division in fire. We have five divisions. They are currently serving all five divisions instead of that. So we're recommending reclasses for both of those. For highways and streets, you'll see a large decrease there. Uh the department wishes to remove the warehouse supervisor position, make it a streets maintenance worker and then the job duties that were previously uh under the warehouse supervisor will be done by three separate warehouse attendants. For IT web administrator, information system specialist, uh it feels that this position can help them a lot more if they're information system specialist. the web administrator job. Now that we're done with our um with our website, there's a little less work to do and there's a lot more work to do with things like pick tickets. That's the things that employees put in that we need help with with it when we can't get our computer to turn on and off, which is more often than you'd think. And then for sanitation, uh sanitation worker to sanitation worker two, these are actually four positions. You'll see a little bigger number. So that's why it's close to $10,000.

This is a way for employees once again to progress when they have more skills that are required uh than a typical sanitation worker and uh more education and being able to operate uh different types of equipment. Lastly, for water distribution, we have a water water and sewer supervisor down to an administrative assistant. This is we have a few employees actually retiring as supervisor and administrative assistant and they need more help with more of the administrative side as well. So, we're request or we're recommending that that is reclassed as well. Going to debt obligations. Now, for our total debt obligations, we have 79,636,889. Uh we feel good about being able to cover these obligations. And this is over a 20 15 20 year period. So, that's not 79 million for for this year. I think it's worth noting too that that that number seems high historically, but don't don't forget everyone that that is including the downtown expansion um that it will likely be sold and Emmery property that could likely be sold. All of those things are are it's it seems higher. Plus, we have some splash overages that we're committing to paying down the the outstanding bond debt. So don't be alarmed by that large larger than normal number. That that number includes the interest portion of it which would will be drastically reduced if we're able to pay those off early. Sure. And to that point, as we look down for what's scheduled for FY26, we have about $9.5 million. The first one there, our TAD fund, that's our tax allocation district. We only have three $322,000, a little over that that is scheduled to be paid out of that bond for this year. However, in FY25, we were able to pay an additional $ 1.97 million.

And this year, we're anticipating being able to pay an additional $2.1 million towards that because everything we collect in property taxes from that tax allocation district is put to pay off those bonds. We're anticipating being able to pay those off significantly early. We also have 2.3 about 2.37 million that we're paying from Splast towards that. So, that's not an obligation on the general fund. That's just what we collect for Splast. Uh, as I mentioned before, we are using previously committed funds that was set aside specifically for the purpose of of bonds. And then for that 4 point about $4.5 million from the general fund, about 3.2 of that is for the 2005 bonds for parks and recck facilities. We only have a few more years left of that. Then we'll be done with that. We have 666,000 for the Smyrna Grove bonds we took out in 2016. 1.52 of that is for the splast bonds to get a head start on that from 2021 and then a portion of that is paid from the general fund and then that 2.37 you see is paid from splast and then we have 855,000 from the church bond for 2024 and then the recently uh agreed to bonds are about 412,000 which could change depending on um when those are sold in the summer in July. They're proposed to be sold in July of this year. All righty. Moving next here. Sorry about my cough. Moving next year to general fund CIP. Uh so we do plan for our general fund over a five-year period. However, only the first year, so that would be FY26 is actually budgeted there. So everything else is just planned and those numbers certainly can and do change. This is our general fund of about 2 uh $2,46,000 is a $362,000 increase from our FY25 adopted budget.

However, a note here, uh, the past three years, we have paid for almost all of our general fund CIP from ARPA money, and again, that's the American Rescue Plan Act. There's no more ARPA money this year. The only project that we have not paid for from ARPA is the green energy projects, which is budgeted at a million dollars. Uh, the reason for that is we have a specific revenue funding source from that in the general fund, but everything else is budgeted from the um has been budgeted from ARPA. this year is coming back into the general fund. So that's about a $ 1.04 million increase from FI25. Um this is historically how it's how it's been budgeted, but we just had the ARPA money that was specifically for capital projects these last few years. So it's it's essentially returned to normal going just through all of our CIP projects this year. The CIP committee um was made up of staff uh the mayor as well. We met all the way through January. I had a meeting in December as well going through this list and and making it. And uh one note here for our capital projects, we do have plenty of money in CIP that we are spending on a lot of these areas or I'm sorry in splast in 2022 splast 2016 splast. Councilman Lindley participated in all of those meetings as well. I just wanted to just wanted to make sure that he was recognized for his time in that effort. Absolutely. Yes, sir. um which it is the this is a repeat performance for uh for many of the many of the council members. Um, so I I I would note again though that we do have uh plenty of splass money for a lot of these projects as well that isn't shown here.

Um, that there's a slide at the end, but uh if this seems small and it's not addressing some some issues, we have that money as as well as an upcoming splice uh uh in 2028. So for parks and wreck here, going through these quickly, we have kitchen renovations for Bronner. This is just to replace appliances, shelving, floors, all those things in the Bronner Hall. And then we have kitchen renovation for the community center on the schedule for next year. Then we have playgrounds R&M. Uh our parks department has made a preventive maintenance schedule that they're trying to keep up. We're hoping to do some things through Splat, but we want to make sure to address all those maintenance issues um and not not get behind on anything. So we're putting money there. Sports field improvements. This is to replace things through all our parks like fencing nettings, wind screens, things like that. For parks maintenance equipment, we have a few years on the schedule for this, but for this year, I believe this is a top dresser they're they're hoping to purchase with this. As we go down for fire training ground improvements for $30,000 and functional fitness equipment for $30,000, the training ground is just to help the department utilize the space that they're using better that's over at the public works complex. This includes a uh just a covered area to keep all their equipment. Um concrete slab lean to for storage, gravel, more props, and just to generally upkeep the area. And then for functional fitness equipment, they're hoping this is equipment that is made specifically to help firefighters mimic uh exercises they'll be doing as they're out in the field rather than just traditional weightlifting exercise. They showed us quite a bit of research to show that this would help prevent injuries and keep them safe and healthy as we go forward.

Next, for our property and evidence remodel for police, this is an area where they keep evidence, which is very important to be secure and safe and clean, and they have a lot of lockers that are in a complete state of disrepair that are irreparable right now. So, we're just helping to improve that area, make it a more efficient area for them to use and a secure area for them to store um evidence. For public works, they have several here. Traffic sign and striping improvements. This is actually a uh combination of a few older projects that they put together. This is just to help us to comply with Federal Highway Administration regulations, update pavement markings, improve safety, replace signage, things like that. And then traffic signal improvements. Uh again, kind of speaks for itself. This is outdated traffic signals, LED lights, cameras, things like that. Conducting studies as well. So we go down there. Backflow testing and replacement. This is to make sure that our water's flowing the way it should with no contamination. Uh public works restroom edition. We have a lot of public works employees that are currently all sharing one bathroom and just making it a very bad situation over there. So we are uh certainly want to help them become more efficient and uh not have to work in in those kind of conditions. I mentioned green energy projects. This is mainly used for some of the work that we're doing with Georgia Power. This is collected from a specific revenue source, which is the street light fee that some that residents see on their property tax bills. As we go down to water heater there, water heater replacement, we're wanting to make sure that we're not only replacing water heaters after they bust and flood entire buildings and then cost us way more money.

So, we're wanting to do that uh preventatively to make sure that that we help address some of those issues before they come up. It's a similar thing with leak detection as we move down here. This leak detection thing is great where once uh any potable water that is a leak is detected in a building, it shuts all the water down, preventing further damage and preventing us from insurance issues. Bridge repairs and maintenance. Cobb County uh did a study. We have to comply with those a few years ago that kind of graded all of our bridges and they they weren't horrible, but they're kind of in the middle. And there were when that study happened, there was about 11 bridges that we needed work done to repair on. This is the second year we've put money in to slowly repair those uh bridges so that we're not once again going to have a year where we have a million dollars to repair bridges. And then for sanitation carts and underground sanitation carts, these are the wear and tear of sanitation day in and day out. Those get broken. We need to replace them. So we've we've had money in there for quite a while to make sure that we're replacing those. for water sewer CIP. We have these are just three recurring projects that we've had um every year. Lead and copper inventory. This was federally mandated by the EPA um to be completed in about three stages. So you'll see we're hoping that will be over in FY28. And then infrastructure and drainage projects. These are just any projects that come up. We instead of bouncing up and down, we've begun a few years of increasing that about 7% every year. So that's why you see the study increase the buildup to make sure that we have enough money to uh replace those things.

And this is funded by transfer in from the water sewer fund for storm water CIP. Once again, this is just to help any storm water infrastructure to make sure that we are keeping up with that. We have about a 7% or a 7% increase. This is about a 2% increase each year. Um this is funded by the monthly storm water fee. Um all the money pretty much all the money goes here. We do have a transfer out because we have a assistant engineer for um in our engineering department that focuses on storm water. So that's funded by transfer in from the storm water fund. But other than that, all the money we collect goes into the storm water CIP to help with that. For our vehicle replacements and additions, as I said, we are replacing more vehicles than we did than we have previously. We're replacing about 24 or exactly 24 vehicles. Um our budget is 3.57 million about 3.6 million. Once again this is a bigger number but we have been putting more and more to fund balance every year. So we have plenty of money that is sufficient to cover um these purchases. We we were also able to use our ARPA funds to buy some vehicles which freed up even more of those reserves. Um we also have $100,000 that is budgeted uh for emer that is we are putting towards the vehicle replacement for emergency funds. There's nothing specifically budgeted. So if a vehicle comes up that needs to be replaced, it gets wrecked throughout the year, that will come back to you all to do a budget amendment to to replace that emergency vehicle. So that's 100,000, which was historically the number we put. We had a few years where we put 50 and then we had one or two where we had 150,000, but we have 100 there.

And I will note once again the the budget book, you'll see um the pages if you want to look over some of those. You can see all the breakout. The big number for fire is a fire truck. And then we have two sanitation trucks we're replacing as well. The vehicle replacement is also done similar to CIP on a five-year schedule. Only the first year, um, those are budgeted, but we re-evaluate based on criteria adopted in the budget book every year. This is a little breakout of 2022 SPLAST. Um, all of these numbers are adopted at the beginning of the SPLS program. So even though you see these numbers for FY26, the whole budget for all these is there. This is what is currently there that we're thinking we may spend, you know, that is at council's discretion and um and staff of how that money is actually spent, but this is um what is shown in the budget book to be spent. And then there's other projects that total quite a bit that aren't shown because it's it's a long list of projects. Um, as mentioned before, we do uh pay a decent bit of our bonds from the SPLOS from collection from the Splast fund. We have facility improvements, radio replacement, resurfacing. Uh, that's something we always do during Splast. And then, uh, certainly as we see our collections come in, there may be some re-evaluation of putting more money to some projects, doing less in some places as well. And just to finish up here, as I said, this budget is available on our website. If you go to annual budget, financial and audit reports, that's under the finance department tab um under departments on the city website. You can find that there. Try to keep it updated. And then our adoption schedule. We're doing our public hearing tonight.

And then I believe there's always been already been a special called hearing uh for the formal budget adoption June 2nd. That's all we got. Are there any questions for Landon or Kristen, knowing that y'all have seen this several times already, any other questions? The only thing I'll add, and it'll take two seconds, is just um it was uh advertised in MDJ as required. Um so we've met all the legal requirements for the budget. So, no questions. Great job, y'all. and every like Landon does a fantastic job every year. So like I give him all the credit. He works so hard on this. He does a fantastic job. Knows all this stuff and talks from memory. So he does a great job. Just want to give him the recognition. I need he felt comfortable with you standing next to him for any support that he needed. So this is a public hearing. Uh if there's anybody who wants to speak on the budget, uh come up and be sworn in by our city attorney now. All right. Don't all come up at once. We're going to close the public hearing and see nobody wants to speak. Um no vote needed this evening. Correct. All right. And that'll be on a special call meeting on June 2nd. You don't want to stay. See you later. Have a good evening. All right. Item C, resolution 2025-00009, authorization for the approval of resol resolution 2025-009 for the continuation of a moratorum for 60 consecutive days beginning on June 8th, 2025 for the accepting of processing applications seeking the issuance of a signed permit for freestanding signs and authorized mayor mayor prom to sign and execute all related documents. Any questions or is there Any background that you'd like to add, Kristen or Scott? Scott, is there any background? Is there any Okay. All right. May I have a motion?