San Angelo City Council Budget Workshop 8-13-20

[0:00:00] good morning everyone and welcome to our budget workshop today on the 13th of august 2020. we have all council members present so of course that means we have a quorum so this meeting is called the order we had no public comment so we will move right into the workshop agenda and we will start with a an update and discussion related to property and casualty insurance charles hagan you're on please good morning mayor council good morning carl hagen your risk manager and we're going to take a look at our property casualty fund account as it relates to auto damages and things of that nature on the first slide you will find that the police department is at the top and they'll remain at the top as we go through the slides the uh and there's some expectation there that am i still on there you are okay because my screen just changed completely i'm sorry uh so the police department is is at the top of the list and in relation to that you know they have a greatest portion of the fleet assigned to them and they're also on the road 24 7. so they inherently are at greatest risk of having more accidents than anybody else and so that explains their number a little bit as high as it is compared to the other departments and that's something that we want to take into consideration the other thing on the fiscal year 17 slide is the cost incurred and the cost incurred will inherently be affected by the severity of the accidents and here we see that the water distribution has an incredible cost incurred considerably more than the others and that was a result of a very severe accident

[0:02:01] and and so you know the severity of the accident will have a pretty good impact on the on the budget as far as our accounts are concerned well i mean i first asked why this information so old because it's from 2016 to 2017. we're in the 2019-2020 was there not more recent information that could have been provided yes ma'am we've got three years of information for you so as we go forward we're going to cover the the last three years and then we'll look at where we're at currently okay thank all you and so the the bottom row on the bottom down there says total across all departments that was 145 total auto claims for fiscal year 617 at a cost of 342 991 dollars do we have comparisons of what um whether this is somewhat in the range of what most cities experience in terms of number of claims and dollars incurred i didn't i have not done a benchmark uh report across the other other cities um though the number of vehicles on the road versus uh the severity the impact is is really what's going to have a greater increase to to our funds and so if we move on to fiscal year 18 you will see that everything has improved and as we go forward each year has gotten better for us the total numbers uh of claims is down to 122 from 145 and we had a total cost incurred in fiscal year 18 of 69 000 so there's it can be a very huge variance from year to year again depending on the severity of claims and the number just to note that was a a reduction of a good number of reductions from the

[0:04:07] prior year and then as we go on to fiscal year 19 we see yet again another drop uh though the uh the cost is up again that reflects the severity of the accidents but the claim numbers were down a little bit more and then in fiscal year 20 which will be my last slide you can see we're currently at 66 claims and uh cost incurred at 299 000 well may i ask because the 299 000 is a bigger number than if you had all of those costs incurred by the individual areas they don't come up to 299. yes ma'am the 299 is all the departments not just those five so those five would be what percentage of that 299 because we're only showing those five and yet those five if you add them up very small percent of them basically 300 000 so where is the other expense if you give me a minute ma'am i'll pull those numbers up for you i mean what says 50 is the police but that's 50 of these five right or 46.97 percent is 50 of the numbers that are there the the 50 is going to be the overall claim number so that's going to be 50 of the 66 claims okay but then the 50 000 is 17 percent cost of your career yes ma'am again if you add those percentages up we're missing something here in terms of where the big whole is in terms of the cost across all departments yes ma'am so these uh there's actually six on this

[0:06:12] slide those six departments represent uh 20 of the total cost where's the other 80 it would be spread out between the other departments we were asked to just give the top five to six uh highest rated right apartments um so i did not put an entire list of all the departments on i couldn't even fit that outside but mayor if i could uh speak a little bit here so when as we were again the brian kendrick director of human resources um as we were putting this together the way that we separated the top claimants was by the number of claims we could certainly get you the opposite information by the cost incurred if that would if that would help but we put it together by the number of claims and it's a good point that you're making because it's it's pretty obvious that this accounts for most of the claims in these top six uh but not most of the dollars and so we could we could definitely provide you with the information of my guess is it's probably mostly in one accident that the uh or one claim that the uh the rest of that money is incurred again it must have been fairly severe well and because if you go back to the 2018 2019 and you look at the total dollars in those uh five categories it comes up to a large percent of the total dollars it's just when you get to this year all of a sudden the 20 of those it only represents 20 of those dollars so there's a big miss somewhere yeah that's that's an understandable question again we as we separated it you know of course most most times if you you know if you uh show most of the percentage of claims then it's going to show most the percentage of cost but on this particular year evidently there's one acci one claim that's in one of the departments that's

[0:08:16] uh significantly higher so we can we can certainly get that information my apologies we didn't catch that um as we're putting this together but we can certainly get you that information okay proceed well we have one more slide this is the grand total from 2016 to 2020 slide yes ma'am there's there's a grand total of the three years and the current year and with the total cost incurred up to this point because see again in this one your cost incurred represents a large part of that 545 000 so that makes sense so there's something about that one slide it doesn't seem right because when this you you add them all up the cost of current dollars of 545 943 is represented there i'm not sure mayor i think you're right that as i'm doing the number in my head uh that appears to be some sort of typo on slide um five uh but like i said we'll we'll get you a resolution on that on that number because this one seems to reflect it so two questions i have and then i'm sure council has some questions as well one is what is the training that we have in place to help reduce the number of claims because if you look at it on 66 claims in 2019 2020 total 66 claims what do we do to work with our staff our employees to try to reduce the number of claims and then number two what with these claims and these dollar

[0:10:20] amounts what impact has there been in terms of our insurance costs so the training that we have in place ma'am is we do a defensive driving course all new hires go through the defensive driving course and they take another course on a third year anniversary and at any point in time during that time period if a supervisor has concerns over an employee's driving they can send them back to the defensive driving course at any time so once someone has the first defensive driving and then a three-year course on defense and driving there's no more defensive driving education for our employees i'm not driven from my office no now they can do tailgate training and things like that down at the department level but i don't manage that i don't oversee that i let those supervisors take care of it charles can you speak to whether or not it's just the third anniversary or it's every third year every third year okay so it is repetitive yes ma'am okay sorry it's all right and then based off of this over the same time period of this of these statistics what has been the increase in insurance costs for the decrease in insurance costs well the cost to this to my funds are those costs that are listed there we don't have an x excess insurance to cover the day-to-day operation so that is what we uh incur in-house so we don't have any increase in insurance costs to the city of on an annual basis or on a every three-year basis or every five-year basis mayor um one of the things that one things that we did this year was actually um in the property casualty fund we were able to actually reduce the burden

[0:12:22] on the general fund this year and we hope to move that forward we believe that we've we've got a plan related to how we assess the the i guess the premiums per um asset and uh we're kind of reworking that as we move forward so hopefully we'll have additional savings that we can uh you know that the general fund will realize as well but this year we actually reduced the property casual casualty burden across departments okay thank you i am going to ask if there's any questions from council members or brian or for mr um hagen yes tommy that's tommy heather senior member district one either either brian or charles either one um i just it hasn't been stated out loud but this is a truly self-insured program we have no stop-loss insurance um above a certain point whatsoever so we we totally self-insure these claims is that what i hear you saying yes sir yes sir okay that's that's what i thought i was reading between the lines so yeah that that would then we would have no insurance cost in there um but we could have increased costs and so the issue is as far as whether it's self-insured or an outside firm you still can have increased expenses relative to these and an impact on the general fund absolutely and i think that's what brian was saying he was they are working on um something that will address or at least help address um our overall costs of self-insurance in this particular account is that correct brian yes um without and i'm sure we'll be bringing you know presentations in the future to

[0:14:25] council as as things change um but one of the things that's been a focus and i know it was a focus from uh from you know mayor council daniel me uh as i came to human resources and risk management uh to look at things from a business perspective to make things make business sense and so we're applying some of those things into how we uh how we look at our risk management side and charles has been great he's been doing a lot of the backup work and again just this year we were able to actually reduce the burden to the funds for both uh risk funds both 320 and 330 we were able to reduce the the burden so hopefully that will continue uh the more business uh you know business driving uh i guess um innovations and uh looking at the the way we do those processes uh hopefully we'll see more of that in the future um and any complete rehab of it i'm sure we'll bring to council uh as that's going forward to let you all know uh what we found and you know get y'all's direction good thanks brian thanks charles appreciate it thank you sir do i have um anyone else who would like to ask a question or make a comment all right i just want to keep emphasizing we need to continue with training and constant reminders of safety so that we don't end up with a huge fit to the general fund down the way so thank you charles thank you brian and thank you for doing that work and letting us better understand what's going on in terms of claims and accidents okay with that we will now move into item b which is update and discussion related to health insurance and we have brian you're back on again

[0:16:29] and i think julie rickman is here as well today is that correct i believe so i haven't uh seen that julie's on the line but i believe she is and so what um what we'll do is we'll start by looking at some of the you know just kind of reviewing some of the things we talked about last meeting uh as a primer and then as we get into the options that y'all had requested um i'll take back over so i think julie if you're okay starting this and then as we get to the options i'll join in absolutely and uh good morning mayor and council this is julie and i'm with holmes murphy we are the benefit consultant for the city of san angelo and so we work with very closely with human resources and environments team to come up with the budget for our medical plans for the ongoing plan year so really what we start off is the look back on how your plan has performed over the history of really the plan and the current contract types that we have now so looking back to july actually this goes back to may of 2016 and this goes through may of 2020 just because the way that we have claims lag data and so you don't see it in may at the end but it's there our plan has been running really well um over the last you know four or five years and we're our trend which means that how our plan is actually running compared to you know when we let me start from the beginning so the green line is your actual claim so each of those little green um peaks and valleys are how your claim is actually are performing month over month the purple line that you see or black depending on how your screen is showing it is the actual slope of your trend and how your plan is actually performing so over the last four years your plan is running at a two and a half percent trend which is significantly higher than the market is and this is medical specifically and if you go to the next slide when we get a little bit of a different story you see that it's not as volatile

[0:18:32] when it comes to your actual trend so you don't see each month hopping up and down a lot but overall the slope of that trend is at 15.9 so we can see it's significantly increasing that really has to do with a lot of those specialty medications that are coming out the ones that you see on tv that cure things that um you know really are very helpful and can very much improve the quality of life for individual people they're expensive because of the nature of those medications and so when we look at that slope of your pharmacy it's not surprising that it's significantly higher than when we look at your medical and we constantly monitor that and try and figure out the best things to do for not just your plan but for the members that are on your i'm sure that we can keep the integrity of of how this the slip keeps going okay next one um excuse me question go ahead billy dewitt single member district six on that first slide julie you mentioned that the 2.5 increase is significantly lower than the market do you know what the market is right now we're looking at 6.9 percent but in this this time period when we're looking at it we've had medical trend as high as 10 percent and as low as 6 and a half for 7 so when we look at our trend um we're i would say 6.9 is pretty fair to say seven percent is pretty fair to say and we're getting at 2.5 okay and you may be going to get to this julie but um kind of the significant increase that we see in the february um april time frame is that due to the covet 19 that actually covid helped us um surprisingly so when we look in february december and january and february we had some claims that hit us in those months which is why we had that big spike our utilization went up but our claim we had some large claims spend that happened during those months if you look at march april and may and you see that big dip down

[0:20:34] that is due to covid so covet actually some people weren't going in and getting elective surgeries done they weren't really frankly they weren't going to the doctor as much as they they would have normally that actually helped our trend line start to go back down again but that significant increase was not overcovered actually helped us level that line back out again thank you you're welcome i would be concerned that if they weren't doing that where if two months down the road we're going to see a spike again because not going doesn't mean problems don't exist it simply means many people were nervous to go to the doctor and nervous to go to the er nervous to seek help and i'm concerned that we could have an uptick based off of your explanation yes yes mayor that's uh in a few slides we're going to get to that assumption slide and i think you'll see um so that we built that into our assumptions for next year correct and that's actually a really good point mara and so just really to for for the mayor and council when we look at covid um the city of san angelos pays for covert expenses for members at 100 and that's um partly because of legislation and partly because of the way that the city pays for those um correct because of the cares act yes absolutely um so when we look at the impact of the claims spend when billy brought up um when councilmember dwight brought up the the that drop down so part of it's the elective surgery as we talked through we definitely saw an increase of people using teledoc for telemedicine so um i always like to give the example of if you have a small child that has an ear infection instead of bringing the child into the doctor and then having to go to pharmacy to get the medication what you know you need you can call teledoc and you can have someone over the phone diagnose prescribe medication and then call them for you so all you have to do is run down to the store and grab the

[0:22:34] medication since people weren't going to the doctor for those smaller those smaller types of services needed we've seen it a shift to people using teledoc which is beneficial it's less expensive but it's also convenient so that shift behavioral shift will help our plan in the future the other is an emergency room utilization decreases um and this is oftentimes we see on plans people going to the emergency room for an emergency situation someone goes in because they have a headache or they have you know um you know stomach ache or something along those lines or they take their child again for an ear infection because it's 11 o'clock at night and i know i need the medication so those two things the teledoc and the behavioral shifts from that and then the emergency room utilization will actually help us in the future as well um because people understand the convenience of care that might be more appropriate to the the incident that they're trying to treat and mayor if i could uh just emphasize what what julie's saying there one of the first things that julie and i talked about in probably november of 2018 when i got over here one of the first things i asked about was er visits um that are unnecessary as far as you know somebody went to urgent care or teledoc and how do we how do we help to i guess educate uh appropriate behavior as far as you know utilization of resources um because you know we are self-insured and we're all in this together so um we have been blitzing information uh as much as we can trying to educate our population as to uh you know the other things that are available other than emergency uh room visits uh so teledoc that the covet actually um has been maybe it may be at the

[0:24:38] the i don't know the uh silver lining uh in a dark cloud that uh people have you know embraced televox use and we think that'll be good for the future um as more and more people see that that is a viable option um to to help them again with you know children with ear infection or whatever that's just a much more uh cost efficient method of dealing with those kind of everyday sort of issues um and the the lack of er utilization will be huge over the time so i just can't emphasize that enough we've we've really worked on that uh education uh for you know behavior uh because we are all in this together well speaking of that brian i'm glad you brought that up i would assume that we know enough information not that it's specific to any employee of course but i'm sure we have a couple areas that are very are the big issues like diabetes or heart what are we doing i know we worked with community before on a wellness program and i know they'll present sometime later of course i'm sure the wellness program thing again but how are we dealing with that to reduce our overall health care costs since we are self-insured i am so glad you asked that now julie can uh give you a lot more information but we we actually have addressed diabetes was a huge concern for us as i think it's a huge concern across the u.s and so we recently partnered with a program called connect and i'll let julie explain a little more of that yeah and so connect is a diabetes um it's not prevention it's really a diabetes management program so for those members on your plan that have diabetes and are are that need to have treatment so basically the program gives them the equipment to monitor

[0:26:41] their blood sugar levels it has an app that they can use that will keep that monitor so let's say i take my blood sugar it's running low or high i can set it up where it automatically informs my doctor or my my partner let them know hey julia's spelled sugar spiking it includes the test strips and the testing equipment which oftentimes we find that a lot of times that folks with diabetes end up having a cost barrier to receiving um or to testing services because they don't want to use their test strips because things are expensive so they can afford the test strips this includes it as part of the program and then just the monitoring in general and they have a coach that can help them with their diabetes and so because it's monitoring them constantly they'll be able to talk to their coach and their coach can say i notice that you have these spikes at this time of day let's go ahead and talk through this and help you manage this better um it's going to definitely be a lot more effective for folks when they go in and get that treatment done and we're very excited to be able to allow employees to utilize this the good thing about this as well is your plan already covers um the cost of a lot of pieces for diabetes but the cost of this program is very equal to what you're paying currently so we expect some long-term um favors through again kind of educating behavior good i think that's an important very important julia you can continue unless there's other questions from council i can't see because the screen's up so i can't tell if somebody's wanting to speak or ask a question so my apologies if you are the the other thing just to address i'm sorry about that the other thing to address for wellness is we have some a system now um our clue reporting um internal of homes murphy that we can get into um looking at proactive approaches to your actual

[0:28:43] claim spend so we can collect your we have your claims data and we can look to it and determine what types of events will be happening in the future and then we work with hr to help determine what programming we can put in place to help people before claims become high dollar claims and so that's definitely something that's a focus for us and we'll continue to focus on um the health of the population and instead of being more reactionary as as most folks have been in the past we can be a lot more proactive when it comes to how do we address the needs of the member population for the city of san angelo employees and their families good i think it's a great program continue okay next slide please i actually have a question yeah um do you happen to know the overall uh utilization percentage of er visits per year on a normal year the top of my head i don't know but i can collect i have that so i can pull it up if i need to but i can certainly get it for you after this meeting but i will tell you that normally when we look at our er utilization for most clients about your size that i have about 30 to 40 percent of the claims that go through an er are non-emergency claims okay yeah it's pretty significant and if you think about oftentimes it's because people don't know where to go for care they don't know what type of care is most appropriate um sometimes it's affordability for that member because if you go to the emergency room you don't have to pay anything up front at the emergency room but if you go to a clinic or your doctor you're going to have to pay your copay and so sometimes it's a cost cost piece um so we try and find ways to eliminate that barrier um through education of employees and letting them know again it's it's your plan everyone's in this together as a self-funded medical plan so you've got er for five thousand dollars versus going to urgent care for 120 to the plan it's going to affect us

[0:30:46] all long term right right 30 to 40 that's what i was trying to figure out how much non-emergence so that's kind of what we're going to see on the decrease with the cova trend oh yeah we're going to see a pretty significant decrease on the emergency room the other part of that is falling many parents work so they can't get to a doctor during normal hours so it's the after hours visit the middle of the night yeah the correct part is what you said earlier that's why we've really got to get into this telemedicine thing so that it's the trip to the er is not necessary even if it's after hours and so i'm going to ask is telemedicine available after hours it is telemedicine is available 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year now again to brian's point that i guess the silver lining to covet is that parents were not taking their children to emergency rooms for ear infection during the last few those first few months especially when we were shelter in place for covid and so for those individuals that started using telemedicine during that period of time i think that they'll um continue that behavior shift because of the convenience factor of it which will help us long term and and hopefully change that behavior i would hope we would do something with our employees um that is educational meaning do we have a flyer that we give to our employees that said did you know if it's not at night um you can call this number or something to make sure people are fully aware of that service we are constantly doing that sort of thing um here we take every educational opportunity that we can to um like i said to try to enhance behavior uh in a way that is most efficient and you know for everybody it's uh we believe it's a win-win for everybody if they um use the the plan uh the most efficient and proper way thank you okay julie you can go ahead or julie is it julie

[0:32:51] yes it's it's julie i mean officially it's juliana but it's not on the screen that way um so when we look at our our trend and we and we come up with our assumptions so what we do is we say this is how your plan is running this is kind of where we're looking to um when we project for the future plans of your plan we use the medical trend assumption of 6.8 and the pharmacy trend assumption of 7.1 and those trend numbers actually come from a single survey of the large carriers other brokerage firms what are you using for this upcoming year so this is kind of a blended rate of what everyone is using which is where those numbers come from we also take into account how your plan is currently running so we were looking at that 2.5 percent trend on your medical and your 15 on your pharmacy we take that into consideration two and figure out your starting point of where we want to and then that's how we projected we included what we call the coven 19 lag so mayor when you were talking earlier about a surgery that wasn't performed during the covid lockdown period that surgery still needs to happen yes that's true however because of the way that our surgeons and our physicians can take appointment it's not as though they can double up on one day to be able to make up for those things so we're gonna see more of a trickle effect when it comes to a lot of those elective surgeries so let's say you had to have a knee surgery you might be able to put that off a little bit longer than something a little a little bit more urgent and so people have been putting off a lot of surgeries and doing that on a more slow basis and so it's not going to be a giant jump up in one month or two months it'll be a trickle over the next year or so as people's continued to do that the other thing i'll point out is there are some soft tissue injuries some spinal injuries that might be able to be treated with some less invasive treatments there is an a company called airrosti that is covered under your plan that actually will have a provider in the city um soon that actually works

[0:34:54] with soft tissue injuries and so spines knees hips um ankles actually have bandage on mine right now from an airrosti treatment it's less expensive and oftentimes can avoid surgeries because of the way the treatment goes and we always have a lot of muscular skeletal claims for the city of san angelo and so this should help maybe people that put off surgery might be able to get something that's a little less invasive a lot less costly and they can and go about their lives on a normal basis a little sooner um the other thing that we assume when we're looking at the plans um and the rates for this next plan year is no plan design changes so when we're looking at this we determined how the plan was running put in our trend put in that covered leg and said if we're not going to make any changes to our plan designs what does this look like for our rates for our members and going forward okay uh next slide please okay and i think this is probably where where i'll take over thank you julie i appreciate it um so again this brian kendrick director of human resources i feel like i said that a few times um the total premium line is on this next slide is the one i really would like to direct you to um and uh it you'll see that that stays consistent among all three of these options at 650 208 that's uh that's what we've determined based on all those assumptions we just talked about we'll will keep the plan solvent and so under option one you'll see that that 652 we take the the current rates and we have increased them for both the city and the employee and increase those by the four point four percent uh to make up for that 650 208 total premium so you'll see that's as it relates to the city contribution that'll move from the current number of 486

[0:36:57] 84 to 508.26 that's a 4.4 percent increase and the employee uh contribution rate and you'll see that that number is a blended rate uh with uh with all of the um all the people that are in our plan across the various uh you know whether it be high medium low employee only uh to all the way to employ you know their whole family um so that's a blended rate across all of those tiers and you'll see that it's moving from 137.76 to 143 82 again an increase of 4.4 percent so that that would be a shared burden of that 4.4 increase between the two groups the city contribution and the employee contribution uh and we'll get into a little more detail in the following slides but this is kind of the overview of this so the option two would be if the city took on the entire burden of the increase uh then it then it winds up being a 5.64 for the city and obviously a zero percent increase for the um for the employees so uh that blended rate for the uh for the employee stays at 137.76 while again the city contribution per employee per month goes from 486.84 to 514.32 then as you look at option 3 you'll see that the employer contribution is 4 86 84 so it's remaining the same and we've dropped all the burden to the uh to the employees premiums and because you know there's there's more uh contributed from the city side that results in a 19.95

[0:39:00] increase uh for the uh for the city employees and again that blended rate moves from 137 76 to 165 24. and i'll stop there and let you kind of look at this and then if y'all have any questions let me know and again we'll we'll get deeper into those options and how that how that looks um but i kind of wanted just to give you a a brief overview and see if you have any questions about what i've just described ryan first of all describe what is er contribution and ee contribution that very good because i called it city and employee er would be the employer contribution um the ee is the employee contribution um so uh sorry as i was saying city and employee those were those were the ones i was referring to okay do i have a question from counsel do i have any questions from counsel all right with that said then uh brian let's you can go ahead and reduce the pictures as it looks like no one has a question because we now better understand e r is employ er and e e is employee so we're saying that if if if we do employee city shared 50 50 what is the impact on the budget and what would i think go ahead okay um so what we've got that in future slides i just wanted to show you how it works from an individual basis first uh and then um i think actually uh kim or tina can tell you exactly how that impacts the general fund overall um but i wanted to show you how it impacts per you know our benefit from an individual perspective first and then we'll go to

[0:41:03] the overall number so just to be clear if it's an employee in city shared 50 50 it would be a 4.4 increase to one's expense so there they would see an increase in their cost of 4.4 percent both for the employee and for the city yes ma'am that's correct so if the city picked up 100 of it we would have a total increase in cost of 5.64 per person uh yes from the city's perspective yes from the city's perspective then of course employee only we get that so all right any questions from council all right continue brian okay so if we go to the next slide you'll see that option one a little in a little more detail um and we just wanted to show how basically how this would impact um the uh employees portion so that you could see that from a tiered perspective so at the top you'll see the current rates um and this is under that 4.4 shared increase between city and employee um then you see that 2021 that middle uh group that's the proposed rates so you can see for instance the current rate for employee only low which is that third from the top on the left um you'll see that that's currently twenty dollars and forty four cents um that moves you know at a four point four percent increase that'll move to 2133 for employee only low and then if you looked at say employee family medium you'll see it's moving from 870 to 54 to 9 10 66 again that's a just a 4.4 percent increase across all those tiers depending on what they

[0:43:04] um what they elected what kind of coverage they elected um so the e the s the c and the f what are those specific those are that's a good question mayor sometimes i look at these so often that i think everybody knows what i what i'm talking about so the employee the e is employee only uh that means that they are just covering themselves um the s means that it's employee and spouse the c means it's employee and children but not spouse and the f means it's employee and family uh spouse and children so that's how that breaks down i apologize um and then at that bottom tom thompson has a question so i'm gonna just have you take a break ryan let's hear tom thompson's question please okay brian as we look at this and we look a girl what is the most common plan that people use are they employably is their family how does that ratio break down which one's the most that's a great question uh if whoever is controlling the slides could you move up two slides or move down two slides i guess just one second we'll have it back up oh looks like i ended the whole show yeah it's the current plan enrollment slide that one you'll you'll see that breaks down among low medium and high employee only spout employee spouse employee children employee family and those are the actual elections so you can see our biggest group of course is employee only low 707 and uh we don't have anybody in the employee family high so you can kind of see how that uh how that breaks down among those various tiers and that's how we get that that's how we get that blended rate that i was

[0:45:05] mentioning earlier because it's it's among all those tiers right so the hip is all employee only i'm sorry the lion's share of it's all employee only yes sir okay that can be a combination of single people obviously or family members who have insurance from other from where they work as well so yes absolutely but that's a good question parents you know so they are doing children up you mean there's yeah combination of those okay so if we can go back to option one i'll see if y'all have any questions about that slide before we move on to option two that that bottom section is the increase per pay period not per month um so that's that's slightly different the top two are month rates but we wanted to show we thought it might we anticipated the question might be asked how does that affect a paycheck and so i think the big thing is how does it impact the general fund and so um our big concern is not getting down digging down too far into the details and looking at it on an individual monthly basis and or employee basis but in combination of knowing health care is an issue what is it what do the various plans one two and three employee employee and city shared or employee only what what are we looking at in terms of the general fund impact yes ma'am and that's uh again i'm laying the groundwork here and that that question i believe that answer the cost of these options we put in the presentation in the next presentation so the actual cost is in the next presentation but we could certainly uh review any question that point that you have i'll i'll be here for that as well um you're going to mayor this is tina dierski director of finance the general fund for the um employer only in other words the general fund picking up the entire cost would be

[0:47:09] a hundred ninety eight thousand dollars the cost and you shared four and four point four percent employee and four point four percent employer would cost the general fund 154 thousand dollars those are obviously grounded but we'll we'll get to that later as as brian said as well all right we'll dig into the details but i think the other part i wanted to make sure we talked about here is when we had a part of this presentation at a previous meeting the numbers were wrong and so the cost compared to what we saw a couple meetings ago is significantly different than what we're going to look at today yeah yes ma'am so one one of the things that um you know our consultant group looks at is from a plan here which uh obviously makes sense from an actuarial perspective as they look forward you know over the because they're they're going based on those costs for that plan year which is a calendar year so that was presented from a calendar year not a fiscal year and that immediately just off the top means that your increase is going to drop 25 because we'll have in a fiscal year we'll have three months at the current rate before it's raised uh so that that's one of the issues there the other one there was a typo on the spreadsheet that should have been 508 and it was 518 and that was the other amount brian this is tina again i would say another change would be um i just lost my there were three contributing factors to that being a different number last time as opposed to when we really sharpened our pencil from a budgetary perspective okay so if we want to move to option two slide two okay um the you can see the it's this it's set up

[0:49:14] the same exact way and this is of course if the city takes on that 5.64 increase i believe um tina said it was around 198 000 for the general fund if the city takes on that entire increase of course there's no increase to the current rates so you'll see that the current rates and the proposed rates are exactly the same on that slide so there's probably not many questions about that slide that one's pretty easy any questions move to the next slide option three uh again it's a fairly easy uh one to look at uh all the increase is from the city perspective nineteen point i mean from the city employee perspective it's 19.95 um and you can see how that affects every one of the tiers between the current rates the proposed rates and again that bottom one is per paycheck so it would show how that would potentially impact an employee uh who had elected those various tiers per paycheck okay if there's no questions there again that final slide is the current plan enrollment that shows the the breakdown um among the various groups and then again i think maybe uh it might be poignant at this point to go back to slide six that has those you know those numbers on him for those various options uh again i think from what tina mentioned it's around 150 000 uh if the uh it's a shared burden um and it's closer to 200 000 if it's the city only and of course there's no increase to the general fund if the employees take on all the burden under option three okay thank you get questions for brian before we move on

[0:51:19] okay there are no questions so we will now okay that completes item b and so we will now move into c which is discussion of matters regarding fiscal year 2020 2021 budget preparation including but not limited to one the general fund revenue and expenditures and then two other items needing council directions so let's move into the general fund fund revenue and expenditures thank you mayor tina dierski director of finance i'm going to present your general fund draft budget and we'll discuss revenues expenditures and other items for council's consideration this morning and as well we'll also discuss some cost saving initiatives that we have already implemented or that we can discuss planning to implement this morning our first line here shows our property tax rate unchanged 0.776 per 100 valuation for fiscal year 2021 valuation certified at almost 5.4 billion dollars which was a 3.9 increase 3.9 increase from the prior year new properties added to the role in the amount of 58 million dollars total properties were just over 202 million dollars added to the role our total property values pardon me we do budget at a 98 collection rate which is conservative and we typically every year get very very close to that 98 sometimes go over repeat those numbers again the new property of course is the 58 million and the increase in existing uh property dollars was how much the total um net valuation increased just over 202 million dollars

[0:53:24] and that the 58 million comes out of there yes ma'am that 58 would be included in that number okay all right proceed okay sales tax was up um we just received those numbers yesterday as you're aware it was at five point two for four percent in august compared with the same month in the prior year your date collections are over fiscal year 2019 by 1.6 percent and 1.4 million dollars in revenue so year-to-date sales tax increase is only up 1.66 so we're basically flat year over year yes ma'am i think that's because we um budgeted very consistently with that as well no i'm not budget i'm talking actually so our actual projected increase year over year is 1.66 yes ma'am so my point is it's a very flat number basically where we didn't we planned correctly because we planned conservatively but if you look at the actual increase in sales tax revenue it will be 1.66 yes ma'am council has done a very good job of holding line on budgeting for sales tax revenue and so we're actually doing pretty well this year considering all things considered okay great thank you next yes so for fiscal year 2019 actuals we came in at 19.9 million dollars in sales tax revenue um our projected year end for this current fiscal year is just over 20 million dollars and we are proposing a sales tax budget at this time of just over 18 million dollars and what percent would that be to our projected actual 2019-2020 10 decrease at this point not eight but ten yes ma'am we do have

[0:55:29] some options later that we'll discuss okay thank you we're back yes ma'am okay i have to move my okay so this is our financial summary sheet and we can go through these line by line and just let me know if you have any specific questions on these so the increase in property tax valuations yielded almost 1.3 million dollars in additional sales tax revenue to the general fund i mean property tax revenue for me sales tax again just over 18 million dollars at a 10 percent decrease from the previous or from the projected year end so a decrease of 600 000 alcohol and bingo taxes budgeted flat franchise is down 60 000 and that is due to a decrease in television uh yeah television and electric franchise fees charges for service is down from municipal court revenues in the amount of 181 thousand dollars and then there is a decrease there for um the way we're accounting for lake patrol revenue that comes in from the water fund we're moving it out of that line and into another line within the general fund all right let's talk about alcohol and bingo tax so the trend on the alcohol and bingo tax right now would reflect that we need to plan that flat we actually um are basing that on a five-year trend until we've for five years primarily been flat uh yes ma'am and there was a difference of like maybe a negative fifteen hundred dollars and so we just budgeted it flat okay and then go you just made mention of 181 thousand dollar difference in the municipal court yes ma'am can we talk through that 181 000 and why there would be such a huge

[0:57:33] reduction in municipal court dollars um yes ma'am i believe sylvia's on the line and i think she usually speaks to that pardon me good all right good morning mayor can you hear me we can or i can okay i'm sorry oh there we go good morning uh sylvia gordorama municipal court director um all revenue is the number of citations that are filed here now we can't hear you hear me i didn't even see her oh there she is okay so now see we can't hear you she's just going to get closer to the mic okay all right can you get closer to your mind yes ma'am is that a little bit better a little not great okay um our revenue is based on the number of citations that are filed in the court um over the course of the years we've had several different law changes um that have affected the revenue um that we

[0:59:35] are able to collect um and and that's that's basically what it comes down to are the the laws the legislature changes so we're saying that the dollar decrease of 181 thousand dollars is relative only to state law changing not to a reduction in the number of tickets or warrants or citations issue um it's a combination of all of that ma'am um how much of the 181 000 would be law changing because of the law changing um i would say the majority of it at least um over way over 50 percent of that um just because the laws that have been um implemented require more hearings before we can collect on anything more hearings before we can issue warrants now um and the laws that have been passed um have basically given people um more options as far as being able to pay their citations off with a community service program and we have to make sure that that's available made available to them we have a lot of more people that are declaring to be indigent and so we have to we we lose a lot of money for that so if we look at a trend so charges for services were down i'm just going to use your number 181 000. is how is that relative to last year were we down the same kind of large dollar amount again no ma'am i don't believe the rolling number okay so do i have questions from council for sylvia on the 200 almost 200 000 difference in municipal court dollar

[1:01:40] amount tom so sylvia i know you've got a backlog in there if we ever get caught up with that backlog is there a chance of this coming back in of us making up a lot of this if you get a chance to make up on your backlog are we looking at this is this is what's going to hit us for 2021 no matter what um looking at what we've got so far um kind of going into this i i didn't think it was gonna be um very good for the next budget year but as long as we continue um the way we are moving forward i think we're gonna be okay i think it won't be any better than what we're looking at here yes ma'am as long as um that was something very hard to project you know the number of citations that we were going to have um you know going forward we didn't know what this whole um you know situation that we're in um but you know we are doing what we can to make sure that we're having the hearings and we're making it um you know collection attempts and what we need to get done okay that answers my question thank you sylvia you're welcome any questions further questions from sylvia donat in essence what what we don't what we are projecting is is that there's no reduction if you will in terms of making sure the safety of the citizens continues by oversight from our police department relative to speeding tickets or running red lights or whatever the other issues are so we're continuing to do the work it's just a relationship between the state and its requirements and what we have to manage yes ma'am absolutely okay all right so then um tina that's 181 000 out of the 407 so you know we've got another 200 and almost 30 000 in reduction of charges for services

[1:03:43] so can we talk through those uh yes ma'am and part of that is just um the way we're accounting for a transfer in from the water fine 200 just over 250 thousand dollars of that we're accounting for it in a different light i'm still within the general fund revenue um and then that is yeah that's that's it that's that's the bulk of the that come out and that transfer of funds from the water department is something we do on an annual basis this isn't a change in the way that we are booking no man just moved from the charges for service line right here and it's down in this line now on other all right any other questions from council all right move down to the expenditure lines personnel personnel is just down across all funds for various reasons some of it being related to that workers comp issue that we've talked about with other funds where we kind of reallocated to a more appropriate allocation setting um but also um largely due to the hiring freeze that daniel has put in place across the city um i believe at the last count and brian can correct me if i'm wrong but i think we had 52 positions frozen um sometime last week i think that came out is that correct brian that is correct um we have uh yeah 52 that we have frozen uh and it would take both a hr recommendation review and recommendation to daniel and daniel's approval to open but i want to be clear on that because what we're not doing any job that is relevant and high priority in terms of services given to our citizens we are re we are feeling positions that they are high priority and necessary to continue with the service level that's a great point mayor yeah yes that of the other portion of that is we have

[1:05:47] 20 i believe at the time again this was probably last week so it might be a little bit dated um but at the at the time of the number that i provided tina um with there being 52 frozen jobs there were 20 that were posted and again uh we've got a pretty involved process where uh you know some people have to fight for a reason that the position is posted then i review that i recommend it to daniel for go to go ahead and post and he approves those postings uh so yes we are doing the vital services the ones we need to to make sure that uh vital services go on then we are we are posting those uh and we are just kind of asking everybody to work a little bit harder as we go through this process go ahead daniel uh daniel valenzuela city manager amir uh also what we do of course a lot of our postings are internal and uh what we'd like to do is to move a personal around if possible but again as brian didn't mention of course essential personnel there are certain positions that will be had to be hired from outside the city and not moved around but again we're very mindful of that and it's not just for this fiscal year again uh for next fiscal year as well so even the number that you're seeing as far as the reduction of the 250 000 that number could very easily go above 500 000 depending on how long i keep this hiring fees going and how long we we persist with this strategy so i just want to make sure that i pointed out well i think it's an important comment and i think it's important we look at this because all companies all organizations have had to reduce the number of personnel and do hiring freezes based off of what's going on in general so i think it's appropriate that the city follows suit just as the private sector is having to do and yet american services mayor i would also um like to say that that that practice has yielded savings here today of 665 thousand dollars good job um and as well um daniel has implemented a travel

[1:07:49] freeze and of course nobody's really able to travel with the coveted anyway but here today we've realized about 84 000 in savings from that all right thank you yes ma'am questions from counsel all right with none continue on o m okay so there's a slight increase in o m of 120 000 um about 70 000 of that is in municipal court restricted funds that would also have an offsetting revenue source so that that increase would be kind of a wash there there's an increase for dispatch software and there's also an increase for ambulance software okay capital capital has decreased slightly um that's just an offset to the o m if we increase the o m line then we have to sometimes reduce the capital item or the capital expenditures and transfers out is due to largely and almost completely due to the transfer out for the safer grant that increase the incremental increase for the safer grant for this year any questions all right let's move to the next slide okay we're moving into the part of our discussion where we talk about items for council consideration we have some requests from the police and fire departments we'll also have a discussion on equipment replacement and then we'll finish off with the final discussion on health insurance and how to fund that so what this first slide just kind of shows you what we what you i should say as a council have been able to do for police officers over the last um several years in fiscal year 18 we added five additional officers in 19 we added five more officers and implemented the loyalty pay and steps and then in fiscal year 20 we had an additional increase there of 232 thousand dollars or the equivalent of a 1.9 increase to salaries for the police department and um next up

[1:09:53] we have body cameras i'm guessing that chief carter or chief howard would want to speak to this to explain the purpose and the need morning mayor good morning council of when we originally purchased the body cameras it was mainly for the officers uh there were uniformed officers patrol officers uh the additional quest we're asking now for the 45 cameras is basically for our criminal investigation division and some of our admin staff that never were equipped with the camera during the first purchase all right did we look for uh because i know last year we missed by 30 days our ability to apply for a grant to help pay for these cameras and i know the health foundation has monies for police body cameras how are we working what are we looking at in terms of potential grants etc to reduce some of these costs we looked at the the grants for body cameras and we were rejected on that the the health foundation we've started that process but we do not have any kind of any direction as far as whether we receive the grants or not thus far so how many police officers do we have currently 167 sworn officers okay so we currently have 145 body cameras we want to add another 45 bringing the total number to 190 body cameras and so the difference between actual existing officers and the number of body cameras is you know just talk through that a minute that should be additional roughly 10 over

[1:11:54] we're fixing to start another academy and also to give us a little bit of wiggle room for some spares just in case okay do i have questions from council have one male 1 yes billy billy dewitt single member district six um chief howard uh you said we didn't get the grant was um did they give any reason why the body came no they do not give any reason i'm sorry billy this is gail smith uh budget analyst they did not give a reason um they they frequently do not either get it or you don't um so no we have no explanation for why we've been turned down um no i 100 support body cam the police body cameras but um is there any opportunity are we continuing to look for additional grants every day i i scan what grants are available right now we have six in the pipeline but for next year but these are few and far between grants out of all the hundreds of grants available there's very few for police but no i continually search for those okay okay well i'm disappointed we didn't get the grants but um hopefully we'll be able to support this request anyway thank you ma'am well we will i'm i'm quite sure the health foundation is supporting body camera requests at some levels so um what i meant to ask is that as we continue to move forward on the budgeting process that we work with the health foundation to find out if some of these costs cannot could be picked up by them to reduce our overall cost

[1:13:59] but they do them quarterly i think they do their grants quarterly so we look forward to finding out what that can do for us mayor i have one other question please yes um one of the chiefs um what would be the approximate cost of 45 more body cameras the breakdown is on that slide right there and it's it's over a five-year period i believe the first year well there it is right there twenty four thousand five hundred first year because the rest of the years are remaining in the contract up to five years be seventy thousand so this would be the total cost for the 45 additional cameras that's correct okay all right so year one hardware line is the is the hardware line okay so one is buying the body camera and one is all the other things that come in terms of requirements for the body cameras it's not only the camera itself but license fees and docking station sorry billy i interrupted you billy i'm sorry go ahead um no that's okay so year one would be what we're budgeting for now the twenty twenty one i'm yeah 2021 budget is that year one yes billy 500. okay and tina the difference between the 24 5 and the 70 000 on the balance of the years where's that other 66 000 or 46 000 coming from um i think that the reason it's uh less in year one is that chief howard worked with um the vendor and asked them to try to get it down in that first year because it's a you know tough year for cities across the nation and so i believe that's a result of him working with axon that's correct i spoke with exxon and they they worked with us to get the first year costs down and as well the police department is going to pay the first

[1:16:01] year out of our own budget let me reiterate that there's been discussion with with city manager daniel valenzuela on that first year cost we do have some federal seizure funds and we're willing to pay for the first year cost of the 24-5 so in total let me make sure i understand this slide so in total buying 45 new body cameras which i like billy i think the body cameras are incredibly important right now so the cost of buying 45 more body cameras in total is in excess of three hundred thousand dollars the city's cost will be seventy thousand six or 67 dollars times four all right and they allow so if we buy in now the 45 they allow us to pay it out over a five-year period or explain that to me it's spread out over a five-year period yes ma'am so we pay the vendor over five year period for the 45. that's correct and then we would assume since we're looking at this over a five year period that there would be no additional needs or requests for body cameras over the next five years that's correct unless there's some sort of expansion and you're always going to happen to be adding licenses or cameras if you don't have enough to support the department um mayor one other question so um the body cameras that we currently have what happens if those go out would we be looking at

[1:18:02] potentially for maintenance purposes having additional costs besides what we're seeing here well you we did we didn't have a little bit of an overage so we have a spare to replace the one that's damaged we immediately turn it to the damaged one back over to the vendor and then they send us a replacement immediately okay so um what about the licenses do we have any would we have any additional cost for the ones that we currently have to keep licenses current or no no it's included in the contract so i'm just i'm trying to make sure i understand that the cost we're looking at here would be the total cost for year one that the police department is picking up but year two through five this would be the total cost yes ma'am thank you so the decision would if we approve the purchasing of the 45 it basically means we're approving a 305 000 if you will increase to the budget without a vote on it next year because we're approving the five year plan by the purchase of 45. is that correct it'd be 280 000 with us to pay in the first year over over five years not the 305 thousand not the 305 we pay the 20 we're in agreement to pay year one which is the 24 5 which will leave the city balance over a five-year period of 280 000 okay do i have any further questions from council okay go ahead and somebody's getting ready to speak

[1:20:04] it's time okay tom single member district two frank maybe y'all could help me with the redaction assistant i'm if if that's software is that software we already have or does each one of these units require more software i know in some in some areas where while you're adding hardware it can still use the existing software and i don't know this and this question has been proposed to me by a couple people and i just kind of need you to walk through that with me a little bit the redaction software we do receive a lot of public information requests a lot of the information has to be is not releasable to the public so there there's manual redaction that has to be done uh that's a painstaking task and it consumes a lot of man hours the automatic re redaction uh streamlines that process dramatically if that answers your question well i was wondering so do we already have that or do we have to have one for every unit no this we we have redaction software and it's not one for every unit no sir uh but like i said it's a manual redaction that has to be done and it's it's very tight frame by frame so if you want to block a face out you have to go through the whole video and block that that face out this will automatically do it for you throughout a menu that you have available to you gotcha but we already have that right and this is is this the additional ones we bring on its initial feature yes okay cool no that answers my question thanks guys any further questions you'll raise your hand or make a sound i'll call on you mayor i do want to make a point as well um i know that in talking with the chief

[1:22:08] chief the first of all my appreciation i know that they wanted to work with us as well to make sure that we had the first year covered and they did it through his discretionary funds on that the remainder years uh we definitely would be looking for alternative funding sources i know that we're committed to it regardless and the city council will approve this we have to pay for it but definitely we'll be looking for any type of grants that will be available uh for the body cameras specifically so that should hopefully help us in the future years as well i'm hoping that with everything that's happened with the rioting and across the country that the importance of body cameras is at the core so i think that i'm thinking that we should see more uh options for uh for grants in the future so again we'll be looking for everything that we can as far as the alternative funding sources but regardless if council does approve this it is something that will have to be covered by the general fund that we cannot find a grant for that well i think that i think the big question is this is this is the cost of just the existing 45 that we want to buy and my concern is so over a five-year period 304 the 285 but what will be the request next year on top of this so if we prove this what else are we setting ourselves up for and i guess we're saying we're going to continue to look for grants and hopefully they will be out there to help us offset what other potential needs might be okay with that let's what's the next slide there we go sorry about that my screen wasn't moving um this next slide is for the police department as well um they applied for the cops grant and were awarded it and i think i will let them speak to this one as well and the way the program works hello again this is gail smith of the

[1:24:14] analyst from police department the cops grant is awarded for a 36 month period we have we applied for five officers this is five officers salary over and above our current budgeted sworn officer rate of 175. so this is officers that are not part of our regular budget that's what this grant is intended for any additional officers above a budget that's already set by the council we applied for three officers to be i believe three officers in the game unit and two in narcotics the one of the requirements for this type of grant is that you hire all you can ask for is the starting rate for the police officer not at a particular in other words at a recruit level that is all you can ask for so this is what we've asked for is five officers at their at the recruit rate now each year successive year that that amount goes up uh the way it's applied for is the first year is recruit the second year's probationary and the third year is the p01 so an increase in funds is due to that the the distribution of the federal funds is is determined by the federal grant this is not our request this is how they uh apportion it out there's 226 000 and i think the purpose of that is to gradually uh ease the department into assuming more of the burden or the of the city to assume more of the burden so by year four one of the requirements of the cops grant is that officers be uh continue to be employed for at least another 12 months

[1:26:17] so you're really committing to four years not just three the apportion the unfunded portion there is the portion that is not covered by the grant there is a 25 match minimum requirement for these grants we do have some grants that are covering a portion of the expense for year one for supplies and one vehicle as part of the grant other grants that we have currently pipeline one is an edward byrne grant for body armor the other one is a grant that is through the state and through the council of governments with their approval for a vehicle for undercover it's a march vehicle but their subdued markings the the vehicles all in black the lettering is black on black they funded on that grant forty two thousand we asked the for that one vehicle we do not know if we will have a shortfall there as far as if there's any shortfall as far as totally equipping the vehicle that will come out of the police budget standard budget the uh the vest grant we have one for 12 300 that's where the 300 comes in so that will cover the the uh equipping the offer the five officers for the first year we do not re-equip every year we just resupply any uniforms that they require the vests of course are good for five years so the total then line at the bottom is the personnel uh total personnel cost for each year and then the 67 000 is

[1:28:24] i believe that's the vehicle is it not 42 000 less less other expenses for officers for supplies leaving an unfunded portion the first year of 114 119 and successive years and again like year three they're they're shifting the burden to uh to the local authority and then year four is the total burden let me ask one question i remember when the fire police done talked about the safer grant and they presented it to council and asked for our permission to apply for that grant because of the impact i don't remember you all coming forward and asking council because i thought that was the policy and procedure that we had in place to come to council and ask for permission to apply for a grant before we apply for it am i mistaken am i mistaken on that policy if i remember correctly when we saw the application we had to expedite we had three to five days before the expiration of the grant uh to even apply for it if i recall that correctly our expectation was we didn't we had no expectations about actually getting the grant it was actually a great surprise that we did receive it the last time that it was applied for was in 2015 and it was not granted we did not receive an award in 2015. so this was kind of a shot in the dark to tell you the truth and we did have to put it together very quickly to get under the deadline well i also remember on the fire department one last year they didn't think we would get it either but we got it and so then we had to deal with the issue of getting it which is a positive thing um on the other hand what we're looking

[1:30:28] at now is you know a commitment again a commitment from council if we approve this for over the next four years an addition of 858 000 dollars plus the 304 thousand so if we approve these two things just on a year after year or four-year window we're looking at increasing the budget for over a million bucks let's turn off these two requests any questions from counsel comments from counsel with none move on for the next math excuse me billy dewitt single member district six um on the unfunded portion of this um any thoughts that y'all have given for any way to fund this unfunded portion hello i'm thinking i'm thinking i'm thinking councilman we just would have to work with the city i really don't have an answer for you like i said we were we were very pleasantly surprised that that we did receive at least the acknowledgement that we could receive the grant and um i do think that we probably are going to have to have an increase if the city grows in staffing okay the other question that i have is um what happens um i guess we've already been granted the grant what happens if we decline it or can we we can decline it uh if we decline it the chances of us receiving a grant in the future

[1:32:31] not good okay can you review with us the crime rate over the past three years the percent increase or decrease in the crime rate i'm sorry you're very hard to hear mayor are you asking for what the increase in crime is yeah i know that you've consistently brought the crime rate down can you just review those numbers with us i don't have them readily available but i can tell you last month um from the six months of this part of the year we're down 10 compared to last year uh crime rate and i think it's important for me to mention where we should be as far as manpower and my goal over the last four years to increase the manpower a city our size and population we have should have a minimum of 190 officers if you remember correctly in 2016 my goal was to increase the officers five per year um city council was authorized 165 in 2016 we're now up to 175 we've increased 10 bodies over a period of three years as you recall last year we bypassed the five officers um and we spent the money on body cam so this this cops grant goes hand in hand uh with the gold and division that i've had and presented to council over the last several years what is the relationship between population growth and additional officers versus reduced crime with existing officers it's just based on volume that that's with the federal level and the state level uh they base the population on the number of officers and that's that's done nationwide and i know they certainly put you know those numbers out there um chief carter's side but how many cities use those numbers as a staffing review i don't know this i'm asking and it's probably

[1:34:34] tough for you to answer that because it's kind of out of the blue question but i would assume that the most important thing that we look at is reduction in crime and if we continually have a reduction in crime what's the relationship between needing more officers when our existing officers are already doing a terrific job of reducing crime and i would say you guys obviously with your ability on a year over a year you have done a great job a really good job of reducing crime and i want to constantly say that because if you have reduced 10 over last year's that's a terrific accomplishment and so i'm trying to keep in perspective perspective the need for more when existing is doing a terrific job particularly in a year with budget dollars are very very limited and i bring that up because we're a tight budget most cities look at population and number of officers per per thousand and that's the way that number is figured there's a specific formula used to come up with that number and as far as the decrease in crime we're doing a wonderful job with the personnel we have yes that we can do better and that's what we'd like to do and granting additional officers pave the way for us to to make a bigger impact all right i think carrie has a question then i have some more questions so harry thank you harry thomas single member district three uh just a real quick comment and and i want to follow along with what the mayor said and what uh miss dewitt said and that is i think we need to find a way that we we find these to fund these additional five

[1:36:35] officers the challenge is going to be is how do we get there and and i would challenge the chiefs to continue to look at grants for these types of things to help offset that cost to the to the citizens to the city and i really want to make sure that we're we're moving towards that goal of five additional officers but i also think in the down year that we're having and projected to have in fiscal year 21 i want to make sure that we're we're able to do that in such a way that we don't impact other departments within the city were already challenged with 52 uh positions that were down and i know that we're we want to make sure that we've got critical services continuing but even in those non-critical services citizens expect to get things done and they're not going to wait two and three months because we don't have the people so i would like to get this done but i'm also going to challenge the chiefs to see if there's not additional grants in year two three and four that we can help offset this 857 858 thousand dollars i i want to be very clear that i am very supportive of our police department and the leadership in our police department but i know that all of us constantly are watching what's going on across the country and even though i know those charts that you're referring to that say based off of our population we should have 190 officers in so many cities across the country right now city councils are reducing funding for police departments not increasing but they're decreasing and so this is kind of an unusual issue

[1:38:38] for us because at a time period when decreasing money support police departments we're looking at an in a request for increases and i say this outside the conversation of i believe strongly in our police department i believe strongly in the leadership of our police department but i also know we are in a tight budget that many cities across the country are reducing the budgets which i'm not sure is a very smart decision but many cities are not increasing and here we are looking at over a four year window of a million one dollars in increases without any other conversation about any other needs or requests and so that's again i say that with great respect for the leadership and what is happening in terms of our assistant police chiefs and their leadership and the good job that you're doing that being said it's still requests for more money mayor gunter may i make one comment concerning it and i appreciate very much your comments i think we're going to see a backlash from the uh in some of these communities that um understaff the police at a later time and the climate that we when we originally applied for this grant this was way back in the first part of march so the climate the political climate the the state of the country everything has changed dramatically since that time it's not something we could have foreseen when we applied for the time that's a very valid comment but bringing that up you're telling me that we applied for this back in march and this is august i think along the way maybe we should have been brought into that conversation

[1:40:40] before today we did not receive any notice of award until late until august i know you didn't receive notice of the award but back in march you applied for the award and i'm just saying it would have been nice before this budget meeting to present to us the grant because you've got it instead of informing us earlier in this process that you are that you applied for it [Music] may if i'm may this is link harder yes go ahead i'm sorry i think uh from the past i think everybody knows how i feel about funding our police and our fire department uh i just want to get this out there that i think it is an outstanding opportunity that we are able to find a grant to be able to fund the extra personnel that we've been needed since we've been severely understaffed for years i know other towns who are defunding i don't know what the levels of their officers were in relation to their population but with us being from behind and i kind of vaguely remember asking if there were grants for the police department when the safer grant came by for the um for the fire department wondering if we could do the same as well for our police i understand that there's probably going to be some later on your budgetary expenditures for it to be able to fund it but we've got some money coming in 226 227 000 off the grant 54 300 off another grant um i think it's time to that we we trust getting our police officers to where they're needed along with the body cams and get them fully functioning that way as we grow as a city where there's no

[1:42:43] way that we will not be protected i think i speak for all city council members that all city council members support our police department this is not about not supporting and not i'm definitely not i'm not i'm just getting that out there i just wanted to state that get it on the record i know we all support it and it's hard that we have to try to find a way to come up on year four with the 364 thousand dollars to be able to to fund but uh we've got a grant coming in and i just think it's an outstanding opportunity i don't think anyone denies the fact that when we have an opportunity to apply for grants and receive the grants it speaks highly of the quality of grant application that was submitted because you don't get them awarded unless the quality of the grant writing and the need is not there so again it is with total support of our police department total support of the work and effort and total support of the leadership that exists and i want to make that very clear absolutely it's not there's no negative with that i'm just trying to figure out where the funds are going to come from and knowing that this year alone we're only talking about the 19 i mean sorry the 2020 2021 year and two years three years down the road we're going to have some big numbers that are not going to be able to be negotiated and i just want to say when we accept we've got to also be aware of the commitment we're making on future councils for funds because we are committing to those funds with approval tina what's our overall um what was our overall property tax or yeah private tax valuation increase and finish coming to us over 1.2 million dollars and and to speak to this as well mayor we'll have some four different options or scenarios if you will coming up later to try to discuss some of these needs and if or if we want or can fund them i also want to speak to lane's question

[1:44:47] about property tax because what we are going to be looking at going forward in the 2021 22 budget is a huge amount of properties today that are on the tax rolls that will be taken to nonprofit status with shannon's purchase of community hospital and all their adjoining properties as well as several other things that have happened in the city including the council of governments purchasing a large property that is taxable now and won't be so what our property tax valuations and dollars look like now we're going to have a huge hit to taxable properties in the next budget year of 2020 or 21 22 because all of those properties are going to go into non-profit status tina is there a way that you could get those numbers for us as a projection by the time she hasn't laid he hasn't okay yeah it was um from the shannon community it was about three hundred thousand dollars in property tax revenue and then you have um the council government's purchase of the um oil field property so i think that's a hundred thousand and then you've got a children's advocacy center that purchase properties that will come off of the property tax you've got a building there's a lot of property tax currently tax properties that go into non-profit next year and it will we will have a hit on property tax dollars next year um billy with single member district six is that not information we need in discussing budget requests billy i did call the appraisal district and discuss that with them it will not impact the 2021 budget that we're discussing right now um if it does or when it does have an impact it would impact the

[1:46:48] following fiscal year okay but if we're making decisions about ex you know um funding out about four years wouldn't that be information we'd need to have now we will not and cannot have that information until probably around april is when they start doing property valuations and that's when they would value all of those properties and then next year in july on the 25th we'll get our certified values for that following year but we can project that now billy is the point and that's reason i've had tina look at the impact of the community shannon hospital issue we did take a look at i think the council government's purchase of the oil buildings and land there and then of course a children's advocacy center that will be impacted as well so you're probably looking at an almost half a million dollar impact from existing tax properties into non-profit status so if if we're looking at half million are we talking about the actual revenue that the city would receive are we talking about the taxable values of the property that would be the taxes that the city would receive in property tax dollars okay thanks all right next slide i think frank and chief carter i think we're moving on to the fire department if there's no more questions from council on the police department requests so thank you and let's move into fire department and chief dunn okay mayor again this is um this slide goes over some um initiatives that have already been covered by city council and the budget um in fiscal year 18 we added eight additional firefighters

[1:48:51] and then um the safer grant was approved the following year with those totals as well for each of those years and this current 2021 budget we're finding a total of 385 148 for that safer grant so the only request we had from the fire department this year was to continue the peak hours ambulance um at a cost of 263 900 um and i'll let chief dunn speak to why this is necessary and how well it's working but we are just so you know recommending to fund that with that charity care reimbursement that we're still receiving and we have received confirmation that will receive it this year and so we feel comfortable with using that to cover it if council chooses to do so morning mayor council by chief brian dunn the peak ambulance um what it does for the city is that we're making most of those runs during the nine to six that we're staffing the peak ambulance and what this does instead of putting that seventh out crew in place or full-time 24-hour crew this this is about uh a third little more than a third play 40 of the cost to cover that instead of putting that other one in place if those uh utilization times go up what happens is we start end up shutting down fire trucks to man ambulances because we start running out of ambulances during some of those times and you generally as go ahead and comment you've done on the funding with the charity care which generally pays for that yes so so what it's been called in the past is a medicare supplement the federal government's changed the name of the the program it's now called charity care and we've got confirmation i believe it's 400 000 and change that we're going to receive from that does that sound right tina uh and this money doesn't we'll get

[1:50:56] final confirmation they give us their estimate and usually they're pretty much spot on uh you'll get final confirmation at the end of september and then the city generally receives the money in early october any questions for chief gunn from council okay thank you chief dunn we'll move into uh the equipment replacement and this is you know every time we have a city council meeting we very often have in the consent agenda things that say budgeted items replacement of x y and z and so what i wanted for us to be able to see today is what is currently in the uh the budget that we're reviewing in terms of dollars by area and what kind of quantity of units new purchases of equipment we would be looking in as we approve this budget yes ma'am thank you council it's shane kelton director of operations for the city um we we kind of had a brief conversation back when we're discussing our enterprise funds and so today we brought back not only for what the general fund is looking at but we also are brought back so we could see total for general water sewer in the storm water funds we as of right now we believe that these are uh going to be the primary funds that are going to be purchasing equipment uh if something happens later in the year in another fund the airport fund are one of those where they need a vehicle that'll kind of be a one-off but right now there's no projection projections for replacement in those funds currently uh you can see the general fund we currently have budgeted 1.3 million water fund 674 000 sewer 450 8000 and the stormwater fund 460 thousand

[1:52:59] uh we kind of have the number of units broken off by fund is what our expected replacement will be uh general fund will be 28 units is what we're expecting to replace right now plus our leased equipment we mentioned this back in the enterprise fund workshop that this year our leased equipment which we call our yellow iron which is our motor graders our backhoes uh that type of equipment we have gone through our last lease and uh five year lease we're into year six of that equipment and it's time to refresh and replace that equipment as well so we will be going out for bids and also a rfp for municipal leasing options for this equipment and so you can see and we'll get into the least equipment and we'll show you how much we're looking for is least equipment in the next slide but as you can see um as we move on through water 16 units plus the least equipment sewer two units plus the least equipment and storm water looking at six units plus lease equipment as well so next slide please uh we broke this down by type equipment type so we kind of know what we're looking at across the board from equipment type you can see up the top we have it broke down uh by uh the fund and then the totals off on the on the far right there we're looking at um uh our and our lease units we're looking at a total of 35 leased units and this will include anything from again motor graders back a lot of backhoes [Music] skid steers compact track loaders wheel loaders those type of things so it's a combination of all of that and we'll bring that back to you later in this next fiscal year just looking at one quarter ton pickup

[1:55:02] which a ford ranger chevy colorado that type pick up uh half ton pickups we're looking at 11 across the the city medium duty pickups looking at 13 that's going to be your three quarter tons in your one tons mowers four mowers one trailer for animal services patrol units for pd we're looking at 11 patrol units this year one patrol motorcycle and one unmarked unit for pd coming out of the general fund replacement fund next slide looking at two boats uh one for the lake police lake patrol and another one for lake operations looking at two tractors a 15-foot shredder for one of those tractors two light towers for the water for the water department water distribution and sewer collection bunch another six foot shredder for the storm water department one street sweeper in the storm water department a back truck for the sewer department a small utv a gator type john deere gator type vehicle and then one ambulance kind of rounds out what our expected equipment purchases uh replacement are going to be this year of course i want to uh also um this this is proposed between now and the time that everything gets bid out and we bring back we could have other issues arise that we need to kind of switch something out that was here for something else that may have been taken out of service due to a complete failure and so you know this is these are these numbers are although this is our best estimate right now these are somewhat flexible uh in in what uh we we we will be doing

[1:57:07] uh as as time goes along throughout the year and of course if any chances come up for any grant opportunities or other funds become available for equipment replacement the need is definitely greater for equipment replacement than we actually have the funds for but based on our funding uh right now this is uh our most critical needs that we have on the books right now well i think it's very important that you've pulled all this together for our overview because i think it makes it easier for us to understand when we go to consent agenda and we say these things are budgeted we kind of know what the overview is going into the budget and also obviously understanding that things happen and um decisions have to be made to replace equipment because of accidents or wear and tear or whatever that doesn't happen but this is a great overview i'm assuming we do a spreadsheet of an excel spreadsheet of some sort that lists all the equipment that we have by department and understand sort of the life of that equipment or traditional life of equipment so we can kind of look at an annual basis what we're looking at is that how we come up with this information yes ma'am we we start off with um oh gosh it's probably um if we printed it out it'd probably be a 20 or 30 page document when we which is the base the base document we start off on and then we start narrowing it down uh by department and then by division and and we just keep narrowing it down and working through uh and we again we really it's easy when we start looking at and just by age and our primary sorting factors just by age and and uh miles or or hours depending on the the type of unit we're looking at uh we start getting those base criteria in and then we start narrowing that down and finally you know when we start getting down into the very end of it you know we're basing it off of uh

[1:59:09] cost per hour or cost per mile on that unit versus its age and you know a lot of different factors but yes ma'am it's uh it it takes uh ryan cramer and myself um and and patrick it takes us gosh a good three or four weeks to go through all of that data and pare it down and narrow it down and based on the based on the current conditions of each piece of equipment yeah it's i know it's a big project but obviously from budgeting perspective we needed i think that billy has a question so billy can you hear me i can thank you um shane how many boats do we have and what is the life expectancy of the boat the there's multiple boats in different kinds of boats in multiple divisions um in lake operations we currently have two boats that they use in lake operations um and we we're getting anywhere from 10 to 15 years out of those boats uh depending on the boat and uh and then also we have two boats in the in the lake patrol and they're getting gosh some of them will get tenure some of them i've we've even had some in the past go as long as 20 years we try to replace them prior to that uh we really don't want them to get much over about 10 years old but as budget constraints come about sometimes those get pushed out further than than what we would like but we we try to try to replace them about every 10 years okay so these two are strictly for the water department that you're looking at replacing uh one of them would be lake operations um and then the other one would be lake lake patrol which is the police department boats but the water fund supports um those two operations all right and um exactly what is a light tower shane those the tower

[2:01:16] it's a portable light tower it's basically just a portable lights it's a generator with a stand of lights that that mostly our water distribution and our sewer collection crews use uh on leaks at night when when we have a leak it in the nighttime hours they can take that tower out there and that way they can continue to work and safe lit conditions at night thank you other questions from council does anyone have questions tommy tom tom thompson you're on hey shane one there at one time we had some tracking software we would put on these pieces and we identified pieces of equipment that we did not use much and get uh we would take them out of the system do we still have that software in use today yes we do uh and that's we use that quite regularly every every almost all equipment not all equipment in the city is gps but almost all of our equipment is gps and we track it and we monitor uh we monitor uh miles and we monitor hours um on all of it and we generate those reports and send it to the directors and the division managers um so it would be it would be suffice to say that it's probably allowed you to decrease our inventory of this over the past couple of years or i'm hoping so yeah the first the first uh the first two years we had this in service we decreased our uh we decreased our fleet by 65 units based off utilization alone okay cool i just want to make sure that was still in effect and you uh back that up thanks shane yes sir great comments thank you for that i think that's important to understand the impact of that software um counsel do i have anybody else raising your hand or wanting to ask a question of shame does not look like it shane again thank you for doing this because this will help us move through agendas going forward better understand what we're doing it's very beneficial and thank you for

[2:03:18] the work it took to come up with all of this and to figure out the budget thing great work thank you yes ma'am thank you all right the next slide is i believe we start to review and start to make decisions about what we want to support and put into the new budget and look at what the impact is and whether it works in total for our projected revenues yes ma'am first i'll just remind you of what the amounts were for health insurance for the 4.4 shared increase to both employee and the city was 144 000 with a zero percent increase to employing 5.6 percent to the city it was 198 000 i'm going to ask this question because i think it's come up before what we do the decision that we make is specifically to the dollars so if the dollar amount is wrong here we're saying that in the budget we would be willing to spend 154 454 or the 198 037 so we are approving the dollar amount that's correct because there was a question before confusion about the dollar amount or a percent i just want to make sure we're clear okay okay tina yes it's tom thompson um so what we're really looking at here is forty four thousand if whether you're going to pay 198 or 154 that's right so the question is the 44 000. that's right all right thank you that's all and mayor to your point these are estimates but we expect them to be very close to these numbers and so yes you're right you are approving a dollar amount and i just want to make sure that's clear it's a dollar amount we're approving so

[2:05:20] do i um have questions or comments or input from council on these two considerations harry thomas single member district three just a real quick and i think a follow-up of what tom thompson said is is you know the 154 454 it's going to be paid one way or the other the the difference between that and the 198 is the 44 that tom talked about during these particular times if we can find that kind of money for this particular budget i'd like for the city to fund that increase and not spread it across the employees that have already been impacted in one way or another now i having said that i'm not sure if tina's got that money located or not but that's what what i would like to propose do i have comments from other council members mayor tommy hebert yes tommy uh i agree with harry i i'm really holding my thoughts until we get i'm going to say to the end where tina says here's the total requests here's the money that's available and you know we can do this and we can do can't do this so i'm i'm i agree with harry on this one but i'm kind of holding my thoughts until we get really to the very bottom line here i i haven't seen anything bottom line yet so okay very valid okay thank you any other questions or comments right now lucy gonzalez single member district four i was also wanting to know um where where do we have the money do we have the money to fund it completely the whole of the whole amount do we have that money mayor are you ready to move on to those slides then yeah because it seems like everybody

[2:07:22] um has a point of view but we don't see the big picture yet and the big picture might make us go back and re-review some of these issues and make final decisions yes ma'am okay so we have marginal revenue of 15 this year um that is including the 10 decrease to sales tax um and so this is this i have four options for you these first two are really just to kind of show you how much the total of the funding need is then we have two the last slides so the first one includes funding the cops grant for year one for the local match and then funding health insurance at the 50 50 of the one with the 154 000 and with that we'd be short 250 253 000 um and the reason you're only seeing those two lines i just want to remind you that we had other alternate funding sources for the other two requests that we didn't discuss and on this next slide shows the city picking up all of the health insurance increase and with that you can see would be short almost three hundred thousand dollars again that's with a 10 decrease to sales tax this third option includes the 10 percent decrease for sales tax um the same two requests but instead of being short the 296 we could as one option for a solution carry over 296 000 of that 1.4 million dollar surplus that we talked about earlier for sales tax and finally if we budgeted at an eight and a half percent decrease we would balance the budget okay is that but you say option four marginal revenue of 300 so that's the 8.5 percent decrease in sales tax not the 10 yes ma'am well let me just go back to option three i don't really want to

[2:09:26] take 296 000 out of the marginal sales tax because one of the big issues that we hear on a constant basis from our citizens is what are you doing about streets we need to focus on the streets the streets in the past two years we've been able to take sales tax revenue over and above the budget and give it to shane pelton to continue to work on and improve our streets and so i would very much not like to take any money out of that marginal sales tax dollars to fund these issues i think it needs to stay in the street we need to authorize that money to go to streets i think it's a huge big important item and i know we hear about it on an ongoing basis what i do believe that we could do and i think the option for where instead of having a 10 decrease in sales tax revenue we plan for an 8.5 sales tax revenue paying for the police cops grant of the local match and then the hunt did budgeting 198 000 for the health insurance giving us a surplus of the 3 900 and i think this option four addresses for me a conservative overall plan based off of sales tax revenue supporting our police as we want to continue to support our police and supporting our personnel by covering their insurance increases and still leaving the city in a good position financially those are my comments i'm open to comments from council mayor harry thomas single member district 3. i agree but i want to make sure that as we get into

[2:11:27] fiscal year 21 and we see that sales tax decline more than that 8.5 we've got a way that we can address both the first year local match with the police cops grant and funding the health insurance so i don't know if there's a combination of option four and option three uh but i mean i understand that this is this is certainly just setting the groundwork for the budget and budgets are fluid and we're going to change them but i do want to make sure that we've got a way to cover that if for some reason or other uh our sales tax is greater than it minus 8.5 percent yeah i'm going to speak to that because i want you to talk through what we've had to do over the past few months with what's going on and our constant review of expenses to keep in mind any negative impact to sales revenue versus budget so daniel you want to talk to that and make sure council understands how you're managing on a day-to-day basis first of all i like to start off and i do want to mention that the eight and a half percent is still a very conservative number based on trends and based on projections that we've looked at we feel pretty confident that this the eight and a half percent it's not going to be an issue moving forward i will tell you that back in uh you know it's recent 2014 that we had a shortfall in our sales tax revenues we did everything we needed to do as a city staff we met we strategized we developed plans to reduce our expenditures and again uh part of what i'm doing right now with a higher uh and other expenditures that we're cutting back we could very easily implement as well to make sure that we come out in the black again at the end of the year uh in the years that i've been here and working very closely with council members and their financial departments done a

[2:13:29] great job as well we've always made sure that we're in the black and that is our responsibility again i feel very confident with the eight and a half percent i think 10 was a very very conservative number so i really do feel that eight and a half percent is very achievable with the numbers that we're seeing right now and moving forward uh again we'll monitor this every single month to see what we are and make adjustments as we go so i do feel confident that we can reduce our expenditures if need be billy did you have a comment were you i think someone was talking a minute ago someone have a comment or question for daniel and or tina or comment about any of these options one through four um no matt i didn't have a question my only comment would be that i support option four okay thank you anyone else with no other questions or questions question mayor oh i'm sorry tommy go ahead sorry um tina we haven't we haven't seen a slide um yet or maybe we're not going to um we haven't even discussed any any in potential um salary increases for employees is that something that is not included in any of your options i believe tommy that we have approached this budget with uh no increases it seems to be a year when based off of the statistics we can't do it and when you take a look at the number of citizens who have had such a negative impact on their income their salaries i think it would be wrong for the city to approach increases in salaries particularly with us picking up the health insurance costs too many citizens have had financial impacts and i think we need to be very considerate of that i have a i have a question tina um if

[2:15:35] you know if council and i may be the only one thinking this direction um could we say come back in three months six months one one or the other or both and say okay here's here's what's going on with our sales tax number could we then say we we will then allocate use a portion and i heard what the mayor's mayor i heard you about the streets um streets are obviously a high priority for me too but i think we also need to consider our employees um so tina could we come back in three months or six months and say here's here's what's going on with our sales tax and then potentially use part of that for an increase at some point in the future this year or next year yes tommy if you request that to be on the agenda we could put it on there quarterly buy annually however you would like for us to do that i'll just throw that out for discussion for the council um that's something i i would like to see and it still may not happen um but i would like to look at our sales tax numbers to see you know then we can see what uh what what it would what it would uh take at that point in time um to to do something for our employees that's i feel pretty strongly about that so i'll just toss that out there for other comments or discussion i value the employees tremendously and i value what how hard our citizens work to produce the sales tax revenue and the bills they're facing with their property taxes i think we have to be considered of what's going on in the entire city and people's individual lives and i also want to be incredibly consistent and conservative as the fine the number one complaint we have over and over and over again is when are we getting the street six when are we getting the streets taken care of when are the when are we getting this done when are we the streets are a huge big important item in citizens

[2:17:39] lives and we've got to keep very focused on moving up and moving fast as fast as we can on these streets okay any other questions or comments from council mayor gary thomas single member district three i i wanna i want to applaud tommy and and say that that's that's a unique approach uh and i think if we come back every quarter and take a look at that then we can make some make some decisions on what we can do uh with any sales tracks increases and i don't disagree with the mayor on the streets but i can tell you you know 500 000 really is not going to make a big impact on any one street project that we're that we're going to do so if we can utilize it in other ways to benefit the the city employees i would certainly like to take a look at it anyway that's just my comment five hundred thousand dollars will fill a lot of bibles just saying other comments mayor i'd like to make a comment um here as far as the the what's been accomplished this past year i do want to give a lot of credit to uh our our city council mayor our city staff finance department there's very few cities right now that'll actually be putting money in the fund balance next year there's a lot of cities right now that are looking at really extreme measures to cut back because they didn't budget conservatively in the past and this has always been our approach with the city of san angelo so to be looking at the potential of actually putting 1.4 million dollars in the fund reserves for next year that should be applauded that's actually an effort from everybody working together to make sure that we're building being fiscally responsible and that's something that we continue to do so again just wanted to point that out that is something that

[2:19:41] i'm proud of i'm glad that we have the leadership and the the staff that work so well together to ensure that we're we're doing everything for our citizens to provide the service we have but do it in a fiscally responsible manner thank you all right with that tina is there anything else that's it for this portion mayor we do have a couple of slides to talk about um expenditure cutting measures if you want to talk about those today sure okay so the current cost saving initiatives like i said that we've already um initiated um include adjusting hiring um travel restrictions again referring to the hiring and travel phases and then utility management that's something that ron lewis facilitates um is ron on the call do you want to talk about what that utility management means i'm here mayor council this is ron lewis facilities maintenance manager can you hear me okay yes sir okay good i lost my picture to see y'all i was watching y'all too so i don't have any slides prepared today but i think i'm just going to kind of want to go over in general over the past many years back to 2007 we have i think every year consigned to an agreement with a consulting firm that works for aep texas and they brought that to us in 2007. it's a way to incent us to make improvements to our air conditioning our roofing and our lighting programs to be able to cut costs their goal my statute in the state law was to cut generation for electricity costs so what we've done is we've gone in and they've helped us to identify projects that we had funding for at the time to be able to well many of it i guess many of the

[2:21:44] projects there was new equipment brought so many of the projects were of course in the time frame when city hall and the community development building were redone back in 2010-11 time frame so we received actual dollar amounts checks from aep directly to us that for rebuilding rebuilding those buildings or renovating those buildings and we have over the years received monies and put those into an account that we turned around and spent those incentives on other projects and to to decrease the consumption of electricity there we've done a lot and it's mostly been by factory renovations and replacing air conditioners and new roofs so the cool roofs as you may be aware all of you of the the white roofs and the single ply membranes those three cut down the heat load on the building so we we've done a lot of good in the area and we have automated systems that let us monitor our air conditioning and adjust schedules and that makes a big difference because our recognition systems are not like you and i have at home they don't come off and own in most cases they they run with chillers and boilers and they're always pumping water through the building and the air handlers are what can be regulated but there's always air blowing in most of the buildings we have that had been renovated so we continue to work we have some projects underway very small ones in the sense of what the money will be paid to us but the savings can be calculated out much better more recently you you're aware that we have you may be aware that we've placed the chiller at the police department and so we'll start seeing savings on that we already are now because it's been actually hooked up i think two weeks ago now and we have some other lighting projects going on a couple years back the operations department

[2:23:46] funded some replacement laps over in the what we call city hall annex now and that was a a big return to us initially but also in savings of electricity and we've been watching our electric bills recently we look back at the past and saw that our reductions and our costs for that building have been significant from an average of about five thousand a month to about four thousand so plus or minus but that's a big difference when you can save that much electricity some of that is about air conditioning systems some of it is by the controls or thermostats that you'd say a control system that's computer-based so i'll be happy to answer any questions and i can provide information to you i didn't prepare slides i do have stuff i can get to you if you want to talk about it more specifically well ron what i really want to do and i thank you for the update is to make sure that we have an ongoing awareness day after day about how to save on utilities and so it's a being aware it's a mind a conversation to make sure everybody is aware on an ongoing basis about how to cut utility costs turning off lights adjusting temperatures down setting a minimum temperature per room making sure if the room's not being used the lights are off the air conditioner is reduced there's just a lot of day in and day out making everyone aware of how they can impact costs mayor would you see on the screen right now is really um there's still certain uh measures that we're working through that are very preliminary we're not quite ready to discuss at this point but we just wanted to put them out there just to let you all know that these are discussions that are being had and strategies being put together to implement as well but uh again just want to give you a quick summary of a quick bullet point thank you questions or comments from

[2:25:50] counsel okay thank you tina what else um i wanted to come back to this side quickly that 3 900 we will um we we have to balance we have to adopt a balanced budget so we will need to move that 30 900 into one of the lines my recommendation would be to put it in health insurance since that could slightly fluctuate when we get actual numbers and then if we don't need it would just fall to fund balance yeah and i i want to make another comment as we talked to one of the things that came up if you take a look at our performance on sales tax on a quarterly basis what we can't do is get into the business of thinking if one quarter has a good increase that the second quarter won't have a decrease to plan and so when you're trying to make decisions on a quarterly basis instead of an annual basis or a six-month basis dynamics change in economies and we need to be very careful about what we're doing so with that i'm assuming no one would have a problem with moving the 3934 into health insurance unless someone has another idea about where to move that 3 900 whether it's an equipment under shane's world is it something else that has been reduced that we might need mayor uh tommy i i think tina's correct i think that the the health insurance line item is is a good line item because those numbers may be as fluid as any numbers that we have yeah so i i would agree with tina okay with that tina okay this is the final um discussion item mayor um we have i don't know if julia do you want to take this one or do you want me to explain this go ahead okay um

[2:27:53] we have new um new laws in place and right now our council meetings are scheduled for the 1st and 15th we are considering asking council to move them to the 15th and the 29th as we are waiting for kind of finalization on some of these rules that we're having from the new legislation um if that is not an option or a possibility we can still keep them on the 1st and the 15th but we're trying to push them out a little bit so we have more time to understand what we need to do well let me ask you a question right now based off of the information presented i'm assuming i'm believing that council would want to leave the property tax levy at the 0.776 and if that is true could we not today vote to accept a proposal to leave the property tax at .776 as it is teresa do we have to have a public hearing on that correct yes we do we have that's part of the reason we're asking for the delay to arrange the public hearing all right well here's going to be my comment i know people make plans and so most of us have blocked out on our calendar the first and third tuesday of every month so i guess everyone should take a look at their calendars and see if that right now presents a problem this would be the third and fifth instead of the first and third and like i said if we have to do it on the first and third then we will make it work we'll figure it out we can think about if everyone will look at their calendar and their plan trips that they've committed to on tuesday at the city council meeting we can make a final decision on this and we'll put that in there to do uh so you have a chance to look at your family's lives and what you've committed to in terms of travel or

[2:29:55] vacations or business meetings etc does that work for everyone yes yes okay what we'll do all right tina that's all i have mayor with that we will um adjourn this workshop and thank everyone for their comments and participation aaron move we adjourn thank you thank you it's a vote see you tuesday

Captured 2026-07-26 · source: youtube.com/watch?v=5qNrlNanj3g