Mayor Recording. Okay. I'd like to call this meeting of the John Scree City Council to order this Monday, March 25, 2024 at 7.19 PM. Sorry, we are behind schedule. Thank you. That's how I'll call a roll. Please. Council Member Tunkey. Here. Council Member Skinner. Here. Council Member Erimelli. Present. I'll note Council Member Coughlin is absent. Council Member DBSC. Here. Council member Elwood. Thank you, Mayor. We have a corner this evening. All right. Thank you. Next item. We do have a scout in the house from troop 143. If you want to come forward and tell us your name and lead us in the pledge this evening. He's just here working on a badge tonight. Fantastic. Hello. My name is R. Farthlem, I'm 3143 and I like to lead the pledge. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Next slide. It's time for Mayor's opening remarks. First off, welcome everyone to another one of your city council's meetings. I just want to share that we've had some great events. Recently we had the first ever battle of the bands that seemed to have been very well received by the community and by the participants. And then of course on Friday we had the Easter Bunny Hop. I do want to say thank you to our staff for being flexible and doing everything they could to make sure that we had the event, make sure the show was able to go on despite the rain. Coming up next, we've got daffodil days featuring the children's entrepreneur market. That's going to be Saturday, April 13th from 11 to 230 at City Hall. And for general information about our events and other things about the city, I do encourage you to go to our website, which has recently been revamped. And so check that out. And that's at johnscreatega.gov. Thank you mayor. The next item on the agenda is approval of our meeting minutes. You have March 4th, work session summary and council meeting minutes before you. Council on any motions? Mr. Mayor, I'd like to make a motion to approve the minutes as presented. Okay. Thank you council member D. Biasi. Is there a second? Oh, second. Thank you, Council Member Schenner. And is there a discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor? And I guess we had one abstention. Okay, that passes. We got it. Thank you. The next item is approval of the meeting agenda this evening. Councillor Noe, no changes or need for changes, any motions? Mayor, I'll make a motion to approve the agenda. All right. Second. Thank you, Councillor Member. Skinner for the motion. For your second, Councillor Aramelli. Is there a discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor? Thank you, Mayor. The next item is a agenda. There are a few items. An action item can stream a construction contract with vertical earth in the amount of $34,672,681. A CEI task order with 8kins for 1.4 million and a 5% construction contingency for the Abbott-Spread Road project. This will be from Parsons to Medlock. There is a construction project with G-Jot and the acceptance of $26,544, 135 dollars towards the same construction project at Abbott-Spread Road Parsons to Medlock. And there's also an intergovernmental agreement with the acceptance pardon me with 3,780,595 dollars for the water and sewer adjustments for the average road road project and finally there's a construction contract with PE structure and associates in the amount of 407,495 dollars for the Audrey Mill amphitheater improvements. Our council that your consent agenda any motions? Make a motion to approve the consent agenda is presented. All right, thank you, Councilmember Erimelli, and is there a second? Second. Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem, for the second. Is there a discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor? Next time. Thank you. This evening we have nothing under presentations. So the next item will be public comment. I do have a couple of cards before me. The first one is Scott Chacho. Chachoa. Sorry. You have three minutes to speak. I have one card. So. Okay. Good evening, council members, Mayor Bradbury. Thank you for this opportunity to share with you. We have together four neighbors between John's Creek, Cambridge subdivision and seven oaks. And we're at the bottom of an incline where a drainage swale has now turned into a grand canyon of sorts. Mainly due to the design that was placed maybe approved in 1996. 1996. But as you know, as today with all the homes and the way it was designed, apparently right now over 100 homes from public streets of Johns Creek flow into our private drainage swale. Because our properties are at the bottom portion, the momentum and the volume and the velocity has reached where it is eating its way towards uphill. And so now Roger here, he's in seven oaks and his property is just totally 30%, 40% washed away where sprinklers and I think during the ribbon cutting, I think the mayor is going to be coming by. Councilman Tunky has already come by our property and kind of mentioned that it was probably the worst example of the problem that our citizens face. So if this is not addressed and also maintained in the future this progression of the, I guess the erosion will continue uphill. And so we're taking the brunt for our neighbors uphill and otherwise if we did nothing right now, that's what would happen about, I mean in the last three months he lost 30% more land so I Think we're hoping that through this I'll share this presentation with you and and if you all can come Yourself and see the plight of of the damage It would be a great pilot project for any capital improvements that could be available. I mean, we're taking on the burden that the city today should, according to some experts, I have various experts today. But I guess I think we have a lot of data for you if we can have a formal agenda opportunity to really present all the facts. So that perhaps as you have more opportunities through I heard from Councilman Tunky that there is a watershed study done for federal grant opportunities as well as other federal dollars that could come. And also this is contributing to environmental issues. If you think about the volume of water that is going through the system and going through the rivers through our little swayo, that's become, the budget, this is the lowest budget we've got to prove between us. Thank you, your time has expired. It is $100, between us. Thank you, your time is expired. This is $100,000 plus. Thank you. Thank you. The next card I have is James Ballon. Greetings and I'm honored to be here. My name is James J. T. Brown and I'm running for 14 county sheriff 2024. I have a master's degree from Central Michigan University administration. I have a BA degree for Morehouse College in political science. But I'm a 14 county retired deputy sheriff while served for 30 years. I served the citizens of food and county from northeast, south, and west. I have with me Sheriff Jackson who is endorsing me. He's in the audience today. The major issues of the sheriff's office right now is management, fiscal management, desks, leadership, the inability to get along with the county commissioners. I am James T Brown and I want to be the next sheriff because my badge has been tarnished. Right now, the sheriff's office is being investigated by the DOJ, the state, and Fulton County for mismanagement of funds. I call myself a law enforcement CEO because I work in every major division of the sheriff's office. I work in the jail division, the court division, and also the law enforcement division. So you need someone with that experience and knowledge because the Sheriff's Office budget is the biggest budget in the county at this time, almost a quarter of a billion dollars. And we see that it's being mismanaged. I have the law enforcement experience to make sure that the public safety issues are kept up. I worked in the ward division where I made sure that I executed wards to make sure the public safety was adhered to by taking felonies off the street. I'm the only candidate who has worked in all three divisions. So remember me, James J.T. Brown for 40 County Sheriff. I'm a watchdog over your tax dollars and public safety. Thank you for letting me talk to you today. Thank you. Thank you Mr. Humball. I have no further cards before me. Anybody else for public comment? Anybody? Seeing none, next item. Thank you mayor. The next item on the agenda is the manager's month or report and we have interim setting manager career for presentation. Good evening mayor Mayor and Council. Okay. So including your agenda packet are the managers' monthly reports from January and February. First you'll note the format is new. The communications team was inspired by the new strategic priorities that Council set in January and revamped the report to tell more stories of progress within those big initiatives. In reviewing them, you had a chance to see them in the agenda packet and there's a lot of details there that I won't repeat. So I wanted to really take a moment to reflect on the amazing and talented staff team we have and some of the ways that they started the year so strong. So it's not exactly a January or February statistic, but the one I want to start with is from fire. Both police and fire spent a lot of time reviewing statistics and call response in an effort to improve. The beginning of the calendar year is a great time to do that. And our fire department's number one metric is response time. The 2022 average response time was six minutes and 18 seconds. Not bad, but in 2023, the average response time was five minutes and 41 seconds. Now, I can't think of a more clear metric that speaks to a department as a whole, working to pursue excellence and improve services in Johns Creek. Sticking with that public safety theme, in February, our police department had their onsite Kalea assessment. Kalea stands for the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies. This is a voluntary accreditation process, and I know council's familiar, but for the good of everyone else that might be listening. It involves 461 recognized standards for best practices. Of the roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, less than 4% are accredited. Because to be accredited you have to have a written policy, covering each standard and ensure that your employees are actually following them. We don't pursue and maintain our accreditation because we love paperwork, but we do it for a lot of reasons that matter to our community. It's a way to show and give people confidence that what we do in our police department is really following best practices and it reduces our liability and increases our defensibility of our actions. So in February, our police department hosted the on-site assessor, and it went really well. Official results will come at the end of July, but 100% of our documentation complies with all of their standards, and the assessor had some really great things to say about the culture of our team. So really proud of that. Another area that people are saying great things about is the team in recreation in parks from Lunar New Year that the mayor mentioned you see in that report to this weekend's Bunny Hop. Our team really knows how to engage the community and family friendly fun events. We're also building some amazing projects out in our parks in January and February. We made great progress on some trail improvement projects at different parks as well as the Pickleball Court renovations that we celebrated opening earlier this month. So January and February were really a busy season getting the parks spruced up for that busy springtime. Speaking of busy, you really can't drive far in John's Creek without running into a few orange barrels and a construction crew are two. And in addition to the construction management that's going on, there are literally dozens of projects behind the scenes that are being engineered and for which right of ways being acquired. As much as I love, the trail projects and could speak for several minutes about Old Alabama winding through the trees or Jones Bridge, the project I want to highlight is the one you just adopted on the consent agenda. We've been working on the Abbott's Bridge project for 10 years. The project is worthy of highlighting as now an adopted construction contract and associated agreements, both because it will improve the walkability and safety of that corridor, as well as how it demonstrates what can be accomplished when you work with G.Dot as a partner. Each stage of the project they contributed funding. And it was that phone call at the very end of February when they said they could contribute the last $7 million to fully fund construction. I could easily call that magic, but I know it's really a reflection of years of strong relationship building and keeping them updated and reiterating the benefits of their project not only for us but for the regional transportation system. So big highlight for the team. There are countless other things I could highlight, but there's a lot on your agenda, so I will stop there. I hope my stories have had a little bit color to this frighten shiny report, and I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Buddy. You're talking about the website. I did not, because that was a March thing, but I am so proud of the free and new renovated website. The mayor mentioned in his opening comments, I hope you've all taken it for a spin. It's still www.johnscreakga.gov, but it now has a cleaner look and feel easier to access all the one click services, whether you are trying to get a billing permit or pay a store motor bill. It's front and center. If you need to contact Councilmember, you're just to scroll away because you guys are on that home page too. And one of my personal favorite features is you can now add events to your calendar. It's like there's a widget, I think they call it in the tech terms. If you click the button and it appears on your calendar. So it has so much more functionality, a more robust search feature. There is a lot to it. I feel like I fall in a rabbit hole every time I open it up now. But- No, it's the layout and the easy on the ice. It is. We had a number of internal focus groups and colluding council members that helped us navigate correctly. Great job for the team. Yes, thank you. Director Mullins, thank you so much because that does look good. We appreciate it. I just wanted to ask you, you give us a lot more information is what they're in the report. Yes. Where do we get that information? Well, I try to preview at least something once a week to Council and update. Does that mean you'd like the report to get longer? I don't mind if it's linked. Okay. Is it sending it a link? That would be helping. Because this is the first time I'm hearing all these good things about the city. Well. Right? Well, I'm not feeling great about the city right now. I'll tell you that. Can certainly. It's not that. Whatever. There are so many great things. And so you know what you're trying to say. What we are saying is just by the watch of looking at the report, we won't be knowing what a nice city VA are living in. That's what I meant. So if you go to at least link it up. No, that's a great point. Down here, anyone? Yes, yes. Thank you very much, City Manager. Assist, interrupt City Manager, excuse me. So I love the fact that we're here highlighting green communities here. We're a bronze level. That's wonderful. But doesn't talk about bio-ready. Was that previously or? It was. It was. Well, you could talk about it again. Oh, we'll come up was, you could talk about it again. Oh, we'll come up with a reason to talk about it again. Our friends at Boston Scientific are making such great progress on their build-out that we will soon have more things to talk about with that, absolutely. And we are preparing, we're going to the Bio-Conference in June. It has been one of our best recruiting avenues because it lines up so well with our Life Sciences health wellness innovation push. I'm so we are we are continuing to work in that area I'm looking for more ways to line up that focus area. So yes more economic development highlights in the future I love that I think it just fits Who we are as a city and going forward and I really appreciate that and the website is spectacular. Thank you. All right. I think the website's look and feel is really good. Thank you. Please tell the director William. Absolutely. I will pass that on to the team. They'll be so excited to hear you guys like it. Thank you. Thank you. Next slide. Thank you, Mayor. The next item on the agenda is the annual comprehensive financial report for fiscal year 23. We have director Campbell for presentation this evening. Thank you, Mr. Mayor and members of the council. So the annual consolidated financial report for fiscal year 23 represents the conclusion of the FY 23 audit that was completed by our external auditors, Maldon and Jenkins. Attach to your agenda report, you have a draft copy of the 2023 annual comprehensive financial report, draft of the auditor's discussion analysis, and then a draft single audit report. I will mention that it is going through its final stages of second partner review, that's why it's still yet and draft, but we have confirmed that while we do have a few audit findings, the annual comprehensive financial report does contain an unmodified or better known as a clean opinion. And I will mention as regards to the findings, we take those very seriously. Our response to each of the findings has been documented in the process and our external procedures have already been revised to address several of the issues that were highlighted. Also later this week, Ron and myself will be meeting internally with staff to further debrief the FY23 audit and then develop and implement what we're going to be doing in fiscal year 24 going forward. A mid-year close focusing on all of the what I call pain points of this current audit to make sure that staff is a clear understanding that six months from now we're ready to complete the fiscal year and audit and not have similar recurrences. The thing that I know that most of you will focus on, I'll just kind of highlight then the financial statements. The audit does present an unassigned general fund balance to link $30 million for $27, $448 that's found on page 14 of the draft report. This number will now be incorporated into the monthly reports that you do receive on a monthly basis starting with the month of April going forward, where it then tells you the different classifications of the general fund unassigned. Overall, the City of John's Creek does remain in a strong financial position as demonstrated by the external audit of our finances and that our financial statements are presented fairly and accurately. I do have Josh Carroll who was the engagement partner for Maulden and Jenkins here in the audience in case you have any questions for either myself or him. But that does conclude my comments. Happy to address any questions you might have. Questions? So when I was reviewing the documents here, I raised an eyebrow regarding some of the items that had been exposed. But more importantly, I wanted to thank you for taking the hard steps that were needed to make the changes so that we can correct the issues that was going on. So thank you very much. I know they're tough. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else? Oh, yes, please. Thank you very much, Director Campbell, and for all your help today. The auditor's discovery and analysis, page 12. The wider the gap between expenditures and fund balance, the less leveraged the city has. The relationship of year and fund balance as compared to each year's expenditures should be further considered. Is there anything we can do differently? From this standpoint, if we look at the results of FY23 as we discussed earlier, perhaps one of the things that we might want to consider is if there is a projected surplus that maybe council would not appropriate all of that. Leave a little bit of flexibility because what we've done by appropriating all of the fund balance in this particular year, we actually then did use a portion of the reserves to cover the GTIB loan that we repaid back in December. So from an accounting perspective, you're seeing a drawing down on fund balance. It really is just kind of a caution, if you will, as we get ready to go into around that June timeframe when we begin to discuss what a projected surplus may look like, maybe we perhaps not be so to the pencil of programming everything, but perhaps leave a little something on the table. That leads you a little bit of flexibility and now it allows your fund balance to accumulate a little bit year over year. Well, okay, well thank you very much. We were trying to tighten our projections, so there wasn't as much of a surplus. So what happens if there's not as much of a surplus? And is there a special percentage that you would recommend if we get that we do not have a higher. So we have tightened our projection so we will expect to see on a going forward basis that we won't see as a larger year-over-year surplus as we've experienced in the past. If we get into a scenario where we perhaps need to slow down an expenditure pattern or something like that, that would be addressed around the same time frame that we're talking about a projected surplus. So you could either have a projected surplus or you could be in a scenario where we're gonna be really close. Maybe there's a need to kind of tighten our belts. All of those things are really being looked at right now as we prepare for the FY25 budget development process. I've begun taking a hard look at the top 10 revenue sources, how those are streaming, but the preliminary information right now is just two preliminary it is shared, but it's something that will be forthcoming within the next couple of weeks. Thank you, thank you very much. And I'd like to thank you for the hard decisions you're taking in your department. I hope the Interim City Manager, what he has done is very commendable. I hope other department heads also follow that so that we don't have these pitfalls which we discover subsequently. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else? Thank you, Dr. Kemp. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else? Thank you, Director. Thank you, sir. Next item. Thank you, Mayor. I have a couple of announcements this evening. There's a public participation meeting on Thursday, April 4th, at 7pm. There's an arts culture and entertainment committee on Thursday, April 11th at 630. And then they cancel me again on Monday, April 15th at 5pm for work session followed by 7pm council meeting. Okay, any other announcements? All right, next item. Thank you. This evening we have nothing under old business, new business or other business. What are the kind of businesses there? We have another opportunity for public comment. Anybody? All right, saying none. Thank you. Another opportunity for marriage comments. None at the time. Thank you. Thank you. Executive session. We do have a need for executive session. Does anyone want to make a motion? I'd like to make a motion. Go ahead. I don't know which of the start of the first. I make a motion to adjourn to executive session to discuss land legal or personal issues. Okay. Thank you, Councillor Rembrellmel, is there a discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor? And we are adjourned to get our executive session shiver early. you