How do you have Mr. Reber? Thank you Mayor. As you well know, our fire assessment fee is imposed to help us support fire suppression in our city, which is the bulk of the work of the Fire Rescue Department. This evening I would call upon our Chief Financial Officer Andrew Thompson to introduce our consultant and walk us through their assessment of where we stand with the Fire Assessment Study Andrew. Thank you. Good evening Mayor, Vice Mayor of City Commissioners, Andrew Thompson, Chief Financial Officer. I'm joined tonight by Shane Black of Answer Advisory, the consultant that we brought on board to fulfill one of your business plan initiatives for this fiscal year, which was conducting a new fire assessment study. Shane. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. As Andrew said, my name is Shane Black. I'm a project manager with answer advisory consulting. And I've had the pleasure of working alongside city staff this year to conduct an updated study of your fire assessment program. Let me know if you can see the screen. Everything's good on our answer. Perfect. As some general background into special assessments, what is a fire assessment? Simply put, a fire assessment is a fee imposed against real property to pay for fire services. These services include anything from suppression to hazmat response to fire prevention. However, it does not include any EMS type services above the level of first responder and I'll get to why that is in a moment. Special assessments are a non-advalorem revenue source and are therefore not a tax instead of being based on the value of the property that based on the cost of the service being provided. The city originally implemented its fire assessment program back in fiscal year 2001. Fire assessments are a home rule revenue source which means the city authorizes itself to impose the fire assessment every year as a non-advalorem. The guiding requirements are case law driven, not statutorily driven, meaning that the requirements for special assessments are based off of the ruling and precedence of the courts. In order for a special assessment to be valid and must meet two requirements. The first is that the services being provided must provide a special benefit to the property. And the courts have determined that fire services up to the level of first responder do provide a special benefit to the properties. However, they have also said that EMS type services, while they do provide a benefit to the individuals on the property, they do they do provide a benefit to the individual's own property, they do not provide a special benefit to the property itself. Therefore EMS services above the level of first responder cannot be funded through the fire assessment. Now the second requirement is that the costs of the services being provided must be fairly and reasonably apportioned among the benefiting parcels. And this is kind of where we come in to analyze the different data components and develop a methodology to fairly and reasonably apportion the costs. The methodology that the city utilizes and that we recommend is the historical demand methodology. This methodology is court tested and approved. The driving factor is the historical demand for fire services, which we determined by looking at your incident data and calculating how many calls and what resources go to the different types of properties. And then we distribute the costs accordingly. This methodology is by far the most widely adopted and prevalent in the state of Florida. I believe anywhere from 90 to 95% of the fire assessments in the state utilize this some form of this methodology. So as we look at the results of the updated study, we have some key points or highlights to make note of. The first is that since the last update, the weighted incident demand from residential and industrial warehouse properties has increased, whereas the demand from commercial and institutional type properties have decreased. Secondly, what we are seeing is that there's this trend where costs of everything from personnel to apparatus are continuing to increase over time. In fact, there's been an increase of almost 2.5 million or 32% increase in the total accessible costs since the last update in fiscal year 2021. The increase in costs also translates to a proportional increase in rates, maintaining the historical recovery rate of 91%, of accessible costs, would result in the residential rate increasing to $402 per doing unit. And that's an increase from the $276 you guys currently charge. This resultant would constitute a $126 increase, or 46% per dwelling unit for the residential. This shift in rates would generate a little over $11 million after exemptions, which represents an increase in $3.35 million of revenue. And this keeping in mind that any of the accessible costs that are not funded through the assessment would have to be funded through property taxes, the general fund, and any other legally available with the new sources. And additionally, staff has requested that we look at the impact of potentially reducing the exemption that you guys have in place for institutional tax exempt properties, a reduction from 100% exempt to 50% exempt. So answer last conducted, an updated study for the city in fiscal year 2021. The results of this was an increase in the residential rate from $199 to $251. And at the time that $251 was the 15th lowest rate in Broward County, but the county average being around $306 for the residential. Last year, the decision was made to increase the rates from the 91% assessable cost to 100%, which brought the residential rate up to $276. Even with this increase, Oakland Park was rated still 20th in the county. So 20th out of 27 in terms of the residential rate with the county average last year being around $350. So here we highlight the increase in costs over recent years since the last update was conducted, assessable costs which exclude EMS type expenditures have increased by almost $2.5 million, which would constitute a 32% increase. And then this comes from a variety of increases across the board. Personnel costs have increased about 19% for various reasons including increases in compensation and retirement benefits. Similarly, operating costs have increased by approximately 60% and capital costs have more than doubled since the last study. Meanwhile, there has also been a small, a slight decrease in the offsetting revenues over the same periods. So the way we calculate these accessible costs is by looking at your current adopted budget and the next year's anticipated budget to forecast a five-year average accessible budget. What this does for you is that, when we develop the rates based off this five-year average, it allows for smoothing of rates over, from year to year. So instead of having to increase your rates every year as costs increase, you're able to adopt the one rate and maintain it over several years. And so while you might collect a little extra revenue in the first year, you might have a deficit in the third year, it allows you to maintain that rate without having to increase every single year. And you can also see here the breakdown of the increasing costs from year over year from the different budget categories, personnel operating in capital. The increases are pretty significant. So once we've developed the budget and calculated the five year average assessable costs, we look at your incident data to determine how to apportion those costs based on the historical demand for the services from the Fire Department. When we look at your call data, we also take into account a couple of waiting factors. Oftentimes the response to different types of properties are not equal. So we wait the calls based on the average number of personnel that are responding, as well as the average duration of the calls that they're going on per rate category. So for instance, we anticipate the calls to industrial warehouse type properties to require both additional manpower but also have a longer, the call to last longer and have a longer duration than a call to say residential property. So by waiting the calls in this manner, we can more accurately capture the full extent of the services that are being demanded. So since the last update, there has been a significant increase in the demand for services from residential and industrial warehouse type properties and a corresponding decrease in services demanded from commercial and institutional. As such, the proportion of the cost that fall into these different rate categories will shift accordingly. So based on the historical demand of the portionment and the accessible cost calculations from the previous slides. We divide those portion costs by the number of units in each course on the category to get the maximum rates shown here. Residential properties are charged and pay on a per dwelling unit basis, whereas the non-residential properties pay on a square foot tier basis. This scenario, I just want to preface this, saying this scenario reflects the upper limit or the maximum rates of the fire assessment based on this updated study. This constitutes 100% of the five year average assessable costs and helps to inform you now and in the future what the maximum rate you can charge would be while staying within the parameters of this updated study. However, based on the historical recovery rate of accessible costs, which again is about 91% over the of the five-year average budget, these would be the corresponding rates you'd be looking at. As you can see, the residential rate would increase to $402 from the current $276 for dwelling unit. This constitutes a $126 increase or 46% increase per dwelling unit. Additionally, the scenario represents a 47% increase in the commercial rates, 164% increase in industrial warehouse rates, and an 8% decrease in institutional rates. And part of the variation in the increases and decreases there has to do with just the shift in units, increase in residential units, etc. And also has to do with the shift in demand. So the increase in industrial warehouse and residential and the decrease demand from the commercial institutional. So the shift in rates would generate a little over $11 million in revenue representing $3.35 million increase in the revenue that was certified last year. And again, that's after the exemption buyouts. The city currently has 100% exemptions for government owned property, institutional tax exempt properties, and various residential exemptions, including those for low-income seniors, as well as disabled persons, veterans, and first responders. We were requested to present you with the impact of potentially reducing the exemption for institutional tax exempt properties from 100% exempt to 50% exempt. So, as you can see highlighted, at the maximum rates, this policy decision would bring in about $136,000 in additional revenue, and at the 91% rates, this would generate approximately $124,000 in additional revenue. But keep in mind, this is 100% of policy decision, and it's up to you to make that determination. And at this point I'll hand the reins back over to Mr. Thompson to close out the presentation. Thank you very much Shane. And one of the key words here tonight is presentation. This is not an action item. This is an informational item. The fire assessment represents about 11% of all your general fund revenues and as part of the budget process it's really it's one of the only two rates that are set by the city commission that determine the funding of the general fund and the other rate is your operating millivere, your property tax. We wanted to make sure we brought this study to you all and full copy is attached to the agenda item to provide this update in a timely fashion. We are in the midst of the budget development. There are still many factors outstanding that we don't have finalized yet. And these are a lot of items that we need more information from outside entities such as the property tax base for next years or so. We have labor contracts for the fire rescue department still that we need more information from outside entities such as the property tax space for next two years. We have labor contracts for the fire rescue department, still need to be resolved. The effect FY 24 and FY 25. But we thought was important that the city commission be updated that we have seen a change in the demand by property class. So as Shane said, that residential and industrial warehouse properties, those have increased and the commercial institutions have decreased as demand. Shane, would you mind sharing your screen still? Thank you. Another major takeaway is that just from fiscal year 21 to 24 the accessible costs have increased by 32%. So if we were to maintain our consistent trajectory of 91%, that would result in a residential rate of $400-$2. Now, again, this is earlier on in the budget development. There are lots of factors at play here, but we did want to make sure you're aware of what that baseline would be for maintaining consistency with our prior fire assessment studies. Just to note, the fire assessment is not a rate that changes that often. Since fiscal year 12, when the rate was 196, it's only increased three times. In fiscal year 17, fiscal year 22, and fiscal year 24. So when looking at this rate study, it's important to recognize that this is a study that's only conducted every three to five years. Five years being the upper limit of allowability based on that five year forecast. Very often earlier if circumstances change financially or operationally. With that, I welcome any questions on the fire assessment and same is also a tip.