Okay, Council's seeing we have a quorum. We'll go ahead and start the council meeting and we'll go into executive session. The city council will now go into closed session at 8th, I guess. On August 8th, 2017, in accordance with following sections of VTCA Government Code, Chapter 551.071.072.087. 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I'd like to call the work session to order and our first item is our 2018 proposed budget presentation and let's call upon our city manager, Mr. Trey-Overton. Thanks, Mayor. members of the council. I have quite a bit of information here to go through, so I'm going to go through it pretty quickly. We have a presentation there in front of you as well as your budget notebook. So we'll get the conversation started today, but over the next six weeks or so in various other work sessions and public forums will have the ability to talk further about how we would like to approach this year's budget. So as you all know, we guide our budget by following the priorities that you all have established. Back in the spring time, we set these priorities. They're the same as in previous last year, investing in the economy, championing great neighborhoods, enhancing mobility, supporting quality education, and putting technology to work. The guideline for how we'll do today, support and quality education and putting technology to work. The guideline for how we'll do today, what we hope to do here over the next little bit is talk a little bit about the city's value proposition, as well as the proposed budget emphasizing certain priorities and core services. Talk about some of the follow-up needs we want to start in on your next meeting as far as the dish things you'd like to learn additional information about and then reviewing the budget calendar. The process that we use this year to build the budget is very similar to what we used this past year. We start with our five year comprehensive financial forecast that we look at in the spring time. that we look at in the spring time. We will then request a departmental, offer the opportunity for departmental reviews. Those will go through the City Manager's office. And then all the items that we've considered, we call this the shepherd amendment. But in the budget book is everything that's left on the cutting room floor, all budgetary ass or in the appendix material of what things we were not able to get to, unfortunately. There's a lot of great requests, but there's also a lot of significant deferrals that we've not been able to incorporate in this budget that we'll have to look to in the future years. And then we've also done a reconciliation as it relates to the ads and deletes and adjustments and organizations as it relates to the ads and deletes and adjustments and organizations as it relates to positions at a high level The budget is of course balanced and in accordance with our city's financial principles does I think advance targeted priorities? especially in the core service areas and it addresses the second year of our three year compensation strategy. Has certain targeted investments in technology. Of course, addresses are needs in civil service. And then this year we are looking at, we've proposed for you to consider a half-cent tax rate reduction, which would reduce the rate from 6448 to 63.98. I'll talk a little bit more about pay in a moment, but as it relates to civil service, I want to make sure you know, a couple things how we've approached this. Really look at civil service in two different buckets. We have kind of a fixed cost of service, as well as the variable cost, fixed meaning things that are revenues or expenditures that are going to go away or expenditures that are required to execute the the new approach with the variable being things that are largely related to litigation risks and things like that that are variable, depending on what kinds of activities come. So you'll hear more detail specifically about civil service and a presentation here after by our civil service director, Mazeka. But at a high level, we've planned for about $800,000 worth of expenditures and civil service and revenue loss as well as some contingency plans as it relates to the variable risks that civil service may present in employment activities. I'll get a little more detail about that later on. So you all know we also like to subject ourselves to best practices and third party review. If there's a third party certification or validation to go get, we go get it. It just keeps us sharper, keeps us benchmarked, it keeps us more innovative, and it lets us know where we're at. And so a lot of these you've seen before, but I'll draw your attention to two in particular that are worth mentioning here are gold medal for the National Gold Medal finalist in the parks department. What let me know is the third year in a row. So I'm sorry. Third time. Third time of four years. So that's worth mentioning. It was there last year, but it doesn't stay there. You gotta go get it every time. And then the other one I wanna mention there is the transparency stars. As I mentioned to you all, I think at our last meeting, we're the third city in the state of Texas to achieve all five transparency stars presented by the Texas Comptroller, McKinney and I think Plano might have been the other two, but that puts information out there about purchasing Oh, Mike remind me Pension liability debt financial transparency and one other and economic development organizations or economic development agreements So plenty of detail there out there and we have to also keep that ever greened and refreshed. You don't earn it one time. You have to earn it and keep it earned. We will keep that all up today. Yes, sir. I believe the transparency star programs only been in this about a year. They used to have kind of a platinum gold silver rating at which we had the platinum standard and the new comptroller came in and he changed the rating system. And we got to got to work and it took us about a year to get everything in order to to earn that. And so we're real proud and thank Mike and all his staff in particular for pulling all that together did a lot of good work. Let's see. One thing I wanted to highlight because there's been a lot of things that are being talked about done in Austin relative to city budgets. And in Texas there's a cost of doing business as a city, as it relates to dollars that aren't sent from Austin to Arlington, but rather from Arlington to Austin. And so just in the context of our budget discussion, I want to make sure that everybody's familiar that on an annualized basis in this budget, we expect about $7.2 million to go from Arlington to Austin, which is about three and a half cents on the tax rate they're about. And largely is in court fines, which they share in that area, and in a sales tax service administration fee. So the sales tax checks that we get monthly, there's a fee that the Comptroller keeps to administer that. So it's $2 million to the Comptroller, $4.7 in court, and various other agency fees, are about $500,000. So it's something for us to keep in mind as we look at how we can, how we have cost constraints and how we try to keep our budget low. We do extremely well at doing that. We work hard to do that. We can do more and we will continue to be innovative and steadfast in that effort. But there's a, there's a, there is this amount in our budget that is beyond our control that we will be sending down to Austin. Now, one of the things that I think is, I think also very important to note, this is to me one of the more important slides in this presentation, so kind of go with me a little bit. Our overall tax base in Arlington is about $32.5 billion. We will exempt about 25% of that or $8.3 billion of our tax base is exempted from any kind of tax collection. Now a little bit of that is what would be called an absolute exemption, meaning it's a school building, it's a church building, it's a nonprofit building, it's university property, those kinds of things. But much of it is also what I guess I would call elected tax exemptions, and that's what this chart mostly focuses on. So whether the Council in the past has awarded it or the voters in the past have awarded it there are a number of Tax policies that are in place not only for residential But commercial as well I hear a lot especially as we talk about economic development efforts about Benefits that are given to commercial properties and we don't do anything for the residential But I do want to make sure that we're clear in that sense. Our tax policy as it relates to residential exemptions in these various categories. The homestead exemption of 20%. That's significant. Not a lot of cities do that. There's a bunch that don't. So that is a significant exemption that's provided to our homeowners. Of course, the senior tax freeze, the over 65 exemption as well as various veterinary the same time. We have a very important exemption that is provided to our homeowners. Of course, the senior tax freeze, the over 65 exemption, as well as various veterinary or better exemptions. Those together, we will exempt $3.4 billion off the tax rolls through these mechanisms. For commercial, we offer We offer free-port and tax abatements based on various types of things that we do. In those areas, we will exempt .9 billion or 900 million. So 900 million in commercial exemption, 3.4 billion in residential exemption. So 4 to 1 exemptions go to the residential properties versus the commercial properties. Also worth note is lost revenues that are subject to things like the senior tax freeze, $2.3 million in this year's budget foregone, as well as the property growth, you know, there's, the presidential district has the 10% growth cap that's in place, $6.2 million in some change that are subject to that cap that is revenue lost to the budget that will feather in years down the road as properties adjust. So tax policy environment that you all have created I think is very favorable. It's very targeted to provide tax relief to homeowners in particular, and then let you all situationally use it in a targeted way to grow the tax base on commercial property. So I talked a little bit about being efficient instead fast in our efforts to do good work. So just always worth a few good benchmarks. the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the because assess value per capita, we really want to find a more robust, more commercially strong tax base. So we need to grow that base and we need to work our way up this particular list. The others being at the bottom of the list I think is wise. So a number of employees per capita is second to the bottom of our competitive set. Largely thankful to a lot of contracting out that we do. For example, we contract out garbage service, we contract out, ambulance service, we contract out accounts payable. So some things that we, what otherwise do with city services are that some other cities do with actual city crews. We don't, and so it helps lower our employee count. The expenditures per capita, general fund, expenditures per capita, Arlington second from the bottom at $613, levy per capita, second to the bottom at $360. So they'll again, conservative principles showing through. As it relates to the tax rate itself at the old rate last year, 6448. You see, it's kind of in the middle of the bench set that we've looked at. But lower than all the cities that really touch us. Fort Worth, Mansfield, Grand Prairie, all have higher rates. And some also do not offer the homestead exemption, which I want to make sure it's very clear to you all that that is a significant thing that we provide our residents. Arlington has, frankly, for as long as I can remember, provided that 20%. But as you look on the list, their grand prairie offers 1% or 5,000. Mansfield doesn't offer a homestead exemption. the public. So, as you look at rate comparisons and benchmark comparisons, that is a very significant thing to pay attention to. And again, I would argue it provides targeted residential tax relief to all of our residents who own their home. So, from a various departmental perspective on the policing side, I hardly find anybody who doesn't want me to find a way to hire more police officers andal perspective on the policing side. I've hardly found anybody who doesn't want me to find a way to hire more police officers and we're on the higher end of that particular ratio. On the fire side, this is an area where we've always been conservative. And I think we're gonna continue to be so. We're gonna need to focus as we recalibrate ourselves in a civil service environment and look to make sure that we're able to achieve our missions. And as we look towards particularly the medical mission and making sure that our response times the use of heavy equipment and those types of things are optimized to the purposes of which they need to be used. So we will continue to stay focused on being efficient there. Parks is a little bit middle-to-packed libraries on the lower, lower tier code in the middle. So very much so in the middle to the lower end of ratios, as it relates to our benchmark set here in the Metroplex for how efficient we are in using our employees. So, couple the budget and service highlights. Of course, the budget is really all about results and you all see in your budget every quarter, we will produce the budget and then just as equally as important the part of and business plan, a budget and business plan, just as equally as important the part of and business plan, a budget and business plan, which includes the performance measures, as well as the initiatives that are being operationalized to implement our city's efforts. So those are put out there quarterly. I've just picked a handful of actual results that are coming off the business plan, reducing our days of initial code complaint from two to one. Capital investment increasing through our office of economic development, going from 32 to 200 million estimated this year. Our communications efforts have been significant with an over 100% increase in views of the YouTube videos that we've produced to try to communicate with residents. Turnover stays very, very manageable, as well as our debt ratios very healthy and consistent with our policies. We also stay focused on cost containment efforts and various budget balancing strategies that we have to try to put to place. For this year, Mr. Parker is going to get to celebrate fully the new electric contract that was negotiated a little over a year ago that will kick in in January. And so last year, you are, remember, we used some one-time money to kind of bridge that this year. We'll do that for the first part of the year, but then from January on, we'll take on the new rate fully. We've also found some savings in our workers' compensation fund this year as things have gone more favorably there from our risk management perspective. Our debt service, you all know that any time an opportunity presents itself to refinance at a lower interest cost, We do that. We've done two or three of those this past year to the tune of saving a million and a half dollars. We continue a strategy of moving items out of our operating budget to the capital budget that that makes sense that our long-term assets. So we'll talk a bit more detail about that. We use So we'll talk a bit more detail about that. We use 133,000 hours of volunteers, largely in the police department, the parks department and the libraries department. We couldn't do a lot of what we do without the people who are willing to help us do what we do. I also should mention animal services is a big, big user of volunteers. And then grants, as those provide us opportunities, this past year, upcoming year, $12.6 million in grants that are expected to come in, this upcoming year. And then we also, in our business plan on a quarterly basis, track what we call our innovation summary. If it's a little bit of money or a lot of bit of money, we track those and try to continue to encourage and create a culture of innovation in the organization to save resources and or drive revenue where it needs to. I mentioned the ongoing structure about moving things into the capital budget that really belong there. So we have certain building maintenance items that were requested in the budget. We could choose to pay those in a pay as you go fashion, but a lot of them are long-term assets, boilers, roofs, air conditioning systems. And so we'll be looking to moving that into our capital budget for y'all's consideration in the spring time, as well as some infrastructure, IT infrastructure to facilitate the moving, tech, taking technology to work efforts. So working to keep our links and working together to make our links better, let me give you a little bit about the cash sources. So a lot of our budget is really about using, is the sources and uses of funds. And a lot of times when I'm talking to the public, they're a little confused of why can you do a forward to do this but not afford to do that in vice versa. And what it really boils down to is where are the dollars allocated? So the general fund is one of our larger funds, but it's also one of the more constrained funds. The general fund is the general fund for a very simple reason. It's a fund where there is no specific specific fund where everything else can fit. So where you have a fund designated water goes to water, parks goes to parks, stormwater goes to stormwater. If you can fit those things in those funds, that's where they go. Everything else then flows to the general fund and that's why then it's the most challenged. It's the most competitive. And it's also the one that's largely funded by tax dollars. So when we're talking to the public about why we can do one thing on one hand but not on the other, it really depends on where the money is coming from and when we're able to allocate dollars for it. But these are some of our largest funds, the top ones. And I'll highlight it in a little more detail in a visual way for you here. and I'll highlight it in a little more detail in a visual way for you here. So as I mentioned, the general fund is the largest piece. It represents just a little less than 50% of the budget, largely made up of sales tax and property tax. I'll go into a little more detail here. Water Fund is about another 28% or so. And then some of the other funds there, Stormwater Streets, that Park Convention Center and we'll talk a little bit about each of those. As you can imagine, the expenditures by fund look very similar to the revenues by fund. So very similar chart just as the money breaks out and again, I'll provide you a little more detail here in a second. So from a percent change of last year to this year, let me take a highlight of a couple of things of note. Speak a little bit more to the water fund here in a few minutes. So let me put that on pause for a second. But the street maintenance fund increasing almost 12%. That's a function of a roll-forward balance. It's a cash-funded fund. So we spend as much as we can that year. And then when we run out of the projects, whatever's left rolls forward. If more rolls forward, we're able to roll forward into this budget. So we have a larger roll forward this year that's coming in, which will let us do more street maintenance this particular year. Part performance up 6%. That's a realization of diddo coming back online and the golf course becoming operational again so that we had to put those dollars back in. Convention event service is fun. We have a healthy fund there as it relates to convention center revenues, hotel revenues, things are going really well. As a result, we've been able to do some additional things and that fund that I'll highlight in a few moments. And then the stormwater utility, this is an area where the council has focused on being much more aggressive and erosion and flood control activities and so this increased expenditure reflects exactly that priority. So by department, everybody knows I like to show this chart, particularly our police and fire friends. So police and fire take up about two thirds of the overall budget. Police for example is about $106 million budget. Our total ad valour at revenue is $99 million. So I need additional $7 million out of ad valorem if I gave every penny of it to the police department. Sales tax by comparison on the fire departments a little different, $49 million investment in the fire department, about 62 million in sales tax. But largely those two departments consume our two largest revenue streams to provide the services honestly their residents want That's how it should be that's the priority and that's the way it works the rest of the other departments the kind of the quality of life departments if you will parks and Economic development are much more smaller slivers of the budget that are evident by that chart You also know we pay a lot of attention about trying to keep our cost of personnel to non-personnel expenditures in a smooth way. We continue that stable trend, not particularly hiring more people at the expense of less other things or vice versa. So it's a very stable environment. And then as we look at the policing efforts, I know in particular, we like to talk about this and we've had a continued trend of increasing state of the state. We have a lot of people who are going to be able to do that. We have a lot of people who are going to be able to do that. We have a lot of people who are going to be able to do that. We have a lot of people who are going to be able to do that. We have a lot of people who are going to be able to do that. We have a lot of people who are going to be able to do that. 15 police officer grant request that is in last year we received 15 the year before that that we received 13 asked for 15 I think we only got 13 but they're about it's call it 13 15 15 so in the last three years assuming we get this grant which is a big assumption it's very competitive but we will have been able to add 43 police officers over three years through the grant sources and as you all know those things work in a matching fund way. They start out where the first year you have to match 25% than 50% than 75% by the end of the three years, you're at 100%. So you're able to roll them in and absorb them in an orderly fashion where you might not otherwise be able to bring that many on at that time. So continuing to try to grow our police capabilities there. Some of the highlights in the general fund area, the Avallorum revenue increase is about 7.6%. We do factor in a couple of other thoughts. Thanks to the great success that we've had down in the Arlington Highlands. We'll be looking to early terminate TERS number four. Every project that was put in that plan has been completed. And we are now starting to get to the point where we're pulling in excess revenue beyond what we need. So project done move on and let's go on to other things. And so we'll be in the process this year of trying to work that out with the other taxing jurisdictions. It will allow us to pull in a notable amount of recurring revenue back to the city as well as some one-time dollars back to the city that are currently in the fund that are not needed for the projects. Generally speaking sales tax we have in at 62.8 million. It's a 4% growth rate. That's right on the right about where we're at now. I think we're running about 3.5, 3.8. So we're assuming that kind of steady growth. And then there are a few other revenues that are a little bit off and court and franchise fees. And we'll talk about a little bit more here in a second. But then we're enjoying good activity in the planning department as far as permitting and plant reviews as well as interesting come starting to tick up for us out there and all that. So from a visual perspective, this gets you various revenues. Advalorum is definitely improving, which is the top line. It is, although so we're still paying, paying ketchup if you will from the 2011 financial crisis. We've had pretty big hole that we had back then and we kept the tax rate the same. We did not increase the tax rate at that time, so we've kept it the same. And now we're able to lower it a little bit, but we're still playing a little bit of catch up. And as a result, that's still something for us to manage. This is maybe a little different way to see it. You can see there for about five years from 2010 to 2014, we were either negative to really stagnant growth. And that's a big trough to pull out of. Clearly, the last two years have started to do that. And I think this year we're really just now getting back to the point where we can call it even from kind of a trend history if you will, if you were to look at it over multiple, multiple years. In the sales tax area, we're pretty much right on budget, about 3.8% up. You can see it's a little bit up, a little bit down sometimes. It depends. Some people pay quarterly, some people pay monthly, and sometimes they change their minds about what they want to do. So it's a little bit inconsistent, but Mike's staff has pretty good model. And I think Knacklewood has done pretty good job at estimating where sales tax can be barring some significant economic concerns. Some of the other main revenues, these are the court and citation revenues. As you can see, they've peaked some years back, and that's about a $3.4 million Delta over those number of years. And as concerning for the general fund, the purple line in the middle is telephone franchise fees. As we look at people getting off and cutting the cord, an&T U-VIRS in particular with their acquisition of direct TV, they are pushing people off of the U-VIRS in a very systematic, very methodical way to direct TV, and that has a direct correlation to revenue loss to the city as it relates to franchise fees. Satellite TV does not require the same franchise fee payment and there's a very systematic approach. We're seeing $500 to $1 million a year negative revenue in that particular area. And so that's also very important as we look at how we're doing on the avalorum side. As those things go down, we have to have the shoring, if you will, to maintain the status quo. So as I talked about a second ago, we're proposing a half a cent property tax rate reduction at 63.98. It's comfortably below the rollback rate. And in today's context, I think would even pass muster with some of the thoughts they're going on down in Austin, where we're well beneath any of the things that they're talking about down there. So from a compensation perspective, this has been the council's top priority for the last year and a half. So this is, we launched last year on a three year plan. This is the second year of that. And you can see the various job families. It ranges anywhere from 4.3 to 9.5 with the more technical and smaller, quite honestly, the smaller job populations in engineering and IT are getting very, very competitive. And then generally in the public safety areas, you know, five of five percentish. And what this lets us do is maintain the progress with market adjustment and then make up for where we've been behind in some of those previous years. The three-year plan was to go with the market movement, divide the makeup provision over three years, this funds year two of that plan. And we would look forward to being able to complete this plan next year, because quite honestly, it is a significant investment in our people. And when we get ready to look at FY 2020, we need to get ourselves into maintenance mode as it relates to compensation because there are some significant departmental deferrals that need to be addressed. And while we treat this as proposition number one, a lot of other things, we can buy a little time on. But in 2020 going forward, we need to get ourselves down back to kind of ground you know, ground level so that we can start to make departmental investments, service level investments back to the taxpayers. Also think it's worth noting here on this slide, which is important to note, I forgot to mention it last year, Miss Capehart, I think reminded me. We historically put our compensation package in play in January. That's since I've been city manager. It's been in January. Way back in the day was October. In this particular budget, given the significant investments that we're making, I kind of got faced with a choice. Compromise on this plan or look at making an adjustment to the timing of it and I chose to recommend to you not to compromise on the plan, but to make a modest adjustment to the timing of it. So instead of January, we'd posted this, start this off in February, three pay period delay that saves over a million dollars. So that's we would ask you to consider as we move forward. In the insurance area, a little bit of good news here. So this says, I think I've told many of you, insurance still represents, I think, our biggest financial concern to the city. It is one of the most significant growing costs for both the active and the retirees. And so through some of the processes that we've gone on this year with this RFP process that I think you all heard in committee about today, we had been projecting an 8 to 10% growth in this area. Given some of the recommended changes, particularly to the pharmaceutical side, we think we can control that rate of growth to 2.7% instead of 8% to 10%. The pharmacy change, if we go that route, actually not only lowers our cost by over a million dollars, but it will also put back what we took last year, which was a narrowing of choices about where you can get your prescriptions filled. We notably reduced the footprint. So you couldn't go to Croger or Tom Thumb, you had to go to a random infarmacy, for example. Much more narrow. And that's saved us about $50,000. This year we'll be able to kind of lower our costs further, but open that footprint back up to a broader market. And so we think that'll be helpful to employees. There are no changes to deductibles or maximum amount of pockets or anything like that. So this is really a pretty straightforward 2.7% rate adjustment. The city covers it's share. The employee will be asked covers it's share. The employee will be asked to cover their share. And for retirees affected, they'll cover their share. And so this is a rate sheet of how it would affect active employees on the high deductible plan as well as the exclusive provider plan. Very modest adjustments, particularly when you look at it relative to the compensation plan. you look at it relative to the compensation plan. Additionally, this year, we had to fund a modest increase in TMRS, about $247,000. It's about a 20 basis point, 21 basis point increase. We continue on our plan to amortize that down. We are on now about 19 and a half years remaining. We are in a very well-funded position, 86.6%. If you look by any measure, plus 80% is really pretty good. Some of our neighbors in the area are nowhere close to that kind of effort. And it would be remiss if I didn't say that we're in the situation. Thankful to good work of our former city manager, past current and past council members as well as labor leaders who helped work with the legislature to make some changes and TMRS to make the changes to put us in this situation to not be in the headlines the way some of our other neighbors are and dealing with their pensions. Our story is not those stories, ours is very different. As you look at a rate history, you see a pretty stable rate. Back in 2011, you can see it was about 17%. The part that's missed on this is it was headed to 20% without intervention. And so that intervention that occurred back in the day helped stabilize this until a little bit The part that's missed on this is it was headed to 20% without intervention. And so that intervention that occurred back in the day helped stabilize this until a little bit of a declining sideways pattern. And let us get ourselves in a situation where the liability started to improve itself as well. So you can see it was almost a quarter of a billion dollars back in 2010, now a hundred million dollars lighter. And over the next 19 and a half years, we'll work its way down to zero. So, all good news. In the OPEB area, a little bit less good news, but other post-employment benefits. This is also one of those areas that represents one of my most serious concerns. go payberry a little bit less less less good news, but other post employment benefits. This is also one of those areas that represents one of my most serious concerns. This is essentially retiree health care. And right now we're at about a hundred million dollar unfunded liability. It has been relatively stable for this period of time. And we are needing to address that over time because eventually those bills come do. So right now our strategy, you might remember from our financial discussion back in the spring is to take at the end of our TMRS amiturization period, we'll get a significant rate reduction Probably four or five percent will take those dollars and then the span of about three to five years Taking that amount of money at the tail end of the TMS ammetrization We'll solve this problem for us. It's not solved for 20 years But it doesn't have to be solved necessarily right away. So that's the plan. That's the strategy we'll hopefully are folks after us. We'll stick with it. We'll see. So, a couple other priorities here. Just when you added all up and do a big mashup on everything, when you take a look at the budget, there's about $493,000 worth of things that are mandates. We have really, essentially, no choice in doing their contractual obligations legal obligations Etc. The significant investment as I pointed out is in compensation and benefits And then there are some targeted improvements in public safety other priority needs as well as IT So about ten and a half million dollars worth of Recurring general fund investment at the same time I mentioned in the general fund, we also have another 55 requests that department submitted that have been deferred. We represent almost $11 million and 32 positions that are just something that we'll have to talk about another day. We're not able to address it right now. So highlights in the neighborhood area, a couple of things I think are worth note to you. The neighborhood matching grant program. We have recapitalized that fund because we got it started again last year, drew the money down. We need to recapitalize again. This will give us another $150,000 this year. We'll take the eight we have remaining and add to it and go. I'd like to point out to the arts funding. We've now moved both the tourism based arts funding, as well as the local arts funding with this investment to 250,000 to 250,000. I think at that point we'll call it a day for a while, but it funds that program at that level that we've been building up over time, from literally zero, not too long ago, to $250,000 program in each area. I think that's a fairly respectable arts investment from the public side. And then Johnson Cemetery, something that we've been hearing a lot about over the last couple of months in particular, the fencing around that area. I've put aside some dollars for the council to consider to allow that cemetery to get fenced off and meet some of the desire of the historic commission folks who are working on that. In the mobility area, you all know we are transitioning away at the end of this year from the MAX program and into really more of the crowd sourced van service or micro transportation however you want to look at it more app based and full city coverage. And so this budget provides for us to make that transition as well as the operating cost for the autonomous project, the Milo project. We also have in it some optimization for signal performance through public works, a bunch of high tech kinds of things on how the signal controller box works. And that will allow us to operate our signals much more efficiently to flow traffic, which is one of our biggest concerns we hear on the citizen survey about its traffic congestion. In the economy area, a couple of things to point out. The downtown master plan, the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of to do that. So working with planning and the stakeholders to look at updating our downtown master plan. And you know, Mr. Parker, I hate to call you out the second time, but we finally got your sign up on I-30. And we have I think heard tons of good things and feedback about that. And so what we'd suggest is that we start working on kind of the next location. And so what we'd suggest is we start working on kind of the next location. And so that's what this money provides is for dollars to look for the next location. I don't know if it needs to be on 287 360 or wherever we want to go. We can talk more about that in the future, but we have that. Also have set aside some money for some necessary improvements down the southwest parking ride for some time. The canopy down in that area has been first, it was just kind of ripped and torn and dirty and now it just doesn't exist. And so we need to take care of that. And so put some resources in the budget to address that. Some some additional efforts and resources in the planning area as far as development process. This budget includes in in this, at least in this area, that I want to mention additional plan reviewer and additional inspector to help keep up with the workload down in that area, which is strong and continuing to grow. And then the Convention of Event Services Fund area, the Convention Center, Chillers, other parking lot improvements, et cetera, some significant improvement upgrades that are needed to the facility there that are invested. I also want to mention that we've put aside about an additional $50,000 to the CVB contract over what they had last year. You all know that they have put in place that tourism public improvement district, which is giving them significant resources on top. We wanna make sure we're doing is we're not supplanting dollars from our base contract with those dollars, so making sure that we're holding that steady to slightly growing, and then they put the tourism public improvement district dollars on top. So I think they still have a very robust opportunity to continue to go get business for us here in Arlington. In the technology area, a couple of things to make mention of. City website rebuild. You all know we've, I think the city website now is 4th year going on 5th. This is a plan for us to start moving to the next generation website. It's not the plan to do it. We'll have to do that next year, but this is the plan to get it together, to think it all through on how we're going to look at all the new widgets and the new ways the websites are being built, so that we can do it hopefully the right, the most innovative and more scrub us way. And we've also put resources in here for electronic plan review down in the development services area. We do a lot of permitting activity electronically, but we don't have the ability to receive plans and mark up plans and come it back on plans electronically. So this will be pulling us into the 21st century in that area. Those are a couple that I want to make mention on that page. In the education area, we have a new school that's being added. So we have the need to put a new additional school resource officer. You all know that while this is our cost, the school district pays 10 months, I believe, of the 12 months. So we only have to take on two months. So we'll get a revenue from the school district, which will significantly I believe, of the 12 months. So we only have to take on two months. So we'll get a revenue from the school district, which will significantly offset this number. We also have to get ready for the library reopening. We have to put the part time money back in the budget and a few other things to take care of so that when the new downtown library opens, hopefully the spring will be situated there. And we're also seeing a growth in our educational assistance demand for tuition reimbursement support. So we need to make sure that we've got enough money there to cover that. So that's what that's about. In the public safety area, we've got a couple of things going on. Chief has requested some assistance in the jail area as well as a defensive tactics coordinator to assist with helping to de-escalate certain situations and training techniques to help avoid the kinds of conflicts that are making national news nowadays. We also need to take a look at our citation device maintenance and get that updated. And then in the fire department, part of our modification, we need to continue to move into the kind of the future, if you will. There is a trade here in the sense that the Chief Given Civil Service implementation is for going one of his three assistant chiefs in reducing down to two and taking that difference and this incremental amount and putting additional firefighters at station one in nine along with the ability for light vehicle service there so it will provide the city essentially with four is that right chief that those two give give it give it five okay so five different squads that can work the city which will help us with as I was leading to earlier response times less wear a tear on bigger rigs as these guys are able to run quicker and faster to various particularly medical or lower type of emergency calls. I think that's kind of the wave of the future for us to manage our workload and demands there. Also would just say that it's not on the chart, but I think it's worth noting. His last number of years as we have tried to address West Nile concerns in town. The planning department has been constrained every year to fund our West Nile efforts. We've never specifically funded it in the budget. And so for the last four years or so, it's been in their budget and constrained other things that they need to do in the budget. So in order to make that right and get it more accurate, if you will, we need to provide the resources, the plan department to do the West Nile information and then let them take care of doing some of the other planning efforts that we are not otherwise able to address. That and in the police area, well actually on this next page I'll mention third bullet police cost of service increases. Put an effort in here to try to make sure that we were getting our budget as accurate as possible. There's some things in this police department, for example, over the years they've had costs, water bill increases, utility increases, miscellaneous things that have kind of creeped that have never been funded. Because they've never been funded, it requires them to fund it in another way, which constrains the staff power, et cetera. And so the West Nile and the stuff with the police department in particular are things that I've tried to get right with our been some previous deferments so that we can ensure budget accuracy in these areas and not just ask people to absorb things that are not explicitly in the budget. And then I'll make mention, I made mention of the cops hiring match grant. Hopefully another 15 officers. If that grant does not come through, then we'll be working with the chief to repurpose these dollars on other public safety types of investments. Two pieces of heavy equipment in the fire department. One, I would suggest to you that we defer. One that we go ahead and acquire. One that we defer as part of the strategy as it relates to what I call that variable civil service liability. If you just roundly call firefighters, fire apparatus, $500,000 if we go ahead and buy one. And then we wait till 3rd quarter next year, depending on our variable cost are, if our variable cost are good, we go ahead and let the second piece of equipment be acquired, if our variable cost are creeping on us in a way that's concerning, we'll of course communicate to you, and we would defer that second piece of equipment until we felt like we had the resources properly to cover all those costs. And then with the City Hall Library Security, this particular library coming on and the kind of the campus being developed here between the two buildings. I really felt like it was prudent for us to get some additional resource here on the downtown campus, if you will, to help library deal with whatever might show up there as well as topics that show up here from time to time. In the parks area, we have several new new parks are coming online, Deaver Park, Brantley Henshaw, Bowman Branch, for example, that need their O&M to be set to it. So they're properly mowed and taken care of and that's what that's provided. And then as I mentioned earlier, the reopening of the operating dollars for Ditto Golf Course. In the economic development area. Couple worth mentioning the employee wellness clinic. You all have heard, I think, directly from some employees that have come down in the past suggesting that we give consideration of this. And we've done that. And I think the committee got a briefing before the break if I recall correctly on this topic about going forward with implementing the wellness clinic, we think it's a short-term investment on the front end to try to ensure longer-term cost containment two, three, four, five years down the road. So that is something that's a new initiative that we are taking on. And then the HRIS specialist, this is an area where we have upgraded and have significant IT resources, if you will, from Lawson and Cronos and Timekeeping, but we do not have the proper system administration going on in this area. And so this is a resource that will help us with our data mining, comp and benefit analysis as well as proper system administration, which right now, if you ask Mike or Kerry, they'd say, well, we've been relying on IT to do that. Well, IT doesn't run the various systems. They run the backbone, the network, the fiber, but various departments run their systems. The fire department runs CAD, the police department runs the RMS, those kinds of things. So we've got to get ourselves ramped up. And this is an area that we need to make. I think we need to consider making investment M. Infrastructure out of service fleet. You might remember this year, it gets based on the budget cost containment. We deferred a lot of vehicle purchases as a result. We're kind of missing the cycle. And we need to get caught back up. So hopefully this is a little increase of adrenaline to catch us back up, particularly in the police car world. Because those are only manufactured at certain time during the year and you can miss the window, you're kind of down the creek without a paddle. So we need to be able to get situated there. We've also continue our landfill gas expansion, so that's what those are. And then the fleet area from the fire side, we continue to be a little challenged with servicing heavy duty fire equipment there. So we wanna do some analysis of looking some other options as it relates to being able to write resources for fire apparatus maintenance. Then, I told you I had a lot of stuff. Almost there. Convention event services. I want to, in the middle of that, I told you we're going to suggest increasing the CVB's budget by about 50,000, as well as increasing by 50,000, both the cultural tourism council as well as the grants. So those are all detailed there. And then the facility improvements at the Convention Center are then detailed out of the one-time dollars of $1.1 million. In the part performance area, it's largely connected to Ditto reopening with a couple of various adjustments in the fund. But the big story there is getting ditto back on line in the communications area. The big story here is an upgrade to the CAD 9.5, which is about a $500 thousand investment. Again, there are some various adjustments that are being made in the fund to follow the flow of funds properly from one source of funds to the other that helps keep the audit trail right, but the significant deal is the CAD upgrade In the IT support area. I mentioned the website and electronic plan review That's a significant investment and recurring investment for that particular Technology for the number of users and size of activity that we'll have here. And then into some of the other funds, you all know, a few years ago, we started on a multi-year plan to continue to have a more robust area of a way to address flooding and erosion in Arlington. And so the budget does plan on that continued stair-step approach, which is a 50% a month increase in the storm water rate. the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of the state of contract and street maintenance that we expect to do this year. I know I know we hear a lot about doing more and then when I do more I hear a lot about doing less. So but we need to do more and we will continue to do more and with fellow works we are push push push get this money out the door and into the street. So we will continue to do that. In the water area there are some rate adjustments here particularly in the fixed area that are worth mention. They're largely tied to, again, increased investment or investment by our part to the Trinity River Authority. Interesting this year that's here in regional water district and want to get them a little bit of a pass because their pass-through cost us were much more insignificant than they have been in the past, which is good. So, TRA, but then also, you all know, we've undertaken now a pretty large capital renewal project of our treatment plant out at Kubala. And so, this is the city's piece kind of coming forward to renew significant investment. So, that's what you start to see in these rate movements. So, on the fixed side, the average user at three quarters of a tap, which is what most of us are, you're going to see a movement from $9 to $10.30. If you've got a 1 inch, 15, 40 to 20, 30, all the other block structures stay the same. So conservation rates are flat, volumetric rates are flat, construction rates are flat, in the sewer side similar story on the fixed side for three-quarter tap. You'll see it going from recorder tap. You'll see it going from 990 to 1294 and 1680 to 2352. But on the flow edge side it's flat. So instead of splitting it the way we've done before with some fixed, some variable, we've left the variable alone and gone on the fixed side. And then when you look at it just from a basic customer perspective, what we see is our main users, it's going to be between 8 and 10% to cover the TRA as well as the capital investment the city's making and the treatment processes. Minimum users, a small base. So when you take a small base number the percent number looks higher, a small base. So when you take a small base number, the percent number looks higher. 10 percent going from 24 to 27. But the average user is 53 to 57 at 8 percent. And then the commercial user, you can see there as well. Consistent with previous years, our rate stabilization fund is doing well. So we would suggest to you that we defer these rate increases until January so that the stabilization fund can be used in October through December to essentially defer the impact on our ratepayers. That said, we're still very competitively positioned, very competitively positions on the water side. We're probably, by the time Carolton adopts their budget will probably be the lowest again. From water side, we're the one of the lowest cost providers in the whole area. For residential on the commercial side, a little bit higher, but still definitely below average. As it relates to the cost comparison as businesses looked at how much water bills cost in Arlington. So that's the situation as it relates to water. And then I think finally in the reserve area, or as Mike likes to say, this is his favorite part. We have several reserves that we have set aside. Our unallocated reserve, just by policy, is 3% of our expenditures. Our working capital reserve is 1-12th of our expenditures. So you see adjustments there on the transfers in to make those match our proposed investments. There are no additional additions to the business continuity, landfill lease or other post-employment benefit. As you may remember, the business continuity is areas that helped us, for example, in the past on red light cameras when we had to do that mid-year adjustment and when we had a threat a couple of years ago as it relates to the handy-train grant loss kind of a mid-year deal. So that business continuity is exactly what it is to ensure business continuity. And as you all know as we've talked with our bond rating agencies, we really don't anticipate any any adjustments in these areas for fear of you know concern to rating adjustments in that area that might be noted because of that. And just graphically our policies require us to have 36.1 million reserve which we do. We have an additional $14.1 million in addition to that reflected largely by the landfill and the business continuity reserve. And so I always like to let people know that's where the money is but this is one of those ones that we really these are rainy day dollars and it needs to be raining pretty good. Over time, what you see here is our budget growth in the past number of years and how the reserve has been a percentage of it. And you see that kind of gently trickling down and that will continue to occur until such point as we start allocating reserve dollars with essentially every budgetary request. We don't do that right now that's something that we are deferring we need to address so as we get back past the 20 20 year that's the kind of thing we need to start addressing is increased reserve commitments with each budgetary request. So when you look at it all we've shown here multiple years of comparison and you can tell particularly from FY 11 to 2016, it was a very stagnant period of time as it relates to tax base. We're starting to pull out of it here in 17 and 18, which is going to continue to help us with things like maintaining exemptions and continuing to make modest rate adjustments in a downward fashion And one of the other things I failed to mention, but it's noted here in the garbage rates $2.76 23 cents a month or 1.7% adjustment that Republic has requested per their contract So that is that is a lot, itemized there. So when you added all up to the average resident in taxes and water and stormwater and garbage, it's about $10 a month is what it means to the average Arlington resident. So I know that's a lot. There's a lot I'm sure we'll need to talk about and consider as we determine where we want to go. The calendar will get the kids kicked off really today. We'll have a session next week and talk about whatever you want to talk about in more detail or more feedback. Then we'll get out, start having some public hearings in town halls later in the month with additional public hearings and votes on the budget about six weeks from now, February or September the 14th. So before I kind of wrap up, like we kind of normally do, but maybe you'll be pleased this year, we did another little budget video. So it was a little shorter. We've getting more tight there. The first one we did, I think was about eight and a half minutes. I think we're down to about three. So if you'll give me just a little bit of attention, I know the communications staff will love to show you the video. They've put together just at a high level to talk about how the budget works and some of the things that we've put in it. When you hear the word budget, you might think of several things, maybe making a great find in the budget-priced items at the store, or getting enough set aside in your vacation budget to take the family somewhere special. The budget for the city of Arlington has decided every year about this time. It's the plan for how city revenue will be spent during the next year. Here are some of this year's proposals. Like most recent years, the biggest chunk of the budget is allocated to public safety. Residents tell the mayor and council this is job number one. Next are items like parks and libraries. Things that help make Arlington the American Dream City. There are some new expenses this year, civil service implementation in the fire department, increased staffing in the police department, the reopening of the refurbished Ditto golf course, and the second of a three year plan to address an enhanced employee compensation. Most of the city's income or revenue comes from property taxes paid by residents and businesses. The second largest source of sales taxes followed by fees, fines and businesses. The second largest source is sales taxes, followed by fees, fines and permits. As we saw earlier, public safety is the biggest budget item. In fact, paying for police protection exceeds the income from property taxes, while fire protection expenses account for a large portion of the sales taxes. We think Arlington does a pretty good job of spending its income wisely and apparently people are noticing that and other things that the city has to offer including being named the best big city in the south by Money Magazine. Part of that has to do with what it costs to live here. Arlington offers different reductions on the full value of property. We also call it property tax exemptions. The council allows for the full number of exemptions possible more than most cities in the area. And here's some inside scoop. Just like last year when the council decreased the tax rate, there's another rate decrease for the coming year partly as a result of increasing property values. So what does that mean for the average homeowner? With a basic 20% home-study exemption, the average Arlington homeowner will pay $69 a month in property taxes or $824 a year. While still having some of the lowest rates in the region, your water bill will see an increase next year, helping us maintain high water quality standards, upgrade a treatment facility, and cover the rising costs for the Trinity River Authority. This 8% increase, or 15 cents a day for the average homeowner, starts in January 2018. The city tax portion accounts for about 20% of the total property tax bill that you receive. The remainder actually comes from four other taxing entities. Of course, as a property owner, you like having more exemptions, but that does mean the city's tax base shrinks a bit. Fortunately, businesses also pay property taxes, most without exemptions, which is why the council places a high priority on investing in our economy to support businesses already here and bring in new ones. Here's an example of how those investments will work to the benefit of the city. The agreements with the parks mall and the Arlington Highlands are ending next year, which will result in an additional income of about $1.6 million this year. Our sales taxes are supported by residents of course but did you know actually non-residents are the city's second biggest source of income accounting for half of our sales taxes. The council relies on input from residents and members really want to hear from you. You'll find dates for the schedule budget town hall meetings online as well as more details about the proposed budget. With that I'll I'll end and see if there's anything you'd like to hear more about detail next week and we'll start putting together additional information or take any questions that you all may have. questions that you all may have. Any questions or comments? Mr. Parker? Trade, thank you very much for the presentation. I know it's tax science and brought out a lot of things that brought some questions to me. Are commitment to employees? Our commitment to our employees for the raises that we've given the last couple years. I think it was the first year, it was 3%, the second year was 4, and this year whatever happens. And some employees got 5 and a half, I believe, percent last year. But have we seen an increase in retention of our employees because of that particular program? We've implemented it. I'll have to pull that data and come back. I would tell you that I think I haven't seen an impact there, but we'll pull the data on retention and turnover rates to see if it is the case. I will just clarify though a little bit about the goal of the three year program. We identified a year, a little over year and a half ago about how far behind the market we were and we quantified that. And then we also quantified what a stated target for us would be, which is the market average plus 5%. So then you back into that math and so you essentially divide that over the three years. So we're moving the market movement and then taking the gap and dividing it by three. And then it's based on job family also. We look at police officers by rank, firefighters by rank. We look at engineers, IT, professional technical craft. We look at them all by job family. And as you can see on that one chart, some markets are really red hot versus others being pretty stable. And so in the engineering and IT world, those are red hot in order to keep up and to keep people here, we're going to have to step up. But that was the approach. It really wasn't 3, 4, 5, it was a three-year gap divided by 3 and keep up with the market and then split that difference over those three years. Okay. Yeah, I'd be interested to find out. I know that we over time before that we're losing a fair amount of staff, especially in key positions. The next thing you talked about, the gas program that we've instituted and anyway our savings will start in January. So that's essentially an FY 9 month. We're going to save 1.2 mil. Is that correct? Yes. OK, so over the following year, well, we can expect to at least save about 1.6 million a year on that particular bond. They're about a year. Depending on what gas prices do. Electric. It's electric. Excuse me, electric. But it's linked to gas prices. Yes, it is. OK. OK, the sign. You can go ahead and call me out for that sign. I don't think there has been one person that hasn't said that that sign is absolutely phenomenal. I mean, it is absolutely beautiful. And it gives us the ability to celebrate certain, by the different lighting aspects that it gives us the ability to celebrate certain aspects like you do. I just needed to get you and my father off my tail about it. So I know that you would much rather answer to me than your father probably. And lastly, the Johnson Cemetery, I know that that's been something that's the historical society or this historical society has wanted to improve out there. Is the 30, they were calling for a capital campaign. Does that $30,000 comply with the finishing product? Or does that believe this gives them what they need to complete that project? All right, thank you very much. I really appreciate it. Ms. K. Park. And thank you, Chair, great presentation. A couple of questions on the retirement of the Highlands Teres. I also noted in the video that the agreement with the Parks Mall is also coming to an end. When does that happen? I think it's February. In February? So what is that netting us? We're recollections about $460,000. So if you think back, I know back in the day, this agreement was done 20 years ago, and it was a controversial agreement at the time. And unfortunately in our cycle, we've buried two dead malls. And that investment in that mall was all about making sure that that one didn't go the route of the other ones. And I think that's helped that. And the good news is it's ending. And so all that net revenue that was part of a reimbursement back to them now flows to the city and is embedded into the budget, which I think this particular budget years around $460,000. Absolutely. So thank you for pointing that out. I failed to mention that earlier. And that was, as it turns out, a very good investment. And on the AIST school resource officer, and so AIST picks up 10 months, do we know where that resource officer is going to be assigned or we just provide it and they assign it? And then a kind of, a company question with that is, do we also provide resource officers for MISD? Mayor and council will, John, Senator Police Chief, to answer the latter question first, no we do not. MISD has their own police department, and we have a mutual aid agreement to provide services to them if they have a particular expertise that is needed beyond just normal police service. For AISD, the MOU is for a number of officers and services that are provided. We are partners with them in terms of the deployment strategy based on the operational impact that they see on their campuses. But the police department retains the principal control on where those employees will work and their deployment strategy. Okay, great. And Trea was obviously glad to see about the parking ride issue getting resolved and addressed in this budget. And then one other question I know is for you or for Will. And over the years I've brought this up before but I think it's time to talk about it again. And that is to have another K-9 unit for the police. So there was a desire to have a K-9 unit in each of the four districts, and we've got three with the loss of mojo, then we were down to 2K nine units. And so I know that there is potential funding for the dog itself, but that's not the bigger cost to the city. It's really all the equipment and the truck officer and that kind of thing. But I really think with particularly when we lost Mojo and we were down to 2K nine units for what about six, nine months, will, something like that. That just brought it back full circle that as large as our city is and as many visitors that we have, it's really time to get that fourth K-9 unit and so we have one in each district. I don't know what that cost would be to the budget but when we get to the August 15th meeting, if you or will could provide that information to the council that would be to the budget but when we get to the August 15th meeting if you are will could provide that information to the council that would be helpful. Okay we can do that. Okay thank you. Yeah let's do that. Other questions comments? Just a couple of comments that I have one is I think it was very enlightening to see There of our our tax abatement slash incentives that was 900,000 for our businesses Which a lot of those are small businesses compared to 3.4 billion that we give to our residents 900 million to 3.4 billion. Yeah. 900 million compared to I say 900 billion. 900 million. Oh yeah. 900 million. Yeah. Now the other thing that is working and its evidence here in the numbers and that is that we are growing. Our businesses were growing jobs at a rate by the way that Dallas Business Journal has said that we are number one in the Metroplex and doing that. I announced that here just the last four weeks. And in addition to that we're growing our tourism. Why do we do that? Because we are trying to one Lower our property taxes along with Increasing the quality of services, you know at the same time and those are our two major tools that we're doing that with but yet Our staff has been creative in other ways here to bring in revenue such as selling water here to bring in revenue such as selling water there to our neighboring cities that not only helps them but it also helps us. It's a great win-win but that's an example of that. And then also I want to compliment staff because of one transparency is a big topic right here and yet here in Arlington we are trying to work hard and our staff is is doing that in the way of getting the information out to our citizens and getting those five stars. But you'll catch that we were one of only three cities in the state of Texas that in beta able to accomplish what the comptroller is laid out in that program, they're with it and that's very commendable there in doing that. It is an exciting time here in a lot of places. We have challenges that we're going to continue to work on that everybody is, but our citizens are engaged they're working very appreciative here and all levels from our boards and commissions to volunteering each and every day we want to keep that momentum going and our every everyday employees here are also, that is a big reason we're able to have such a low number of employees per capita. And they are working hard and diligently doing their job here so that we can keep that number and yet still be successful here. And I wanna compliment our staff on being able to or being willing to work as hard as they are in making a difference here in our community. Does anybody have anything? Miss K-PAR? Thank you, Mayor. I try one question in the mowing cycle for 360 30 287 and 20 is that and I know we supplement it three of the months out of the growing season Is that in this budget as well? I believe it is Let me Yeah, yeah, it's recurring so it's already in the budget then have to be in this budget Okay, okay, but I want to make sure we're still there and a companion question to that. I know the city were mowing those quarters in July. Okay, and I got an email from Lemuel, but 20 doesn't look like it's been mowed at all. And I think in August, text dot did we mo it in July I mean it's it's six feet tall out there long 20 and I've gotten several emails about it so if you guys could check into that I'll check on it and get you probably in the next week we'll come back with kind of the broader mowing cycle situation and kind of a map so you all know where it is but I'd also point out and maybe it's in my list there under the State dollars. Yeah, that's state rights away not the city. So Yes, our friends in Austin like to moat twice a year and call it good But we know that doesn't work in an urban environment So that's why our three supplemental moans have been put in the budget the The execution of that will talk about and bring back an update. And that would be very good. And I realized the state is not helping us to the level they should be. But I also realized that we try to keep our city looking really nice. So I'm glad we've got that in the budget. And I know the people appreciate it because when it doesn't get done, we hear about it. Oh yeah, absolutely. All right, thank you, Troy. Mr. Glaspy. Thank you, Mayor. I just thought of a carler question to Mr. Parker asked about the turnover rate with our employees with what we're doing with increases. What the primary objective was to make ourselves more competitive with the marketplace. Do you have any feel about the progress we made with that? I think we're very close. With this package, I would tell you, we're probably slightly above the market average. So we're pretty much right in that market average. Next year, we'll let us get to the broader goal of being a little bit above that. So I think we're pretty good. Dr. Marsh. Thank you, Mayor. Just a quick related question on the compensation. I think I heard you correctly when you said that the raises for the police would be deferred from January to mid-February. Is that correct? Everybody. Everybody. So all raises. So that says 1 million. How does that help us budgetarily? Can can just tell me why that was a decision? Sure. So you know we've been funding it on a on a January to January basis. So you know we could budgetarily reduce the amount of comp or really anything else in the budget that we'd like to stay on that same approach or deferring the payment by three, the increase in three cycles, three pay periods. So from January, whatever that is, to February 12th, I think was the date, it just defers that incremental amount for that three pay period amount, which differs $1.1 million. Now you have to pick it up the following fiscal year, which is what we're gonna do anyway. So, but it's just a deferment of that for one year and let's you use those dollars within your broader budget to balance it. Any other comments, questions? Thank you, Mr. Yoverts. I appreciate Yelts' time. And if I could just transition to your next topic for you, we've asked our civil service director, slash HR director, to give an update on civil service. But one of the things I'd like to do is, I don't think she's planning on doing this piece, but it will be inherent in the conversation. As we've talked about in here, the cost of civil service is projected to be $800,000 through a variety of revenue loss and new expenditure requirements and some optional expenditure investments that we believe are needed to properly execute the program. What it boils down to is how you compensate for this approach. How you, the budget, let me make sure the budget has compensated for this investment already. What we'll need to get y'all's feel on is how you want to do it. So there's at least three ways to cover this cost. One of which I know is a non-starter topic, but I'll just for all practical purposes. I mean, we've proposed a, you know, an increase or decrease in the tax rate. One possibility is to absorb this in less of a decrease to the tax rate. That's an option. I don't think that's what taxpayers expected when they voted for it. And I don't think that's how we should handle it. So then it boils down to how you do it in the budget. And you could look at handling it, which I think y'all's prior direction has been in the fire department budget. This is a fire department program. So it needs to be in the fire department budget. This is a fire department program, so it needs to be in the fire department budget. Of what you all know, that's largely tied to personnel. So when you look at that area, there's really two choices core. There's more you could go down, but the two core choices would be to look at less of a base pay movement. So if our average raise is in the 4% to 5% market, that could be reduced. That's a little bit of a, oh, shoot yourself in the foot thing because you're trying to raise the salaries to be market competitive, right? And to be fair. So if you take it there, you're kind of being self-defeating, I think. But nonetheless, a legitimate real choice. So then the other choice becomes on how you take it there, you're kind of being self-defeating, I think. But nonetheless, a legitimate real choice. So then the other choice becomes on how you administer it in some of the other ways we pay, some of the special pays and or methods we pay. And so that's the area that Carrie Jo, I think, will talk a little bit about and give you some suggestions. But those aren't the only suggestions that you'll have. You'll kind of have a cafeteria style of choices, but those are three core choices you can have on how you'd like to approach it. And like you all, I know maybe you'll come up with a fourth or fifth and we'll be happy to talk about that. So, Carri-Joh. Thank you, Carri-Zika, Director of Human Resources and Civil Service. Mayor and council, nice to be here today. So today I'm going to give you an update. We're not just going to talk about special pays. That'll come later. This is a comprehensive review of where we are with civil service. You had a break. This goes back to the adoption on May 6th. And so I wanted to just walk through the timeline first with you. May 6th, the citizens adopted civil service. These are the things that are completed. We have appointed and confirmed our commissioners on June 27th. We've already had a commission orientation, so we got them together. We've elected a chair, a vice chair, there's just a three. I was elected, voted by them as the civil service director on that date. We also provided them a brief orientation on open records and open meetings act, things like that that they have to follow. There's only three of them. And so they're very bound to not talk to one another unless they're all together in an open meeting. And that was on July 12th. What are our next steps? There's some things that we need to talk about. You're the governing body. There's also the commission. There's things they need to do. And then staff, of course, gets put to work doing a lot of these things that are laid out. So one of the things that we need to talk about is what to do with meet and confer. So that's under local government code 142. And do we withdraw from meet and confer entirely or not? We also have before us the local government review and that is something staff is working on. This is green because as you can see by the legend, it's a commission item. So council does not get involved in the local government review. Staff will be going before the Civil Service Commission, kind of in a chunked fashion. We're not just gonna throw them a big packet of rules and say here you go, what doed fashion. We're not just going to throw them a big packet of rules and say, here you go, what do you think? We're also not going to give them a blank piece of paper and a pen and say go ahead and write them. We're going to bring them along that process and make sure that we all have consensus on the local reviews. However, we come back to council. There are some things that you are responsible for. We have the approval of the pay and classification ordinances which are set out under chapter 143. We have to appoint and confirm fire personnel. You have to give authority to the chief to appoint his personnel, his two assistant chiefs and so that you'll see some resolutions coming along there for that. And then any other resolutions as we go through this chapter, which in the beginning we all said, well, we'll read the chapter, we know what we're doing. But what's behind all of that is really the devil in the detail and all the case law that goes along with chapter 143. So there's a lot that you can't get from it just by reading the chapter. So we have a lot of work in the rule creation, especially on how we do that. And then we land on publishing those rules. Those rules have to be published. We have to give a seven day notification at minimum. So we have to have those up by October 22nd for that October 30th implementation date. Just to stay on the rules for a moment, just to give you a general idea. Again, this is up to the Civil Service Commission, but just high level, some of the general things that we have to cover in the rules is our general rules of order. How do they go about doing their business? They are responsible for identifying the hiring exams and the promotional process through those local rules. They identify certification and appointment rules. The appeals process, if somebody disagrees with a test or exam process, they can appeal to the commission. And we'll set that out in local rule what that looks like. Also, removal and suspension of employees, if necessary, as in disciplinary actions, disciplinary actions which we've talked quite a bit about. That chart just kind of lays it all together. Everything is related in some fashion. We start in the middle with chapter 143, which helps us identify our local rules. We overlay that with our SOPs in the fire department and also city policies come into play. So we have a lot of work to do between now and October 30th to get to the end result of what we're implementing under chapter 143. Some items of transition as we work on this, that we are looking at that aren't decided yet, but just for your informational purposes, we are reviewing the ongoing fire department hiring specifically in promotional process, specifically in relation to the captain and lieutenant promotional list that's in play right now. We have the apparatus operator promotional testing that has just been released and as well as new hires. There's rules related to all of this within 143 and we're sorting that out right now how to move forward with our implementation in October. Also effective employees under the chapter. We have the F class, that's what you're used to hearing, the firefighters. But then as you know, we have our deputy chiefs and our assistant chiefs are what we call the management professional class. And so they're not on the step plan and how do we parse that out. We have to look at arbitration. We've been before you with the arbitration policy not too long ago within the last year with some changes. Arbitration under chapter 143 is a little bit different than it is what we currently have. And so that's a personnel policy that we have to take a look at and make a decision how we either adjust that to be in compliance with 143 or have it set out in local rules differently, et cetera. And then as I talked about in the first slide, what's the consideration of which are all of meet and confer under 142. We're here because the meet and confer process perhaps wasn't as liked as we wanted it to be or so it was voted in. And so we were looking at streamlining labor relations through a single program chapter 143. This would open the door to all employees versus having a single representative and be responsive to those labor concerns with the meat and confer process. As a reminder, this has been in previous presentations, but these are some of the items that came out of concession, what we call concessions out of meet and confer, implementation of paramedic pay, the arbitration pool for fire disciplines, the wellness incentive program, drug testing, AP time allowances for APFF business during working hours, educational requirements for firefighter ranks, swing pay, and the promotion of apparatus officers. So this is just kind of that smorgasbord of what have we done under meet and confer that we talk about if we withdraw meet and confer than these concession items would also perhaps be taken off the table. Now I want to get into the pay categories, what is and isn't covered under 143 and this is where we're going to gradually move into the budget process and talk about that $800,000. So chapter 143-041-044 says in general all firefighters in the same classification are entitled to the same base salary in addition if approved by the governing body that you. The following optional pays may be applicable and these are just laid out specifically in the code, longevity or seniority pay. What we currently do there is we have both. You can have the longevity pay until it's to your benefit to elect the seniority pay. And so our city offers both technically. Educational and Senate pay, we do provide for that on current hours. Do provide assignment pay as is afforded under chapter 143. It's a variable assignment pay based on the type of task. Certification pays, shift to forential and fitness incentive pays are not under our current policies. And again, these are optional items under 143. So what did our budget look like in fiscal 16 for what we do pay for? So these are the special pays which is a long list that we do provide for here in the city. I don't have fiscal 17 numbers but this will give you an idea of how much was spent and how many employees are affected by these items. So for example, assignment pay for a hazmat, we've spent 34,800 and I put under each of these boxes where this falls, whether it's assignment pay or policy, etc. Our job requirement, so we've got dive pay, is optional, technical rescue team, gas well pay, incident tech, community paramedic, EMT-1, which is one of the larger amounts, everybody gets that because it's a job requirement. So it's an extra pay, but you have to have the EMTI in order to be a firefighter. So that's a different one. Paramedic pay, which again I mentioned, was part of the meeting confer concessions. 162 employees, a large chunk received that, and then language pay. This is the education pays that we afford. So education one is what we pay extra if you have a bachelor's degree. But we also pay extra if you even have some level of college education. So you can see we have 90 hours, 60 hours, 30 hours, it's all dependent. And then there's a few folks who get a cell phone allowance. I would guess that they're in the upper management ranks. One thing that we do have to keep in is acting pay, which we call out of class pay. So if somebody's on a fire site and they need to be moved up and rank in order to manage the situation, then they would get acting pay for that moment that they're acting in a different capacity than their actual rank. That is a city policy pay, but it's also required as part of 143. Now I want to get into vacation and sick leave. These are additional benefits that are afforded through 143. City policy is different but what we have learned is that there is no property right to our current sick leave and vacation. there is no property right to our current sick leave and vacation. So once we give notice that things are changing, we can change them. And there's no property right or we don't have to give them what they had in the past. And so this is a comparison you've seen before, I won't walk through it. Chapter 143 does have a minimum on the vacation of 15 work days per year. That's 180 hours. The differences they have to use it in the calendar year and there is no carryover. Carryover. There's also no payout. The city of Arlington currently pays your vacation hours upon termination or separation, so that is a big difference. And we also afford a lot more time than currently allowed for under 143. So a couple of the things that could be taken into consideration when you're looking at what do we do with this policy, this local government rule, we can adjust everybody's balances to 180. That's the minimum requirement on the date of implementation. What do you do with those who are over 180? Well, an idea is to freeze those balances at today's base pay, hold them and pay until termination or retirement. So if I'm an individual who has 500 hours in my vacation balance, I still get my 180 to use for the rest of the year. but I have that balance of 320 that's going to stay there at today's rate. And today's base rate, and I'll tell you why that's important until I leave the city. And we talk about base pay because under chapter 143 any terminal payouts are at total rate of pay. So right now our city policy is not written that way. Our city policy, when you leave the city, you get paid based on your base rate. So we don't calculate in overtime, extra pays, assignment pays, etc. That will change under chapter 143 and it will be total rate of pay. So if somebody has this balance out there of 320 hours when they leave, they get their balance of times the base rate that they had left behind, plus they get the total rate times the balance that they have in that current year. Does that make sense? Another option that we could do is adopt the current city policy into local rules for vacation and terminal pay and keep all things the same. Sick leave is a little bit different. It's kind of easy to lump vacation and sick leave together, but under 143 it is different. So under chapter 143 again, you get those 15 12 hour working days per year, which is at 180 hours. But the difference between 143 and what we have now is that there is no limit on sick leave accumulation. Versus we have an 1800 hour limit on your sick leave accumulation. There's also a difference between 143 and city policy on the terminal pay. Right now under city policy, you can only get your sick leave payout if you retire. Under and then it's 1440 hours. Under chapter 143 you can only get 1,080 hours and it's for any reason. So if you just want to resign, you terminate it or you retire whatever you have in your bank up to 1,080 hours is afforded to you to be paid out. There is no sick leave sellback, which is a program that we have here under city policy available through 143. So kind of similar considerations that we could do under sick leave is reset all balances to 180 hours on data of implementation, but what do you do then with the remaining balance? One idea would be to create a pool because one thing that we worry about is people hold on to sick leave in the event of a catastrophic condition event, even for a family member, something covered under FMLA, and so we could create with the remaining balance a pool that individuals could apply to use at time of need. But it does take away the payout portion. It brings people up if they're under the 180 hours as well, so it goes both ways. And then conversely, we could just adopt the current city policy and amend it to keep the chapter 143 requirements. We do have other policies that impact pay that aren't specific line items in the budget, but you should be aware of them. The first one is FLSA overtime, and I don't mean to say that we want to mess with FLSA, the federal law, but it's how we refer to overtime. Vacation leave time is included in the total hours worked for overtime calculations, and this is actually a city of Arlington policy that affects all departments not just fire. And so even if so if you took a day of vacation but worked extra hours on other days that week that's all calculated together and you're going to get overtime because you had that day of vacation in there. So you're not you're getting paid for more than hours worked. We estimate the cost of that in fiscal 16 was between $50,000 and $150,000. Another thing that's different here in Arlington comparison to a lot of other cities is that we pay 11, 12 hour days of holiday leave, whether you work that holiday or not. So you get a bank of those 11 holidays. And even if you don't work Christmas, you work that holiday or not. So you get a bank of those 11 holidays. And even if you don't work Christmas, you still get paid for Christmas. We could shift that and pay time and a half just for holidays worked, which is something that is more usual in the Metroplex and save some money there. A meet and confer concession item was swing travel pay. And erase, what swing travel pay? Swing travel is, if I show up at station one and they say, oh, we need you over at station five, I can turn in mileage and be reimbursed with money in order to cover the mileage to travel from station to station during my shift. That we pay an estimate of 10 to $20,000 per year on that. that we pay an estimate of 10 to $20,000 per year on that. So what's the budget look like for fiscal 18? There's a lot of things on this list, but this is the, how we break down the budget. The Thrift 401K, that's our city's match on the 401K plan. And I put behind each of these if they're optional or if they're under some other conditions. So that's 667,000. The MTI pay is optional. Stability pay, the difference between stability and longevity is 224,000. And that's the amount above the required longevity amount that we pay out in stability pay. Paramedic pay, which is a meat and confer concession item, $193,000 longevity pay, that's what we have to pay. 161, so that's not an optional item. Educational incentives, $151,000. That acting out of class pay, again, not an optional item, 127, sick leave sellback, 87.5, and has map pay. There's more. We also pay positional pay. Divers pay, language pay, investigator EOD pay, incident tech bonus. These are all optional pays in our current fiscal 18 budget. So what's the total required by local government pay of that $2.1 million, $288,000. So there's 1.8 million of optional pays on that list. So to wrap this up for you in conclusion, we've got some items to discuss. One is meet and confer to withdraw or remove the previous concessions. So that is a council item for discussion. What to do with vacation? Start with that 180 balance on October 30th and freeze the remaining balance. That is what I would recommend that we do to maintain that those individuals still have their balances available to them on sick leave. It's a little bit more administratively difficult to create a pool and figure out how people can use that and so I would suggest that we amend our policies affecting the fire department to align with 143 so we don't affect other city employees as well. We had to be very careful about that. And then we're looking for that $800 plus thousand dollars to cover the cost of civil service for this first year. So the items that I put up there are the EMT IPA, which is a job requirement. So you have to have an EMTI anyway to do your job. Holiday pay, and that would be changing the holiday, the way we run the holidays, educational incentives, but not the bachelors. So we would take the educational incentive pay off for those who have just the extra hours. Once they obtain their bachelor's degree, they would get that pay back. The sick leave sale back program, the FLSA, overtime policy, that would affect, again, all city employees because we would have to change city policy on that and then the swing pay. So we've got 807,000 there. So that, the recommendations there, there are a mix of where we ought to market some equity issues and some efficiency savings. And I think that's probably the best place to start to meet what we need to do for this upcoming year. But know that if these costs continue to rise, there was a lot of items I went over that could be looked at again in the future. So it's not one and done deal, but this is what we were talking about for the first blush. How do we get to that $800,000? So this is your opportunity. See I didn't have as many slides as traded. So this is where we've got lots of resources here to answer your questions. Talk about these transition items and the budget process in review, and we will wrap this up Commit September so we can implement in October Any questions comments Mr. Shepherd Thank you mayor Carrie One of the one of the many things I'm confused about the sick leave cell back, you have classified as 87.5. If we took sick leave back to conform with 143, there's no limit in the accumulation, but there's no limit in the accumulation but there's no sellback. So the 87 five represents all of the accrued hours that are presently outstanding in the fire department that exceed 1440. No, do I have a number down? Well, that's why I'm confused. I thought you could sell back based on one of the earlier slides. You serve the anything that you have over 1440, you could sell back. I don't think that's the calculation. I think the calculation is that's what was in fiscal 16 that we actually funded selling back in that year. So on average we probably sell back about $90,000 a year or sick leave sell back. I got you. I got you. Okay, thank you. Other questions, comments? other questions comments. Miss Zika, one thing that I don't see that's an expense that we have heard from a lot of other cities is the legal expenses and where is that in this? Those are the variable costs that the trade was alluding to. the any questions, sir? So if I could just elaborate on that a little bit. We have our self-insurance risk fund that takes care of litigation. And so that is where I think litigation costs will be born. What we need to do is track those expenses and reimbursed that fund from the fire department by a amount that's commensurate to what's expended. That's one option. Another option that I would suggest I think I alluded to earlier as we have two fire trucks in the budget. They're roughly call it half a million dollars a piece. What we'd suggest is by the first one in the early part of the year but defer the second one till say third quarter or so. So we can see how these variable costs were occurring. If we were starting to incur something that was consequential, we have kind of a foreshadowing of that that we would just hold on that vehicle. Or if we feel like we're in a good spot, we'd go ahead and release it. So that's kind of a, you could defer a piece of apparatus for the short term and the longer term. We'd be looking for reimbursement from the Fire Department budget to the risk fund to pay for any litigation expenses. Okay, appreciate that because it's well documented that one of the biggest expenses of civil service are legal expenses that have been occurred. Mr. Schaffer. Thank you, Mayor. The other thing that the FLSA over time, you mentioned that would affect all employees. So help me understand, either try or carry the economic impact like across the board. Because if we have a savings in fire of 90, I guess that's what that is, then there's additional savings for the rest of the employees if we implement that. We'll have to get that to you as far as what the rest of the impact is. That's the fire department impact of that policy. So that savings is not accounted for in the budget. Could we explore another option there for that approximately 100,000? At least give us some other ideas about where we are. I'm a little concerned about making a move that's across all 2,500 employees when we're talking about civil service that's only four fire. And at least one of the things I had said is I'd like to keep the cost of this contained within the department at effects. So thank you, Dr. Myers. Thank you, Mayor. I know we've seen a lot of budget slides today, so perhaps I'm missing something. So please feel free to point it out if I have missed it. But I see here on your conclusion chart, you said the cost of civil services $807,000. Did I miss a breakout somewhere that did indicates where those costs come from? I'm just curious in terms of- This list adds up to $807,000. That's what that numbers from but trade you want to end. Can you kind of help me? Yeah, I will get you the whole committee more specific on this next meeting, but what it boils down to is four or five items. One is civil service 143 does not allow you to charge an application fee for applicants, for example. So that revenue is no longer revenue that can be collected. It also does not allow you to hire in initial hires through a contracted service. They have to be brought on as full benefit firefighters. So that's an incremental cost. Those are real and kind of un-debatable as it relates to that. Those together I think were around $400,000 as my recollection. So about half of that is in those two items. The other half comes from four positions, two are in human resources, two are in the attorney's office to deal with litigation management, civil service management. We have to deal with litigation management, civil service management. We have to do things such as, you know, we have to create a separate office for the civil service. We have to have a separate file room. The files have to be under separate locking key. Only certain people can access them. Just all of these various kind of frankly bureaucratic things to do. And as we have with one system, I think I was using Mike actually to use this metaphor with me the other day, is that you have kind of a production line assembly. You have that general motor assembly line, if you will, of just, you know, issue after Eftishu that's solved very efficiently and very effectively. When you start to customize a job, and you pull a vehicle off the line and you do things special to it, it requires special attention and special care and special treatment which is more expensive. We don't want to invest money that we don't need to invest. We don't need to take on those expenditures and certainly if we find that we don't need those, we'll be the first one to put a position back and lower those costs But that's the best estimates that HR and legal have and what they need to run the custom shop parallel to the mass production shop Mr. Parker anybody else miss Parker Carrie I don't know how to express this, but during the campaign for civil service, there was a military question about someone having to take vacation pay in order to fulfill their annual requirements as a reservist. And anyway, I know that the city, although improperly stated in this particular literature, the city allowed 180 hours to be utilized whereas civil service only allows 150 hours to be utilized. So the city, actually contrary to this particular piece of literature, allowed more time, and I don't know how somebody could make that big a mistake. I for one do not in any way shape or form want to hamper our people in uniform and I would like to keep that particular 180 hours in the budget if we can. Other than that, my position is that 143 was voted on and passed in 143 and only 143 would be what the entitlements are at this particular time. So that's where my position is. Noted. I will also add that under chapter 143 military time is addressed in 143.075 and it talks about how your fellow co-workers can donate time to a military leave pool. So I don't anticipate military leave being an issue and we will make sure we address it in the local rules. I just know that there are cuts up here and that that would be a cut from the current benefits. And I would hate to see our military be hampered in any way shape or form and reduced by this particular program. And yes, it does address accounts that can be given from other employees to the military individual. And I think that's part of 143 and I'm all for instituting that. So thank you. Ms. Swam. Carrie, I'm on holiday pay. Could you help me understand that a little better? It says, if you get holiday, if you get the day off, but you work on that day, do you get time in a half for that day because it's a holiday, plus your regular pay? I'm not sure. I'm going to let them know how that works. Chief Crowson explained this to you. Okay, good. Thank you. Okay, so get ready. We allow 11 12 hour segments, 11 holidays a year. Those holidays are represented as 12 hour segments. The firefighters are guaranteed those 11-12-hour segments. So whether they work those holidays or not, they're given 11-12-hour segments of holiday time. For instance, I believe in fiscal 16, and I may be wrong with the shifts here, but one shift worked five holidays. One shift worked four holidays. And one shift worked five holidays, one shift worked four holidays, and one shift worked two holidays. Firefighters on all three of those shifts got 11, 12-hour segments. So there's an opportunity to actually, instead of doing what we currently do, potentially pay firefighters time and a half, holiday time, and those segments of the holidays they actually work versus giving them 11, 12-hour segments of holiday time. So what we do is we cover all the holidays whether they work or not they're given those days. I think that was my question. I didn't understand. If you get 11 days for that ship, and you're going to pay for it anyway, but you work on that day, you get the 11 days plus the time and a half, that was my question. Is that? No, we don't do that. We give you a holiday time that you can bank and take off at another time. Oh, OK. But you still get time in half on holiday. Well, by calculation, there are many ways to do this. Okay, there could be a recalculation of how you do the holidays. You could pay time in a half for holiday time work. Actually worked. You can have a variation thereof. So to get to a number, this is an area which the city could reassess its policy on how we do holiday time ensuring that a firefighter who works a holiday is paid holiday time and a half. Oh okay thank you. Any other questions or comments? Okay. Thank you, Ms. Zika. Thank you. We'll now move to a, you have another one, Mr. Sherp. You don't mind me. Are you a bit of a trait or a chief, whichever one of you would be appropriate. Any of the recommendations here, if we were to adopt these, do you see any of these affecting us competitively in the market? Are these things that other cities pay, that if we were to not do these, we would shoot ourselves in the foot for future phrase earlier about this. Chief, if he disagrees with me speak, but if you agree, we've looked at the EMTI, there's only one other city in the region that does that besides us, so the rest do not. And as Kerry said, it's only one other city in the region that does that besides us so the rest do not and as Kerry said it's a job requirement. Holiday pay, I'm not sure, we have not compared competitively but just that one in a way just you know it seems right to pay people for people who work the holidays and for those who don't. That just seems to be kind of straightforward to me. Educational pay, that's also a market assessment. Most other cities do not pay for 30, 60, 90. You will find that most others will pay for a bachelor's degree or some will pay for an associate's degree. Sick leave, sell back. Don't have a comparison on that. Swing pay I think is probably pretty unique and FLSA is probably a little bit unique, I'm not sure on that one. So there's a mix of market incompatibility here and a little bit of efficiency that's being identified and kind of how the policy. So FLSA and holiday would be policy modifications EMTI and education pay would be Out of market kinds of things sick leave sellback would be hey, we're about to take the lid off of sick leave and it's gonna be on it You know Know how higher however high it can go plus I don't think civil service specifically authorizes sick leave sellback it's one of the pays it's not specifically listed so okay and the swing pay was a unique unique deal that fire guys as they get moved around as they get swung from station station we're incurring you know vehicle cost and that was an important topic to them that is it's one of the concessions we worked on and meet and confer we tried to resolve and we did It's a lot of red tape for that amount of money quite honestly and you're given if if we're gonna proceed down the road Of with drawing from being confer that just maybe one of the ones that we we withdraw from okay, thank you Mr. Glasping Thank you, Matt just just for clarification sake so from your analysis, 800,000 is pretty much what we see as a, I guess you call it, fixed cost. And we still have the unknown out that you think we hopefully can cover with how we're 800,000 in fixed costs between the hiring practice changes no application fees Four positions authorized to an HR to and legal those are all the fixed cost Variable cost would be litigation cost as the unknown first defense would be a deferment of a piece of apparatus until later in the year So that we could set those fixed costs. See how the year unfolds. If we were taking on costs, we delay. And then the back stop on that is the risk fund that would pay. And then we'd look for reimbursement from the fire department next year to recapitize the fund by whatever amount it was debited based on that. Mr. Parker. Trey, are you looking for guidance currently on meeting conferred this particular meeting? I think that last sheet tried to summarize where we thought things made sense to head as far as the civil service offsets and kind of the sick invocation don't don't underestimate those are significant issues to employees and how we manage those but then yes we've you know we if you chose concurrence to move forward towards the focus on 143 implementation and not through the confer process just for efficiency if nothing else. Then the validation of that would be important and we need to have a subsequent action on that down the road. If we were gonna do that, we could set that up on your next council agenda on your next council agenda, assuming that's what you wanna do. So, sheppard. If that's a, if you need a response, I'm okay with everything up there except the FLSA. That's the only open issue I still have in my mind. You know, we probably could spend three weeks debating whether you should do this or that or this or that. But I think you guys have done a good job of coming up with a reimbursement model that doesn't sound like it negatively impacts our are positioned in the market to stay competitive and being able to continue to attract the best firefighters out there. So FLSA is just because it's kind of system wide and that may be a good solution. It's just in my mind that the system wide aspect of it concerns me. in my mind the system wide aspect of it concerns me. Well, Ms. Walman and then Mr. Glassby. It's a short question and all of these things that will not affect the other employees in the city is that correct? None of those will affect any other employees in the city. FLSA is the main one. I probably ought to check holiday pay is that isolated into fire? How it works? Yes. Okay. So that's you need to fire the red. So all the others are there. And I think it's important to say to you that as we looked at that if you will, that cafeteria style plan, if you will, all the other choices, you could do other things, you know, such as just not mess with any of this, but mess with the 401k match or not mess with that, but mess with the base pay. That's what I was alluding to earlier. There's different ways to mix and match. But what we were trying to do is make sure that we're still meeting our corporate objectives of competitive pay and trying to be fair to employees and not be, you know, draconian in the sense of removing all of those items, although they all stand the potential to be removed if costs creep over time. So we've limited our cost and aligned what we think are the most reasonable suggestions to consider to that cost. And if it creeps, we'll come back to this list and revisit it. that cost and if it creeps we'll come back to this list and revisit it but that's what we're trying to do is be as I don't know just fair if you would as an implementing this even though none of it's good news I mean none of us would choose to have to implement any of this but with the cost there is a need offset and you have choices and we've recommended those choices to you. I would add that the sick leave sellback is a citywide policy but we would parse that out because other employees won't have that option have unlimited sick leave. So there's the differential there so that's why we would apply that just to the fire department. Mr. Glassfield just for clarification. So these, we're looking at potential things, we adjustments we make so that we could offset 800,000, but it doesn't impact the salary adjustment we're trying to make. Okay. Faced pay would still move and we'd stay on that plan. I think that's a great point Mr. Glisbee. We're trying to be very fair in this, but yet there's a real cost here to implementation of this. Mr. Parker, do you have anything else? No, I was just looking at the cafeteria style to see where we could go to flesh out another $90,000 in this particular budget. So I just want to make sure that we get $90,000 in this particular budget. So I just want to make sure that we get to the $807,000. I agree with Mr. Shepard that to affect people that with the FL say affect people that are not in the fire department the impact of the FLSA. We'll have next week here in more budget discussion in which we can go through this and talk some more there about it and move forward. How does that sound? Okay. All right. Thank you, Ms. Zika. We'll now move to the AT&T Stadium Refunding Update. I'll call upon Mr. Mike Finley, our CFO of and Finance Department Director. Thank you, Mayor, members of City Council. As we move forward with the Ranger Ballpark project, one of the initial steps in terms of actual financing is to open up the Cowboys lane. And to do that we're going to in two weeks request you all to vote on a parameters ordinance about refunding the Cowboys debt. In conjunction with that tonight you have three agenda items that allow the motor vehicle tax, the occupancy tax, and the sales tax to also be used on rangers, not just AT&T Stadium debt. With that, I'd like to introduce Dave Gordon. He's the managing director with the strata hinted host, our financial advisor. And will both be available for any questions you have after this. Thank you, Mike. Afternoon, Mayor of City Council, City Manager. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. So as Mike mentioned, this is a representation on an overview of the plan of finance for both the Cowboys refinancing, which we're going to be bringing to you very shortly, as well as the Rangers financing. They have to be done kind of in context together. Very brief, they'll just let me just touch on the market. The market luckily has held in there. As we discussed a number of months ago, after President Trump was elected, rates went up relatively significantly. Luckily we have received a gift from the market and many of that rate increase has been given back to us. Over the last number of months, we've been kind of in a range and hopefully will rates will hold in when we go to finance, not just the Cowboys transaction, which is coming up shortly, but also the Ranger transaction. And just another real brief slide on the market. You've seen this one before. Rates have increased on the short end of the curve a little bit, which is indicated on this orange diamond on the longer end of the curve, still well below average, even since this time period during 2000 to now. So let's kind of discuss the overall plan of finance. Again, we have to do this in the context of talking about both Cowboys and Rangers debt to understand how we're going to put this together. Also, I've got a couple of folks here from City Group that is our senior manager in this transaction, Bill Karada, and Durk Spines, are in the ONIEDS here and they've been very instrumental in helping us prepare this transaction for market. So on the right hand side you see a graph that kind of illustrates how the overall structure of the debt would look like after the transactions are complete. And if this works, no, it does not. So we're expecting that the rangers financing will be a combination of senior and subordinate debt that will have a senior and subordinate lien on the special taxes that we'll also use to support the Cowboys refinancing. The rangers transaction will be mostly tax exempt, but there will be a small piece of that that is taxable. And we're working with a bond and tax council as we go through this process to determine what's the liver of that needs to be taxable. As I mentioned these of course are supported by the various three taxes that you the voters reinstated back in November to be allowed to be used for the Rangers ballpark and as Mike just mentioned those are being restated tonight. You got the .5% sales tax, the 2% hot and the 5% short term vehicle rental tax. The taxable debt will also then be secured by the lease that the rangers will pay. And then of course all of this is very dependent on what happens with interest rates. As I mentioned, rates have been good the last number of months. And hopefully the market will stay with us as we go into the process of doing this transaction is coming up for the Cowboys refinancing as well as for the rangers. So this pointer isn't working here but just briefly describe the graph on the right hand side. The Cowboys debt will be restructured and I'm going to go into that in a bit. It will look something very summer to the gray on the bottom. That will allow us to basically have enough capacity up front to service the debt for the rangers. Rangers debt, as I mentioned, will be a combination of senior and subordinate taxable and tax exempt. The dark blue is the senior lien tax exempt debt service. That'll be sized to about 1.3 times current year revenues at this point will be 2018. Revenue is over debt service. The very light blue sliver that you can see there and you all have printed copies if you want to see this a little closer. The light blue portion will be the taxable debt and then on top of that will be the green debt services, the subordinate debt service that will all be tax exempt. Again, this is the plan right now. It may be, you may change as we go forward. I won't go through all these numbers, but I wanted you to have at least a copy of these, just to be able to kind of see how the overall plan of plans puts together. We have kind of four different areas that we've highlighted here. The upper section that's highlighted in blue, those are the sources of funds. These are basically bond proceeds as well as various contributions from the city. We've got the in the uses of funds, those be principally obviously the deposit of 500 million to fulfill the city's contribution to the Rangers project, as well as the deposit to the escrow for the cowboys refinancing. And then there's a number of other reserves and things like that that need to be deposits for as well. And then in the bottom, in the green area, various statistics on the transaction right now, and these are current rates that we're showing here. There's not a cushion built into this particular point. The true interest cost on the refunding, for example, we estimate to be about a little over 3.2%, about 3.2% about a little over 4% on the senior lane of taxes and obligations, about 4.4% on the senior lane taxable, and about 4.4% on the senior name taxable and about 4.4% on the subordinate lane. And again, just to reiterate, these are current market interest rates. And then on the bottom, we've shown you just very preliminary the overall debt service that we expect on all the obligations about 1.2 billion. And then as you've done historically, you will be using excess revenues after you finance the 500 million to basically retire debt early. So depending on how those revenues come in, this particular model for example shows 985 million of debt service versus the 1.2 billion of state. So it will depend upon obviously how those revenues come in over time. As Mike mentioned, on August 22nd, and I'll go over a schedule here in a bit, but on August 22nd, we will be bringing to the council a new bond indenture, as well as a new supplemental bond indenture. The new bond indenture will basically be controlling all of the structure and various covenants and things like that that are related to both the cowboys and the rangers data at that point. And then the first supplemental bond indenture will be the authorization to do the Cowboys refunding. There's a couple of important assumptions that were kind of built in the overall plan of finance. And then on the next screen, I'll just go over some of the assumptions, or I'm sorry, some of the covenants that are in the new bond indentures that you'll be approving by ordinance. On the seniorly in debt service, this is being sized as in kind of an A rating category. Right now you're also in A category for two of the agencies and one of them increased to recently in the double A category. That was based primarily of course on the the fact that you've been paying off all of those bonds and so your coverage was increasing. The sub ordnance debt would be sized to be in the triple B category. We'll be receiving ratings from all three agencies. The maximum term on the debt of the rangers will be 30 years and that's by a state statute. The cowboy's debt will be restructured as it's shown in this illustration earlier so that it would be back to the original final maturity of 2034. I ideally would actually extend that out further, but right now, the way we structure that is out to 2034. The revenues that are excess revenues then over time, that we would use to pay back debt early would be used to pay back the subordinate debt first, which would have the higher interest rates. Another component that may be part of this, the subordinate debt first, which you would have the higher interest rates. Another component that may be part of this that was not shown in this particular illustration based on where rates are now is we might have capital appreciation bonds in the overall planning finance as well. What you typically have used are called current interest bonds, which basically mean you pay interest payments every six months and you pay the principal payments once a year for any given maturity. For capital appreciation bonds, what happens is you accrete the interest and you basically pay it on maturity. So what that allows you to do is basically get through some early years where you might not have sufficient revenue to service that debt. We also will look at bond insurance and surety policies for the reserve fund and decide at pricing whether or not that makes sense economically or where we should go on the credit rating as a standalone basis and make cash fund a deposit to the reserves. Right now we're contemplating all fixed rate debt. All the ordinance would allow for variable rate debt if we ever saw that as being an important component of the overall plan of finance. Again, I'll get to the Cowboys refinancing a little bit more detail, but the Ranger's financing right now, we're assuming would happen around February 15th of 2018 and per the documents that you recently approved, the project funding you recently approved, the project of funding and closing agreement that requires them to get the guarantee maximum price contract in place first. And you have to do it by September 30th. Again, right now about 18.4 million of taxable debt would be issued. We're working with Council to confirm that number. And as I mentioned earlier, this is rate sensitive and rates obviously affect the coverage and things about nature. Working with city, for example, we have stressed this to 75 basis points above current market and the plan of finance is still executable and we're hoping that the market cooperates with this. Again, as I mentioned in the ordinance and the master ordinance, there are a number of covenants that are embedded in that document that you'll be getting from the bond council here shortly. The first is, and probably the most important is that you are going to be contributing a total of the proceeds of 500 million to the project. As Mike mentioned earlier, after we do this, we refinancing of the Cowboys debt up into the point when you have made that 500-large contribution, the lien will actually be open. So you will not be paying off debt early. You will be contributing and letting some of those monies flow through to the rangers with certain restrictions, principally being that they have to fund debt service for next year first. We don't anticipate really that that will happen very long if rates stay within the range of what we're looking at. We'll do the refinancing in September. Moneys will start flowing through but we'll be funding debt service first and then we'll do the new money in February. The lien at that point will be closed back again and all those access monies will be used to pay off debt service early. The additional bonds test, there is an additional bond test in the document that basically allows for the issuance of additional seniorly debt with 1.30 times maximum annual debt service and supporting a debt of 1.15 times average annual debt service. This additional bond test won't be functional if we get to the 500 million on the first issuance. It's really only there in case for some reason we can't condition the entire amount. There also be debt service reserve funds that are established on the senior lane. It's a three prong test either maximum, either a maximum of debt service, 1.25 times average of debt service, or 10% a par. And we are then working on the subordinate lane reserve. We're going to wait until we actually do get closer to pricing to decide exactly how that's structured. So a little bit more details on the Cowboys Restructuring and Financing. This will be refinancing all of their outstanding or all of your outstanding bonds related to that project. There is one principal payment of a just over a million dollars on 815 of 17. So the balance after that would be about 145 million 835. As I mentioned, we will be restructuring that debt. So if you look in the upper and corner, you'll see that the current debt service that goes out through 2027. As I mentioned, that debt service actually originally went out through 2034, but the city has paid off some of that early. We will refinance it to something similar to the second column. And you can see that there actually is a net present value savings that we expect have about 7% those savings will be really in the early years between now and between the 18 and 2027 and then that debt will then be pushed out longer to make room for the Rangers transaction. transaction. So in terms of the schedule we've been working at a number of meetings we've been working with your staff as well as with with bond council and with city again as our senior underwriter to develop not only the plan of finance but the various ordinances that you'll see shortly we're also working on a preliminary official statement or the offering document. We expect to have conference calls with the reading agencies next week. And on August 22nd, as I mentioned, we expect to have the master bond indenture and the first supplemental bond indentured to you to be approved. That would be a parameters indenture which would allow us to do the Cowboys refinancing within certain restrictions and then ideally then we'll come back let's say in February or maybe a little bit earlier to get approval to do the Rangers financing. So we expect right now the price on September 13th that's that would be the date that we would set the actual rates and then we expect to close and fund the Esgro on September 28th. So that's kind of a broad overview of what we've been working on and just wanted to give you a heads up as what was coming down the pike here the next couple of weeks. So there are any questions on the plan of finance? Any questions, comments? Mr. Glasping. This may be for Mr. Finley. I just based on kind of where we are now. What are your expectations on the ratings review? Okay. Yeah. So we expect there, they're on the top of the page. We expect the senior lean bonds to be in the A category and the subordinate bonds to be in the triple B category. This is unlike, of course, the city of the city. This is the city of the city of the city. The city of the city is the city of the city. The city of the city is the city of the city. The city of the city is the city of the city. The city of the city is the city of the city. The city of the city is the city of the city. The city of the city is the city of the city. The city of the city is the city of the city. The city of the city is the city this debt that you'll be issuing for both the cowboys as well the Rangers will only be secured by these special taxes And because of that and because of how it's structured We're going to expect that the ratings will be lower Obviously we'll work as hard as we can to get the highest ratings possible and the fact that You know the city is so vibrant and has all the other characteristics that you were talking about earlier in your budget For example, and those excellent ratings you have in your other debt, that's going to weigh on here as well. But they're going to be looking specifically for repayment from those taxes only, and then how the transactions are structured. Any other questions, comments? Thank you, Mr. Gordon. comments. Thank you Mr. Gordon, thank you Mr. Finley. Next we move to discussion of informal staff reports on those. I'll receive the reports or there any questions on any of these. Okay, seeing none we'll move to committee meetings. Finance and audit, Mr. Parker. Thank you, Mayor. We had a, everybody was on board today for the meeting. We had two subjects that we covered on RFP. The first one was the wellness clinic. And we had a previous meeting on this particular subject. A mosaic has stated that with the shared clinic and taking the option by CARATC was probably the best option itself, okay, for our participants. There has been very good success in other cities and the utilization of wellness clinics and essentially a reduction in normal claims on our on our insurance and that is going to in fact give us the savings that we're looking for if we Proceeded down the road and 2021 we would essentially accrue a liability of about $155 million without a clinic of insurance liability. And if we go ahead and establish a clinic, then we would look at approximately $147 million, which would be a reduction of about $8 million. Essentially, CARE-TC has one clinic currently fairly well up north. It is unacceptable to us. They're going to build a new clinic down by Arkansas and Matlock and the medical district down there. We have a higher density of our employees that live down south and to the southwest. And so there's not only that clinic,'re looking for another clinic, even further down south, near 287 to put in. So that pretty much concluded our, excuse me, in order for us to use this particular clinic, we have to acquiesce to a annual health assessment of each one of our employees. They have to go down there and they have to get their blood draws and they have to do their things. And they do it. This is a reduced copay. So you would normally, if you went to your doctor to do this, you still maintain your doctor. But if you did this for the tertiary medical requirements that you have, your copays at this particular clinic would be reduced from like $100 down to approximately $40 to acquire these things. So we would ask that you can visit your normal doctor, but it would be beneficial to you if you have a sick child or something of that nature to go to one of these clinics. So that was our first RFP that we took a look at. The second one was very interesting. It also had to do with healthcare insurance. And that was the main body of the insurance. And employee insurance, RFPP just like Tray said you know we're looking at approximately a 2.7 percent increase on an annual basis. So what we have three different categories and the three different categories that we take a look at if I can find them here. if I can find them here. One of them is your normal. The other is the drugs and the last one is a provisional category. And what the staff had suggested was that we move away, essentially our contract is expiring. So what we want to do is align ourselves with probably the most economically feasible program that we can get in at this particular time. What they suggested was we go with the United Health Care and essentially United Health Care would be increasing their admin fees so there would be no savings there. But if we went to Navitas for our drug care, that would save us approximately a million dollars. And then if we went to Prudential for our provisional care, that would save us approximately a hundred thousand dollars. for a provisional care that would save us approximately $100,000. The bottom line is that we had an issue with that. And the issue that came out in committee was the fact that there is an intrinsic value of having Texas health care resources or a THR to have them local, we can pick up the phone and solve any problems that we need. And so there is a benefit to that. So what we've done, we have a time frame that we have to meet in an effort to get this accomplished by the end of the fiscal year. And what we would like to do is we're going to meet prior to the budget meeting next Tuesday as a committee and see what value there is in keeping the THR are going to THR with Etna versus United Health Care. So that's that was a consensus of the committee and that's what we've decided to do and we will report back to you on the 22nd with hopefully a response. Mr. Parker, thank you for the work the committee is doing and thank you for looking in fully exploring Texas Health with them being right here in our community. Appreciate that. Any questions for Mr. Parker? Miss Kaye, part. for Mr. Parker? Miss K. Paret? Not really a question, but just to add to Mr. Parker's report, which was very thorough, we did inquire of Miss Zika if we could offer our employees both. So both United Health Care and THR at a combination. And the answer was no because we don't have a large enough population, so we have to select one. Okay. All right, any other questions or comments? Okay, then we'll move to Ms. Wolff, community and neighborhood development. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. We met on two items today and we did not require any action by council, but we did get a final report on our HUD dollars and wouldn't quite as drastic as we thought so we have some reprogramming to do and we reviewed that with staff and we'll be prepared next time we meet to make a recommendation move forward public hearings and we anticipate that that full product will come back to the council by September 26th that will allow us to make that decision and get it to DC in a timely manner. The other project that came before us was very encouraging and staff's very enthusiastic and they reported out a new market's tax credit properties efforts that came forward from the housing channel, which is the new name for the formerly Tarrant County Housing Partnership that we all know Donna Van Ness operates. She competed as a entity, highly competitive market, very similar to what we applied for as a project zone. In fact, staff assisted her and used some of that same information that we applied as a city about three years ago and they were very successful and won that award. Staff will be continuing to work with them very diligently. She's got about seven and a half million dollars and has 12 months to spend it to address to spend it to address redevelopment of either full neighborhoods, housing, street improvements, infrastructure, but they must be owner occupied. And she has already found the five support. We try to get lots of banks and builders and competitive market. So it was very good, very exciting, and it was information that was very vital to what our efforts are. And staff will diligently continue to work with that group. And hopefully we've got some neighborhoods that she will be required to do 26 separate structures. So we thought wouldn't that be great if the city had some land somewhere or could acquire some that we could make those in a group and make a major input and address the needs of that particular community. So any other questions or council members can make other comments. But that's exciting, Ms. Wolfe. That would be a great resource for us there in redevelopment here of our community. Okay, next we'll move to transportation municipal infrastructure, Ms. Walman. Yes, Mayor, we did meet today and we only had one issue to talk about and it was an update on Senate Bill 1004. And that's the one that allows the cell towers on the poles and that this legislature passed. And so we discussed that in depth. It's, it will be coming to council next on the 22nd with resolution. Since we got our permit design manual in, there were some changes that were made. And so we'll have to amend that policy on the 22nd. So you'll get all the information then. It's still actually there are going to be some problems and we'll just go ahead and talk about the permitting will be coming in in September and it will basically cost some delays for other permitting because there's going to be such an influx of hundreds of permits coming in from the cell towers, people at and T and the others that will be applying. So there are going to be some delays and it is going to cost us a little money, but it's done and we're going to work with it and we'll do the best we can. And staff is willing to, they were, they really gave us a good report today, saying they can step up to it and they'll get it done, and they'll get it done in a timely manner as best they can. But there is, it's gonna be a change. So, full report will be coming on the 22nd with three resolutions that we will have to pass to being compliance. And that was it. There's no action today. Any questions from Ms. Walmond? Okay. Next, we'll move to Ms. Alainia's items. Pointments to boards and commissions. Mr. Pino. Mayor, we'll have 13 appointments this evening for Council's consideration. Okay. Evening agenda items. Does anybody have any discussion or anything? Ms. Kipart. Thank you, Mayor. On the item 111, I guess it is the platinum storage. Mr. Paragion or Mr. Dugan, have we gotten any kind of definitive word from the city of Grand Prairie about an agreement? Not definitive yet. I've been in contact with the assistant city manager. They're talking now with their attorneys and they are going to have a report back to the city manager by this Friday. So I would suggest that you maybe continue that item tonight for the next public meeting, public hearing. By that time we should have some recommendations and proposals back from them for revenue sharing. Okay. Thank you. Mayor, I'll be willing to make a motion for a continuance. I would just like to have a complete application before I vote. And I don't think we have all the fact ship, particularly with the revenue share potentially with green curry. Yeah, and I think it could affect the design. And so I think it's even protecting the applicant there by holding off till we find that out because it could affect the design. Have it Miss Walman, do you have something to ask about that? Yeah, well, I would just say that the developer, I have been in contact with the developer and he's completely okay with continuing the case. Great. Okay. Anything else on the evening agenda items? Okay. Next we'll move to issues relative to city and textile projects. Okay. Future agenda items, Dr. Okay. Feature agenda items. Dr. Marsh. Thank you Mayor. There's been so much significant collaboration between the Chamber and the City on assisting small businesses here in the city. I really would like if Council would be in agreement here from staff of briefing of the effort so far that has been made by staff and the chamber to help small businesses here in the city. I would love to hear that and I think it would be included all of the things that we were already doing for small businesses. Myself, I'm a small business owner and I think it's really outstanding. I think that's a great topic, Dr. Myers. Mr. Myers. Ms. Sheppard. Yeah, thank you, Mayor. As many of us did or all of us did, we met with different legislate tours from Austin over the past few weeks preceding today. And I had the privilege of meeting with Stakewrap Chris Turner. And as many of you know, Senate Bill 4 has been in the news of late. I think Fort Worth Council considered it last week or the week before last. And so, Representative Turner asked me if I would bring that up for consideration. And since I was the only one sitting in the room at the time I had to say yes. And so I am doing that. Representative Turner has asked if we would consider joining the lawsuit regarding SB4 and its implementation. So I'm throwing that out to see if there's any appetite putting that on a future agenda or not. Well, my opinion is that we are a city that is open to international visitors and citizens. And in fact, we've become an international city by our demographics. And we're very proud of that. I'm very proud of that. But however, the many ramifications of that lawsuit is just not something I want to put our city or our citizens through myself. I throw that open to anybody. Have any differing opinion there of that. Okay. All right. So we will not put that on the agenda but thank you for bringing that forward and we certainly appreciate representative Turner. Yes, Mr. Farker. Thank you, Mayor. What I look at this particular subject, it's already being pursued by the largest cities in Texas and I don't see Sorry our City attorney has come because the item is not on the agenda All you can do is discuss whether or not you want to put it on a future agenda you actually you actually cannot Okay Yes, Miss Kaye party I did I Yes, Ms. K. Barton. I like a future agenda item dealing with Stovall Park. That park continues to have a problem with the neighbourhood that completely surrounds it except on this very north side. And it has to do with closing of the park at 10 o'clock at night like a lot of parks are. But Stovall Park is considered a larger park and we're a regional park and we've left it open later. But the neighborhood continues to suffer because of the late night that is kept there. And we've had considerable crime problems there. So I'd like some staff feedback on that and what it would take to close that parking. Okay, everybody in agreement to that? Okay. Any other future agenda? Okay. Next, legislative update. Miss Wakeman. I'm sure you've got some good news for us. Thank you, Mayor. Jennifer Wakeman, Director of Management Resources. You have before you a memo which was updated just today, and it gives us some of the issues the city's been tracking. Just to let you know, the main concern is a bill that's going to, well, it's over in the House Calendars Committee now. It's Senate Bill 1, and it would have to do with revenue caps. And this would impose that 6% rollback rate from the 8% that we've talked about. Mandate an election if it were exceeded. And it only applies to the 38 largest cities in Texas. It creates a sort of a level of if you go above that, then you would be subject to this. However, all the other cities, many of which are in Tarrant County and are surrounding us would remain at the 8% rollback rate. So that's the bill that's the bill that's gotten the furthest. Certainly the one of many we were concerned with, but we'll continue to keep an eye on that. And there's information here. There's going to be a press conference tomorrow at 11 AM. I know it's just some information earlier about possible calls you could make. Or if anyone was able to attend that particular gathering. And I will tell you the location I have is actually incorrect. So if you are going to travel, please let me know. It's been updated since I wrote this. So, and I'm happy to answer any of the questions that you've got about other items that are, other bills that are out there or the what we've already discussed. Miss Wolfe. Any dialogue about short term rentals? There was some concerns that short term rentals would be allowed in cities as a result of the property vesting bill that was out there. However, the original as it was filed and the property vesting being if I bought my property in 1985 when I built in 2017, all the rules from 1985 would apply. And so the implication was that any short-term rental regulations that a city might adopt and ordinance that council might choose to adopt would not apply if I bought my house in 1985. That bill has not moved very far. We just saw there's a new version of a bill out that is going to be heard in the house. I believe if it hasn't been scheduled it'll be heard soon. And that has new versions. We're working on analyzing it, but we believe what that would be is it would start after a certain point. The property vesting. So we still have a concern about that since you all have not taken the option of adopting a short-term rental policy that would basically anyone who owned a house then it would then be wouldn't apply anyone who currently owns a house now or I think it's as of maybe December sometime in December of this year so that's something we're still need to keep an eye on I know that we've had a lot of input from some residents who've contacted us about concerns there. that's about concerns there. Mr. Glasfi. Thank you, Mayor. Probably shouldn't say this. But what one of the things that the government indicated that we should have consistency and what's implemented across the state, so why do you want to create a two tier of 38 cities versus everyone else? Yes, sir. That is a fair point. I believe that that is a desire. The governor didn't approve that change, but I believe that change was made to because the rural constituency in both of the houses would not have approved it otherwise. If it hadn't had that change, it would not have made it out of the Houseways and Means Committee. So that change was made to do that. But I would say to any of our neighboring cities who perhaps don't exceed that rate, it's very easy to remove a bracket in future legislative sessions. So I would believe that if this were passed, there would be an eye towards achieving the governor's interest in making all the regulations the same. So I think all cities would, at some some point if this move perhaps be subject to that Any other questions from miss Whitman Thank you miss Wooden. Thank you, sir All right seeing no further business will stand adjourned Thank you.