All right. Welcome to town council's first workshop on the FY 26 budget. I'd like to say that this is a workshop and we're in workshop mode, which means council members don't need to be recognized by the chair to speak if you have a question during the presentation. And this a warning to the presenters. You're welcome to ask that question. The public, we have a sign. I think we have at least one member of the public. We have about three opportunities at the beginning, middle, and end for comment. But if you have a burning question or in a presentation and you want to be recognized, raise your hand and we'll consider it. So I think Dr. McGraw has an announcement. Yes, today is my youngest daughter's birthday, and so I will not be staying the entire work session. Just wanted people to know, so if you see me up and leave, it's not because I don't value, I don't value what you're saying. I just, I wanna go see my daughter. So that's all. That's great. So with that intro, I would ask the town manager to get us started. Very good. Thank you all. So we're gonna talk about the fiscal year 2026 budget tonight. We have a number of departments that will present to you all. But first we want to talk about timeline again for citizens watching at home. This will give you a great idea of the best times for public input where you can make the most impact. And then also give you a little bit of an idea of the process moving forward and where input's still valuable but we have less opportunity to change so as you can see in February we held an unofficial budget public hearing where we asked folks before we even start putting pen to paper on budget numbers come tell us your wishes and desires so that we can try to incorporate them as early as possible and now we move on to the work sessions you can see there what departments we will talk about at each of the two work sessions I will remind council I'll probably say this a few times. What you're gonna see tonight from the I'm sorry. work sessions, you can see there what departments we will talk about at each of the two work sessions. I will remind council and I'll probably say this a few times. What you're going to see tonight from department heads and myself is what we call our department submittals. And what that should mean for you and the public is this is not our recommended budget. This includes both the wants and the needs that department see throughout the year. And I encourage them to present that to you so that we can have have the conversation and also so that we can educate you on what our department heads are seeing as long term needs in the community and things that we all even if we can't address this year that we're probably going to have to address in upcoming years as well. So take note that this will have to be cut substantially when it gets to the town manager's budget but we do want to hear from all our department heads on all the things that they think that the town could use. Yes, sir. I apologize for the interruption. I should have mentioned that the mayor is not with us tonight. He's in his role as president of Virginia, Minnesota league is in Washington, DC. It's a national league of cities. Got it. Finding out what's happening up there. Yep. Anyway, thank you for- No problem. As we move through the work sessions, I plan to present my official town manager's budget on April at the town council meeting on April 15. Again, I will make this note throughout the months coming as we do budget process. That while it is just what I present to you, does have legal standing. Were you unable to come to an agreement on an official budget and vote on your own? What I submit as the town managers budget would kind of go into effect on July 1st automatically, should you not vote so that the town can keep operating. But we have never had that happen during my time. I don't expect that will be the case this time. After I present my budget, we have to go through the legal advertising periods to make sure that all our ads are correct. And then we'll hold public hearings for definitely the budget. And it's looking more and more like we also have to do a public hearing for what the state calls a real estate tax rate public hearing. But I am not recommending any changes to our tax rate. This is a legal requirement that any time assessments in the town go up over 1% for real estate, we are automatically required by the state to advertise it as a tax increase because assessments have gone up even though we will hold the right flat in this proposed budget. And just for legal purposes, you are not allowed to vote on the budget the same night that we hear the public hearing and so we then move budget adoption to a later meeting in June. So that will be the process as going forward. So tonight we've already kind of shown you this slide in a different form but these are the items that we're going to talk about tonight. Sorry, I made a note I want to keep up with this. So before we get to the details the budget, I want to share with you some of the things that staff and I are thinking about with the external environment, the internal environment, and then some goals I've set for us. Obviously, there's some economic uncertainty in the world right now. Quite frankly, I struggle to find out what the economy is going to do over the next year. We're seeing a lot of different trends, and then you add in the federal government impacts to the economy, as well as what they're doing to federal revenues. And so we are in a little bit of a world of uncertainty, and that has framed a little bit of what I'm going to show you tonight. I will make note that at least two of the administrators managers in the region, for much larger localities have brought up the concerns about our session and their presentations to their board. So that is also something that we are keeping an eye on as well. Just to make sure that we have a conservative budget that can get us through both good times and bad times. On the internal side, obviously our goal every year is to have a balanced budget and we will continue that goal. We do also want to focus on compensation recruitment and retention. We've had a number of discussions with town council about the recruitment efforts and the turnover we've had over the past few years. I as well as some department heads are starting to see a light at the end of that tunnel. I think we have an absolutely amazing team right now and we've talked with council about we may even be in the world of switching from that recruitment to really focusing on retention and make sure that we can hold on to these wonderful staff that we've hired. Council is very well aware but for the public's perspective we also are completing what we call our ARPA projects and that's American Rescue Plan Act that was a large sum of federal dollars that came to the town three years ago. Really at beginning had a number of strings attached, but by the end the federal government removed many of those strings. Mr. Goodman's going to do a wonderful presentation for you at an upcoming meeting saying, we basically completed all of this. And here's what you bought with that $8.2 million that we got. So this is the final year that we'll be working on those projects. We may have three-ish that rolled over into fiscal year 26, but we are on great pace to complete all those projects as well. And then again, we had a wonderful year last year, even though there was a lot of turnover, what that led to was a lot of savings from the salary lines in our budget. Our revenues did better than expected, And so we had a significant surplus in FY 24 last year. And so you'll see in this budget, when we get to the capital section, we're gonna make some pretty heavy investments in certain projects so we can make substantial progress on them again using those one time surplus monies for one time capital projects and make sure we don't cover ongoing expenses with that one time money. So budget themes, this is largely what I think of as the self-imposed goals that we want to work on. Obviously, balanced budget every year is certainly a goal. We want to continue investment and connectivity and infrastructure. You've heard me say this, but for the public's perspective, we've heard this loud and clear over the last three years. Connectivity in particular on the infrastructure side with sidewalks and trails is the number one desire of this community. And so we're going to continue investment in that area and make sure that we can build out our trail and sidewalk network. In addition to that, we also, or at least I've tried to frame, that connectivity goal as one with connecting with our community, not just physically, but in all the things that the government does, and so you'll see some improvements to our community engagement budget as well, an additional efforts to try to connect with our community and make sure that we're passing good information back and forth between the town and the community. We'll do some investment in employees. Again, the retention piece of this, you've seen probably a number of different proposed increases to staff at other localities were I think right in the middle of that and for a small town of 7,000 people we're gonna be able to propose some raises that I'm really proud of We've been financially stable for a long time and that's gonna allow us to make some investments in our employees as well as I mentioned earlier in the external pressures part There's a lot of uncertainty going forward. And so with that and with the roll off of our ARPA funds, we were using a lot of those funds for some one-time expenditures that we now need to incorporate into the budget. I'm looking at trying to make fiscal year 26 kind of a new base year budget for the town. One, when we're not getting a lot of new revenue, we're not doing a lot of whole new things, we're gonna focus on doing really well what we've built up over the last three years, get a base budget and then allow FY27 to be where we make some additional investments. And then again, I already mentioned it, but use of those one time surplus funds to invest in infrastructure. And so I hope you will see these come through as we do the presentations tonight and then in two weeks as well. On the personnel side, so before we get to the spreadsheets, So I hope you will see these come through as we do the presentations tonight and then in two weeks as well On the personnel side so before we get to the spreadsheets Our compensation plan Is one that I've mentioned to you all that we're gonna work on in the coming year It served us very well for about ten years now and been a great tool for us But over the past few years with the dramatic raises that we've seen in other localities and some of the ones that we've been done for our employees, it's gotten a little bit out of whack and that the percentage increases are not quite falling the way we would expect them to. And so I'm going to recommend for this year that we just go with a 4.5 across the board raised for employees. And then we're going to, in the coming year, work on creating a new compensation plan, one that will bring to you all, help you understand, and make sure that everyone's comfortable with moving forward. On the personnel side of things, we do have a number of recommendations for additional part-time hours that could potentially put someone into a full-time category. I not recommending adding any new full time positions, though. And so you're going to see three positions under discussion. And I think Ms. Miller will talk about the community engagement once a night. And then Ms. Amos will talk about the planning employee in a future work session. But there is a recommendation from our community engagement staff to up the part-time which is their title. I'm sorry about digital media specialists to a full-time role and actually partner them with parks and rec a little bit and then miss Amos is also going to talk to you about upping the hours for our zoning enforcement employees because that is a need in the community and we could use them for some more hours but Whether those make make it through to the final budget, we're not 100% sure yet, but do want to make sure that again, you all hear the needs even if we're unable to fund them in the current year. We're also looking at significant succession planning efforts in the Public Works Engineering staff. We have some really happy for them, but disappointing for us retirements coming up on their staff and actually within about a four month period We're going to lose two really important employees to us and so you also see when we get to Mr. Jennings presentation and public works administration and engineering That we budgeted in the regular salary line some overlap so that we can hire a little bit early and make sure that those people have time to sit with their employee the existing employees understand the role and Really be able to hit the ground running when they do start so there is some additional salary line in there made so that we can do that overlap And then I already mentioned it but the on the arpus side of things we have three positions that were 50% funded by that federal funding And so we are moving those to full time as well this year. I'll mention those when we get to the individual budgets. And then finally, you all just approved updated committee stipends for our council committees and so that is incorporated as well full funding for an entire year of those on the personnel side. I'm going to just keep on rolling and since you all have the ability to jump in. Is that okay? Great. As you go through this, obviously everything operationally, we want your input on, but in particular because we have the money to invest this year, love your extra lens and extra focus on our capital projects, which ones in addition to the CIP top 10 that you've already, and for the public, that's capital improvement program, that you've already told us you're important. As you see, the recommendation's coming through, make sure you talk to us about, well, I'd like to see a little more investment there. It's great if you could even say, maybe take it from there, but you can leave that to me as well. So, all right. We have a moment for citizen input on the meeting. There's any more citizens for Mr. Ferrer. Not at this time. I'm sure there will be others. All right. Is there a member of the public who would like to speak on anything? All right. Well, that's your prerogative. Mr. Mayor, we had a- Yes. I was going to point to the clerk. Great. We had a visitor come to Town Hall just before the meeting started that one of the 10 the meeting but couldn't but he provided a letter with your permission. I'll just read that letter into the records. This is for the Town Council budget work session dated March 11, 2025 from Mr. Paul Kosa of 100 Brookneil Alley, Ashland, Virginia. He also provides his email address. He had four bullet points for Council to consider as we look into the budget. The first is sidewalk connection from Lourdes subdivision to the town of Ashland Street System. He shared that the initial developer installed a sidewalk that runs from the south side of the subdivision gathering barn to the tree line at the end of the property where it dead ends. It's the understanding homeowners this was was supposed to be connected to the future town sidewalk system. This may be far into the future. As an immediate step, the sidewalk should be extended through the tree line and connect to the parking lot of first Baptist Church. At minimum, this will provide access to Wesley Street and access to the town. Number two, repaving on the east side of South Sinistreet from Ashcake Road to England Street. the side of self Sinistreet is in bad shape and merits repaving. Number three, repair and replace the concrete barriers along the CSX railroad tracks along Sinistreet. After recent installation, new ties and ballast mini the concrete barriers that kept ballast from spilling onto the street are broken and in many cases completely missing. If this is the town's responsibility, the barriers should at minimum be repaired or ideally completely replaced. If this is the responsibility of COS, then the town needs to keep pressure on the railroad to get this repair completed. Number four, repaving of Henry Street to England Street, from England Street to Smith Street. Again, if this is part of Henry Street, his badge street and marriage repaving, I will tell you I believe that is already on the schedule for the next few weeks to get done in meetings I've been. So that is all the public comment that clerk received before the meeting. Well that's very helpful and appreciate the comment. It's not been our practice to respond to the questions but we certainly will take them into consideration. And they're fully part of the record. Unless there are any other comments, I'll move on to revenues and Mr. Farrer. Yes, sir. So we're going to begin talking about revenues. But before we do, since this is the first spreadsheet on the screen, for your purposes and the publics, we'll do a little bit of orientation. Obviously on the left side, you have the name of the tax. Our GL code is kind of our accounting system code, not really all that important to town council but really helpful for us as we look at the budget. When you see actual, the FY23 and FY24 actual, those are audited numbers. That's what actually happened to that year, not necessarily the budget that we adopted that year. And then amended budget for FY24 and 25. That is the original budget that you approved with some amendments that we've done over the year. And then FY25, mid-year estimate is our estimate of what we think will happen for that FY, compared to that FY25 budget. And so that is literally an estimate of where we think we will be on June 30th of this year. And then finally, Department Request, I talked about that naming convention that we have earlier. That's where we put in, even I know it's a revenue, it's not necessarily a request. That's where we, what we call this portion of the budget where department heads and myself and the finance director and the revenue side have put in what we think it will be at this moment. So hopefully that gives an orientation. It's obviously broken up as you scroll down into different types of revenue. But I'm happy to take any questions on these as we go through. Yes, sir. Utility tax revenues up 52%. I was going to talk about that one. Yes, sir. I'll wait until you go ahead. What is going to say is throughout the presentation, just like Vice Mayor Rodgers just did, please ask questions. I know some of these, you may look at it and go, I don't even know what that is doing let alone what type of tax it is those are great questions for now or you know find me at one of our regular meetings every week but I'm gonna touch You may look at it and go I don't even know what that is doing let alone what type of tax it is Those are great questions for now or you know find me at one of our regular meetings every week But I'm gonna touch on some of the highlights if there's one you'd like a little bit of an explanation for please Please jump in and so as I look at the sheet some of the important ones I see are the personal property tax the third one down from the top you can see amended budget for this year is about 650,000. We are expecting significantly more revenue to come in than the budgeted. I expect we'll probably get to that amount also with a little bit of delinquent collections actions on the finance staff. So that was a great development for us. And so we're estimating for next year a slight increase of 740,000. I will remind you we budget very conservatively to make sure that we never overestimate a revenue. In addition, sales tax has been an incredibly strong performer for us. You can see the growth over the, just since FY23 and it's actually even more substantial than that. If you go back further from 767,000 to 918 and now we're getting up into the millions in this year. I will remind you that for the public's notice as well, that is not just the sales that happen in the town of Ashland. And so sales tax in the state of Virginia is dived out to towns based on a formula of the percent of school age population in the town relative to the entire county. And so I think we're at 5.5%. Something to that effect. changes every few years based on a census that's done and then the entire county. And so I think we're at 5.5 percent, something to that effect. That changes every few years based on a census that's done. And then the good news is that the town gets that percentage of the county-wide collection of sales tax of that 1 percent optional tax. And so it's really helped for us that Hannah was growing, right? And so their growth in the retail market helps us on the sales tax side of things. we continue down I'm gonna bring up the one that we talked about there consumer utility tax You can see significant growth in fiscal year 24 But if you go back to that year's budget presentation that is a year that we actually did some pretty substantial tax changes And so the big changes where we did increase the consumer utility tax We cut the personal property tax by seven cents. We also eliminated that vehicle decal that we had for a number of years. And so this was a little bit of an expected offset, right? So we increased the rate. We expected the revenues to go up. I'm happy to share with you that they actually went up a little more than expected. And those decreases in the revenue on the personal property and vehicle decal side were just as budgeted as well. And so that change has been a net positive for us, being able to provide the tax relief on the other side while making up a little bit here. In addition, our two biggest ones that we always talk about hotel and motel taxes are the transient occupancy tax. That one you'll see, not that much growth in that one. It is one that we're not seeing the level of growth that we have in prior years. So that one we're being very conservative with our estimates. It's just not growing at the pace that we might have expected. I'm quite surprised by it just by the sports authority coming online down at Virginia Center Common. I thought that would have had significant more impact on our overflow hotels, but we will continue to kind of monitor that. There are some elements there where there's some delinquent collections that are delaying some of our revenues, so that may actually even show a little bit higher than we're showing there. On the Meals Tax side, that is our single biggest revenue in the town of Ashen, is the Meals Tax, that's a 6% rate on top of what you pay on. It's been incredibly strong for us. We continue and you see us try to invest in those restaurants along Route 54. They really pay the bills and allow us to keep our real estate tax rate so low. So good collections there. We're seeing substantial growth. And hopefully the more we can turn over those empty buildings on Route 54, the more benefit that will provide in the long term. All right. I'm going to keep on moving. Yes. On revenues as we go into the permitting side of things and the fees that we charge, I will note here really just an error on our part. We left out the right away fees. We will expect a budget for that in the coming year. These are all the fees that are zoning in public works, folks charge as we go forward. The one you may be trying to understand the name of is the tourism improvement district or TID tax. That is something that we worked with town council and the Richmond region tourism group to implement, I believe it was, that be FY 24. And that is a 2% fee on all hotel room nights that goes straight to Richmond Region tourism. And that was a partnership that we did with every other locality in the region that also implaused that tax and it was important that we do that because you don't necessarily want to differentiate as you go across those borders. So that is a straight pass through. We collect the revenue on one side and then shoot it right back out to Richmond, Regent Horosom. And then you can also see here the court finds in forefritors is a little bit of an odd naming convention, but that is the tickets that we write, the fees that we receive for criminal violations through the court system and through APD's work. Obviously not all that much decline or growth. The thing I think that tells a nice story of is there are a lot of folks and I won't say necessarily our community but in the world that think police are very focused on, we have to write a certain number of tickets. You're only ticketing me to make up revenue and pad your budget. As you can see here, $80,000 doesn't do much to fund a $2 million plus police department. So that is not our focus. So we don't necessarily try to increase or decrease that particular one. That's just based on the behavior of the people in the town. Sorry, this one got a little bit smaller. But as we go forward, on this page, one of particular note, and you can see it in the increases and decreases is bank deposit interest. If any of you have savings accounts or investments over your own, you probably saw similar increases over the past few years. And interest rates have really allowed us to earn a significant more amount of dollars in revenue on the interest of our invested funds. In addition to that, you'll see a lot of the kind of pool and parks and rec fees that we charge. ME will probably talk to you if we haven't already about the fact we are not recommending increases to those fees. So this is based on increased in activity, not necessarily an increase in fees. And then the last one I'll just make note of is that whole last section. None of them are going to break our budget, but we do a lot of kind of incidental small things. There's some lights that Randolph-Macon reimburses us for street lights. There's things like grants that we get. And so that one is a little bit of a catch-all for many of the smaller revenues that we have. Keep on rolling. This page usually is not much that we talk about, but in light what's going on in DC I think it's a good page to reinforce the fact that we are not reliant on federal government revenues or revenue streams. You can see there that the total we are estimating for the entire year is $6,650 so we are not at great risk of losing any ongoing revenue from whatever happens in the federal government Most of these are some form of public safety Grant that we would get for equipment or training or something else the last one there was CFPF Mike do you remember that is that community flood protection something a grant that we got a while back Either way a grant that we received that We've already finished out You got it sir. Thank you the grant burn transportation safety Those are it's actually justice assistance grant is the burn grant and then transportation safety grant is a separate separate one. I got it. Yeah. Thank you. All right. So as we asked the question, yeah, please. And I missed it somewhere, but we have a, as I saw a transfer from the general fund. That's coming up in the capital projects side. That's about a slide and a half away. I can't wait. So general fund revenues, that's what we just talked about. We'll talk about the much smaller projects fund revenues. But this largely says what some of the things I brought up. Sales tax continues to great. There's the summary of those tax changes that we made that I mentioned earlier. Males tax continues to do great and then interest is really helping out the budget as well. So capital projects fun. This is where in about a slide we'll get to what Vice Mayor Hodges just said, but again, revenue from the use of money, that's our interest in investments. So those funds that we hold as we save up for capital projects, we invest them so that we can make a little bit of return on behalf of the town and so that has done very well for us again. stormwater management fees, that's a fee that we charge for stormwater permits, for commercial and residential construction, and then our broadband zone lease and broadband fiber lease. Doug will talk to you about what that actual budget is, but there is a revenue component of it as well, where we basically charge a fee for that provider that wants to use our dark fiber. And so it's basically a permitting fee for them to be able to use it. When you say revenue from the use of money, is that interest? Interest. Yep. Yep. This is checking. Yes. I didn't know if there was something else going on. No, no, it's all interest. Like I said, investments in only vehicles that meet the state standards. So as we move on, you can see on the grant side of things we do, and Mike and Ingrid are awesome at this in our engineering department, a lot of stormwater grants. We've used that stormwater local assistance fund a lot, and we've been able to make great, great progress with it. What you see in here is that we're going to finish out a project and that we just will, We're going to finish out one of the projects, the Maple Swale Trail, this fiscal year, and the other one is going to roll over into FY26. That's a grant that we just will we're going to finish out one of the projects the Maple Swale Trail this fiscal year and the other one is going to roll over into FY 26. That's a grant that we've already been approved for in the fiscal year. As you keep going down, that was a community flood protection and then here we get to what Vice Mayor Hodges was talking about transfer from the general fund and so while it's a transfer we show it here here for revenue because it all needs to balance on the bottom. That 2,983,000 number is based on the wants, not all that just the needs and necessarily what we can afford. And so when we get to the capital project sheets, there's a bottom line down there where you should see that number match up exactly. And it's the sum of all the new money that we would need to transfer from the general fund to the capital fund to pay for all those Investments obviously as we get to the town managers recommended budget I'm gonna cut that number back significantly to a more affordable number and that will drop I would guess to at least two million or below Does that make sense? Great it was a big number it is a big. It's probably one of the bigger numbers in the budget. Yes. And so you can see there, even with that number, our total capital project fund revenues about 3.3 million with 2.9 of that made up of the transfer. And then we get to the book grand total. So this is that bottom line where you add the capital and general fund revenues and see what the totals give you. The important one here is that unappropriated funds transfer line. It operates very similar to the capital project fund transfer. That is a number that we have to take from our fund balance, so not necessarily ongoing revenues, and use to balance the budget. That number obviously is way too high as we speak right now, but do remember that I told you we have significant surplus from FY24 that make up that we are going to intentionally spend a significant portion on capital projects. So that number will come down as we both cut the capital project side of the budget as well as the operating side of the budget. And that also is a number that I'd like to get at 2 million or 2 million below so if we Accepted all the department had recommendations that would be the $17 million and we'd be using about $3 million out of our unreserved fund balance And thank goodness we have a town manager. Closer. Has it got? Yes. So we are in good financial shape, but we still need to be conservative with how we use that. We're not disparaging any department heads. The request is what you should. Exactly. And that's the direction I give them. It's not that they're over asking. It's that they're doing exactly as direct and telling you everything that they think we want and need. Yes. So as we talk about. We ask the question. Yeah, so we move in long okay or do we need it? I'm fine. Andrew, listening. Great job. I know I talk quick, so please slow me down if you need to. Yeah. I think we're good. Very good. Tax rates, obviously, all important as well when you're talking about revenues, the good news is, and I'll say it, again, no recommended tax rate changes in this budget. But this does give you a sense of what they are in the current year. I'm not going to dwell on those all that long because they have remained relatively consistent other than those changes we made in FY24. You, more of them, there's that consumer utility tax that we talked about earlier that we changed in FY 24. And then I'll make a note they weren't listed on the slide, but the meal tax rate is 6% and the lodging tax rate is 8%. And then here's where we use that unassigned fund balance. It kind of gives you an idea of what our balance is. The top line is the amount of our general fund budget that is applicable to fund balance. When we do the calculation of percentage, we have a beginning balance going into this FY26 fiscal year of about $8.3 million in there. I'm sorry, a beginning of FY25, $8.3 million. We expect to use about $200,,000 of that in this fiscal year and then we would, with that $3 million transfer that you saw on the last few slides, that would bring us down to about 5 million. As I mentioned, we're still going to cut that back and make sure that stays at a healthier number. All right, that was revenues and we're going to move on to the expenditure side of things. Great shot. Yes. So as you all have seen but for the public's perspective, we have, while we have one budget and it's the General Fund and Capital Project Fund budget, we do split it up into what we might call departments. And so you're going to see a lot of smaller budgets and we call them many departments, especially in public works there are a few street lights and storm water and things like that. So as we go through all these budgets make up that grand total that we just talked about. For the town council side, obviously this does include your wages. There is included here an increase. We had that talk with you two or three years ago about tying increases to town council stipends, not necessarily salary, to what our department heads average as their increase. The idea behind that being that we waited probably 10, 15 years between updates to town council salaries in the past and that jump just makes it really seem unpalatable when you have to make that jump. The percent increase is just too large and so we thought it, let's just kind of program this. Let's get it in a way that it goes up at a reasonable amount each year. You obviously have the prerogative if you want to devote down your increase one year, you're more than welcome to do so, but we think it's good to kind of keep that moving along as the cost for you all to even if you wanted to you know get a babysitter get coverage attend these meetings we know that there's a cost on of that to you all we want to make sure that we're keeping up with those expenses. Let's see what else do we want to talk about here. Contract services jumps out at me yes I have a note on that so contract services that is largely granticus. So our granticus software that runs the town council meetings. That is a service that you've seen us work on and continue to try to make better. And so we have some contract costs associated with that. As we continue moving on, the other part of that budget is the travel convention and education and the big number you'll see there is contributions other payments. I will make note for council this is going to change a little bit. This is a little bit different than how we've done it in the past. In prior years you would get all our community requests for funding in this section. This year since we're doing that through the Auschwem Foundation, I'm changing this to a little bit of what we consider our operational partners. It's basically nonprofits who do basically a government service. So think DAA, we partner with them for tourism and economic development services, Dominion Energy Innovation Center, some of our economic development and job growth services, and then the new ones in for this year, make sure I'm telling you all of them, are the Ashland Foundation, which we talked about. I have that listed at $50,000. And then a new one that I'm gonna make a recommendation for this year is $10,000 towards a group called Moments of Hope. They are one who provides homeless services to the donut hole of folks that the county doesn't have dedicated funding for. So the county has great funding for seniors when it comes to homeless services. They have great funding for families and what they're missing and they actually, the county relies on moments of hope to bride is in the instance where it's an able-bodied adult, right? Where in theory you could go back to work. They don't have dedicated federal funding for that And so there's a missing middle of service there. If we are going to go down this path, it's one that I would want to make sure we do it in partnership with Handover County. But I thought this was a great way for us to kind of supplement those services for a population in action that we know isn't currently getting those services. So happy to have more conversation on that, but that's the recommendation there. DAA and DEIC, they will be at your second meeting to actually make their budget presentations to you. When the budget comes out, I assume there will be a breakdown showing the 220. Yep, it's, and I'll give it to you right now just so you have it, Ashen Foundation at 50,000. Moments of hope at 10,000. And then the requests we receive from DA and DEIC are 30,000 for DEIC and 135,000 for DAA. So DAA is higher than it was. They're going up. I can't remember the percentage, but they were at, gosh, 92 or 90, last year I think. Okay and it's 130,000 for D. Yes. Thank you. 135. 135. 135. Okay. And the 10,000 apologize. That's moments of hope. Moments of hope. Yep. Any council questions on our budget? All right. I'll keep moving. Board of elections. This should be a relatively easy one. This is one we don't have to do moving forward. Mr. Goodman has had conversations with Ms. Smithson at the county and there are no ongoing costs for us for local elections anymore and so that it always used to be a three or four thousand dollar budget every other year. Now we get this will be the last year that we make this presentation to you. So who's paying for the? The county's got to cover. When we move from May elections to November elections now that it's wrapped up with the elections are governed by the State Board of Elections anyway, we will move into that. So the previous dollars we had in there were if they needed copies on site or they needed any kind of office supplies from us or any other kind of services that we could build to that budget code. That's pretty much what that was a placeholder but Miss Smith's confirmed that we don't need to worry about that any further. All right, let's have the easy one there. Now we get into the section of the budget where my staff lie, and so you'll see a theme here where we talk a little bit about what we've done this current year, show you the budget, and then talk about what we hope to accomplish in the coming year. Even though my position is relatively high profile, some of the things we do in the department, especially on the HR side of things, are maybe go unnoticed by the community, but do you want to especially give a shout out to Miss Cornwell? We did a lot of recruiting over the past year and those have resulted in an absolutely amazing staff that we have. So, seven recruitment processes nine new employees. Every one of them are absolutely wonderful. So really well done there. We've also, and I chaired this with Council, we re-structured our leadership team with the promotions of Mr. Goodman and Ms. Miller to assistant town manager. We actually transitioned some succession planning duties for purchasing to Ms. Bernie Cornelius. And then even Ms. Amos took over some meetings for me to offload some of my staff time as well. So we did some restructuring the leadership team and so far very pleased seems to be working really well. Obviously council is very well aware but we did the national community survey and then strategic plan update that trying to do a database update to our strategic plan make sure that we're hearing from the community understand what their concerns are and that we're able to address them so we've done a lot of work there. Obviously we continue to partner with the county, Randolph-Macon, other service providers and regional partners as well. And then really proud that we're moving into a new way of kind of assessing our organization from an internal perspective, Mr. Goodman's leading the charge on an organizational assessment. Basically, what are employees think of our environment and what are our department heads think and where's the gap, right? What isn't getting communicated that needs to make sure that our team is in complete alignment. And then also not much fanfare for it, but that employee manual update was an absolute bear of a project. And again, thanks to Mr. Goodman and Ms. Cornwell for that, that was great work as well. For those of us who can't read what you're holding up. Oh gosh, I don't even remember what's on there. It appears to have your name and your likes. I was a first day of school, like how kids hold the first day of school like who you are. Who you are. When you grow up, and so it's how many years you were here, I think what you wanted to be when you grew up and the other things, but it was a really good social media thing we did and stuff. We're doing for another. Yeah, we're ready for new stuff. We've got new staff so it's time for another. But those are the four employees in my department. Obviously, a misfortune, Kirin Segalhoff is not pictured there. She's our part-time digital media specialist, but great team there and very happy to have them Thank you on the financial side of things There's some notes to be made on the budget There so on the personnel side the biggest change here is incorporating Miss Miller's full-time salary back into the budget. That was 50% funded by ARPA as well as some of Mr. Goodman's efforts with his management of the ARPA program were actually funded out of there as well. And so this now fully funds all the employees we've been operating with out of here. And so that is the percentage increases that you're seeing. That's the large majority of it. This does include at this point, making adding those extra hours to the digital media specialist as well. So at this point, that is still included there. Those extra 20 hours that Miss Miller will come up and talk to you about a little bit in a few slides from now. So included in here would be the extra 20 hours that would make that a full time position. OK, thanks. As we move into the non-personnel sections, I want to make note of some of the things included here, legal and professional services, a large majority of that, as you might expect, is our legal services with Sands Anderson based on the mid-year estimate and what we're expecting to budget this coming year, I think we actually got it pretty right the first time, even though we weren't really sure how much we would need to increase that budget to add on Sans Anderson. So I think we did pretty well there. You'll see additional funding for them. This but line also does the service to host our town charter and town code. So, code that website that you get on there There's on call translation services for all town department so that we can better interact with our citizens And then Miss Miller will go through a little bit later some of the additional items in there that are part of the community engagement efforts as well As we continue to move down I will make make note just because it's a large number the liability insurance, that is for the entire town. It's just budgeted under my budget as a central location for it. So that is not that my department necessarily needs that much insurance. And then the last thing that is a substantial change, and I'll make note of is at the lot, sorry, bottom there where we do capital outlay, budgeted $24,000 to upgrade all the AEDs throughout the community. Hanover County recently updated theirs in their ambulance and rescue vehicles and there is a goal for us to have interoperability. Unfortunately, the ones they updated to are not interoperable with the items we have and so we're just going to bite the bullet and go ahead and update ours as well. AED is an acronym automatic electronic defibrillator something that can show the defibrillator. It's the second time today you've had that question. I know. That's the same thing earlier. So basically if you go into cardiac arrest shock you and try to bring you back. All right. Keep on rolling here. Again, a summary of what we talked about there. Fully funding these positions. Consideration of the part-time position. Legal services. Continuing to right size that for us. And then that replacement of AEDs. With that, I'm going to transition it to Miss Sugar. Welcome Miss Sugar. Good evening. Good evening. Okay, let's see if I can operate this. Okay, so I realize I don't have any photos of finance staff. So that will be on my looking forward thinking slide. I'll add that to that. Okay, so under finance you'll see this is the personnel section. This includes the wages and benefits that are based off of our current staffing right now, including the increase that Josh had spoken about a couple of of points that I wanted to. I'll go back to the other. Yes, sir. I'm sorry. A number that jumped out to me was 274%. Not a big number, but the VRS. So the previous finance director was under a different arrangement and she didn't have VRS coverage. So as I came on board as a full-time employee, I do have the R.S. coverage. I see. Yes, sir. Good. Okay. So under the next section is beyond the personnel cost, you will see just a couple things I wanted to point out. So in the professional services line, we pay for multiple things in here including our audit, our accounting software, things like that. We will be transitioning away from our legacy system, right, and going to Tyler Munis for all of our modules, including receivables, and the cost for the maintenance fees for that is not included in this budget right now. I'm working with Munis to get a solid number so that we can include that, and that we'll be included in the town manager budget when it comes forward. So if you see an increase in that, that will be the reason. The other thing I wanted to point out is an office supplies, 7,500. 3,500 of that is for cigarette stamps related to cigarette taxes. So I just wanted to point that out so you're aware that is where that falls within our budget. Okay, the next slide is kind of fiscal year 25 going into fiscal year 26. Obviously I've been here since the end of December so I don't have a lot under looking back. I'm sure there's a ton of things that I could have put on here, but this is kind of what I had for what I have Just being here since December so the award for the fiscal year 23-Akifer for for GFOA their certificate of achievements for excellence That's always a proud achievement for finance the the aquifer does take a lot of work of not only finance But all of our staff throughout the town We also completed our first full year of payroll processing in our new system and issued W2s out of that system. So that was a great accomplishment there. So for forward thinking, what I had put on here is what they call government accounting standards boards puts out new accounting standards each year, making sure that we get those implemented into our financial report and also produce another award winning act for. And the act for is the annual comprehensive financial report. Sorry, I'll throw acronyms around and sometimes forget. Thank you for the explanation. Also as I've talked and I've talked every meeting that I've come before you we are implementing Tyler Munis for all of our remaining accounts receivable modules with that comes some expanded and we will be doing communication plans and things like that so all of our businesses and citizens are aware of things that will change related to online payment fees and things like that there'll be new port portals and things like that. So stay tuned for that. We will definitely make sure everyone is fully aware of that before we get to that point. And then the last one is just finding some efficiencies that can strengthen both the department and the town. As I'm here longer and things that I see that we can do, I would want to make make sure we implement those So that's all I have if anyone has any questions questions Thank you It's a good time for me to transition out All right, I do know we have some citizens. I didn't know if anybody wanted to speak while I'm here I didn't know what particular things y'all came to want to speak about. We have after Miss Miller, his next up citizen comment, but since Dr. McGraw's leaving, he has another family engagement, so we'll modify the agenda and ask if anybody would like to have any citizen comments. Yes? Go up here. Up here if you could say your name and where you live. Yeah, my name is Griffin Smith. I just recently moved to town so I mean really just want to say I guess thank you. I guess first you, I feel like I was drawn to Ashland because I think a lot of the good things y'all are doing. And just came here with just some ideas, more on the later half, but since you're about to go, that letter that came, that someone who lives near me. So I would support that as well about the sidewalk that wasn't fully constructed. And I guess just on the capital improvement side, you know, I've noticed just like walking the town at night, like there's some street lights that could be present. Like I've just I guess to be specific in between Wesley Street and Vaughan Street along Chapman. There's a, you know, some lack of street lights or lights that have either faded or maybe need replacement or an additional one could be used put in place. But really most of my things I'm bringing was more when Parks and Rec had some ideasas there, but anyway, I just wanted to put that out there while you're still here So it's easy lights again. Where are those like street lights? Where Chapman Chapman street. I just noticed you know walking at night It's it's a little bit dark in certain spots because I think lights have either faded and certain spots. It's in between Wesley and Vaughan Street I believe. Thank you. I would have to look it up on the map. Wesley and Vaughan, and you'll see it on Chapman. So you have some thoughts about Parks and Rec, but you want to wait till Ethnist or Richard's makes her presentation. Yeah, that was mainly while I was here. Got it. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. That's fun. And not going to watch later. It's fun. I just wanted to be respectful since you were here. And I appreciate it. Well, thank you. Thank you. And y'all are OK. OK. Have some big frosting. I will thank you. We amended the agenda consent to move citizen time up after finance and so we'll pick up tourism and community engagement at this time. Ms. Miller. Yes. Good evening and shameless plug of my tiny children. They look like babies right there. They're a lot bigger now. But it is a reflection of how long I've been here, because they look very different for when I first started. So thank you for listening to me. I'm going to start with community engagement this evening and then transition to detourism. I'm happy to take a gap in between if you want to tackle one versus the other. So just as looking back and kind of we're midway through FY25. I want to touch on some highlights. So the community ambassadors program continues to grow. And as a reminder, that's our quarterly lunch series. It's an informal group of folks that I kind of reached out to and invited to join this group based on their expression of interest in town events in the past and also their location. So the idea is to get equal representation from a variety of neighborhoods. It's turned into a really great and dynamic group. We have some changing membership. I'm hoping to continue to expand that. But currently we have about 45 members in that group. When we meet quarterly for lunch, on average, I would say 20 to 25 are regularly in attendance. Topics we covered so far this year are public works. They took a tour of the new Ashland Helping Ashland trailer. We recently did a sit down with the Patrick Henry YMCA and went over the bevy of community services that they provide, which most of the members of the Ambassadors Group reflected they didn't know about everything the Y does. I felt that was helpful. And then coming soon, Vice Mayor Hodges, I hope you'll appreciate this. In April, our community ambassador's lunch will be visited and hosted by plan RVA here in Chambers. And they'll be working an exercise and stations on the long range transportation planning that Plan RVA is currently doing. So we're happy to host. Yes, them to consider the feature of rails, for the Ashley. Noted. Well noted. Moving on down to the Canadian Leadership Academy, which our next iteration of that is coming up. We have continued to have positive and strong interest in that. We converted to a slightly different schedule last year with six consecutive weeks, rather than six months. The idea behind that is to enable more networking opportunities as well as to build week to week on, and so you don't have that kind of knowledge loss for months to month. That was incredibly well received by that kind of pilot class. So we're planning to replicate that. Applications for this next iteration close on Monday and we're almost full. We only have two spots left at this point in that application. So again, that's a great turnout. So far, council elections. Obviously we have an election coming up this year. We've continued to be pleased with the outreach and kind of, you know, as staff, we don't promote any particular angle of the election. We just promote running and encouraging public service and help people get access to that information and also connect them with current serving members of Council if they have questions. And so we saw a really diverse and large group of candidates in our last election. And I'm really hopeful we'll have the same similar turnout in this upcoming election year. For the Berkeley town Heritage Park, we have collaborated very successfully, I think with the community there, the Hanover County Black Heritage Society, as well as Randolph-Making College on some oral histories. And our ribbon cutting for that park is on April 19th. That's a Saturday. We're sharing that now out publicly because we have confirmation. And I'll be happy to share it. It's going to be from 11 to 1 p.m. And it's going to be a little bit more than a ribbon cutting, but a little bit less than a full-fledged event. So some community performances. So we're excited about that. Obviously you all are well familiar with the recent changes with the Ashland Foundation and kind of bringing that back to life with transforming kind of community giving here. And we really appreciate the opportunity with town council's investment to do that. And then, of course, we saw significant improvements in the results on our national community survey, specifically around community engagement type initiatives around public transparency and the willingness that citizens feel that the town government welcomes their input on that. And one statistic that stood out to me, which I was really happy to see, is that that welcoming community involvement went from 56% to 66%, which tracked higher than the national average. So I think that's a really great nod to the efforts made of late and town council's investment in community engagement. So looking ahead to FY26, this is that conversion to a full-time position. And you'll see a different title here. It's because internally we're still trying to figure out what we might decide to call this person. So nothing is set in stone. But this is that current 20-hour part-time position that would add in 20 hours would convert to a full-time position. What I envision this position to be is an entry-level position that will oversee all day-to-day communications and content creation across eight plus channels that we currently operate. And that would be about 70% of that individual's time. And then in talking with my staff person, Ms. Richards, who runs our parks and rec program, she continues to grow that program, has a growing need for support on a programming side. And so our idea was that there would be a somewhat of a job share since we are within the same department and we work so closely together. And so many of our tasks and projects overlap. We think this would be a really great opportunity to be able to provide some kind of concerted customer service and community engagement support on our events and our programming side as well on a communication side. So the approximate cost here and this is salary plus benefits so this is all in town investment is $82,000 and the bottom line is my appeal to you of why make this full-time. The part time position as it is, Ms. Segalov especially especially in that role, has been completely invaluable and transformative. And it's been, I so appreciate you all approving the addition of that part-time position. But as my portfolio kind of continues to expand in my new role with the town, and I take on much kind of bigger strategic projects, I don't want to see the momentum that I worked so hard a couple of years be lost and really concerted a strategic and deliberate effort around our communications and our community engagement initiatives kind of at the entry level and this would allow a full-time person would allow for ownership of those items as well as kind of dovetail with our new efforts to streamline our special events process and grow the recreation programming in our parks and recreation department. I had a question. The 82,000 is that the net increase to make it full time or is that the full time cost? It's not the net increase to make it full-time. She's about what, like, at probably part-time 40, 35, yeah, if we add up the hours. And so- That position full-time. Yeah, so at full-time, the salary of that position would probably be based on our compensation plan would be somewhere around 60,000. And then in all of our generous benefits would take it up to 82,000 thereabouts. And I noticed that there wasn't a spreadsheet for communications in the VES. That is because I'll come to it in two slides. I have a breakout for you. And it is that peculiarity of the community engagement budget is that it actually lives inside the town manager's budget So I don't have my own little mini mini department budget. I knew there was a good reason sure All right, so in addition to the escalation of this position to full time Another big goal that I have for this and ask I have for this fiscal year is investment in an online community engagement platform What is an online and community engagement platform? There's a lot of companies out there that are providing this service. Hanover County is currently using one. It's their engaged handover site. So if you went to provide feedback or get more information on the Henry Clay School project, you were on their community engagement website. These platforms are kind of standard now for most local governments. There's a variety of reasons for that. It's because it gives you a great opportunity to kind of house projects and be able to provide timely updates to citizens on how things are going. You can solicit constructive feedback, moderate dialogues, so some of the challenges we've been having with social media recently, with bots commenting on things or getting inappropriate comments and our content being beholden to the algorithms of the particular platform, this gives us an online space that we can really craft and customize and make sure that the dialogue is constructive and beneficial for everyone, but most importantly for our community. So they have somewhere to go to have conversations with each other, get informed. There's also some really cool budgeting tools on there where you can do participatory budgeting exercises. So we may not have a lot of people here this evening, but there are ways that we can get more feedback during our budget process in our following years by engaging our community on this online platform. And I can share a price point with you on that next slide. It is coming. I wanna expand our Community Ambassadors program, professional development-wise. I have a goal this year to become IAP to certified and for those that aren't in the community engagement world. That is the International Association for Public Participation. It's kind of the standard bearer in the United States and even abroad for facilitators and they have a certification process. So that's a credential I would love to bring back to use for the town. It is also highly recognized and well respected in the same way that we have a credentialed town manager. I want to continue to support and guide the Ashland Foundation, especially as they look to start fundraising and have the time to do that. Continue to be very involved in partnership with the county around the future of Henry Clay. And also seek out opportunities for meaningful dialogue., what I mean with that is to collaborate and to get out into the community more and again having that increase in hours where someone I know is keeping the trains running on Facebook will enable me to kind of be out in the community a little bit more. So the numbers, this is my little mini budget within the budget. So under professional services, the community engagement platform is $10,000. That includes setup. There is kind of a year over year increase, but it's not substantial. It's kind of in line with a lot of our other products. Under professional services, you'll also find the impact report, which is the town calendar, as well as our regular contributions to the Hanover review. And then the only other kind of new addition is that certification, which I have an asterisk next to. And then community engagement supplies is the line item that the manager was mentioning. And that is just costs that I used to run those community outreach programs that are listed there. Questions? Keep on rolling. Keep it rolling. Alrighty. Let's jump onto my other hat here, which is tourism. I meant pull up my notes. So tourism continues to be a really rewarding thing to work on here for the town of Ashland. We continue to grow our visitor outreach. Thanks in large part to our digital marketing agency, which again, you all approved budget four, two years back now. And we increased our investment this past year to expand our outreach to be on platforms like Spotify, which has been a really cool and successful new platform for us. And I have a couple stats that I'll just throw out really quickly from the agency. So in 2024, we had over 40,000 unique visitors. That's not repeat unique. So individual visitors to our visit ashlandva.com website. 67% of those were directly attributable to the digital marketing firm that we're working with. And this is my favorite stat. We had over 29,000 outbound links, which means individuals came to our website and then clicked on a business listing to go learn more about that business. So that's something we can market to our local businesses to say you may not have an advertising budget, but we're doing that work for you. And then the direct benefit obviously to our local businesses is huge, especially because the bulk of our listings are local businesses. Our website sessions increased by 340%, that sessions are time spent on sites if people are spending more time on the site, which is great. And then all of our paid tactics combined, we had over four million views on town branding and businesses, which is, I mean, for the amount of money we're paying, the digital marketing company, you can't buy that kind of exposure and, you know, at television advertisement. Up next, social media content. So thanks to Ms. Segaloff, we've reimagined a lot of our social media. She's into reels. She's doing all this kind of dynamic video as king on social media. And she does a great job with that. Our visitor center staff was resertified in ADA training, which makes they get a certification for our visitor center and they get listed on a website. So people know that if they come and they have a mobility challenge or anything that our staff is equipped and ready to assist them in and out of the building and around town, which is a great thing to talk about. We continue to collaborate closely with our special event partners. Obviously we worked closely with the Secretary of Virginia folks and getting big red installed there in the picture. And then on the Public Art Commission huge strides with them. We completed the first public art master plan the town has ever had as well as commission the first major artwork which will be installed by the end of this calendar year. So coming up for F-226 we're going to continue to build our digital marketing strategy, although you'll see in the following slides on budget, I'm not asking for an increase in that. We're going to stay status quo, and that's actually the recommendation of the agency. They think it's working, it's doing what it needs to do, and frankly that's why I enjoy working with them, because they're not just trying to get me to buy more and more each year, and so that cost is staying the same. In collaboration with the Ashland Police Department and Ms. Richards, we're going to continue to streamline the special event process by adding a special event guide which will walk our special event partner step by step through getting a permit as well as launching an online permit application. So it's all done digitally, which will save significant staff time. We want to continue to expand the public art collection. We're going to launch an art on loan program. And I'm just going to continue to kind of provide services to support and guide our public art commission as they continue to kind of get their confidence and figure out what their role is here in town. I really want to continue to enable a success at our visitor center, our staff down there is phenomenal. They encounter a wide range of situations day to day, and the ongoing construction with Amtrak and the PIDs and the public information displays, it's been a very eventful year for them. So I want to continue to support them, especially as the public learns how the PIDs work. And then again seek out opportunities for collaboration and I specifically want to mention but I'm not going to steal her thunder. I see a big aspect of this is this new and growing partnership that Miss Richards is establishing with the Hanover County Parks and Rec Department as an opportunity for tourism and parks and recreation. So numbers, under regular wages, this includes our full-time visitor center manager as well as her part-time staff down there. We do still have volunteers that work down there, but the day-to-day it's Miss Novak and her part-time employees and then all of their benefits there. And then under the rest contract services, you'll see largely no major changes there. Slight increases for anticipated printing cost increases for our brochures and things of that nature, but this budget largely is staying status quo from last year. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions. Okay, well, I want to say, I'm sorry. I had notes here. Take a time. Anyway, I'll try to do it on memory. I entered the last part of the community leadership academy before I entered the new schedule and I really like what you've done as far as changing the schedule to make it run consecutively. I think that's very good. Also, someone that I know applied for the the leadership academy and it's anxiously waiting to find out if he got in. The other... very good. Also someone that I know applied for the leadership academy and is anxiously waiting to find out if he got in. The other thing, let's see, I kind of hang around the, you know, I hang around Ashland a lot. And I hang around the train station sometimes. And I saw the ADA equipment aid someone who was getting either, I think, off the train. So that is a really good thing. I witnessed that. Yeah, and I just want to clarify too, that is Amtrak staff that is responsible for that aspect of it. Our staff is just certified to assist people kind of in and around the visitor center specifically. But I'm glad to hear that because there were, I think some initial hiccups with Amtrak staff like knowing that the lift was there and doing that. So that's great to hear. Yeah, I saw that. It was really great to have that. That's it for me. Right. Is that any other? No. Well. Thank you. You're going, I think you're up. Good evening, everybody. Good evening. We're going to start off by talking about what happened in 2024 and 25 years ago. Thank you. Mr. Richardson, thank you. Good evening. Good evening, everybody schedule. It was the first time we've had it in a few years to let you know we did pretty well. We had one medium, no high, and we had the medium remediated within a couple days. It was a civic plus issue. Can you tell them what penetration testing is? Thank you. I was going to ask. Penetration testing is. I'm not sure I wanted to know. Penetration testing is simple. It's right there in the title. They're going to come outside and they're going to try to penetration test. And they're going to ping on every single thing they can do. For those of you from motor technology, they beat on ports to see what ports are open, see what protocols are available from the outside firewalls. They basically tried from the outside firewalls, and they basically tried from the outside to get in. Now, a lot of time we use penetration testing as a general scope, because this year I'll come back next year until you'll be doing it again next year, but we're going to do outside inside out. So it'll be inverted because we're doing on a three step cycle out in and out, and then we're going to do a third year will be social. So we're going to get through all that on a three year cycle for all the locations. We also were able to get that paid for with a Versa grant or a V, yeah, Versa grant. So that was actually came at no cost to the town. So that's the security thing that's usually what people want to know about first. So, I built an employee internet so that there's a single source for everybody to go and get documentation. We have four pages currently and Martha helped me out with two of them. But that's up and running and everybody has access to the new HR manual and all those good things so they can have what they want in a TZ accessible, you know, even outside of the domain if they need it. So, that's just an nice idea for the users. We've also gone through this year. We've implemented some new tools for security. We're doing a new monitoring inside the building. We started some web filtering, which is real popular. And we've also got, we're going to go with a new, a little bit more robust antivirus this year. And we're scaling it all out. And that's been in the cycle of this year. We've also gone through, and we've kind of cleaned up the licensing that we've had going on for years, since it's the first year that we've had a full-time IT staff member. We just cleaned up some things that made it more accessible for the users, and made the licensing more aligned with the talent needs. So, that's why I'm going to jump in here. Yes, Doug would like to have a few words here. In interrupt, because John and I have become the gruesome Tucson around the office night. I won a two-year zone horn a little bit in a way that he felt uncomfortable doing. So I'm going to step in for him and do it for him. This transition from contractor to IT employee, even though John filled both roles, has just been amazing. And it falls under the broad characterization as we didn't know what we were missing. We had no clue what we were missing going from that, one call as needed basis to having someone here in the office. And it's so nice not to have to submit a trouble ticket. You just, hey, John, can you come help me with X, Y, or Z? And I think everybody in this room has experienced, to maybe some of the folks up here, have experienced some of that hopefulness that John offers. So John, you know, he's a constant source of information here and work, but also at APD, at the Visitor Center, takes care of Ms. MoVak and her staff over there. In the shop too, he installed two standalone PCs in the shop break room that they can access anytime, to access their internet, access their human resources manual on the internet, which also has a lot of forms that people would have to go ask Ms. Wanda for. I have to go check Wanda Cornwell and try to get her. So he started a great job at being kind of omnipotent in town at all of our locations not just one hub you know he is available with the staffs just a moment notice he got our note before back and running so for you that love to get that email once a month that here's your your monthly five minute IT quiz he got that up and running and more of a regular basis for us all. And just a little few little things I just want to point out because a lot of what he does is it's tangible but you don't write it down every day. But he enabled a scan to email feature that Bernie loves that where she could just scan something emails right to her computer. A lot of our staff wanted that. And again, that's saving time on the back end. Not have to do it twice. replacedplace all of our old copiers in such a way that he pulled all the staff, say, okay, what do you really want out of your copier service? And it only didn't follow our IT, but he went out and took, what do you need out of this? And we found that there was a big lack of printing envelopes and we were able to get copiers that actually now print envelopes because that was the desire for mass mailings. He helps me chase the gremlins that live in this room still and make sure that they stay in this room until we can catch them. So we work hard at that and I have had few partners in my 30 year career that we communicate as well as John or I and I appreciate that. We installed a granicus encoder which is the little box in that room that takes all of the magic here and puts it all the magic streaming and out to Channel 17 that device was getting a little bit dated. So we updated that he assisted APD with their continuity of operations plan, the COOP plan, which is if APD has a massive emergency of the building, they can't operate any more. How do we operate elsewhere? And John was able to participate in that live and kind of give APD some feedback. And also prepare some things here that we can say what if they have to move down here, how can we set them up in a matter of hours to be fully functional out of this building? And John's been working on that as well. Again, we launched the internet. And one of the things I was most impressed this year, and again, this is more sound than like a John's evaluation than a budget presentation, but he went out and got that grant from Versa the Virginia Risk Sharing Association without asking any of us. He just went out founded and then got it awarded and then moved forward and that was pretty impressive. So I just want to again trying to put a I'm trying to put a tangible feeling on this Intangible of what we we didn't know we're missing so the value that he brings as an employee versus just a 20-hour Week contract and on a personal level I'd like to thank both of you for your help and allow me to participate virtually in Council meetings because I know that's not easy easy. I could just add my summary of a lot of that is we went from a very responsive contractor to an employee who has taken complete ownership of that function and that department and when you're in my role, Doug's role, that is the best thing you can get is an employee that knows what they're doing, taking ownership of it, all they need is high level guidance and they take care of it and it's been absolutely wonderful for the last year. What do you want to say, Mr. Richard? You might want to say that. The small insert to my presentation was longer than my whole presentation. Thank you, Mr. Goodman. Thank you, Josh. Thank you so much. Now moving on with next year's forecast, we're going to try to do some things to reduce some costs in the long term. we're going to be swapping out some devices that have subscription based licensing models to a per- We're going to try to do some things to reduce some costs in the long term. We're going to be swapping out some devices that have subscription-based licensing models to purchase and renewable contracts. It should reduce costs by about 30% on some of the items. For example, we're going to replace the routers this year. What we were paying was about $5,000 a year per device. And we're going to swap them all up for about 11. And that's for one year purchase versus 15 year over the life of the same cycle. It's going to save a considerable amount of money. And then year four and five should be somewhat free other than just maintenance renewals. So we should see some benefits. And some of that will be broken down better in the budget. So I'll show that to you in a couple slides. Speaking of the budget, another big thing we're doing and continuing to this year since this is the first year that we've had the whole year scope of what was entailed in the full-time department is to cleaning up the budget in regards to how it reflects from other departments for things that they've been paying for that should be in an IT budget and vice versa and cleaning up some of those things. So we'll see that in a second. This slide is fairly self-explanatory. I don't really know how to describe it because it was handed to me, just said, put it in your insert. So if any questions on that, we might have to go to Mr. Goodman on that one, but for this slide, this is where you're gonna see some of the discrepancies that I was talking about of splitting up. I've added a couple categories, we're added a hardware license, excuse me, a hardware category and then an individual license because when I took over over I saw that professional services had hardware renewals, it had licenses in there, it had dues and memberships and it was all just kind of a catch-all for everything and then PC maintenance and repair was just another category and then basically it was a two line budget that had no real dissemination between any of the other items and we broke it out and I I tried to clean it up so that it will be more accurately Represent the actual products and services that they that they were using them for so you're gonna see some Descrapaties you're also gonna see there is a little bit of increase in there because of things like copiers came out of Someone else's budget and that's coming in here and correction correction for some of the licensing things I spoke about on the slide, that's going to be represented and some of the tools and et cetera that we're trying to implement to make us a little bit safer around here. So those will be some of the things you'll see in some of those line items. The bubbles help. Yeah. Well Doug, maybe put the bubbles in. You can thank mr. Goodman for that one He's any questions No Thank you, all right. Thank you And I think next up is Broadband mr. Goodman. Hey John. Can you have right? Can you forward the slide if you free slides for me? Can you drive for a minute so I don't have to move? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I gotcha. So Council, the broadband budget is, I'm God bless that the biggest asker of the questions of broadband had to leave. So he may want another bite of the apple the next meeting. But you'll see the broadband budget and this is for the most part a kind of a placeholder budget at this point. The money you see there are, especially for the Telekella Communications line, that's the biggest chunk for 34,000. That's just the service we've had to keep the current infrastructure we have up and running. Then when you look at repairs and maintenance, that's if folks call 811 and they want to do a locator. If our line is near there, then we work with 8-1-1 to pay their fee so that's why residents don't pay any fee when they call the Miss Utility 811 number when they have to either dig a hole for a fence post or a tree or something along those lines. We know that during the 2023 Strategic Plan, Town Council will kind of put a pause button on any new Fiber that was a decision made at this day. And so that's why you're not seeing any big numbers moving forward with This budget as well. So we're looking at level funding in the near future for the broadband budget I'm happy to take any questions and I'm sure mr. Fairwell happy to answer for you Any. Any questions? Thank you Mr. Goodman. I thank our next presenter is Mr. Jennings. Good evening town council. Thank you. Thank you. I'm the opportunity to present the public works budget with me tonight. I have Todd Evans our operations managers in case any questions. Comes up with come up with the operation side of public works The general fund budget for public works is Provides the same level of service and the activities that are currently funded These are kind of the summary slides of all the personnel contract services and commodities But it'd be easier when I break them down per each of the sections, so which I will do. But the overall proposed budget for public works, the general fund is almost $4.9 million. Now we can look at breaking some of that down. So as Mr. Ferrer mentioned earlier, in a revenue side, we do get V. maintenance funds to maintain our roads. That's to do all the work in the right way. The drainage work, paving the roads, putting up the signs, maintain the signal, stuff like that. So the revenue that we get is based on the lane miles that are accepted into our system. So the roads are broken down into either arterial routes, which are the major routes like Route 1 and Route 54, or the locals and collectors, which are our smaller subdivision streets, you know, local roads that people live on and stuff like that. So one of the things if you're a numbers person, you actually realize that the local and collector roads went up 1.96 miles from last year. And that's because, or from this year, because we're in the process of working V.D. to accept the roads in the Amber and Subdivision, the Haley Meadows extension, and also the roads in the Johnson Road Industrial Park. So based on the amount of material miles and local collector miles, we expect to get about $2.4 million from V.D. our roads. Yes, sir. As a trend from previous years, is that number per lane mile going up, staying steady? Or we've had a few years that we didn't have any new roads accepted into the town system, but then every few, every couple of years, we'll, a couple of, you know, a couple of miles will be accepted into the Z-DOT increase or add a percentage. So the percentage that it's average is about 4% per year, but unfortunately there's no guarantee of that. So we kind of kept the revenues kind of fairly flat this year, just in case, just for predicted, and maybe we'll get more. But the average has been 4% per year for the increase from V.DOT. So in the of that V. fund, so a five-year average through FY24, we spent, you can see, like, a little over $1 million for our operations, the stuff that Todd and his crew do, that's 53% of that V. funding, and then on capital projects and paving, it's almost just under a million dollars. So, and this doesn't include any, but well excuse me, I'm never mind. Okay, so first section, sorry about that. First section we'll go into is our administration and engineering side. Mr. Ferrell has already touched on the fact that the wages and personnel sides are a little higher for our engineering section. That is to, as you mentioned, a couple upcoming retirements. Mr. Mjorn is going to retire with the town with a little over 20 years. At the end of the year and our civil engineer, Tom Dickerson is actually going to retire at the end of October. So part of the succession planning is we want some overlap with the town engineer position, which we're going to plan for about three or four months hopefully. We can fill that position. They'll be able to learn Tom's role as a civil engineer and also learn to town engineer role. And the other thing that we're also planning for, there's a few activities that one of the things is we have a bridge that needs certification. It's under the V.D. National Bridge Institute system, we only have one bridge that qualifies it needs to be inspected every two years. And currently, Tom Dickerson, our civil engineers, the only one that's certified to do that. So part of that is we might bring, see if we can bring him back. So we need that, that's due January, February, time frame of next year. So part of this is we like maybe bring him back part time to help with that inspection since he has a certification Which bridges it's actually though. It's under the meat jumps at cottage green right next to junction drive because of the width of that culvert It's classified as a bridge So yes, it's kind of odd But unfortunately in, in the past, before, two years ago, three years ago, if you were a professional engineer, you are allowed to do these bridge inspections. But they changed that, that you have to go through a certification program now. And Tom is only one certainly has that certification with the town. The next sections are contact-troned-track services, that's pretty stable. Most of the expenses that went up in the engineering side were just normal fuel cost and other things that are just going up, you know, motor vehicle insurance stuff like that. One of the things you'll see that did go up is the travel convention and education. That is a couple things is to train the new employee, get the certifications, that person's going to need when they're hired as the new town engineer. And also one of our current project managers, but I'll show you a picture here in a second, Brad Helman. We want to get him certified floodplain manager. So we want to pay for that certification for him. So here is the staff. They do a lot of the background stuff. You know they look at review, they review plans, they do inspections on the fields, they manage our environmental programs, our stormwater management programs that I know you all are familiar with, with our stormwater projects we got going on. They also coordinate with the town contractors and maintenance projects in some of the town, whether it's our pavement contractor or talent Armstrong or on call engineer doing drainage work in the town. They oversee those projects. Of course, they oversee all the manage all the capital projects. So here's our staff and administration engineering is actually seven folks. It's these six and I, or me, I don't know if you remember. So we have the Project Manager, Brad Helman, Ingrid Stimbjorn's, our talent engineer, Kathleen Bison is another project manager, Travis Wilson's a project manager. Tom Dickerson is our civil engineer, he's gonna retire at the end of October and then Jenny Sean tags our admin assistant. Yes ma'am, I thought you were going to say something. I think you're about to ask me a question, I'm sorry. So one of the things I wanted to highlight is some of stuff that they've been doing this year as you'll know the big thing is our projects, our projects, our projects. So the thing is you know the nice part is now that we're seeing some of these under construction. A lot of the real work for our staff was a long time before that. Either doing some in-house design, working with our own call, engineers to design the projects, working with, putting out the project out the bid. Sometimes you have to work with, to mean your energy on these projects, as you all know, Verizon, sometimes getting easements and stuff like that. So there's a lot of behind the work. So ARPA's been the big thing for our engineering, the Indian, these ARPA projects going has been a big part for our admin engineering staff. So of course they've been managing the storm water projects, the upper left you'll see the new town hall. I got this picture before they striped it. And town hall, park, additional parking lot, I'm sorry. Yes, thank you, sir. Yes, the additional parking lot out back. This is before they did the payments driving and marked the spots and the signage for the handicap spaces. On the right is our Maple Street trail. That hopefully within the next few weeks, if the weather stays warm, they'll be able to pave that and complete that project. Another thing they would do is they manage all the single family residential construction projects around town. One thing nice about the picture on the lower left, that's Lourddale, and they're actually the last house is under construction. So that project is about to be complete. So. And then of course they oversee our capital projects. In the middle you'll see our Maple Street project that was finished up early last year, and then our England Street Skate project. You know what all is going into getting that project going and our water line work started last week on that. So that'll be done for the first nice for the first phase of that. Question. Yes, ma'am. The managing single family residential house construction. That's just making sure the builders are doing what they're supposed to do. Is that what it is? So for public work side of it is looking at the land disturbance, make sure they have their like, like their EMS measures, erosion, sediment control measures in place, make sure nothing's done to the dirt draining off site, make sure if there's any work in the right away, if they're putting in a driveway or sidewalk, overseeing that work. Just to make sure it's in time properly. Okay, now we're getting towards our operation side. This is pretty flat for our personnel. It's just the increases that Mr. Farrer talked about and the increases that are proposed. Contract services. Contract, contract, contractual repairs and maintenance, that one actually is going, oh, that one's going up because one of the things we're doing with that, that's our landscaping contract that we have with the town. One of the big initiatives going into FY26, it's not only do more landscaping, but also do more detailed landscaping. Proper cutting back, what is it called? Like trees when you have to trim them back, proper pruning. Pruning, yes. Pruning, certain, like three or four times a year, more detailed landscaping than what we've done before, really keeping track and making our streets and even our town properties look good. So that's why that one's actually increased. The big line item has not gone up, but the contract repairs and maintenance, that's our paving budget, where we pave our streets, where we stripe our roads and then do some minor curve and gutter repair stuff like that. So, and then I think like tree landscape trees replacement, we've increased that because we like to replace some more trees and bushes around town. And then the big item that stands out on our commodities, most of the others just little increases due to just the cost of fuel and vehicle repairs and stuff like that. But really, the dues and memberships went up because you'll remember we upped the amount that people could have for their gym memberships this year. So that's part of that. This is our streets personnel. There's actually 12 and a half folks slated for this section. We have a little bit of everything out there. Rodney does a lot of our, I kind of highlight, they all do a little bit of everything where there's the push snow, leaf and brush collection, but I'll kind of highlight what each one of them does a little bit. Rodney Bakers are mainly our traffic person, installing signs, payment marking, stuff like that that we can actually do as a town. We have like our big streets, when payment markings come like that, we have a contract for that, but Rodney does our traffic engineering. John Loven, you'll see him in the big streets weeper. Going around town. So Moe mainly does the big mowing machines and stuff like that. Harry does a lot of his specializing, shouldn't say specialized, he does what he does is a brush collection, you'll see around neighborhoods. Alan is, you can only see half Alan there, not just kidding. Alan is the one that's halfway in streets and it also helps with our fleet maintenance section. So Andrew Mills does drainage and it feels longer beam. He does a little bit of drainage and bus collection. Kevin Seaton is a drainage and then Robert Stanley's brush collection. Mike Moulter is one of our long time employees that really does a lot of the drainage work. It's really an expert on the equipment and been here quite a while, a matter of, I think next week is 22 years with the town. So and Donnie Weinin is one of our newer folks and he helps with all these mismanment. Okay, one of your employees was working out in front of my house last year and I went to introduce myself and I couldn't get his real name out of him. Mo. All right, so that's a good point. I'm glad you said that. Randy Allen, his real name, Mo. That's his name. He goes by Mo. Randy Allen's his real name. He wouldn't give me his real name. But he goes by Mo. Matter of fact, it's funny you said that for the first few weeks I started here, I started seeing these things for Randy Allen. I was like, I had to ask Todd, who's that? Yeah. He said, oh, that's a guy I recalls Mo. I said, OK. Even my whole name, so I wanted his, but he didn't give me. Has he ever given out his real name? I don't think so. No, I'm glad you asked though, but that is Mo. Our storm drainage is, this is fairly flat, level funding as proposed. This is where we do our, some of our drainage like repairing storm inlets, not curbing gut, storm inlets, pipe flushing, cleaning, if we have to replace pipes and stuff like this. So this is the repairs and maintenance of it and also the next sections of supplies for actually making those repairs. This is flat. Street lights are the streets that I mean the street lights that we that we maintain are in the town right away whether or along 54 whether on railroad Avenue or whatever so these two items are the repair and maintenance of those lights. You took out of Mr. Smith's comments. Yes. You were just talking on the bridge. Yes, so that's so okay. So I was gonna lead to that, but thank you. And then the other item that's in this is the electoral service, the cost of the electric to that. So one of the things we do that first item entails is there are times that we look at street light request. We actually have standards of, you know, have to be on the corners and certain distances and stuff like that. So when a request like that comes in, we do evaluate fratting new street lights in town. Great. Snow removal, I know you all know what this is. This one, it's weird, I don't know if sure what happened to the programming, but the amount requested actually went up this year, but it says zero change, I'm not sure what happened with that. Probably an updated sell that's calculating the wrong sell. Right, get that fixed for town manager. Right. But part of the reason is that we want to up that is the cost per ton of salt went up $20 per ton since the last time we purchased it. This also, you know, not only do we buy salt in it, you know, some minor repairs, the equipment, the buying blades and stuff like that comes out of this, but with the cost of salt increasing, we need to raise that amount. Traffic engineering, that's, we have a contract with venture to do our signal repairs. That's what this cost of $47,200 and that's been sufficient. This is level funding in this. Some of the supplies, obviously, is for the supplies to do that work. So level fundings requested in that. Refuge collection. This, both I- do that work. So level fundings requested in that. Refuge collection. Both items have increased this year, but this is expected with our contract that we have in place. So you'll see both of them, one on increase with 6.7% for the refuge and recycling went up 8%. So give a little facts here just so we know. We are actually part of the Central Virginia Waste Management Association, a regional program that helped negotiate the cost for this and there's 13 localities that are involved. So waste management won that contract to do the residential refuges for the town, or for the whole region, but they do it for the town. And in tidewater, fiber corporation, or TFC, is our contractor for recycling. So, and then just a little tidbit at the bottom, town typically generates approximately 16 tons of municipal waste and 350 tons recycling annually. So, and we actually work in with the, to actually increase, especially the recycling, we're trying to look at different options to increase that in that number because there's some things that we hope they're better recycling more and stuff like that. So we're looking into it. Yes, sir. Does hybrid call Chesterfield County stepped out of the CVWMA or Central? They stepped out a part of it, right? There's a part of them there. They stepped out of just a recife. That's right. That's what I was thinking about. I didn't want to say it wrong. Thank you, Todd. Thank you. Fair fine. Yes. Leaf collection. This is where we the cost to collect all the leasing town for the repair of the equipment and also One of the big expenses you'll see an increase in the repairs and maintenance That's where we do our grinding of all the leaves and brush that we collect around town and that the cost of doing that is increased So that's why that numbers increased so that's under contract your CVWMA but unfortunately there was actually two contractors that had the contract, but one of them just bowed out, so there's only one contractor to choose from currently with that contract. So we're preparing for the cost of that. Next section, buildings and grounds, they of course, I can talk more about that. That's just the typical increases here. Here, yes, okay, I was hesitating because I know there's another succession but that's somewhere else. And then the contract services, those are pretty same. The only increases here, really, there's typical stuff like fuel costs going up little vehicle insurance stuff like that So it's typical yes, sir 25% Yes, I believe you not just this necessarily cost change You also have to remember it looks like we got the budget wrong last year So we're adjusting the budget to reflect two years of accuracy with actual what what the cost were I see right that makes more sense. Yes. Thank you So here's our buildings and grounds crew there's three folks here You see Dustin Wine and Steve Smith and then Dennis Woody is actually the lead of that section is three full-time folks in our buildings and grounds And of of course, they do a lot of special events around town. They help maintain the mediums on Route 1, Cottage Green, England Street, Hill Carter, and other landscape areas around town. And of course, they maintain our parks. So that's a list of all the parks, but I'll highlight it. There's a picture of the railside park, of course, a treline trail. And then part of, I guess you want to call the park out front, I couldn't leave out the Christmas tree. So, of course, they put that up and it'll take it down when we have the opportunity. And of course, they take care of our town owned properties. So we got the Newtown Hall, the Visitor Center, and of course, the National Theater, of course, other buildings, of course, got to Annex building across the street, of course, APD, stuff like that. So plenty to maintain. Yeah. Our last section is our vehicle maintenance shop. That is a little bit of increase here with the personnel above typical, little bit of succession planning here, only because with the transition and as y'all did the proclamation last week for Scott Samuel who retired after 31-half years. We went apart of the succession management, it's kind of a succession management in a reverse way is we want to be able to bring him back at times to help out the new person. So that's why there's a little bit extra funding there for above the normal percentage that we saw in the other places. This is flat projected level spending for vehicle maintenance. And then I did include Scott for one last picture with the town, thought he deserved it after 31 and a half years. And then Alan Wells there is our, you know, the person works half his time in our vehicle maintenance shop. Of course, they do all the preventive and maintenance repairs and all of our equipment, both large and small and all of our vehicles, whether it's admin vehicles, police vehicles, and everything. So. Oh, she's a guy. What? Two guys. Yes. And there were times that some others pitch in if necessary. You know, you have to move a big axle or something like that. But those are the the fault the slated positions are one and a half. But depends on the needs people pitch in. You know, people wear many hats and as you know in this town. Yeah, which is good. Impressive. Yes. So here's some statistics. For vehicles around town, there's nine administration vehicles. There's 34 police vehicles. Public works has 22 vehicles. Some of the larger equipment. Some of the big trucks. There's eight dump trucks or flat beds. Some of the large tractors. There's 15 stuff like that. And there's back hose and other equipment like that. That's the large stuff. Then of course, there's a bunch of small equipment, mowers, weed whackers, tremors, chainsaws, our zero turns, a little bit of everything. Then the bottom is just a snapshot of FY24, the workload that Scott and Allen did for that year, for PM of vehicles, repair vehicles, and PM is preventative maintenance and and preventive maintenance of equipment and repairs. And here's a kind of a snapshot that was taken from a drone of some of the vehicles sitting out there, which looks pretty neat, out at our town shop. There's our street sweeper down the bottom left, and there's a police car, of course, down in the right. So one of the things I wanted to highlight for operations is some of the stuff they've just done so far this year. So we've had what, five snow and ice events, they put in 1,196 hours for those. Street sweeping, they swept 2,098 lane miles, in which it was 656.5 hours of work, and they collected 154 cubic yards of material with that work. So cleaning our streets, leaf collection, 71 loads and that are the loads that are sucked up by our leaf vacuum. So you'll see loads and then there's bags and of course the folks want to bag them, they picked up 631 bags so far, this fiscal year and that's 329 hours of work, brush collection, you can see 836 loads, 1,295 hours of work, maintenance of insulation of street signs, 1,744 and a half hours. So a lot of work, you know, a lot of that's not only fixing signs, but some of our new signs going up. Some of our signs that we did the district A and district B parking and stuff like that for around the college. That includes those hours too. And of course drainage maintenance around town, cleaning our ditches and cleaning our culverts around town, 300 and a half hours. And as you saw in the previous slide, vehicle and equipment repairs was 107. So that's impressive. Yeah, with that, I'll be happy to answer any questions on the questions questions on revenue side or general funds. Yes, keep up to good work. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Next, Ms. Richards. All right. Thank you for having me tonight. Let's talk about Parks and Rec. My favorite subject and TV show. So FY 2025 highlights, we did some big stuff this last year, especially thanks to ARPA funding and town council's generous support of the Parks and Recreation Program. We renovated our skate park. We now have the state of the brand new skate park and I can tell you if you are there any time, any day, other than after dark, it is slammed. I've gotten nothing but positive reports. I hope that we are not promoting true and see because there are a lot of kids there when I'm like you should be in school. But we renovated the skate park. We acquired land at South Taylor Street Park. So adjacent to the existing park, we were able to purchase another parcel and we came up with a site plan for that park and phase one is going into construction in the next couple weeks, which I'll talk about when I get to our capital projects section. We broke ground on the Hanover County and the remaining a little bit of the Ashland part of the Fall Line Trail. The Fall Line Trail is at 43 mile trail that is going to connect Ashland to Petersburg. That is a huge regional spine. Think of the capital trail that goes east to west and we are really excited to be the northern trail head in the center of the universe. And we will have a spur trail actually working on the signage, getting the signage fabricated now that will invite people into downtown from the trail head at Carter Park. Construction continued on the Berkeley Town Heritage Park and we are nearing the finish line as Ms. Miller talked about. We are anticipating and ribbon cutting on April 19th. It is a lovely space and we're really excited to celebrate the legacy of a very strong and vibrant community. We had a record Carter Park pool season. I came I think last week at town council and presented on The pool season, but we saw an average of 90 additional people per day at the pool and I was remiss in leaving out on this highlights list that we passed our bicycle and pedestrian plan So the 2045 bicycle and pedestrian plan, which was a two-year process with our Parks and Recreation Committee. So last year, FY 2025 was a really big year for us on the park side. Programming wise, we can elaborate with a lot of local partners on recreation programming. Recreation programming takes a lot of staff energy and hours because you have to physically plan and implement all of the programs. So being a one-person show, it was really helpful to be able to work with our community partners like the library, the museum, Hanover County, our local scouts, and many other local organizations. We will continue to do that in the following year. We supported regional and statewide efforts with play all day VA that is a Virginia Recreation and Parks Association initiative and it's actually a national award-winning initiative to encourage a full day of play on the longest day of the year so the summer solstice and we will again continue that this year. And we engaged the community through many events including pool parties, many community engagement opportunities through Miss Miller and so we will continue to kind of look at how to build out that recreation side of the house. I think last year when I presented on budget at town council I talked about really wanting to build out that recreation side. If you look at parks and rec, you kind of two buckets. You have your physical tangible parks and passive recreation, and then you have your programming. And so now, you know, with the ARPA funding and the creation of my position three years ago, there was a lot on that parks and infrastructure side that we, you know, kind of the ball was rolling on a lot of projects. And so now that we have those kind of coming to fruition, or we're kind of the ball was rolling on a lot of projects. And so now that we have those kind of coming to fruition or we're, you know, kind of chipping away at those, there's a lot of opportunity to build out that recreation side of the house, which I'm very excited for. So our existing parks, a list here you'll see I include the town hall lawn with the construction of the pavilion and the rentals that come through there. So I won't get too deep into the existing parks and trails but as you see we have a pretty diverse and pretty big parks and trail system for the size of our town. Future parks and trails, Berkeley Town Heritage Park is nearing completion. I went on a run through the park today and it was lovely and so we're very excited for that. A South Taylor Street Park revitalization phase one of that project will start in the next couple weeks. North Ashland Park is an existing six and a half acres that we have in the north side of town. It's adjacent to the trail that is that feeds out of railside park and trail. That park is the Parks and Recreation Committee decided in their work plan this past year that or this past January that they are interested in starting the design community engagement and design phase for that park. So we will look into doing that this year. And then the fall line trail. So the fall line trail construction as said is underway. We anticipate that the fall line trail from Ashland to Woodman Road in Virginia Center Commons will open no later than September 18th, 2025. And so by the end of the year, we will be, I live in Virginia Center Commons. And so I live only a half a mile from the trail. So I could ride my bike to work in a very safe and enjoyable manner in just a matter of months. So that is going to be a huge addition to our park system in network here in town, but also be really beneficial for active transportation in the region as well as draw visitors to our wonderful community in the center of the universe. I have a lot in my brain, so I made sure to write notes so I didn't miss anything. So highlights, yes, as I mentioned, we participated in play all day VA and that we hosted a free afternoon at the pool. We had over 300 people come through between four and seven PM. We had a DJ, we had giveaways, we had games, and that was really successful. We've hosted phishing programs at the Jarnit, pool parties, especially we did a kickoff pool party when the pool opened. Page paths and collaboration with the Pomunkey Library, and that's where we deconstructed a book and you would walk a trail and read a book. We're excited to reimagine that for this year and the page path is going to become create your own story walk. Instead of calling it once upon a trail and so as you walk the trail you'll have prompts. I love a pun. Okay, I can't help it. You'll have prompts to create your own story and kind of an imaginative play. So that's really fun. And then last year this past year, while BCD USA was adopted in 2023, 2024, we saw the blossoming of our BCD beds and we're currently working on signage to talk about the uniqueness in collaboration with Colesville and really celebrate the B-City designation. We will also continue to operate as a tree city USA. I believe it will be 37 years at this next Arbor Day celebration at the end of April. But what I'm really excited about and and not just our accomplishments this past fiscal year, is the future, and it's really, really bright for Parks and Recreation. The biggest thing that has developed over the last few months has been a partnership with the Hanover County Parks and Recreation Department. We will be hosting, well, I've started meeting with them in the later half of last year to talk about doing joint programming because as I said, it takes a lot of energy and effort to run recreational programming and I just don't have the capacity by myself. Nor do I always have the facilities like if you want to run a soccer program, we don't have fields in town. But hand of our parts ination also saw an opportunity to collaborate with the town in our opportunities in town like having the pool, having to charn it park and the pond that's there and really wanting to tap into the Ashland community since Ashland residents are also Hanover County residents. So we've developed a partnership where this summer we are hosting eight different programs in two special events in a collaborative fashion. So everything from paint by the pond at DeGarnet Park where we'll actually be bringing in a contractor and if you think of those paint and sip nights this is the painting without the sipping part and looking in the pond kind of landscape. We're doing a young angler adventure at DeGarnit Park where we're doing a fishing program and the Department of Wildlife Resources is actually bringing staff to come teach young people how to fish. We're working with Hanover County and their therapeutic recreation program to bring adults with special needs into parks and actually run programs with them as well as a big kickoff to summer party at the pool. So they found a lot of benefit in this partnership because you know they wanted to tap in this market and we have things that they don't have and they have resources that I don't necessarily have. And so this really wonderful partnership and collaboration has grown out of it and I'm very excited I actually go on Monday to meet with them to talk about our fall and winter programming and so Working on a memorandum of understanding so we can continue this into the future But it's really a win-win and creating a really healthy working relationship with the county that benefits all Residents in town and it's great because we're all Hanna variants and we face the same taxes. Yes. Having you collaborate with the town, or the town collaborate, but the county is increasing the quality of the recreation programs that we can offer. Yes. Congratulations. Thank you. It's been really been really fun too. I often talk about, you know, kind of being a woman, show I have wonderful collaborators and people here to bounce ideas off of a brainstorm, but there's a certain type of energy when you're in a room with all parts of recreation professionals. And it's really fun to sit there and talk about, you know, what's coming next and how to take something to the next level. So I'm really grateful to also be part of those conversations and my professional development and thank them for that. You have a question. Does the county have a pool? No. Town of Ash, on Dice. Yes, ma'am. Okay. And how are we going to find out about the upcoming programs that you're collaborating about? So the Hanover County guide, they have a print and brochure that goes out. It was just released this past week for all of their summer programming. So I am working with our Assistant Tell Manager for Community or for External Operations on getting that out through our social media channels. And it's also going to go on the website. It'll go in the newsletter. So actually today I was working on a pretty detailed email that we'll be able to. Thank you. Yep. So in tandem with that Parks and Recreation Partnership, my hope is once I kind of get into my general fund budget is I've included some funding for a Parks and Recreation Scholarship Fund that would provide financial assistance for Ashland residents to attend Hanover County Parks and Recreation programs that are not hosted in the town of Ashland. We I have worked with Han Hanover County that all of the parks and recreation programs hosted within town limits are going to be free, but not all of the Hanover County parks and recreation programs think like week-long summer camps are free. And so using a sliding scale for financial need, every Ashland resident has the opportunity to apply for funding and then they would get a percentage of that program funded based on their financial need. So while I may not personally, Ashland Parks and Recreation be able to provide, you know, a week long summer camp for jujitsu, Hanover County Han, and since Ashlanders are also Hanover County residents, I want to assist them in being able to attend those programs. So when I get to that slide, I'll tell you exactly how much I've allocated in that budget and how many, you know, people, how many users I've been covering. But this would be our, we, in the past, have done parks and recreation scholarship fund for, like summer camps, and we only had a few people apply, but it was for the broader summer camp population. So it was any type of private institution and anything within Hanover County. But this is specifically working with Hanover Parks and Recreation on that scholarship fund. And we have a really good internal way to kind of process that funding. So it would go straight to Hanover County through a very specific process that we have. Great idea. Yeah. I'm very excited though. And then we will continue to collaborate with all of our other community partners. Had a really great experience at the museum yesterday with a group that I took over there and will continue to work with. Handover safe space is building two additional plots at the community garden in order to do some planting and prevention activities. So we'll continue to use our parks to engage the broader community and yeah and you know really build on that quality of life rational residents. Did you have anything to do with the alpacas being at the theater Saturday? No, and I didn't know about it, but I'm real sad I missed that. Oh, I was there, and I was right there beside that. Yeah. Where was that, Bobo? I really am very disappointed. That was fun. So our Parks and Recreation budget for our regular wages, for our regular wages, you'll see a pretty decent increase there. All of those regular wages, that is mostly pool staff with an increase in usage at the pool, including having a slide. We now require more staff to work just for safety and risk management purposes, as well as hiring some manager who works basically full time but through the summer at a higher wage because he essentially manages all of the staff in the pool operations during the summer and assistant managers who you know who really help run the facility. So with an increase in minimum wage and and just kind of at, you know, compensating staff and competing with places like King's Dominion and their water park and other parks and recreation, we anticipated pretty decent increase in cost for our wages this year. Are there full-time staff members over there? There's one, so he's not full-time, but because of, works during the summer season, but because of the nature of the pool being open seven days a week, he works a 40-hour plus week during the summer. This book is also where Emmys Salary comes out of, and part of the increase here is making sure that she's fully funded from that 50% amount we were using for our policy. Thank you. So the Parks and Recreation General Budget, a few budget highlights that I want to touch on here. Professional services you'll see increases quite a bit. We as a Parks and Recreation Committee met in January and decided on a work plan for this. It's not the fiscal year. We're kind of doing ours yearly and starting in January. One of the initiatives from the Parks and Recreation Committee is conducting an accessibility assessment in all of our parks. And that means looking at our parks through the lens of those with any type of disabilities or special needs. So this would require, because I am not certified in therapeutic recreation or any type of like ADA programming. I'm aware of ADA and aware of making accommodations, but it's not my specialty would be bringing in a third party to come in and do an assessment of all of our parks. This is to make sure that they are, or to identify ways that we can make them more inclusive to all populations. Yes. Right there. After my tour with you, last week, a Berkeley town, that was on my mind mind and I just didn't even think to bring it up to you. That definitely needs to be worked on there at that part. I'm sure at all of them who definitely at that one. In regards to the parking, or in regards to how would someone who is disabled and in a wheelchair get you know can they easily get in there? So well so the park it was designed with ADA accessibility in mind it's the it's a 10 foot wide asphalt path and we specifically kept in mind ADA law with all of the grades. And so the 10 foot wide would allow like two wheelchairs to love that. Yes. And we specifically kept in mind ADA law with all of the grades. And so the 10 foot wide would allow like two wheelchairs to pass. Yeah, so it's looking at, there's a difference, but you know, we don't want to make all of our trails 10 foot wide asphalt paths if you think of Dejarnet, like it would really change the environment out there. But we want to do what we can to improve accessibility. So Berkeley Town I think is actually relatively accessible compared to some of our others. Now there are always improvements as I said I don't have that you know the 100% the therapeutic recreation because that's an entire degree field but you know looking at like where can we make improvements and puffer belly Park so that a user in a wheelchair could easily get into the playground and use those features. Thank you. Yeah. You were mentioning professional services. What would that include? So the professional services would include contracting somebody who is a certified therapeutic recreation specialist to come in and actually walk through all of the parks and I'm connected with a few people in our Virginia Parks and Recreation Society who actually have the certification. But that's not the only reason for the increase there. We also now are hiring a cleaning service to annually do a deep clean of the Carter Park Pool locker rooms and a weekly cleaning of the park facing public restrooms. And then we also anticipate increases in our software that we use for Carter Park pool, our membership management software. We kind of see a little bit of an annual fee increase with them, as well as we, through a Versa, our insurance grant last year, were able to install security cameras at the pool. a trust passing incident where somebody came to the pool and actually pushed in, pushed those big picnic tables and some other pool furniture into the pool after hours. And so we were able to install security cameras using this grant, but there's going to be ongoing costs for that every year. And so that kind of adds to that change in the balance as well for professional services. Thank you. Yep. You'll also see an increase in our repairs and maintenance line. That is for the pool. That our pool is while pretty new ages every year. And every year we have preventative maintenance that we need to do with the pool. So we do have a contracted third party pool crafters that comes in and manages all of our pool maintenance and our chemicals but we are working with them on a I decreed a preventative maintenance plan with them last year and we will have to you know every year like you know we had to change the lights out last year it's not you know and that's not included in the general contract. So we do have some items this year coming up that need to be done to the pool that are included in that pool maintenance line. Next you'll see travel convention and education is one that went up substantially last year when I brought, came to the budget meeting. we talked about and are continuing to pay for lifeguard certifications and reservications as a recruitment technique in order to compete with other jobs, especially like I think about Kingston Union just up the road. They pay quite a substantial amount more, but they don't cover initial certification costs, which can be a barrier to high school students who are looking to get their first job and they don't maybe have $300 in their pocket to pay for the certification. So we will continue to cover that. It also will include my travel and education. I'm very involved in our state and national organizations and then also included in that is funding for the lead conference which is the Virginia Institute of Governments residential leadership development program for government employees. And so I'm interested in doing that this year as well. And last but not least, the miscellaneous line is where you are going to see the increase for the Hanover County Parks and Recreation Scholarship Fund. So I'm initially looking at putting I think it was five yeah five thousand dollars in there for that fund that would allow for us to cover 16 people going to one week of summer camp. Because their summer camps run about to their week long summer camps run around $250 to $300. Thought this was a really good initial starting point. It would be a pilot year for this program. So we would kind of, once the money is gone, it's gone. But we could reevaluate for next year. But I thought it was a good starting point to kind of launch the program and see how it works this year. That was good. That's great. Cool. And that's it for me. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much. Thank you. I was just going to say Mr. Smith earlier said he had questions. I didn't know or comments and I didn't know whether council would entertain allowing those comments. Please. Well, Miss Richardson's here. Very patient. There's Richard, excuse me. Well, first of all, thank you so much, Miss Richards. Actually, big part of the reason I moved here is because of all the things you're doing. So just, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. My wife and I moved here, large part to the Fall Line Trail coming in addition to other things that you've been doing. So thank you. I guess, I just, a question I had, I didn't, didn't cover it. Does the town yet have a strategy on like the Henry Clay or that's just elementary school or is that I know it's still an open debate yeah it's owned by Hanover County and so they had their public input meetings I think it was in February there were two of those and their plan and their meeting on it now is to develop a request for proposals take the community input build that into the proposal of what were the uses that the community said they were open to, what is handover, and they're going to include the town of action in that discussion of what may be a good option. You put out the request for proposal to basically nonprofits, developers that would be able to come in and say, here's my proposal on how I would accomplish your goals in that. That's the understanding right now in the process. Handover County is at the moment summarizing all those community input meetings so that they can get that better understanding. But what I do know is that the two baseball fields on the other side of handover revenue are going to stay baseball fields. On the side of the school, what they call, I think, in town of Ashland, Parallel and St. Gumball field, is that one is open to potential change. And so that's kind of what's happening right now, there's no intended uses at the moment. No, that makes sense. And it does appear, correct me if I'm wrong, that county would keep the two ball fields, there's three, but two are owned by the county on the north side of Hannah Revenue as county part. Yep. Yeah, today I actually submitted to their website, the Hannah Reckani website. The initial thing that came to mind from my perspective was the potential for pickleball courts. I think what's cool about that is it's good for all ages. I don't know if that's what they're going to go or not. But if the town, if you all find that interesting, it could be something. Whether they're somewhere else. I don't know if that's. I've got a lot of work to do. I figured that it's already come up. The only other thing I guess parks and recwise that I had, that I've just been thinking about is from the Hanover County Partnership perspective. I just thought it'd be cool. What I guess parks and recwise that I had, that I've just been thinking about is from the Hanover County Partnership perspective. I just thought it'd be cool whether it'd be in the short term or long term in a decade or so, but would be some sort of trail that could connect, you know, students from the town to Liberty Middle School and Patrick Henry High School, like a way to walk to school or a way to take their bike to school. I don't know if that would be possible, but it's just something that caught my mind is my wife and I are thinking about having kids. We don't have kids yet, but just something that I thought could be a benefit to all, a different way to get to school. So, those are my only two comments on parks and racks. I think you're right. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Next I have Mr. Ferrer and Mr. Jennings on Capitol Projects. It is a tag team. I'm going to let Mr. Jennings start because most of the front loaded ones are in one way or another street road streets or community facilities So go ahead and start Mr. Jennings. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Farrah One of the things that before I forget it like I did last year the items in blue Our V dot eligible funding so from our V dot maintenance payments. That's still true. Okay. Don't make sure Okay, I don't make sure so glass you have forgot to mention that so So, um, V.Mainnance Bainman, is that still true? Okay, don't make sure. Okay, so, last year I forgot to mention that. So, basically, I apologize for the red. CBTA, is there any significance there? Red is the town council's top 10 projects from the capital improvement program. I think I'm talking about the CIPID category that says CB. We used to label our CIP projects with a short code, so we could tie it to that project within the CIP. That is a column that will probably remove next time. CVTA if it's in there, also could denote that we're going instead if you see zero funding, we're actually funding that so CVTA, not the capital project fund. Right. And I apologize. These are projects that are funded with local funds, not other resources. There are great funds in there. There are great funds in there. Sorry. Or it's all funds. Yeah. These are what we're putting in for capital project fund. Some of them are going to be a V.L. eligible. Some of them will go for some grants to help fund some of these projects. But this does not include CBTA. That no-die said is just a reference to the other spreadsheet. I see. Thank you. I was a little confused. All right. I'd like to highlight a few of them as we go down. The residential improvement program we're posing to put $100,000 into that. looking at possible projects in the John Street area and the Park Street area in the future but definitely at to build up funds to do those projects for some drainage and some pedestrian, you know, the sidewalk, curb and gutter and some drainage improvements in those areas. The next big one is the sidewalk, curb and gutter, requesting 300,000. That's one, as you all know, we still have, I think, seven streets left on the priorities list to do. Unfortunately, with spending all these ARPA funds, we had a little bit of delay between completing our Maple Street project and our next project. But beginning of FY 26, we're going to get back onto the next one on that list, which is the Duncan Early Street, the Sidewalk Project. So we're gonna get back on that, but these are built up funds so we can continue doing more of those, especially once all these ARPA funds go away, so which would be nice. So, traffic signal improvements, actually increasing that cost, that pays for all the big traffic signal improvements around town, whether it's upgrading a a signal like one of the things we're trying to budget funds for is upgrading the signal at cottage green and route 54 because as y'all know it's an older signal we get this signal heads in the median and every couple of years those signals get not this polls get knocked down in the median because a large truck movements or accidents or something like that. So we'd like to upgrade that whole intersection. We put massed arms and all that across the entire intersection. So that's one of the things we're saving up money for that. So, thinking at the bottom, we threw out a $200,000 towards the signal, around one in Archie Cannon. That's one that we're not sure yet where the town's gonna have to build up funds to install or hopefully maybe the developer will come in here and help pay for that signal also. But we wanna start budgeting more forward. I know we've got some CVTA funds towards that project, but this is the only capital project funds that we put towards the request and towards it. Excuse me, where's the one about the traffic light? Oh, the very last one. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. big drainage projects around town requesting $100,000, which is level funding from that. $200,000 towards our stormwater management program. Fortunately, fortunately for the last couple of years, a few years that we've been able to use ARPA funds towards those projects, but that money is drying up. So which is good for Mr. Goodman over there. Had that stressed level any anymore, but we expect to only have about one project going to FY 26 that's ARPA funded, which will be good. So, with that, so we want to start building up those projects because we still need a lot of small more projects we need to do around town to meet our TMDL or Total Maxxelund daily load requirements to clean up the Chesapeake Bay. Those are the are just some of those slap grant grants and mr. Farrah mentioned earlier that we're gonna wrap up the maple street trail FY25 but FY26 the stony run stream restoration project will go into that so And then the next are facilities money towards make a comment. Yes, sir. I think Stoneys spelled without an e. You are correct. I did not realize that it was a wrong on that list. Thank you. Your work. Building up funds for our downtown campus maintenance fund. Definitely one of our building days up, especially with the new town hall, if anything, ever goes wrong wrong with this building plus It takes care of some other buildings around town Facilities put in $10,000 in that towards some facilities out there The yes, ma'am. Where are you? Oh, I'm sorry. I guess public All right down in public facilities where it's gray Starting with the downtown campus maintenance fund with $50,000 at the... Okay. I'm sorry. Thank you. And the next is our public works facilities items where we build some big, any big buildings or anything needed at the shop. One of the things we wanted to focus on there is one of the things I've realized over the last year or so is the buildings that we have are very old and very thin. If we ever had a big storm event and the test that was, today was a test, right? The storm test that you know, you go find a middle thing that's secured. There's no place out the shop that's secured during a hurricane. So we want to build some storm shelter or some part of a building that's safe enough for them to go to if they need to. Public Works and maintenance facilities. One of the things we want to use those funds for next year is to replace some siding on one of our salt sheds. And then I think the big item maybe, Mr. Ferry, would like my touch on the strategic property acquisition. And if you do have questions about the police section, Chief Aaron Holt will be here at the next meeting as well. But for strategic property acquisition, we've done a good job and we're fortunate to be able to get that $650,000. That's a portion of the sale of Apple Garden Inn when we did that project. We appreciate it, Council be in force having for site to let's say reinvest that money into the capital projects to allow us to do another deal. But with that one time surplus in FY24 that I was talking about, I think we have an opportunity to build this fund and potentially go after another project. I'm not necessarily going to use this meeting to divulge which particular property that would be to not hurt our negotiating position. Let's put it that way. But there are some dilapidated buildings around Route 54 that are an obvious need of some level of intervention. And that is the goal is that the town would get involved in one way or another, whether it be purchase and remediate the site and make ready for development or working with another potential developer. If we can find one to make sure that the purchase goes to someone who will transition those particular properties into good tax paying businesses that are serving the community. So yes, it's a very large number, but the costs we're seeing to get involved in some of those types of projects is at or above even the level I have after adding the $500,000. Some people might call it a war chest. It could be considered that one. Okay, I'm looking at a very small number. I don't know about what things cost, but that neighborhood residential improvement program, $150,000, is that gonna be enough to cover that drainage problem? No, and that's what Mr. Jenning said. Those are the types of things that we save up for over multiple years. Okay. That is the type of money that might allow us to do some of the initial kind of site inspection ideas of engineering, but it's not going to get the project done in any way whatsoever. I was wondering. What I saw was that the proposal is to make it 100,000 as opposed to 50,000 in previous years. So now there's already 50,000 in there. We're requesting another 100. So we'll have a total of 150. 50. This is approved. And in the one year, in any case, 150 is a beginning to be a significant. Yes. And like Mr. Ferris, we conduct doing some of the preliminary work, maybe doing paying for some of the engineering work and stuff like that to get to pro, as they're doing the engineering, maybe next FY27, we'll, you know, can get some more funds actually, you know, build a project with it. Typically takes anywhere from two to four years to save up enough to do one of those types of projects. When you, once you start with underground infrastructure, things get really expensive really quickly. Okay. And the last item on that second page was just the Ashland Theater. That's the build up funds for any major repairs at the theater for $50,000 for requesting. And then the top one here is the public works placement vehicles. What we do in public works is Scott Sam, who was big into this. It's kind of planning for the next eight years all of our vehicles, which ones need to be replaced, which new vehicles we need, stuff like that. So we've got a plan out eight years, but this is a level request from last year of 190,000. I was actually showing you a picture here in a second of some of what we're looking at for this year. So, and then I guess on that one. So I don't know if you want to touch on other parts and wrecks or if Amy's going to do it. Obviously, I mean, we definitely want you to help me out on this, but maybe we could go through the park section together. Just so make sure I say what we're doing correctly and don't miss it. Yeah, I'm happy to talk to it and go for it. Okay,. Parks and Recreation, Capital Projects Fund, the first big ask is going to be North Ashland Park. So that's at 6.5 acres on the north side of town that I talked about earlier that's adjacent to a railside trail. The initial park, so that park is 6.5 acres and it's going to be quite a lot to develop, quite a lot in funding to develop that. But before we actually, you know, know what that dollar figure is, we need to come up with a design for the park and we need to go through a community engagement process. So asking for $100,000 here to add to the pot of money that we can contract with a third party, we can run a lot of the community engagement in-house because we have a lot of great tools to do that. But when it comes to physical, you know, park design and putting it on paper, we've worked really, third party, we can run a lot of the community engagement in-house because we have a lot of great tools to do that. But when it comes to physical, you know, park design and putting it on paper, we've worked really successfully, especially for South Taylor Street Park, with a contractor to do that. So that's building up the funds in order to do all of the initial studies for the land that we would need to do and then work with that contractor to come up with a design and then once we have a design we can move forward from there and kind of figuring out how do we actually build the park. For property acquisition the $50,000 request there is just so we continue to build that fund in case other potential parklands come online. Part of the Parks and Recreation Master Plan is that every resident is within a 10-minute walk of a park and we do have some quadrants of town that don't fit that objective yet. So just continuing to look for areas that we could potentially develop for future parklands and protecting and preserving green space in town. That one could also potentially be used to gain access via an easement or even a property purchase for like a trail potentially. If we're kind of at a section that we just don't have right away for, it would allow us then to go and make sure we can build complete trails. The maintenance lines last year we were able to put in some funding to keep those maintenance lines around $20,000, which is a level I feel pretty comfortable with for parks like Puffer Belly Park and a Jarnit Park. Carter or $10,000, which is a level I feel pretty comfortable with for parks like Puffer Belly Park and a Jarnet Park. Carter Park pool maintenance. As I said, I'm continuing to build up that Carter Park pool maintenance. Eventually the pumps will need to be replaced. Last year we had a pretty, we had to replace the filtering system. And so just making sure we have enough funding in there to, you know, handle any type of big replacements that may arise. And then the biggest and new line item that you'll see is a South Taylor Street Park revitalization. So earlier I talked about how we are able to do phase one using ARPA funding and current funding in the South Taylor Street Park maintenance line. That, so the entire scope of the project for South Taylor Street Park was split into two phases in order to fund it using ARPA funds and then look for future funds to do the second phase. So, the first phase is a basketball court, the slash foot saw court parking. We are going to relocate the swing set from its kind of recessed place and bring it closer to the existing playground, which has been requested a lot by families if they have multiple children playing. It's nicer to keep them closer together as well as demolish the current asphalt that's there. The second phase is to include a walking loop and then some additional play areas including some ADA accessible spaces and equipment. And that total cost for the phase two is $300,000 for that park, in order to completely finish that park project. And so that's that $300,000 ask in that section. So that would basically close out that project or at least allow us the funding to build it and close it out. And then otherwise the eight-year park equipment replacement fund we like to build up funding in that pod and every eight years we look to replace our playground equipment. We did that with South Taylor Street Park about two years ago. The next park that will need to be replaced is Puffer Belly Park. And kind of that not the section done by the koanas, but the older less climbers, the more traditional section. And we will need to do that in the next few years playground equipment, especially if we really want to be up and coming and kind of the top of our game, continues to get more and more expensive, just like everything else in the world. So making sure we have enough to cover that. And then the traille line trail, fall line trail, the ask there is for infrastructure that will need to go and place both known and unknown based on the fall line trail and being the northern trailhead. So part of that is the signage and that connector spur trail to get people into town as well as a functional trailhead, functional trailhead art piece that we're looking at. And then other amenities that may arise that maybe we don't know about until people start using the trail and we think, oh goodness, we need more bike repair stations or we need more bike racks or that type of thing. Thank you, Emily. I think that's it. Thank you. Thank you. All right. All right. So this is I mentioned earlier just to kind of show you just what we put money towards. So FY25 we bought the flat bed dump truck here on the left. So which is putting that to good use. And then the FY26 we're planning to get another leaf vacuum truck. So which is very successful. These getting rid of the we get used to pull behind leaf boxes and all that and it took three or four folks to do those and a lot more hand raking. So these trucks are nice. We want to get another the vacuum truck so that's why I want to show you all that and it took three or four folks to do those and a lot more hand-wracking so these trucks are nice we want to get an early vacuum truck so that's why I want to show you all that so and then it's kind of our economic development portion here the big thing is up top the second-line item the downtown street scape we're asking for $500,000 towards the next phase of that project so that's gonna going to be a big ask to build up funds to be able to do that next phase. And then we just have to run through the rest of the short. Okay, sure. A little more familiar with them. Gateway and Wayfinding Signage. You've seen Miss Miller do a really good job of replacing our Wayfinding signage to our new branding and our new theme. We still have a few left that we need to get to and we really want to get this done. We've been probably replacing them for a few too many years. We're hoping that this would be the amount we would. Everything newly branded, ready to go, might also include some of the wrong word for them, I think. But entrant signs for our parks, just to make sure that our signage is thematic throughout. So that should wrap up that project and get us done there. Commercial quarter, beautification, improvements We did to read the root 54 medians in the center We'd like to continue that and match it on Hill Carter Parkway going north and south That's a really important intersection from a traveling public perspective and how you know what our bread and butter is the meal Stacks and so we want to make sure that that is a very attractive place that people feel great getting off and feel like it's a very welcoming area So we're gonna do the improvements to the north south section of Hill Carter Parkway there as well Economic Development Fund. This is the one vice-marriage is that I call based our war chest Sometimes you need to have funding available to provide incentives or by property Potentially work on right away with big economic development prospects that come into town. And so this largely is just a holding line. We have money in there. Every year we try to put a little bit more in just to make sure we have sufficient funding, but in all my years here we have not had to use this yet, but with some of the projects that we've seen come across our desk in the past year or so, I think the likelihood of that use is becoming more and more likely going forward. So that's one's there. Public art. Ms. Miller mentioned this in her presentation, but we are adding a line item for maintenance. We have some pretty good records from the artists on how to maintain the new art that we're on, now an ownership of. And so that will be an cost. We're going to build that fund so that we have the ability to do the various cycles of maintenance we need to do on secretariat, on our new gateway arch, all those good things that we're going to be building. And then there's the second line item there for public art, and that's the new construction. So we do typically try to separate out maintenance and new construction. And so that is again building a fund so that we can work on the next projects from the Public Art Commission. I believe art on loan is going to be the next major undertaking for us on that one. And so again just building funds so that we can successfully implement that program. And with that you can see the totals at the bottom there. We do a little bit of math in the second to last column there, where total new appropriations, then we reduce the amount that is direct revenue into the Capital Project Fund in that 2,983 number should be familiar from when we were on the transfer to the Capital Project Fund question. On the revenue slides, those should match up just about perfectly, hopefully. And with that, I'll take any questions questions on the capital project. Any questions? I think we're ready to move on. All right. The CVTA, Mr. Ferrer, Mr. Jennings. Central Virginia Transportation, sorry, excuse me. So this one, again, actually acts a little bit differently just from a budget perspective. We have our general fund, we have our capital project fund. The Center for Virginia Transportation fund is what we call a special revenue fund. And it's basically direct revenues from a certain source, in this case a regional gas tax that has to go towards transportation projects. And so we've got two slides for you. One, we do, it's a very light touch, 10 year estimate, but we try to project out things that we know will go coming forward. And then on the next slide, I'll show you the more condensed FY25, 26 actual budget recommendation. But what you can see here at the top is on the revenue side, CVTA, local distributions. and that's just that monthly money that we get from that gas tax. And that comes directly to us from the Central Virginia Transportation Authority. You can see the good news is that that revenue is going up again because it's largely calculated in the same way our sales tax is. We grow as the Hanover County POT grows as well. And so we're going to be looking at receiving 400,000 in new revenue coming forward. The FB, in our terms, that's fun balance from prior year, is that kind of a cumulative total that we carry over. In Ashland's instance, in the Central Virginia Transportation Authority, because we're so small, the amount we get on an annual basis of 360 to 400,000 isn't really enough to do a road project. And so we've had to accumulate over years. And so that's what that is representing the new revenue coming in when you add to the basis of 360 to 400,000 isn't really enough to do a road project. And so we've had to accumulate over years. And so that's what that is representing the new revenue coming in when you add to the total that you've carried over from prior years. As we move down into the expenditure side, you can see there's an estimated expenditure FY25. We've got three projects or things that we were in the FY25 budget that we're expecting to close out. 300,000 in paving. We have 75,000 reserved for the England Street, StreetScape. That is something I'm not 100% sure we will need by the end of it. Construction's interesting business. We'll see what the end comes, but we did reserve a little bit here. I would imagine at least a portion of that could go back into the CVTA fund at the end when we're done with that project. And then we have 100,000, and I'm sorry, I'm even for Vaughan Road extended. I believe the idea behind that is to do some, again, engineering and design for that road so that we understand what the actual more detailed plans look like. I think we got like 10% or 30% something like that plans and it's to try to get us to next level so we can get good cost estimates and figure out how that project could come to fruition. So that's the current year that we're in. As we move to next year, we don't have any big projects that we're planning to implement locally or any state funded projects that we need to give our local match for. And so what I've committed to you all last year is that starting in FY26, we would use a portion of CVTA for sidewalk construction. Understanding that the biggest request I think we've gotten and the very direct input we've received from the community is that connectivity is the thing that they want most. We thought we could dedicate about 150,000 a year that would be in addition to that capital project fund total that you saw on the capital project fund to continue our sidewalk construction progress. And so just looking out in some of the out years you can see things in FY27, economic development, road construction, that is a little bit of a remnant but not knowing the future We're gonna hold on to it in that placeholder mode of when we thought that the Holland track would actually develop as an economic development Manufacturing facility there was an option that the town might need to come in and kind of incentivize through the construction of roads I don't know that that wouldn't necessary but okay to keep as a placeholder for now since it doesn't commit money at the moment. And then, again, Route 1 and Archie Cannon signal design. As we were doing that, looking at that through the capital projects in CBTA, it's certainly a CBTA eligible expenditure. I would dare say I might be likely to cut the funding out of the capital project fund and keep the funding in the CVTA so that we could save local dollars and use CVTA towards that project in the long term. Some of the Capital Project Fund and keep the funding in the CVTA so that we could save local dollars and use CVTA towards that project in the long term. Some of the other ones you'll see here, the next few are matches for state funding. Sorry, I'm going to try to get the Ashcake Road sidewalk project. Mr. Jennings can tell you about the details of that, but that is that extension of a sidewalk essentially from the intersection of Maple Street down to Sheets, Morellas, along Ashcake Road, and so that's our match for that. In FY29, we have 50,000 each for Hillcarter Parkway North and Green Chimney Extension. Those are two projects that have been approved in the six-year smart scale program at the state, and so we do have a local match that we have to have. are the years We expect a construction to happen so we budgeted our match in that year and then in the far out years FY32 Since we had accumulated money it looked as though it might be a good time I'm hoping we can get it for done far earlier that we would have money to invest in a large English street skate project whether that's the next phase or even phase 3 when we get to FY32. In addition to that, we've got 300,000 for Von Road Ashcake Overpass, the idea there being some form of a match that the state would require of us if we do get Ashcake Road Overpass approved eventually. And then again, trying to make sure we're planning out 200,000 to study, sorry, not even to study, for the match towards the I-95 intersection interchange improvements that we have there. So that one eventually may need to be moved up but is in placeholder mode at the moment. And so you'll see at the bottom what this does leave us and you can kind of follow it in the second to last column savings for future years Is even in 2032 and 2033 we have 270 to 500,000 that dollars of Money that we haven't allocated yet, but I think that's largely because it's so far out It's good to just keep some that we don't know what the future is going to hold and I'm sure projects will arise that we need to allocate those for. And so a big part of CVTA budgeting is not getting too itchy to spend all your money right now. Because we have to save up for these big projects and a lot of them are tied to state funding cycles. It's important for us to keep savings and be a little bit conservative in where we put our dollars here. Go for it. My comment would be that the CVTA in the region has been most successful in when localities have used that money to leverage and our most recent experience Hill Carter Parkway North when we matched it looks like $300,000 and then green chimneys, $50,000. Both of those were approved through the SmartScale program and will leave milk in the next three years. That's significant. It's important to fund sidewalks. It's important to fund England Street. Phase one, but I think a significant use of the Central Virginia Transportation Authority money is match for bigger projects. I think the two examples you just gave of whether it was a hundred thousand or a couple hundred thousand we got tens of millions of dollars in return. Exactly. Yes. The return on investment. Exactly. Yes. And so last slide in the presentation here is just that condensed into what you would see as the FY26 allocation for it. Nothing's really changed here. It's just again a condensed version so you can see the audit at FY24 where we think we are in FY25. And again, that department's a middle for FY26. Any questions? We'll take any questions you may have. I'm not hearing any. The last bit is again your last opportunity for citizen input. Anything that's occurred to you or not seeing any interest. Is there any other matters to come before council? Great. This meeting's adjourned.