was created. This was a more of a manual model. >> Yeah, we um a lot of people will use tailored tests. So, it involves like a little different chemicals. You would fill up a container and drop them in like a certain amount and basically it'll calculate from there um what your
pH and chlorine is. >> And this is the daily task. >> Yeah. This is what we do at the start of every day. >> Inside the control room, he fired up the valves that get the entire water park up and running. When we have everything going, the water level will be back up, but since we're not running everything
in the moment, it'll drop it down a couple inches. >> Next, he showed me the daily checklist for the part. >> Then we have our chemical data sheets. So, basically just making sure like that our comp pool, lazy river, kids pool are all where they need to be, anywhere
between two parts per million or 10 parts. And then pH is somewhere between 7.2 and 7.8 for a healthy pool. >> There you go. Then came the back washing and wasting process. Flushing the filters to keep the water flowing freely or removing excess water from the system
to keep the water levels balanced. >> And then it'll start coming out in this pit. >> So this this whole pit will fill in about 3 minutes. >> Really? Over there? >> Yep. >> Next, we changed out one of the strainer baskets which help catch large debris before it can reach the pumps.
>> I'll tra that one. Thank you. Then new one goes in just like that. And we usually let those dry out. I'll clean them later this week. >> Before joining the team in Northport, Matt worked as a lifeguard in Charlotte County under Trish Sturgis, our assistant director of parks and recreation.
>> So I've known Trish a very long time. So that definitely was one of the influences of wanting to come work at the aquatic center. Had me go out for an AFO course recently, which is aquatic facility operator course. basically anything and everything relating to a
facility like water chemistry, safety rules, that this and that. So, I went there. >> Good morning. Today's Friday, March 13, 2026. It's 10:00 a.m. We're in the city chambers and I call the city commission
budget workshop meeting to order. Commissioners present are Commissioner Dval, Commissioner Stokes, Mayor Emery, Vice Mayor Langden, and Commissioner Pro. There is a quorum present for this meeting. Also present are city manager Fletcher, city attorney Fino, Deputy
Clerk Powell, and board specialist Lane. Is that your title or what is your title? >> Service specialist. >> Okay. What she said? and police chief Garrison and Fire Chief Tardis Titus. I am going to call on Mr. Fletcher to lead
us in the pledge since he is the man of the day in a row. >> Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I pledge al to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with
liberty and justice for all. >> Thank you, sir. Thank you. >> City clerk public comment. >> Yes, we do. Uh first is e comment from Robin Sanente. Good morning. I appreciate the amount of work that went into the attachment. I just have a
couple comments. It would provide greater understanding for the citizenry if there could be a web link the actual projects listed so the citizenry can clearly understand the project. Looking at the tree fund for the environmentally sensitive land acquisition, the total CIP funding throughout fiscal year 2036
is only $2.5 million. How do you expect the to properly acquire sensitive lands with that amount? A clear explanation needs to be given, please. And as for in-person comments, we have Tim Doyle. >> Good morning.
I guess um I'll start out by making some comments about the last meeting because a couple things that were said really annoyed me and u it's been said in this room before by others not only by you guys. I will say
this but again I'm going to point at that sign behind you. It says 1959. Four of my siblings were born before 1959. My parents were born in the 1920s.
Some of my thinkings don't come from 1959. The constitution was made before then and a whole bunch of other things. I think sometimes in this city we don't take that into account.
So I like definitions of words. So on that sign up there's a word called north. What's the definition of north? Is north a direction, a coordinate?
Would that be a fair definition? I don't know. I'll let you be the judge. Port. What's the definition of port? Let me think. I think a couple of of you out there drink beer because I've heard
that before. Port could be a wine. I don't think I'm in France and I don't think I'm having dessert. I don't think there's any orchards in this city of wineries. Port. What's the definition of port in
this instinct? A refuge for boats. Is that a fair definition of a port? A refuge for boats. A place to keep a boat.
Is that what a port is for? This city was founded because of the water. The oldest neighborhoods in this city are on the water. The oldest neighborhoods in this town have boats. That's why people bought the property here. Some people came here
because of the water. Look on your seal. You have a fish up there. How do you get to the fish when you're on dry land? You can't. You people got to get off this kick of going after people who own boats. It
drives the economy down here. It feeds people and it gives people clean entertainment. And kids love to go fishing. Stop picking on the voters. I'm sick of it. Is there another one?
>> That is all, Mr. Mayor. >> That's it for now. Okay, moving on to general business. Um item 26-0376 discussion and possible direction regarding fiscal year 2026 2027 budget
assumptions, financial projections and strategic priorities. Mr. Fletcher, this is your item, sir. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Uh thank you everyone here, commissioners and our team and everyone listening. This is our first budget conversation for this fiscal year. Uh we
we heard a lot from last year to this year, not only from our commissioners, but also from our community. And I think that what you're going to see in what we presented today is going to reflect a lot of listening. Um my apologies for you getting the presentation yesterday
afternoon. It's really just so you could just have a chance to walk through it and see it. We know that today we're just looking for feedback. We're not looking for you to make any decisions that are going to be binding as this is a workshop. But I think that we are further ahead now than we've ever been during our budget process based on
everything that's going on around us and knowing that we need to prepare for that. Um, I got to thank the finance team and their leadership and how they worked with their colleagues in order to present all the information that you are going to talk about today. It was not
easy. The exercise that they were given were to take a flat budget and then reduce that budget by 5%. Um, these are things that, you know, I talked about over the course of last year's budget to this year's budget, but now we're actually seeing it in place and 5% is a
lot to cut from a budget that can't withstand it. And many of the times of the departments, it came down to them having to go to their personnel expenses. Our personal expenses for the city is about between 75 80% of the
city. some places, some divisions and departments cannot get there without touching personnel. And that's how we know that we are getting to the line of what we have versus um what we can live with and what we can't
live without. These are needs the the must the the wants and nice to have or things that we left out of this current projection that you're looking at. But as you go as you go through it, you're going to see a lot. And we're going to
go through a lot. But let's start by looking backwards. Uh we're going to go back and see what last year's budget did for us. Uh we do have our new annual report that's online. And I encourage everyone to go through it. But as you start looking at everything that's about
the city and the different departments and who you are and who we are as a community, this this work sort of kind of falls to the back burner because we've already moved on to next year. We're already now looking at this year's budget. But we need to stop and take a
take a moment to say that the budget that you all approved in the prior year led to a lot of success success for the city. And I don't want that to be minimized just by the current challenges that we know that we think of today. But when you look at the different groundbreings, you look at the different
business opportunities and the interests and the assistance that we're trying to do communitywide, whether it's, you know, north, south, east, or west. One of our core priorities is to make sure that we don't forget any segment of our community. Um, we know for a fact that
the natural resource division provides a great asset to our community, showing that we know we are still making progress in various areas, but that progress is offset by our concern and care for what makes Northport special,
which is um a very good culture, a very good character, and our town is not our city is not going to lose that as we continue to move forward. Um so I encourage everyone to please go take a look at our annual report if you have not done so. Our team spent a lot of
time and effort to make a very very well well viewed document that reflects the effort of all the staff in the city and we thank them all. Uh, another thing that we are working on is our what works city certification.
And I'm not sure a lot of you know what this is, but it's an international program that sets a standard of excellence for well managed data driven local government. And that's what we want to be. And when I when I heard about it, it's being led by Caitlyn Griffin in our office. But when I heard about it, I like I was like, we want
that. Why would we not want that? And uh we were quite a ways away from being there. I'll say uh we have three I think out of 22 when we began. And you know as of March we have nine out of 22. So we're still moving in the right
direction. But as we all continue to say and believe that the city of Northport is a great city to live, work, and play. This certification would allow us by making sure that we meet the benchmarks and the progress of how we can prove that we use evidence to drive our
decisions across our organization so that we can be recognized truly for the value that we do. So when we talk about what what we heard from Northport, when we say we heard you Northport, Northport had a lot to say
last year and a lot of it began with Doge and a lot of the comments were you know Doging Northport and you know why are we not and we should and we always said the door was open because we wanted to make sure that people knew that we had nothing to hide whether it's based
on your um financial audits or based on third parties who come in to look at what you're We always want to make sure that they understand that we are we are very very confident in the things that we do and why we do them. If you're not, then we shouldn't be doing them in the first
place. Um, so Doge did have their experience in the state of Florida over last year. They will sunset on July 1 of this year, but as they put out their report, they listed their criteria. They listed their techniques on how they evaluated the different communities
throughout the state that they chose to um visit on site. And so these are these are the these are the main tenants of what their process relates to. And it was transparency and accountability and budgeting and spending growth in relative to population and inflation.
Now, to me, those two at the top that they selected are two of the strongest ones that they have to defend and that we as the city of Northport have to defend. And so, what you're going to see throughout the presentation is us taking their procedures, their techniques, and
applying it to the city of Northport. And then, as we all know, then we, you as a board will make decisions on if you like it, you don't like it, you want to keep it, you don't want to keep it. These are conversations that I think are fair for us to have now so that we can
say we know exactly what we do, why we do it, and we either want to continue to do it or to make a different choice. Our growth in personnel costs um that is that is one that they also are looking at statewide. What I will say is that when
you look at our growth in personnel cost, we are even acknowledged as being one of the fastest growing cities when you start to dig into our data and that shows in alignment with the chart you'll see later with our FTE count as we continue to grow. It is in uh very much
alignment. Um the spending on enhanced services is not the core services. So the core government services as outlined by Doge are four services. police, fire, utilities, and public works, and that's
it. Anything else they list as an enhanced service. And as you know, there's a lot more in our city than just those four core programs. No one's going to deny those core programs are material and matter in every municipality, but we
are going to show you some of the other spending that we do on enhanced services and why it makes sense and why we believe that we should continue on the path that we're on. The policies such as DNI initiatives or climate programs, uh we don't have either of those initiatives or programs in our budget.
Um, I will say as we continue to go and we talk about some of the environmental programs, I do have a a spin on that. But these are also policies that the Doge team deemed as ones that should not exist um through government as much as
possible. Nonprofit grants. Uh we do have some nonprofit grants. Our NP squed program we're very proud of. um our leader, Miss Puro and her team do a great job of making sure that we can service our community as as needed and
that program has done very well and continues to gain more and more momentum. The personnel cost attainment um in this budget what we did was we revised our merit structure. We essentially cut it in half for our non union employees
which is just under 500 employees of our thousand employee organization. And that means that we still wanted to make sure everyone got a cost of living increase and got some sort of increase that recognized their performance which totals in this document that you're
looking at now roughly around 3%. Which is lower than the 4 to 5% total on annual um in a normal year. So it's it's roughly about half of it. Part-time Rex um recalls recovery. Um the Doge team believes that oh let me let me back up.
um the vacancy and overtime. So vacancy the vacancy of saving who we don't have on board right now has helped us this year and we began this exercise and I will end this exercise with always saying that we are here to protect the employees that we have. We have to try
not to lay off people if we can help it. Our first priority is to maintain them here so they can help maintain the quality of life that we want for our residents. Um and we're going to try to do that. My goal is to offset any FTE
requests for this fiscal year 27 with vacancies that we will hold until we get there. That way we will not ask you for any new FTEES. We'll have those FTEES and the net each FTE number will stay the same. Very important.
Parks and Rex um they believe parks and Rex is an enhanced service and the cost recovery of it should be raised. So specifically thinking about the aquatic center of Warm Mill Springs, you know, some of the ones that are revenue driven, those are ones where the
non-resident rate could be looked at to say we want the cost recovery to be higher or lower. Pros and cons to either which way you go, but we all can hopefully agree that parks and recre is an intricral part of what makes this city special and we have to treat it as such. Um the fleet optimization um we as
we as we go through Doge and Doge looks at vehicles, they look at whether your vehicles are underutilized. They look at your take-home policy and they look at um when you actually um replace them on
the cycle. Are you actually replacing things too early or too late? And and there there is there is something to look at there. When I look at the fleet and I look at the the overtime as mentioned earlier, these are things that I want us to look at agencywide so that we don't just pick and choose and go to
one department or one area. It's going to take a deep dive on some of these things as we go forward through this next fiscal year to say, okay, let's let's peel back all the layers of the onion and see exactly what is behind there and get some very very thoughtful recommendations on how to make sure
we're doing things in the most optimal way. And that's not to say that we're doing things wrong in those areas. I just think that if we're going to be prepared for what's coming for us in the future, we need to keep making sure that we keep looking at ourselves internally. We've had a great start with our um our
lean six sigma teams and that group that you heard from about a week or so ago. Just knowing that there are there's a process there. There are efficiencies that can be had and we need to take advantage of them. the prioritizing the CIP. Um the finance director has done a
great job of creating a guide that has allowed us to rank our projects and I believe that's what the caller was talking about on the voicemail and the public comment. It it was a lot of work and they did a lot of projects and it is a um it is a great document that's going
to help us as we map out the spending going forward. And I'm also going to give you a great reason why we should not follow the very beginning of that document later in this presentation as we do have some current needs that are even more pressing if you will follow um
what what I say to you in a little bit. So here we go. So applying those to the city of Northport. Um when we talk about transparency and accountability, our workshops, the budget documents that we put online, our community input process, whether it's in person or online, both
all remain strong, our public hearings, you see, we public we um we um publish our our adopted budget. You know, the the acter we've gotten I believe at least 20 years uh in a row of good outstanding from our our budget being
reviewed by outside parties. We have independent auditors that come in to look at our finances to make sure we're all in a good place. So when you when you hear questions about, well, you know, blank check this or blank check that there there's there's not a blank check that would not have to be
verified, not only by you as a board, by an external party as well to make sure that we are doing exactly what we're supposed to be doing. Um we do always make sure we stay in compliance with the state. Um the commission um the commission you are the oversight body
for us and we run everything as we should through you u and that's part of our oversight measures as well so that we can make sure that we have that transparency and accountability to the public. Very important. So when you look at applying doge to the city of
Northport this one is very important. the spending growth relative to population inflation. The criticism has been that led those to begin their efforts were that cities were making a lot more money in property taxes and other taxes and just inflating
themselves as opposed to not reducing the burden on those who were paying it. And I believe that's where they probably hit their tipping point. But when you look at our information and this is their formula, this is not our formula. They they said their formula was the
fiscal year 20 budget times population growth time 20 a 26% inflationary factor that equals the amount of growth that they thought you should have and that's how they came to their numbers and that's what they looked at and I think
the higher that number was the quicker you got on their list of areas that they wanted to review. So when we did the same thing for our budget so we put our fiscal year 20 budget number in there. You take the $175 million and our population growth and look at that 30%.
That 30% again is a very key figure as to how we reflect to the world on our and justify our growth of our city. Um, and there's their 26% and then our our U
25 budget 288 million uh of expected from Doge and our actual 25-y year budget was $288 million. So you see the lack of discrepancy there which shows to the quality of the budget that was created last year knowing that we are
still going to do better but this is where people say you should go and follow Doge. Look at what it's telling you. The good thing is we're right in alignment to where we should be. The other side of that coin is talking about the items that I said on the prior slide
that are not within the Doge categories and those are decisions that we'll have to talk about as well. So the growth in personnel cost um that we talked about earlier we can look and you can see the the growing scale that is um in alignment the total FTEES is
going with our population and what's what's going to happen is you see the the last slide of 26 the blue line is going to outpace our orange line because we're going to start to hold our FTEE neutral. Now that has pros and cons to
it. If the population keeps rising and we don't keep rising in people to service them at the level that we're accustomed to, then we all have to agree that a different level of service has to be agreed upon. And that's a choice. And as um someone told us very recently in
one of our reports, you have to decide on what model we want to be at. You could be at a Cadillac model, you could be at a Camry model. Both models are effective. Both models are nice. It depends on what we're willing to live with and without. But we have to have
people to service the city. Um, as I mentioned earlier, these are the four core services that Doge um identifies, police, fire, infrastructure, utilities. Um, everything other than that they would say is something to have a
conversation about. I do have I do have um some questions breaks built into this long presentation so that we don't go too far without allowing you all to comment. So in a few slides I'm sure there'll be a question slide to let you sort of ask something on what um I've
talked about. So the DEI programs uh like we said we do not have a DEI office or program budget and they were clear in their doge report. I believe it was Hillsboro County had two highlevel assistant county um
administrators if I'm not mistaken and one was an open office of compliance and the other one was conservation and they they clearly listed that they did not believe that those roles should be in existence in that organization. So they were very consistent throughout their process of where they looked and who
they looked at. um our environmental programs um for the city is you know when we say we don't allocate funds on programs such as environmental or social governments I think our what used to be known as the tree fund that we renamed
to the environmental protection fund is one that would draw some conversation and you know the first thing I think that we would tell them and we would tell remind our community is that that fund is not funded through taxpayer dollars
That is not a taxpayer dollars funded. It is funded through the fees that they collect and that's how we are able to support that staff their their their equipment and their initiatives to make sure that that program and that process is done properly. I think that that is a
a a huge asset to our community. Uh even though I know it does not fall under the doge process. uh the funding for nonprofits. Like I said before, the Northport and North uh nonprofits united NPR program. Um we're very we're very proud of the fact that we support
nonprofits because they need our help. They're servicing the same demographic in our community that we need to serve. You know, why would we not want to partner with nonprofits to be stronger together? But again, it would not have made the uh the dogeness,
so to speak. So the personnel cost containment as we talk about that this is where this the discipline of your governance starts to matter the most. You know when we talk about personnel being the highest cost driver that means it needs to be the highest area that you
then scrutinize to see if there's ways to reduce that cost to ourselves and our citizens. So we had to find a balance. How do you how do you find a balance of making sure that you you you reduce your reward to them for working and not harm
their morale? Um, so our first attempt at that was like I said was to sort of cut it in half and that's what it looks like when you look at our budget numbers is roughly half of what it was and we believe that based on the climate of the city, the county, the country,
everywhere that that is a justifiable approach. What we don't want to do is we remove our merit increase. What we don't want to do is have a hiring freeze or other things that signal to anyone in our organization or who wants to come to our organization that we are going
through something that the actual other um I'm sorry we get his name plate changed that's not his name the name is not right I'm sorry sir >> you look at >> your name plate says James toll hearing officer >> I'm in disguise
>> he was throwing me off I tried to overlook it I just couldn't I'm Thank you, ma'am. >> All right, back to budget. Um, >> very distract. I'm like, that's not him. So, so that is very important to I think
all of us, we can agree on that. The morale of our employees needs to remain high because the city is at a very high place. We are doing so many great things and it's all because of the work that they do. for them to feel that we are anything other than grateful for what
they do would be um would be inaccurate. Our vacancy overview uh we started this back in the fall. Uh we have a a small list of employees as they have left the organization. we've decided not to fill those roles so that we can create a pool
of employees because we know that every year uh we we know that every year there's you know a fire class that's coming in for a station that's going to open in the very near future. The way that the chief has the methodology spread out to get those firefighters ready for those opening buildings is
accurate. So we we need to follow that. But that includes new people. the police department, we I did not give them I think roughly 30 positions that they asked for last year. And so we're still dealing with that sort of backlog of how
do we get them to where they need to be. And both of these departments, core services departments as listed by the Doge report, participated in the 5% reduction of their budgets. And again, that's when I say we had to get to
people to some people in there. The fire budget just does not have enough room to get to people. And in order to do their budget alone, they will be looking at removing roughly 18 people in order to meet that mark of 5%. The point is not to say we're going to let go 18
firefighters. The point is we're trying to show you that sometimes in certain departments it gets steep enough for personnel is what has to be reduced. Um our current hiring scrutiny goes with the vacancy overview. We're just being stricter about what people can and can't
do. making sure that we don't overwhelm people. We want everyone to be busy. We don't want anyone to be overwhelmed. And there's a balance there. And communicating with the hiring official to get what they need to make sure they have what they need. Um if we can do
that without hiring someone that we are separating from the organization for whatever reason, good or bad, um we want to do that and that's what we are we're going to continue to do for the rest of uh this fiscal year. The overtime analysis is one of those deep dives that I talked about earlier. I don't want to
cherrypick here and there. We need to do a deeper dive overall. Most of the staff knows that except for the structured overtime that's built into contracts like fire. Uh I I'm not a fan of overtime, but it doesn't mean that overtime isn't right. It doesn't mean that it's wrong. It just means that
drone just doesn't like it because I feel like that's an area that people can use a little too loosely if it's not done the right way. And we've talked about and we've looked at our overtime here in a couple departments for the years that I've been here. But I think that even as Doge would tell you, a
periodic deep dive into it to make sure that your processes, your structures, your policies are all in alignment can do you uh a lot of good. Uh Parks and Rex. So in fiscal year um 25 parks and rex as a department had a
51% of cost recovery nearly doubled the national average. Now that is impressive. Um it is it is very strong and very good and that is due of course to the leadership director Funheller and her team. You know they are always trying to be cost effective and they
always are looking at ways to make sure that they reduce any burden that their department might produce on us financially. Um when you look at the recreation division, we're talking about $618,000 in revenue that they generated. Um with a the budget cost of $445,000
for different departments that we need. We will have to look at and we are looking at some of the events that we provide and the things that we do in parks and reccks. Um as we know, we talked about the Mullen Center and it how it's utilized and the senior center that's going over there and the other venues that we have. The revenue
generating ones speak for themselves. I don't think we ever want to price out people like at the aquatic center for instance. You don't want to price it so high that then you know people don't or aren't able to enjoy it for what it should be which is a quality of life feature. There's a there's a balance
there. But um for me to believe that our parks and recrecks is not a core service um I don't think that would be accurate and or fair. Um cuz the aquatic center generated, you know, $1 million in revenue last year and had over $15,000
visitors. You know, that's not something every community can say. That's a that's a very strong statistic um based on how long we've had our aquatic center open, how many people come to visit it, the staff that works there. It's a very
strong asset to our community. Um, we know that the summer of course is the biggest time drawing in most of our business, but we also have we say that the the warm the um the summer with the 10
11.8% spring 76.6% um winter drops down to 12.77%. Uh the Warm Middle Springs Fund 125 supports our park personnel and operating costs and has generated
positive gains. That's not to be confused with pays for itself because it never has recovered the purchase property price amount that we did with the city. But we can say that every year it is moving in the right direction and only getting to be a stronger asset for
our city which is also evidenced by the renovation work that is going out there now that is occurring through the bid process and when people start to see that activity actually happen on site. It's only going to generate more excitement out there. Um we've had this asset in our community since um what
2012 and here we are now taking a great step forward in renovi renovating something that we all know is near and dear to our community um agencywide fleet as I talked about earlier I think that these are the three things that we need to sort of look into
to see how we fare where we can find efficiencies and see if there's anything we can do better or differently mayor I'm going to pause right here and see if there's any questions in that first batch of slides that we can answer and try our team is here. We have um I
think just about every every department represented and we have space of them here here for them to answer any questions you might have to see if anybody's going to put in the queue. >> Vice Mayor.
>> Uh thank you mayor. Um, first I I I really appreciate the Doge analysis. We heard an awful lot about that last year and it's very gratifying to see that when we applied it to our own city, we
look pretty good. So kudos for going through that. I think it was very insightful. Um, just one comment and I I think I heard it in your comment, city manager, but in organizations I've been in in the past
where we were controlling headcount, >> our FTEES, there was a mysterious increase in our consultant contract spending and our overtime. So, I think it's very important that we monitor those um as
closely as we monitor our full-time accounts. So, I think >> um and eyeopening 30.8% population growth since 2020. >> Wow. >> That's incredible. Do we have any sense?
Is is it sort of maintaining? We were at about 5% a year give or take a little bit. Are we maintaining that? Are we cooling off a little bit? Do we have a sense of that? >> Good morning. >> Good morning. Better.
>> Better. Um we have we were advised by the state last year that they would likely uh reduce our percentage of growth slightly but they did expect us to still continue to be above the
statewide trends. Uh we remain one of the hot spots for growth um but by every indication that we can find. Um so we do anticipate that it will be we'll see a slight reduction in in that growth rate.
Um but we do still expect it to be um significantly positive. >> Thank you for that. >> Right. Um so it was it was right about 5%. Yes about 5% last fiscal year. >> We did we did the state did indicate
that it may trend down more towards four um >> this year. So, we don't have those numbers yet, but um as soon as we do, we will provide that information. >> And about how above the state growth rates are we tracking half a point?
>> We uh I haven't looked at the state growth rates in a while. The last time I looked, we were between a point and a half point. >> Okay. Thank you for that. I'm off. Thank you, Mayor. >> Commissioner Pedro. Thank you, mayor.
Um, couple questions on slide eight. Um, and that is, um, fiscal year 20 Northboard citywide adopted budget. Does it include is that fiscal year 2019 to 20 or is it
>> Yes, that's 2019 to 20. >> And does it include any amendments that >> No, that's just adopt. >> Just just adopted. Would it be appropriate to include any amendments throughout the year
>> to reflect a more correct number? >> Well, those probably would be more one time um adjustments or we also in our amended budget include um rollovers, project rollovers. So it would not be really appropriate to include the
rollovers because if we have not spent for capital projects, we roll those funds into next year and that is included in the amended time. >> But if we split rollovers from the the rest of the expenses which are actual expenditures throughout the year as amendments would it be how much more
would it be different the number? >> Yeah, we could look at that but I don't have that information right now. >> Is it possible to do it? >> We can look at it. Yes. Okay. and um the population growth and I think we've had that question before. What are
the metrics and how do we track it? Is it by uh issuing our residents uh IDs and licenses or is it permitted permits for new construction? How do we measure the growth that is reflected in 30%.
>> That's just population growth. The 30.8% 8% of the population growth based on the RB board numbers. >> Yeah, we get those numbers. >> Those are provided to us by University of Florida. >> Yeah, >> fever.
>> Yes, fever is and and I do have a correction. Um the statewide population growth in 2025 is approximately 0.85% 85% to 1.37%. Northport's population growth rate in 2025
was 4.22%. So we are almost 3 percentage points higher than the state average. And the city manager will say that it's being provided to us the growth numbers
how and by whom it is provided >> that is Bieber um it is the University of Florida Bieber provides that they have a division that provides all of the population data to all of the local jurisdictions every year. They base that on multiple factors um inbound outbound
growth as well as building permits cos those types of things. They do electrical meters. They drill down. They send us their projected estimates every year for us to review. There is a method where we contest
their proposed rate. We did that. Uh it was either last year or the year before. We felt that our growth rate was a bit higher than what they initially projected. >> We provided them additional data. They reviewed our data and they agreed to
adjust their growth rate slightly higher. Um not to the full amount that we thought it was. We made a compromise. Uh but they do give us that opportunity every year uh before they finalize their numbers.
>> So is it provided at the end of the year of each year? Was it the actual numbers or projected numbers? >> Those numbers come out towards the end of the year. Yes. I just, you know, if it's permit based, you know, we have over 3,000 vacant houses in the city.
So, if we doing by the permits or by co, I'm sorry, by cos um that would be very skewed information. >> So, first the the number of vacant houses um is hard to pin down. We can't
look at Zillow or Realtor.com or any of those because there there's a lot of variables that go into that and it doesn't mean that those are vacant in real time. Um Bieber does look at um the outbound
uh migration. Um so they do look at um various factors um for essentially for people who are are leaving the area. Um they've got m as I said they have multiple data sources that they're
pulling from to determine who when people are moving out. Um but they do have a factor that they program into their numbers for um homes that are not occupied. Would it be is there any subscription to that service that they provide or is it
just they provide just to provide? >> It is online uh at Bieber and you anybody can go on and drill down into those data tables. There are more Excel spreadsheets um to keep you up at night than you can imagine.
>> Commissioner Petra, I'm sorry if I can add. So we use the same methodology that Doge used. So Doge used and I just looked it up. they used uh the methodology uh based on the budget baseline. So that's adopted budget. So
we followed the same methodology and try to apply how would that look like for the city of Northport. >> Mhm. I just think as a logically speaking the amount of people or the growth um
population would be very easy to find by issuance of licenses that tied to the city of Northport. I don't know if it's possible. >> Oh no, we wouldn't do that as >> um the next question I have is parks and
recreation cost recovery. >> Um In these numbers that are provided on slide 14, do we have any >> numbers that build in into the personnel or is it how >> which number are you talking about?
Which side? >> 14 parks and recreation cost 13. >> Sandy Funhiller, parks and recreation director. So those numbers are based on um the total budget
um taking out the free events, the free signature events where there's no um admission revenue coming in for those. So that that includes personnel and expenses. >> I also learned and correct me if I'm
wrong. Um there is a administrative position and I don't know how high of a ranking is that that specifically devoted to look at the the parameters of how the city is
awarded um various awards. So that position specifically looking into >> accreditation >> accreditation correct. So >> it's a fulltime position. >> So like other departments um we have an
accreditation coordinator and while that's one um focus of the position it is not the whole position that um position also does all of our um performance metrics. Uh it also works on
our um our software systems. um does training. Um so it's it's not all within accreditation, although accreditation is a very important part of it. Um that's that's our commitment to best practices um and showing that that we as a
department are meeting those best practices um for our community. So do do you project any cutting in those rules as far as not to let people go but as far as combining
responsibility and not have that specific position that focuses only on accreditation and what is the percentage of the devotion of that position to accreditation? So staff across the city
just are in the process of doing that exercise with the class and comp study. Um so I think once that information is with HR we could provide you that breakdown of their responsibilities. Um but that position like I I said is is
already doing multiple functions. It's not just accreditation. Um and uh we can bring that information back. And as far as what positions we might cut, I I couldn't tell you at this point. Um it depends on what um the commission
decides as a whole. Um is the um percent cut that you're looking for within the city's budget. Um and what each department is asked to bring to the table. And I think I think where the commissioner is going is that he he's he's seeing that the accreditation role
itself is necessary and those roles which as you said are in multiple departments and I'm I'm thinking pretty much a lot of them all >> right. Um so those roles I think your point is do we need those roles? Why is there one person who does that in
another department? Is that where you're going with this? >> Yes. And if you can what is the title of that position in your department? >> Accreditation coordinator. >> Accreditation. So this basically explains itself. >> So so that person is the point person
that's that's getting all of the data together. There is a lot of documentation that's required to be an accredited department. uh parks and recreation and um at the first set of standards um there were 154 different standards that we had to meet to be
accredited um and and were one of only um 222 agencies across the nation that is accredited. So there there's a lot of work to make sure that we have the standard operating procedures, the policies, that we're following the best
practices, and that we're also um providing the documentation that backs that up to show we don't just say we're doing this. We put it into action and we can show you that in the documentation and that's that's part of the process of accreditation. So since we're on the
subject, how many positions of accreditation coordinator we have throughout the city's departments or divisions? >> We will let you know. We don't have that number off the top of our head. >> That's all
it commissioner. >> Thank you, Mayor. Um I was really happy with this the complete handout, you know, all these 73 slides. Um, what I did was I've got like three pages of notes that I made as I went through
the slides and uh I'm not going to bore you with all all of that all at once here, but um I just have a couple comments like on slide six we talked about fleet optimization. Um, I'm just wondering, you know, I'm just hoping I
don't need an answer right now that uh as the city buys new vehicles that we are considering hybrids, you know, and uh more efficient vehicles to use. It will save on save on gas
can save on the cost of the vehicle. Um, I also discovered recently that we have city vehicles that are available. I took a trip to Tallahassee this year and a trip to Jacksonville for training. I received $1,121
back from the city because I used my vehicle. And now I find out that we have vehicles that may not be in use while I'm out traveling. So, I can take those and that would save the city some money. So, in the future, I'll be looking to use, you know, a city vehicle if I have
to travel out of town. Um I was also happy to see on slide six CIP prioritization. Uh that's definitely so important. We have limited amount of money and we have
a lot of important things to do. Um on slide 11, I had a question about uh the environmental protection. Uh, has our
tree fund become the environmental protection fund? Is that >> that's what it Okay, >> it was renamed. >> Um, and it says it's supported by developer mitigation fees. Now, I know there are mitigation fees for the trees
that get cut down. Are there any other mitigation fees when a lot is cleared? Good morning. Um, there's a land clearing permit as well. Um, so that is that is one thing, but it also funded by
review fees. So, every time our natural resources division reviews a site plan for a new development, there is a fee for that. and that that particular part of that fee goes into the environmental protection fund. So, it's not just for
taking um trees down. It is also for the work that they're doing, the review that they're doing, the inspections. We charge inspection fees for those when they go out and do those inspections. Uh so, it is recovering costs that um are
incurred by having the personnel do that work. >> Okay. Thank you. Um kind of moving moving on and this is just a general comment. Um on slide 12 we mentioned
uh merit increases and and I a personal thing would be I just kind of question the merit fee process. Um to me as an employee, you know, I I
believe in, you know, succession you start out as a you know, uh you start out as as a helper and then you move into, you know, doing the main functions of a position and then if you want to advance your career, you know, you advance your career moving into
another position. uh having a merit increase besides COA each year uh and you know while we're trying to keep up with uh market conditions so we don't lose employees you know I just wondering
if we're overdoing it with a merit system also that's just a general question um we haven't gotten to slide did we get to slide Um,
>> yes, >> that's the last one. on the last report that we had on vehicles and equipment, you know, being replaced, auctioned off, you know, got I
noticed a number of trailers and it seems like every time we do have trailers specifically being auctioned off or whatever, they're always in poor condition.
Now, I can see with a vehicle like a police vehicle, okay? Our officers are in a in a patrol car 12 hours a day, you know, through all kinds of conditions, you know, the vehicles running all the time. It put a lot of miles on them. Sometimes they get in, you know, we had,
you know, one was involved in had a crash, had to be replaced. But a trailer is a specific piece of equipment that a lot of the time is just sitting somewhere. And when it's in use, I hope that we have employees that are
trained in how to use and and drive a vehicle with a trailer. And and I see I just don't see that all of these trailers being traded in should be in such poor condition. I'd like to
see if we can have a little better control uh maintenance on them, so to speak. Um um if I could um most of our trailers are are uh in
public works and utilities, they don't stay on the road. They frequently go off-roading >> and uh in uncertain conditions in order to do their job. So, um, thank you. I definitely agree. I think most of our
employees, um, take great pride and and and ownership, so to speak, of the assets that are entrusted with them, the stewardship responsibilities they are given by the city. Um, but the reality of you've got
trailers going off-road in all kinds of conditions, doing all kinds of things, but uh, you know, there's always opportunities for optimization and improvement, but the reality of it is they do a lot of work in in very tough conditions. >> Okay, on the road looking pretty. >> That's all I've got for right now.
>> Thank you, sir. Commissioner Stokes. >> Thank you, Mayor. Um, first I want to thank staff cuz I I I do appreciate the kind of efforts that have gone into this and and I do appreciate some of the education so far this morning. I think
you know it's always nice to get educated on how things work. Um, since we ultimately are the body that has to give direction. So I'd like to take a little more of a 5,000 ft approach to this. And you know, to start with,
there's really, it's undeniable that in this day and age, the two things that are most concerning to our citizenry out there is affordability and infrastructure. I mean, it is undeniable. People feel the heat, they feel the pressure, they
find it difficult to make ends meet, and they also look around them and see the growth that is inevitable here in this city. It is not controllable. People have rights. No one denied us the right to move here and live here. And we're not going to be able to do that. We're
going to have to manage our growth. And that challenge in the area of infrastructure is significant, especially since addressing those needs have been kicked down the road year after year after year primarily because it's been hard to
figure out how to finance them. All that said, as we go into this budget cycle, I appreciate the mindset that staff is taking. Um, you know, it might be helpful for people to understand, at least from my
perspective, what my expectation is for this budget cycle is that one, no property tax rate increase at all. Two, that we reduce expenses. We take a flat revenue approach and
reduce our expenses so that we are able to cover cost of increased wages, increased benefits, increased material and supply costs and to additionally create a reserve for an allocation for
capital improvement projects, whether it be through financing or whether it be for pay as you go. We have to be able to do that. That is no simple feat. We're talking four, five, $6 million in order to get there. But that needs to
be done if we're going to move forward. If we're going to be able to create the infrastructure, rebuild the infrastructure we need to cope with our growth. And it needs to be done without raising people's taxes. The other piece of this is that every
year we've raised fees, enterprise fees, district fees. We were well below what a lot of other places were charging. Now we're a little higher and we need to look hard at being able to roll some of those numbers back so that we can put
some dollars back in the pockets of our taxpayers. They need some relief and we need to find a way to do it. Now it's easy to say all this because you know where do you cut? How do you do it? How do you find the balance between cutting services,
cutting government, and there is a distinction between those two and still providing a high quality of service that everybody's grown accustomed to? That's a sweet spot that's not easy to find. I dare say that before this process is over, there's going to be
some pain and we're all collectively, including the citizenry of the city, going to have to evaluate whether or not we're willing to live with a lesser quality or quantity of service if we're going to create some relief here. And we're going to hold the line on taxes.
Growth doesn't pay for growth. It lags. And until growth until we realize that growth and that growth is conditioned on the infrastructure being in place to do it, it's a hurdle to overcome and we're
looking at a couple of tough years to get to that. Um I think it's important also that we don't just look at cutting services that we look at government itself.
It's hard to determine. You know, over the years, there are some municipal and county governments that do a lot for citizens that Doge and other parties out there wonder whether or not government should
be doing. And that's something to look at. I mean, at what point does government say, as you saw here, are we talking four basic departments? That's what government should do. And no quality of life, no
public service, uh, no good governance, no it. I mean, you look at all these other areas and there's got to be a balance. You can't cut them out. You can't eliminate them. Not still provide
what a city citizens need. So, this is no easy feat. It is. It is not easy to do. And as a commission, as a body, I am less concerned with how you get there as to giving you clear direction as to
where you need to take us. Okay? We I don't at least I'll speak only for myself. I think I'm a relatively smart guy, but I'm not nearly as smart as you all. I can't figure out the best way to get there. What I can tell you is where I
think as an elected official we need to be. And I'd like to see that separation maintain itself throughout this budget process. I'm not going to cherrypick. I really am not interested in some of the
ways in which you do it unless it starts to really impact services to our citizens. I want to be able to say here's where we need to be. And and and I've highlighted my hot buttons. I don't want to see a property tax increase. I
want to see money go back in the pockets of our citizens and I want to see a clear balance between the way we cut. We need to not only take this budget down to offset all the increased costs we're going to experience but additionally create a reserve for capital improvement
projects. I don't know how else we move forward if we can't do that. and and and I have to tell you, if you guys can find a way to do this for us and make this work, we will lead the county. We will lead for the most part the state in
getting out ahead of this and addressing, not hiding it, not playing numbers games, not jerking things around. And so, you know, again, I'll I'll end my little soapbox speech with thank you for all the hard work because
it's not nearly finished yet. and I know how hard this is going to be for every one of you and all the people in the departments you represent. So, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Yeah. The only comment that I have is when you brought it up about vacancies
and overtime. There should never ever be routine overtime to where it compensates certain individuals weekly because of their job status. I don't want to see the vacancies be put on hold and overtime
being spent to cover those vacancies. So if that vacancy by hiring an individual is cheaper than paying the overtime and time and a half then you have to look at that you know hugely because in my opinion not in favor of overtime unless
it could be an emergency situation. It shouldn't be routine, you know. Um, and since we do you put in different areas for questions and discussions, I must also open it up for uh public comment on each of these stages as well. So, city
clerk, do we have any public comment? >> Tim do. >> Thank you, mayor, for that. >> That is very decent of you. I appreciate all I could really get in trouble on this topic. I ran a business. I had
thousands of employees. I did business in six different states. Laws are all different. Hiring's different. I don't know the specifics of the budget. I'm not going to talk about specifics of the budget. All right, you guys put uh one slide up
there that showed the four priorities that we should bottle under Doge or whatever. I'm going to be totally honest with you. I think Doge is garbage is it accomplish nothing. I'm going to be totally honest with
everybody in Rose. You might want to put that word up there because it's trendy today, but it means nothing. You have four priorities. I don't agree with them. You have police. I agree. Priority number one, fire. I agree.
Priority number two, public works. I agree. Priority number three. Now we're in trouble here. And someone's going to assassinate me when I leave this meeting.
Utilities are not the government's job. You provide no utilities to me. None whatsoever. I don't have electricity through you. I don't have water through you. I don't have sewer through you. If you're
including the canals and the water system in that, then I will give it to you. But I would consider that under public works. My big problem is department of wreck. I would replace
utilities with department of wat is I think that's very important to our society. I think it's very important to our youth and if you don't give them a place to go and do things then they're going to wind up in this guy's car
someday. And I'm a firm believer in that. That's one of the reasons I like this area. I come here and criticize you guys all the time, but the parks, me being able to get to the water, what the kids
can do in our society. I brought it up the other day when you said, "Oh, don't let them on the ballparks." What was my comment? Give them a park to play with with the electric bikes. So, I I can't sit here and criticize. The only other thing I would say is to
all the employees, thank you. And I would say to the employees, if you live in town, you're working for yourselves. and you should take your job that way. And I want to remind everybody that I believe and if I'm wrong, this is a
right to work state or meaning that I don't think unions and regular employees should be treated any difference. And if you're going to give raises, you can do them both. Unions aren't on top of normal people. Hands over.
Hi Pam to cars for the record. Um I just have a few ideas as we go through the budget based on what we went through last year too. Um I'm wondering if uh there might be a way for sharing equipment between departments because one department might not need equipment
all the time and if they need one piece of equipment that's a big capital improvement. um project uh meets that requirement and another department has it, maybe they could borrow it from the another department to save money that way. Uh when you present the uh budget
to the commissioners, I I it's such a detailed list if this year you could give it to them and it because I asked for it an Excel spreadsheet last year and I was able to sort everything. So this way you can just go look at something and you can
get the columns or the formula. If there's like a 100% increase in an item from last year over to this year, then maybe the commissioners can just zero in on that. It makes it easier to sort and find the information that way as opposed to the paper that was given. Uh maybe
this year it would be a good idea along with Commissioner Stokes plan to run a parallel budget. So this way it's going to be a lot of work and a lot of headache this year, but this way next year if they do cut the property taxes on us, you'll be ahead of the game with
the budget that way. And I don't know, I know you've got a lot of um incentives for employees, but maybe have some incentives for employees to come up with this might exist already. I'm not sure, with an idea if they can save money on the budget cuz they do those jobs every day. And they they're the ones that are
going to know where we can save money at to give them some incentives for saving money. And then as far as the accreditation, I think what you have to look at is does the being accredited in one area or another, does that bring what kind of value does it bring to the
city? Does it bring more revenue? Does it bring money into the city that way? Because as far as accreditation goes with me doing it in my other past job, it's a lot of work. And if you were going to combine one person to do accreditation for the whole city,
they'll learn from the building because of all the minute details they have to provide. So accreditation is important, but I think what you need to look at is what value is it going to give? And I might be back after the rest of the presentation. Thank you.
>> That is all right. >> Thanks, sir. Back to you, sir. >> Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Uh, two things before we move on. Your overtime analysis, as you represent in your speaking, that's I can tell you that is true. The deep dive that we will go into overtime that I propose will sort of
prove that it's true to make sure that that's not happening. Commissioner Pro, we have six um accreditation coordinators in the city with one vacancy in plus one vacancy in utilities. >> That includes the vacancy. >> Oh, so is it six total? total >> with one vacancy.
All right. So now we are on slide number 17, please. You please. Yeah, there we go. Thank you. All right. So this is very familiar information to you all. This is how we categorize our fund balances for the
last three years. Um, as you can see, most of them normally increase year to year, and that's based on the activity that happens. And, uh, we know that 22 was a very different year, the one that's not on here now because of Hurricane I, but we've been very fortunate in the last couple of years to
keep balances where they should be. On the next slide, you see where the fund balances actually begin for this year, fiscal year 26. Uh, I'll point out the general fund column where you see the emergency and disaster reserve of 20%. that $19 million would be part of what
we would need to use if we were um hit by a or more hurricanes this year on top of what we used last year, last year, last time. Um but once we use those two pots of money, that's where we would run into the challenge of knowing um what we
tried to get done in 25 with the voting referendums that did not pass. we would have to figure out what we did after that because our funding is limited without the ability to borrow and sort of get ourselves out of that situation. Um when you look at our general fund um
tax assumptions for this year, we the conservative growth rate of 3% on the revenue side is very conservative. Um, we focused on expenses as Commissioner Stokes said, that's that had to be the priority, things within our control. Uh, what we heard from the
community was telling us to make sure that we lived within our means and not ask for more. And I think that this this is a great first step in that direction. Um, collecting tax at 96.5% is pretty standard. The homestead amounts of
residential properties in our city adds up to about 45% of our taxes. So when you hear later about $39 million being our property tax revenue and 18 million being the number the amount of money that we will be affected by if a property tax uh reform is effective.
that is a that is a large amount of our our um property taxes that would not we would not see that money which is scary. Um so the assumptions of what we will bring in with a stable mil rate flat mill rate
of 3.7667 which is has been the same for six years uh will be $1.2 million. Uh the next slides get into some comparisons for our effective milit rate and service cost rate. You can see here
we're at 7.6549 compared to our peers within our proximity. You'll also see that as we look at cities for the effective militant service compared to peers who are in our size and scale. These are uh Braden,
Coconut Creek, Fort Myers, Homestead. You see that we are in the middle there. Uh here's our taxable value. Our taxable value in dollars is actually $10.8 billion. Um
you can see Sarasota County is leading that way, but we are lower than city of city of Sarasota. And for the local municipalities only, it's the same chart just shown for those who are exactly like us.
The per capita revenue estimate based on effective Miller rate is very telling as you see that we are lower per capita. That means we have more people and less money coming in per person, which again sort of contributes to our ability to
not continue to pay as we go for longer than we have to. Another point of focus has been grants. I think a lot of you have seen our grants team grow under Valerie Nonowski's leadership. Um, she now has a team that helps her with grants. And
when you look at this, it shows the actual volume of grants that we have 88 open projects and 52 active grants, you know, totaling nearly $50 million. That's impressive. We don't talk enough about the amount of money that our
grants team has their hand in, so to speak. Um, the investment that was made into her and her division has been very successful for our city. We hear all the time from those who look at the city of Northport and say, "You need to apply for this grant and this that grant." And
most of the time when I share that information with her, she tells me someone on our team is already on it or already looking into it or already has a plan, which is which is really good to hear because we know that as a city of our size and our position, we need to continue to try to get as much funding as we can that don't affect the bottom
line of our taxpayers. Um, so for our overall budget assumption, this is sort of what we made our decisions on the 5% from the adopted budget. Like as I said before, that was that was and is a painful exercise. I I
do applaud everyone for going through the exercise, but it was necessary. And now that we've done that, we can have something to shape into something that's more manageable, something that we can work with and get the direction today from to build your budget and put it in front of you um at a later date. Uh no
new positions, current staffing levels. We've talked about that. Um evaluating staffing and operational needs and potential impacts on service levels. We're going to have to continue to do that as things are uncertain around us. It's just a part of being fiscally responsible. We we don't know where it's
going to take us, but we will we we will make sure that we keep doing that. The um the cost the um cost impact associated with capital projects and ongoing operating and maintenance expenses. I do believe that we have to make sure that we keep our maintenance
expenses up. The cost of not doing maintenance, deferring maintenance, uh hurts our infrastructure. It hurts our long-term vision. It does nothing positive for us, but it has been maintenance is typically a category that municipalities usually go into and say,
"Well, let's just take it from there." We are an aging city. We cannot do that any longer. And I'm going to say we were guilty of it because most people are guilty of it. um maintaining adequate reserves to support financial stability. That goes into the the money that we're
trying to save to repurpose for the the potential borrowing situation, the potential um showing the community that we heard them when it says you need to put some money aside for police headquarters before you ask us to put money into the pot as well. That's a fair assessment. um the budget capacity
for future debt service payments. The money that we want to share and spend towards a potential bond validated project is roughly about two $2.5 million. And I think that by doing that, it will show the community of the
ability to be fiscally responsible. Or the alternative is to put that money into a cash reserve that then shows them that you're not just going to take it and spend it, but you are thinking about some of the overall priorities that we're asking our residents to contribute to.
the compensation impact. Um the top one is our current structure of what we had this year and the next one is the proposed merit structure. Um I did hear the commissioner's comments. I don't think I've ever been anywhere that doesn't have a merit structure of some sort.
um rewarding employees for their work is a part of the uh the system that we have where we do show appreciation to them and they are actually compensated for how well they do and their ability to adjust to the rising costs around us. I
do remember back in the uh 20089 era where the recession happened and local governments did remove their merit altogether and that was a very tough time not only to get through that time but then to recover from that time of
the people who left government for various reasons. Um, the other categories here are are union employees and it shows their impact and their volume and how we want to make sure that the non-UN employees still have something to look forward to just as our
union employees do as well based on their contracts. So, the general fund changes here. You see some of the the actual totals of what we've been talking about the union increases and the n the non-union increases is the the merits based on the proposed system you just saw. And that's
like I said roughly half of what we paid last year. Uh health insurance is always a cost. Um city normally absorbs or takes a huge hand in that. We'll have that conversation a little bit later as we get better numbers and better projections and a recommendation. Um
operating costs um going up by inflation. We have to allow for some of that to happen. It will happen. Even if we reduce our operating um number of number of expenses, the the cost of those expenses are still going to go up. The $4.8 million in reduction right
there represents what we truly talked about last year, which was a bring back a budget that look what would a budget look like with a $3 million um reduction in it. Well, this year that number based on what we did is 4.8. And that 4.8 number, just to be clear to everyone, is
too deep. But we will come back and keep working with the numbers to figure out something that we can put in front of you that we all uh the majority of us all are comfortable with um recommending. But again, it's a process and we'll get through it together. But we wanted to make sure that the exercise
was done as directed this year and we believe that doing this exercise is going to put us in a great position to make some good decisions in the very near future. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'll pause right there for public comments and your comments as well. >> Thank you. Commissioners, any questions on this
last set of slides? >> Commissioner Pro. Thank you, Mayor. Uh, slide 26. Um, we have a line that bullet point prioritize maintenance of existing infrastructure to avoid higher long-term
costs from deferred maintenance. Um, on average tax bill there is a Northport R&D capital improvement. Is that related to this item or is it completely different? >> No, that's that's a specific project.
>> Okay. What is >> it on tax bill? >> It's a road bond. >> It's the road bond that was done. Was that maybe 2011 or 12ish? >> Yeah. A road bond. >> Okay. Uh, >> is that when does it mature or
What is that broke bond? >> I can look it up for you. I don't have that right now. >> I guess I calculated on approximately we have slightly over 7,000 75,000 properties in the city. So we we've collecting
about just a little bit over 3.5 million on an annual basis. So that that money where is it being used to as far as the existing infrastructure? That doesn't include roads. Correct. >> The amount that you just asked about the road bond is going to pay off the bonds
that were borrowed to fix the roads during that project. >> It's a repayment of the debt, >> right? >> Yes. >> To service the debt. >> Yes. It I don't understand how you're relating the road bonds to the maintenance.
I thought it's included as far as the >> infrastructure because it says existing infrastructure. So >> do we separate any projects that related to road infrastructure in this?
>> I'm sorry if I'm not making myself clear. >> Yeah, Chuck speak public works director. I I I do need a little clarity. So, uh, we we have projects that are annual projects that are funded through other sources for road rehab. >> The road bond is was voted on by the
residents to bring a section a certain amount of roadways up to standard >> and and yeah, 266 miles. >> There you go. So, correct. >> Just over 250 miles. >> Uh, that project is complete and this amount for the road bond that you see on
the tax bill is just to pay that debt service. When does it mature? >> I believe it's got about 15 years left. >> Okay. >> I think it was I think I think they refinanced it >> a couple years back. So, we'll have to check on that.
So my question is to the city manager. How when you say um prior prioritize maintenance of existing infrastructure pro um infrastructure to avoid higher loss, what exactly or how do you implement to how do you foresee that to
be implemented? >> Sure. From my point of view on that one, as far as the infrastructure, you're looking, if you remember, we had the conversations on the facilities maintenance sides, which would affect the general fund, and that's that, uh, $12 million gap that we had on deferred
maintenance that was identified in the alpha study of our facilities. So, um, last year was the first year that we really contributed any money towards deferred maintenance for those buildings. as you see um you know in in the condition of some of our buildings
now the conversations we're having about having to knock buildings down because they haven't been maintained in the in the past we're trying to avoid that and keep the buildings that we have now that are online safe and uh functional for the future. So by cutting that deferred maintenance if we go back to that then
you're going to see more and more of this letting building go to where now it's not worth repairing. It's better taking care of what you have while you have it. >> Absolutely. >> As opposed to not and then having a bigger bill at the end of the day that
you could have hopefully reduced along the way. >> In this proposal budget in that 12 million, do we include that uh maintenance for um for that senior center building that do
we include that? 12 being the the number of deferred maintenance that was a identified study that that is something that was a that's a long range goal to get there. So we're doing it in pieces because of course we can't we don't have 12 million to do and we couldn't handle that project load uh anyway in one
fiscal year. There's money already identified in last year's deferred and this budget current budget's deferred maintenance in our operating to address those issues uh at awaken. Now, when I say address those issues, remember some of those can't be addressed. We're going
to address what can be done um to make that facility functional for the near future, but anything beyond that will require a more extensive project and likely
be it would honestly be better to knock it down and build a new once you get to that point. >> Thank you for that. And that uh slide 28 when you said a reduction in various levels of services can you identify
>> commission I just wanted to respond. So, um the uh bond um matures in 2037. >> Mhm. >> Um and it got refinanced in 2023 with a better rate than I hope.
>> Yes, we had some support of course. >> Uh the city manager would you say the reduction in various levels of services and it's 4.8 million. Can you give more specific what type of services would be affected? No, not at this time, sir. That's the
exercise we've been talking about with the 5% for each department. We don't have that in front of you to show you the 5%. Thank you. That they've all reduced at this point. So, that's not that's not what we're showing you today. >> So, you just took 5% and that's how you
ranked this number? >> No. >> What we did was as I've explained, sir, >> I'm sorry. I missed it. I probably I missed it. >> Okay, I'm going to say it again. So the 5% exercise that our team did was to start with a flat budget of this year's
which was fiscical year 26 and then to reduce their budget by not just saying we'll just take 5% of it. They had to go out go in and evaluate the services that they provide and the outcomes that would be affected by that and going through that going through their operational department. Then some of them most of
them had to go into their personnel because personnel is so heavy in our organization. though we do not have that information to share as a public document for you today. What we're asking you today is are we going in the right direction of where you want to see
us with this number or do you want us to do something different and by something different I don't mean sort of uh we know that we have to change that number because the personnel is not going to be realistic as I gave the example a fire and there 18 people they would have to cut to meet that assignment. So there is
going to be some art in there. That's what that number represents. Okay. Okay. That it flasher. >> Thank you, Mayor. Um, I totally agree with the approach we're
taking. Um, and I really appreciate knowing that we're approaching this budget cycle in a very conservative way. I think the external environment that we don't control is really dictating that we take this approach as well as the
feedback we're getting from the community. So, um I'm very supportive of the approach. Um just a couple of comments. Slides 23 and 24 are really my favorite slides because to me they
really explain the challenge that the city of Northport faces and um on slide 23 when we take a look at taxable value. So this is the basis that we
um apply our millage rate to to determine how many tax dollars come into the city. And when we look at the city of Northport 10.8 8 billion and the city of Sarasota 9 19.5 billion.
They have twice the taxable value as Northport, but we have roughly twice the land mass we have to maintain and worry about um and about twice the
population that we need to serve. And when we look at slide 24, we see how much the different municipalities have to spend per resident of the city and and we're so
incredibly low. And then on top of that with Camaro, I mean, we're beaten that course to death. Um, but th this just illustrates the incredible challenge we have as a city. Um, and I
so appreciate what staff is doing this year. It ain't easy, folks, and it's going to be a rough budget cycle. Um, I do have a question on slide 25. This data is sort of a current snapshot of where we are with grants.
Do we have any sense? Now we have invested more in grants over the past three or four years. We created our team and added to the team four years. >> Um any sense of how our grant revenue
has grown? Ah here she comes. >> How our grant revenue has grown with that investment because $50 million that's not chunk change. >> Yeah, it's not. Um, Valerie Malangowski, grants division manager. So,
7 years ago, we did not have a grant writer or any grant staff. Um, it was commission direction um 7 years ago um during a budget workshop um to hire a grant writer and that was it.
So back then what I was doing was writing grants and pretty much nothing more than doing that. When that started the volume started increasing >> and we had departments at the time
handling the compliance. Um so the compliance piece of it especially with federal grants is really difficult. Um there's Davis Bacon, which is certified payrolls. Um section three, which is making sure that the
contractors are hiring low and moderate income um uh employees basically. Um there's countless things. There's procurement requirements, special terms and conditions that need to be in procurements. Um
and it started becoming overwhelming. And it was overwhelming for me because we had staff in departments that didn't understand the conditions that were coming with these grant contracts and it was a risk to the city basically. So 3 years into
>> a risk cuz we would be in a situation of having to pay the money >> pay them back or cl get a claw back later. somebody would so when you close a grant um a granting agency can come back audit you and take back money up to
3 to 5 years later afterwards. So um that's a risk and then it also affects our um audit our city audit. If we start having findings we won't be able to get more grants basically. So we we want to steer clear of that. There's a lot of risk. So um we hired two grant
coordinators um about five years ago and then hurricane Ian happened. So um at that point we were receiving a lot of money. I don't have the numbers in front of me. So but there was a lot of um federal grants that we're receiving. I wasn't prepared for the question. I apologize. Um, Hurricane Ian happened
and at the time, um, I promised Chief Titus, um, whenever I had a grants division and people that we would take over the the FEMA, public assistance grants, because it truly is a grant. It's really not emergency management's job to handle that. It's a financial
thing. Um, and I promised Chief Titus that, you know, with his support, thank you for your support, um, that we would take all that over. So, hurricane Ian happens and um so now we have all these grants and here's the hurricane and
we're like drowning. So, um I um asked Jerome if we could hire a disaster um assistance coordinator. So, we hired another person and that's what she does. She's very good at it. Um she get
solidifies our reimbursements. Um she she's very good. So, she's been handling all that in-house herself with a little bit of assistant from our consultant. Uh, especially with Ian, we need assistance from our consultant from Ian. We don't for the other disasters. Um,
then as time goes on, we're getting more grants. We have the Resilient SRQ. We have um well over $10 million that we got from Resilient SRQ last year. Um, and now there's more compliance and there's more. So, um I asked if we could
hire a um compliance coordinator to help with all of that because it was a lot. Um and Sarasota County also changed their structure of how they're going to do um section 3 and um Davis Bacon compliance and we need to handle some of
that in house. So, um it's increased a lot. I'm sorry that was a long line of explanation but that's basically the history of >> and the question wasn't the cost managing it was how have the grant
dollars so the inflow of grant money how has that how much has that increased in the past four or five years roughly >> well so okay so we're talking about hurricane Ian just that alone we're talking $70 million worth of damages
just that alone right Um, and then plus actually I just wanted to correct these numbers too. It's actually $35 million that we have awarded. We have another $15 million um pending that's been submitted. So, um, we weren't anywhere near that. Maybe we
were 10 million. >> Okay. >> 7 years ago, >> if that. I I don't even know if it was that. We just We didn't have the volume, but now we're getting the volume. That's amazing. Thank you. >> You're welcome.
>> Yeah, I'm impressed by that number. Um, so I I I have to concur. Not that I have to, but I do agree with um with commissioner when he said that
it's not our job to figure out how you get there, but it's to sort of set the direction and the goal. and then you guys figure out how to get there. I I'm 100% um in line with that comment of
Commissioner Stokes. I I do want to share, however, um in in my experience in private industry when things got a little tough, this is typically how we approach compensation and this is just information.
Um people rated a three, those are solid performers. There are people who show up every day and they do their job and you can depend on them. In tough times, their reward was they got to keep their job.
People rated two and one and I tend to get reversed. Five is good here or one is good here. I always have to >> five is good. >> Five is good. So people, it's just the opposite where I came from. So five and four people who perform more than their
job description on a regular basis, those are the folks that would get merit increases. So just sharing a perspective from um private industry when times were tough, that's how we would approach um
compensation. But anyway, great stuff. I I like I always like to see how we compare to other municipalities both in our geographic area as well as the the um municipalities that are like us. >> Uh it's always very helpful helpful to
see that. Thank you. >> All right. Uh Commissioner Duval. >> Thank you, Mayor. Uh I want to start out on slide 17 and this is going to seem a little bit redundant but I just want to get myself clear on this that uh I was
looking at the road and created district and from 23 to 24 to 25 the revenues and the expenditures go down each year. those revenues are going down because
that's a portion of the road bond money that's coming in to support I presume that that the you know I'm wrong here that that the expenditures go down each year because we have completed that road
bond project we're getting that done so we're not spending as much money but the revenues are going down also so does that represent that initially we use we had this bond issue that would give us this amount of
money and we spent this amount the first year this amount the second and the third is that >> so your revenues will be tied to several things and and some of them are what Val was talking about some of those revenues come back uh into the city um it's not
kind of broken out that's not revenue from your assessment right those that res That's revenue from several different areas. >> It's the total revenue uh in that fund which includes reimbursements. So we were just coming back from EN damages
and so we started getting reimbursements and that's where you see increase in revenues increase in expenditures both and then it starts coming down as we >> back to our to our normal baseline right Ian caused us to spend a whole lot of
money in R&D u and across the city and and then it is coming back down to that base budget. It will also our expenditures will come down based on uh large projects closing out, right? We may close up one of our large order control structures like 113 that's a a
four or$5 million project that's an expenditure in that year and then the next year it falls off. >> Okay. All right. Thanks for that. Um >> right. >> Also under uh the building fund um where exactly do the building fund revenues
come from? Building fund revenues come from building permit fees. Everything from plumbing permits, mechanical, um, electrical, uh, new homes. Every construction permit in the city that is
pulled has a fee attached and that fee goes into the building fund. And those funds are restricted by state statute, so we can't move them around to use them for other things. >> Okay, thank you. Uh let's see.
Okay, I've talked about this before. Uh on slide 19, uh we talk about the budget adorum revenue at 96 12% collection rate. Um, is there any way we could up that
collection rate? Or, you know, sooner or later you would think that someone doesn't pay their taxes. Well, eventually we're going to put a lean on there and eventually it should kind of
catch up, you know? I mean, the lean's only going to go so long. When they sell the house or or whatever, we should catch up. And I'm just just a question I have is would it be worth our time to dedicate
one person to raising that collection rate? However you could do it. Um >> I would like to clarify. So this is more of a discount that you get when you pay taxes early. You get a discount, right? So that's what that is. A lot of that is
a discount. So you get Right. >> Oh, thank you for that. Uh slide 24 just a amusing comment. Uh when we look at it, you know that per capita revenue estimate, you know,
compared to the others to the other communities around us, you can see where we're at. And I just wondered what does it tell us? you know, I mean, how can we use that information
going forward? It's just a just amusing. Um, slide 25 on on the grants. What just um I had a robust.
What is the difference to me between an open project and an active grant? >> Yeah. Okay. The uh Valerie Malagowski. Um an open project means that it's a project that the city has. It could be a
CIP. It could be um even an initiative or something like that that we're looking for grants for. Um an active grants means that we have the grant and it's active. >> Okay, thank you for that. You're >> welcome. >> Uh and let's see, moving on to slide 26.
Uh we're going to see this again in I think around slide 55. Um, it talks about maintenance versus
uh maintenance versus uh long-term cost resulting from deferred maintenance. And further on in slide 55, it's going to
mention this again. And this is just me personally, but there should be no deferred maintenance. Uh, deferred maintenance is an increased
cost in in my book. Um, you know, that's maintenance needs to be done. Get it done. That'll save us money in the long run. Um, I already talked about uh slide 27 about
merit increases. Um, on slide 28 uh talks about our health insurance cost going up, you know, $750,000. Um,
I know employees don't want to hear this, you know, but our employees pretty much don't pay for their health care costs, you know, other than through um, you know, deductibles. >> Am I am I wrong?
>> I wouldn't say that. >> I pay a lot, right? Good morning. Christine McDade, human resources director. Yeah, depending on the uh insurance, depending on uh which plan you pick, if you're picking the
family plan, our employees pay quite a bit out of their paycheck uh by, you know, their bi-weekly paychecks and they pay all their co-pays, they pay deductibles. uh we are able to offer you know a variety of plans that you can choose from that you know is the best for your
particular you know economic situation but we are we do our best to be competitive but there are areas for example of our insurance that are cost more than other entities in our region >> yeah see it's I'm rather unnowledgeable
about that I don't use any I don't use any of the health benefits uh okay thank you for That it sir. >> Yes. Yes. Thank you. >> Commissioner Petro, >> quick question. Um that lean enforcement
and cost recovery uh which will be implemented I believe in at the end of 2026 2027. Is that going to be a cost recovery or it will be more of a revenue as well bundled into that cost recovery because of administrative piece and all
that? >> My question is when >> can you clarify what? >> Yeah. What do you what's the question? >> Building division building >> building all that. That's more of a we were bold recently on lean enforcement,
>> but I had to go through this >> with the county. >> I'm sorry. Could you please repeat that because I thought you were talking to finance and >> uh the enforcement of leans. >> Yes. that we could not enforce before
but with recent ordinance and what we voted just recently when that will be implemented is that 20 end of 2026 >> no that would be the end of next year 2027 >> end of 2026 >> correct correct now the uh I am working
with the city attorney's office to identify leans that are approaching 20 years old because under Florida statutes es once one of our code enforcement leans reaches 20 years old, it is no longer enforceable.
So, we are we are working to put together a list of those leans and the city attorney is um planning to uh bring that information uh to the commission in conjunction with our department so that
we can foreclose on those leans that are approaching the 20-year mark when they would no longer um be applicable. >> How can we catch up on those 20 year um >> extraition
>> that that's why the that's why this exercise is being done so that we can bring those to the commission and have those um loans leans foreclosed on prior to them becoming uninforceable. Uh we want to be able to capture that. I I
couldn't tell you how many leans the city has allowed to to go uninforceable over the decades. Um, but the city has not previously had a program where they actively foreclosed on uh these old leans. >> In the dollar amount, what would be your
estimate of how many leans that are there? >> We currently have over $3 million in outstanding leans. I couldn't tell you how many are within, you know, a couple years of that 20-year mark. At this point, I don't have that information in front of me. And the reason why trickles
all the way to 2027, end of 2027, >> because the deadline with the >> there are numerous deadlines that have to be met and there is a lot of notice that has to go into putting those uh assessments on the trim notices. So there's there is a lot of work that
still has to be done. Can we charge any administrative inflated I shouldn't say inflated but anything that we can just not cost to cover but you know because of interest and all that >> the leans include administrative costs
to file the leans and the cost of uh the cost recovery from staff time that was spent enforcing the lean and the violation. That is that is all we can do. We can't we can't inflate the cost of the lean just based on the amount of
time >> and uh nothing will be reflected in this process of this budget. >> It will not >> because we don't know I mean there's no it's not enforceable until then. >> Correct. Correct. >> So we'll see that number. If if by
chance we are able to foreclose and collect the lean sometime during this next budget year, then that would you would see that reflected at the end of year totals. >> Okay, thank you for that. >> You're welcome. >> That's it.
>> And that was a quick question. >> Just check. >> Commissioner Stokes. >> Yeah, just uh one observation and one question. Um, as far as the grant division, I mean, I think it's pretty amazing that with less than a half a dozen people or roughly half a dozen
people, we're looking at between 35 and $50 million worth of grant monies. That is mono from heaven as far as I'm concerned. Kudos to you, Val, and your people. You're doing a great job. Um, and just a clarification, we're still
working on the health clinic, which will dramatically affect our health care costs. >> So, we don't need to go down that rabbit hole today, but I just want to make sure you all were still working on that.
>> Thank you, Mayor. >> City clerk, public comment. Tim. >> All right. A few comments on what was being said. Keeping up the buildings, very important. The money needs to stay there for a couple reasons. One, you
need to use it. Two, down the road, even if a department doesn't need it, you might want to sell that building to recoup the cost. So, you always want to keep up the building. Um, I saw the insurance line up there, but I didn't see anything on workman's comp
up there. So, I don't know where you guys put that in your budgets or anything up here and pay, but I would consider that part of pay and stuff. And the one comment you guys were talking about was uh overtime. I don't I don't think you're
self-insured or maybe you could be. I have no idea. But usually on workman's comp, from my experience, if you have overtime, your rates go up is they charge you more because they think the people are tired and they can get hurt. So overtime does affect your working
comps rate. You guys might just want to be aware of that. Um the money coming in, we really need to do a better job, I think, on the industrial and uh commercial properties trying to get people to move here to bring up the tax base. I think that can
help some of these problems. Uh the the lean money, I got to be honest with you, some of you guys up here, I have a big problem with it because some of these leans are for lawn cuts. They're not for taxes. They're for
those stupid things. You never mailed out a letter or they never got a letter and there could be a lot of problems with that. I know the leans exist. If it's for property taxes, then go get the money. But if you cut someone lawn 20 years ago and you never mailed them a
letter and there's never been any foreign sponsors, I'm sorry. I'm not going after a lawn cut because someone had a hair across their der. I know what that causes because you put a lean on my house for the same thing. So I know how that works. So to me,
that's stealing from the people. And I have a real problem on your wage structure. I have a real problem on your wages. There should be no difference between a union employee and a regular employee
who works for me in this city. If you're going to have a pay structure and pay increases, it should be the same for the union employee as the non-UN employee. And from and correct me if I'm wrong, but from the slide I saw, it
looked like the two uh the union employees were getting 2 million in raises and the non-UN employees were getting 775,000. I come to these meetings to be fair to me. That doesn't sound fair. You guys figure it out.
>> Did you want to talk again? >> Thank you. All right, city manager. We're about halfway through your presentation and we've been here for a couple hours. So, would you like to take a lunch? >> A 30-minute lunch would be great and the second half will go faster than the first half.
>> No, fine. We'll take a 36 minute lunch. >> 12:30. >> Thank you, sir. >> We're journ till 12:30. >> Just passed that class. So, it's a little little bit of knowledge under my belt. It was definitely useful. >> Well, Matt, we're we're grateful for
your time and your experience and all you put into your career here and congratulations on your certification and you do amazing job here, sir. >> Thank you for joining me today at the Northport Aquatic Center. It's a great facility. I want to thank Director Sandy Funheler, assistant director Tish Sturgis. I have learned so much amazing
things today. I would like to say that the technical expertise that goes to keep the water safe as well as the people safe is an amazing combination. See you on the next job. Thanks for being here. Hey, city of Northport. My name is Sandra Budro. I am with AECOM and I'm
representing the city of Northport on this glorious Price Boulevard project. We are here on Price Boulevard at the Blue Ridge Waterway in which we are building the box culvert. Um, as we've talked in the past, we're doing a double barrel box culvert here and we are
currently pouring the second wall of the structure. That wall's got to cure, the concrete has to cure, and then we can strip form. So, it does take some time for the walls to cure and then for us to start building the top. After that, we're going to build uh the earthwork
and then the roadway. So, at this point, we are currently early on in the process. If you want further updates, you're going to go to the Price Boulevard web page. Hello, I'm Jerome Fletcher, city manager of Northport. I'm on the job with the solid waste division of public works.
Let's go. Make yourself at home. Oh, I love the duck. Look at that. >> Yes. >> That got passed down through a few co-workers and then now it's it's ended up in this truck. So, I was like, I want to keep it. So, >> well, maybe it's for the uh two-time
driver of the year. How about that? >> Yeah. >> Oh, congratulations. >> I appreciate it. >> Yeah. You You only been here for two years, right? >> Two and a half now. So, >> right. >> Recognition is nice, but what he really values is the simplicity of the work. Meet Cole Sigley, a solid waste driver
for the city of Northport. >> You can put me on the same truck and same route, leave me alone for 30 years, and I'll be it'll be done. You don't have to worry. You don't have to worry about it. >> Right. It's very low stress. Let me do my job. >> Yep. >> I'll do it right. Come back tomorrow. >> Yep. And then you go on to your next
route and then you just keep doing that and then eventually the weekend comes, you enjoy the weekend right back to it, >> right? That's that's how life should be. >> It's a career he planned for early on right after high school. >> I went and got my CDL after I graduated high school and my goal is to get here
eventually. So, >> all right. >> So, I sound like a man with a plan. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. We appreciate it. We appreciate everything you guys do. He even shared a little bit about where he grew up far from the Florida heat >> because we we're from West Virginia. >> Okay. What what part of West Virginia?
>> Uh so it's north central so like Clarksburg. It's about 40 minutes from Morgantown which is where the university and the schools are and all that stuff. >> I've been to Wheeling West Virginia a couple times >> up in the mountains. >> Yeah. >> I I I'm going to tell you driving up those streets when the streets are like
really narrow >> and you got to wind up those I was like oh my And I was young. And I was like 23. >> Yeah. >> And I was like, man, this is going to be a problem. >> There are some of those mountain roads where it's just we like to call them kiss your butt turns where you're
sneaking through >> and then you got to do that in the winter when it's icy on the road. >> I don't want to think about it. I don't even want to think about it. >> No, I'll take this over that up there. >> Any day. >> And when the talk turns to hobbies, the trucks don't stop at work. In his spare time, it's all about monster trucks and RC cars.
>> Nice little basketball court right there. My son would like that. of our house. >> Oh, yeah. >> That's nice. >> Your place to run your little RC trucks, too, >> right? Oh, yeah. >> I got a bunch of those. I like >> Do you? >> Yeah. >> Oh, man. Do you have the gas powered ones? >> I have the electric. I don't have the
gas power. I've seen them. >> I I just want like the ones that go fast. I mean, it can be electric or gas, but how fast can yours go? >> I have So, I have a couple that can go 40 plus. >> Oh, yeah. >> So, they're the brushless motors. So, >> you go race them somewhere like on the track? >> No, I just race around my yard. They're
monster trucks, so they you just take those things anywhere. >> They can jump over anything. >> Oh, yeah. >> Right. >> I rip them through the sand and the grass and hit big jumps with them. I break them more than I do. >> You take a big jump, you're like, "All right, let's do this." And then you land it and it's like boom, it's done. You just broke the wheel offer.
>> But when the work day starts, the focus shifts to keeping the city running smoothly. Every collection has a plan. And behind the scenes, people like Mario Vaniti, planner and scheduler for the city, help make sure it all runs like clockwork. So basically I'll and I will check them one by one.
>> Right. Do you really? >> Oh yeah. I'll get out at every one and I'll check I might take a section and do like three or four streets. >> Right. >> But for the entire city. >> Yeah. So here we have contamination. Our first tote. >> Right. >> We have yard waste which does not belong in there. >> Right.
>> And we're going to end up tagging this and they're not going to collect it because of that. >> Okay. But but as I'm familiar with you write on there exactly what the problem is. I can check off. There's a spot for yard waste on there that doesn't belong in there. And I will show you that >> the goal isn't punishment. It's education.
>> Making sure residents know what belongs in the bin and what doesn't. >> So, here we have these are um it's a recycling notice. It's not a violation. It's not It's just a warning. It's just saying that, you know, oops, you had something in here that didn't belong. >> Right. >> So, I'll date this. Today's the 24th.
And there's a spot on here. We noticed your recycle container that had something that didn't belong and there's a spot for yard waste, >> right? >> Any kind of branches, trees, plants, anything like that does not belong in there. It's not recyclable. The collection center won't take it. So,
basically, I just leave this notice on top of the lid like this. >> Leave it closed like that. Yard waste and that's it. and the driver knows not to collect this. >> And if there's ever confusion, there's even an app that takes out the
guesswork. >> So, the Recycle Coach app, it's easy. You just put in your street, your zip code, and it will it will notify you the day before on your phone. You get a notification and say, "Hey, tomorrow's your trash day." And you put the tan lid out. Wow. >> It'll give you notifications, so you
can't mess it up. >> I like that. From drivers to planters, each role shows the same thing. Pride in their work and pride in serving the community. I do the best I can for y'all. >> Learned a lot today. Had a great experience with the gentleman from solid waste division of public works. What I
learned today was that we have a lot of programs I don't think citizens are aware of to take advantage of. Whether it's cardboard collection, whether it's tote cleaning or also just the fact that we have one gentleman, Mr. Mario, who goes out through the entire city making sure that we recycle properly. Please
make sure that we recycle properly so that we can get the best most efficient use of our solid waste throughout the entire city. It was great to be here today and thank you for tuning in. See you on the next job. >> Residents may begin to see some changes taking place here at Fire Station 81 on
Sumpter Boulevard. And here to tell us more about it is Deputy Chief Nick Hurley. Thank you for being here. >> Thank you for having me, M. >> So tell us about what's going to be going on at Station 81 in the coming months. So, in a few weeks, uh, we will see the station being torn down and the crews that normally respond out of this
station are moving into the temporary fire station, which you can see in the background, and our fire admin will be moving into city hall. >> So, it's being torn down completely and being built back up, right? Not being retrofitted. >> That's correct. The project started out as a remodel and our design was more to
just add a little bit of square footage. The the building's not that old. was built in '98, but after the hurricanes, we had to bring the building up to current code. Different codes existed in 1998. So, that process led to a cheaper option, which was to tear down and rebuild.
>> Sure. So, is there a general timeline for how long this project is going to take? >> Yeah, so the tearown should start in December. So, by the end of the year, it should be all flat ground. And then we are being told anywhere between 12 and 14 months before the new station is
complete and ready for our crews to move back in. >> Gotcha. Okay. So with a project like this, what does the cost look like and where are those funds coming from? >> So the majority of the funding is through Certax. Uh the total project is around 17.5 million.
>> So since a brand new building is being built, what kind of improvements can be made by taking that route? >> So one of the biggest is we are a critical infrastructure building. So, our crews are expected to respond as soon as the storm clears. The new building will be rated up to a category
5 hurricane, and that meets the code for our wind load this far inland because we we get a little bit less intense winds as we get away from the coast. >> Sure, that makes sense. So, we're coming up here on some beautiful trees. >> So, tell me about the plan for these.
Are some of them sticking around? What is your plan? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, one of the things we did very early in the project is we recognized that to the best that we could, we wanted to save as many trees as we could, but especially the mature oaks. >> Sure. >> They provide a lot of shade and they're beautiful and, you know, native to
Florida. So, we worked with the contractor to design the parking lot in a way that we could really maximize the ability to keep these trees. So, a large amount of these uh more mature oaks that you see that were standing under the nice shade canopy, we were able to keep a lot of these trees. some of the
smaller oak trees and some of the older palm trees uh we won't be able to keep. But we worked with the city arborist to ensure that you know we we did the best we could with how that design can be and found out that honestly some of the palm trees are at their end of life as is. >> Got it. Okay. Well, that's great. I know
a lot of the residents are going to really appreciate that as well. So to cap it off, service is staying the same. Everyone's getting the the same level going forward. >> Yeah, Madison, you're right. So the crews that normally operate out of this fire station are just going to be a little ways down the road in the temp
station with a temporary apparatus bay. And all of our administrative staff from fire rescue are moving into city hall which is right down the street and if you need anything from fire rescue you can go in the front doors of city hall turn to your left where economic development just moved into and you'll see a friendly face from fire rescue
ready to help you out. >> That's great continuing to provide that exceptional customer service. So I really appreciate all the information chief. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me. The city wakes before you do. Quiet work already in motion. Work continues even after you've gone.
the way forward kept Ready. Every step, every turn, prepared long before you arrive. When your day ends, others begin theirs. Every hour, every act quietly connected. Most of us don't think about how our
city works. We drive on maintained roads. We call when there's an emergency. We assume someone's keeping it all running. And they are. Northport University gives residents a chance to step behind the scenes, to meet the people doing the work, to see how decisions are made, and to understand
how we, as a community, can be part of it. It's not just about learning the facts. It's about learning where you fit in and how you could shape the city we call home. Uh, the most surprising thing would probably be the opportunity to get taste, which is really cool, understanding how that feels. Would
recommend for everyone unless they have a heart condition. I think another thing would probably be how many people it takes to run everything >> is how well all the departments work together and how well each of the departments know about other
departments. So in the case of a big emergency, they already know what other departments are already supposed to do and they all work together. >> This is always a dance. There's always moving parts. There's always things that are that can impact a decision whether
it's state, local, federal, revenue, all these things come into play and it and it's just amazing all these things that of how how the city is impacted for the variety of things that can occur. >> I feel more confident in the city in the way it operates. I don't see wasteful
spending. I see a lot of uh proactive thinking way outside the box of what I thought a city does. >> Well, I was already in love with Northport. Um I think everyone knows that I got to meet the people who work here, their love for the community, how
hard it is to run a whole city, um the intricacies of it, and the why. It answers so many questions about the why things are done the way they're done. So it does it empowers you to love where you live more and to get more involved.
>> And I think the important message here is the confidence that I've really feel now of the people running each each of these departments. You know, they are running multi-million dollar businesses all separately but coming together with
tax dollars that that come through. And that is by far not an easy task. departments that we've been to seem to have improved with the growth in the city. So, the mere fact that we've grown such a major amount, department has have grown, the staff has grown, the
offerings have grown, and the um need for involvement from the residents has also grown. >> I think parks and wreck really showed up and did an amazing job. They had a bunch of staff people. They kind of brought us around, had different speakers. I think they take the prize for the best uh
overall display. >> Places that I didn't think I would enjoy as much. Like I didn't think I'd enjoy public works as much as I did. I loved it. And it seemed to me that there were the more questions that were asked. >> The economic development council. I think that is just a again it all points
to uh live, work, and play within our community. >> I think there's a lot of misunderstanding out there about really how these departments work, how the city really works. And I think by offering a class like this, you get such an exposure to so many different departments and meet so many different
people. You can't help but want to be a part of it. >> If you plan on living here and living amongst the community and understanding the growth and understanding what we need, definitely join the Northport University. You're going to be pleasantly surprised. >> I would absolutely say do it because you
don't know until you know. And you can go online and you can read all these things, but a lot of it is the experience and sitting across from from whether it's the the chief of police, the chief of fire, rescue, utilities, all these, you know, administration, all
these departments are absolutely you want you meet the leaders. You can look into their eye and ask pertinent questions that are important to you. to understand of where they're at, where they're going, what are their constraints, and how we can be as residents try and give them the
resources they need to provide the services that we're asking them to provide. >> I'm more in love with Northport than I've ever been. >> Hey, Brandon, what are you listening to? >> Just listen to my CPR playlist. What's on that? >> Staying alive.
>> I'm Zach and this is Travis from Northport Fire Rescue. And I'm Brandon and this is Brett from the Northport Aquatic Center. >> Did you know a lot of the songs that you listen to on a daily basis follow the beats of CPR? 100 to 120 beats per
minute. >> CPR saves lives. >> Hey, Northport. I'm here with Ryan from our engineering division in public works and we're in an area that is experiencing some drainage concerns that were brought to us by some residents. So
Ryan, what are some things you do when you get onto a scene like this to see what the issue may be? >> First thing we do is we start at the bottom of the system, the outfall, how it connects into the uh canal. Then we start working our way up. We go through the cross drains, the culverts, the under drains, and we look at every way the water flows downward. And we look
for blockages, uh, sumped uh, dirt pile up and even sometimes could potentially collapsed uh, coverts underneath. And you got to remember, you can't report your uh, water being an issue until we have 72 hours of no rainfall. And let's say it rains on Tuesday and a couple
days go by and that second day it rains again, you got to restart your 72 hours. We have to spend time of our water inside the system in order to clean it and in order to slow it down. Otherwise, we're going to end up washing out our neighbors below us. >> Absolutely. So, tell us about what's happening here.
>> Right here, we have a rather large uh blockage inside the system. This is clearly a um illegal dump of some sort, uh a tree obviously, and this will slow down the water. If we could see on the north side of it, or north as in the upper part of the uh drainage way, it's
full of water. But when we look at our footage from down below, it's dry. So this is a huge point of collab collecting water. These systems really fail sometimes with like a a death by a thousand cuts. You get a um a sump here, a collapsed uh covert pipe, a blockage
like this, and it slowly adds up. >> That makes sense. So if anybody out there is seeing issues like this or experiencing it in your neighborhood, you're welcome to report it um through our Northreport system, which is at northportfl.govnorthreport, /northreports or you can give the public
works customer service a call. In Northport, families are finding more and more places built just for them. We opened um this past June. We are an indoor play center for children ages 0 to 7. We do open play sessions, birthday
parties, special events, and classes here at the play center. for me. Um, you know, being a Northport resident, there was really not a whole lot in Northport for children. Um, besides the local parks, so it was super important for me to have something in the community to be
able to offer to families with young children. You want to have that option to be able to still get out of the house with the kids, get their energy out, and not have to hike all the way up somewhere with traffic. and you can just go to a spot near you and just make
those special memories that are close to home. >> Playtime Paradise isn't the only new spot making Playtime local. Do the Beach is a immersive indoor adventure park. We are primarily an inflatable based attraction. We have over 14 different ride attractions scattered throughout
the park. With growing young families pouring into Northport and growing the city, we just knew there was such a need for families to have an outlet and some some good entertainment, active entertainment for children. One of our core beliefs as a as a company is encouraging kids to get involved in
active and social play, getting them away from their screens and using their imaginations. From slides to inflatables, dance classes, birthday parties, Northport is growing and so are the options for young families right here at home. The community has welcomed us with open arms.
>> We are thrilled to be here. >> Shows families that there's a place for them um to grow as a young family in Northport. There's a place in Northport that invites you to slow down to see, hear, and feel the world around you.
Inside the Garden of Five Senses is Boundless Adventures, a playground where every child can play, no matter their abilities. Just beyond the playground, the story stroll turns a simple walk into an interactive adventure. Each step reveals a new page or
activity. sparking imagination, curiosity, and conversation. It's a walk, a story, and an adventure all in one beautiful setting. The Garden of Five Senses, Boundless
Adventures, and the story stroll where every visit is a story waiting to be discovered. While you're watching me run away from this hurricane, you could be signing up for emergency alerts. Sign up at alertsacount.com today.
Welcome to the brand new Northport Podcast Network. We're so excited to introduce you to our revamped lineup of shows created to keep you connected, informed, and inspired about everything happening in our city. >> That's right. With three unique shows under one network, there's something for
everyone. >> First up is Northport. Now, Madison and I will rotate hosting this fast-paced news-driven podcast to bring you the latest city updates, event previews, and important information, all in one quick listen. >> Think of it as your weekly guide to staying in the know about what's
happening in Northport. >> Next, we have Northport Stories. Laura and I will share heartfelt and inspiring tales from around our community. Stories that showcase the people, places, and moments that make our city special. And don't worry, Voices of Northport isn't
going anywhere. I'll continue bringing you even more personal stories and interviews with residents who shaped our city. And last but not least, Northport Living. Cody and I will also rotate hosting this show, which is all about tips, events, and lifestyle ideas to help you make the most of life right
here in Northport. Whether you're looking for familyfriendly activities, ways to get involved, or helpful home and garden tips, Northport Living has you covered. With breaking news, heartfelt stories, or practical tips, the Northport Podcast Network is your
go-to source for all things Northport. >> Make sure to subscribe to the Northport Podcast Network wherever you listen and join us as we celebrate and connect with our amazing community. >> Northport Now will be released bi-weekly. >> Northport Stories and Living will be monthly. A schedule will be available on
social media and our website. Hello everyone, Devon Pulis here, aquatics manager. Welcome to my crib. We have fun here at the crib. Programs included. Become a pass member. Play all year long. Payer at the crib. We do have
rules. We take all payments here at the crib. Apple Pay, Mastercard, Visa, cash. You pay right here to enjoy the crib. So, enter through the gate. Childp proof, most adult proof.
Shade. What's that? Our newly installed sun shade available for rent all season long. Here at my crib, you don't have to worry about a place to find a seat. We've added more chairs than ever here at the crib. You're coming to enjoy the cribs
and you got little ones. We got the perfect area for them. Our Pelican playground. Newly painted, fresh floor, fresh palm tree. It's looking clean. Looking for a place to work your upper body? Take a shot at here at our Stingray shuffle.
Looking to relax? I got you covered here with our lazy river. Living more on the adventurous side. Check out the slides right behind me. Newly painted. All offer something individual and unique. Check it out.
Check out the main pool kept at a wonderful 84° all year long. I just want you to have a good time. We have safety covered. Lifeguards here, staff all day, every day when we're open
for you to enjoy. Concession is open. Pizza, pretzels, nachos, ice cream. We got it all. My crib is your crib. Looking forward to seeing you here.
>> Duty calls. Hello, my name is Jerome Fletcher, city manager of the city of Northport. I'm at the Northport Aquatic Center. I'm on the job today. Let's go. Morning. Good. Hey, sir. >> Nice to see you. Thanks for having me today. >> Of course. Hey, we're going to go
through our opening checklist for this morning to make sure that the facility is safe and operational. >> All right, sounds good. Let me do it. Before anything else, the team walks the entire area to make sure everything is clean and in good shape. >> Our next part of our task is to make sure that our body of water is one
clear. The water must remain clean. We must identify any possible materials that shouldn't be in the water. >> Then it was time to check the surge tanks. >> You can see the glistening of the water down there. >> If the water is too deep and you hear a rushing of water, that means that this needs to be filled before we can begin
operations for this. >> Okay, >> it's part science, part intuition. At the relax river, Jesse showed me the digital checklist system, the hydro app. As soon as I click yes on this checklist that let's say the water is clear and I do not identify that the water is cloudy
or any sense that yes goes directly to my manager and lets them know that at this exact time I checked that water to make sure it was safe and clear. >> This technology being used at its best job. >> Now our rotations we have evolved to having our lifeguards into a more of a
roving position. >> With the competition pool we still maintain the chairs for the height eligibility. Um, but here we have to have a minimum of five lifeguards just to run this body of water. >> Wow. >> And we actually have a lifeguard
positioned in our catch pool over there to help our guests that are coming out of the slides at a bar tarp and twister. >> I've seen that person there. Then Jesse brought up something that most people might not think about. Pool skimming. >> Pool skimming is the sounds of the water being properly flowed. So with those
drains, all the water has to constantly filter throughout our pool at least three to four times a day. So not only is the water continuously being pumped in, continuously flowing out, being cleansed through our sand filters, then being pumped back into the pool. It's a
very long process, but it makes sure that the water stays the clear as possible. >> Then Jesse taught me about the zones. >> It helps maintain that their body of water is theirs to protect anybody that's in their zone. So lifeguard Brandon right now is actually scanning red one zone. So red one zone is here.
Any part of this body of water that reaches let's say all the way from those stairs to the bulkhead and to the side of the corner. This entire zone is his right now to make sure that they are staying healthy and hydrated. We do have a 30 minute a rotation here for all of
our lifeguards. And lifeguards are not meant to bypass more than one hour of continuous lifeguarding. So after every hour, the lifeguards must take either a visual break or an actual break. After Jesse's walkthrough, I met up with Matt,
one of the pool technicians responsible for keeping the water clean and safe every single day. He started by showing me how they test the water across the park. We got comp pool, lazy river, kids pool. >> Each sample is dropped into small disc and loaded into a device and in just
seconds it gives a full readout on the pool's chemistry. And before this little machine was created, this was a more of a manual model. >> Yeah. We um a lot of people will use tailored tests. So it involves like a little different chemicals. You would fill up a container and drop them in
like a certain amount and basically it'll calculate from there. Um what your pH and chlorine is. >> And this is the daily task. >> Yeah. This is what we do at the start of every day. >> Inside the control room, he fired up the valves that get the entire water park up and running. When we have everything
going, the water level will be back up, but since we're not running everything in the moment, it'll drop it down a couple inches. >> Next, he showed me the daily checklist for the part. >> Then we have our chemical data sheets. So, basically just making sure like our comp pool, lazy river, kids pool are all
where they need to be, anywhere between two parts per million or 10 parts. And then pH is somewhere between 7.2 and 7.8 for a healthy pool. >> There you go. Then came the back washing and wasting process. Flushing the filters to keep the water flowing freely
or removing excess water from the system to keep the water levels balanced. >> And then it'll start coming out in this pit. >> So this this whole pit will fill in about 3 minutes. >> Really? Over there? >> Yep. >> Next, we changed out one of the strainer baskets which help catch large debris
before it can reach the pumps. >> I'll tra you that one. Thank you. Then new one goes in just like that. And we usually let those dry out. I'll clean them later this week. >> Before joining the team in Northport, Matt worked as a lifeguard in Charlotte County under Trish Sturgis, our
assistant director of parks and recreation. >> So I've known Trish a very long time. So that definitely was one of the influences of wanting to come work at the aquatic center. Had me go out for an AFO course recently, which is aquatic facility operator course. basically
anything and everything relating to a facility like water chemistry, safety rules, that this and that. So, I went there. I just passed that class. So, it's a little little bit of knowledge under my belt. It was definitely useful. >> Well, Matt, we're we're grateful for
your time and your experience and all you put into your career here and congratulations on your certification and you do amazing job. >> I appreciate you, sir. >> Thank you for joining me today at the Northport Aquatic Center. It's a great facility. I want to thank director Sandy Funheler, assistant director Trish Sturgis. I have learned so much amazing
things today. I would like to say that the technical expertise that goes to keep the water safe as well as the people safe is an amazing combination. See you on the next job. Thanks for being here. >> Hey, city of Northport. My name is Sandra Budro. I am with AECOM and I'm
representing the city of Northport on this glorious Price Boulevard project. We are here on Price Boulevard at the Blue Ridge Waterway in which we are building the box culvert. Um, as we've talked in the past, we're doing a double barrel box culvert here and we are
currently pouring the second wall of the structure. That wall's got to cure. The concrete has secure and then we can strip form. So, it does take some time for the walls to cure and then for us to start building the top. After that, we're going to build uh the earthwork
and then the roadway. So, at this point, we are currently early on in the process. If you want further updates, you're going to go to the Price Boulevard web page. Pop. >> All right, it's 12:30. We're back. Just waiting on a couple commissioners, but I
do have a quorum. City Manager, this is back over to you, sir. >> All right. All right. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Uh, we're going to keep going through the slide deck. Uh, some of the slides that we're going to talk about now are more familiar to the commission. So, that's when I said it should go a little faster
and that's why I said that. You look at the the pillars which we all know in the last one we added was disaster response um to the right which gives us seven pillars and you look at the adopted budget by the pillars of course safe community is uh one of the largest at
29% and then you have infrastructure and facilities at 38%. When you look at the general fund, that's where you have uh oops, I'm sorry, public safety as the largest general fund user. And this goes back to
the whole conversation of property taxes. Uh our public safety, I think we've we've sort of all understood that enough to where we are now. Here we talked about the reduction potential reductions to the electric um public service tax. Earlier this year is when
the conversation came before the board and you gave us a direction of two scenarios and one was a revenue neutral and one was a um reduce it to 6% and what would that impact look like on our particular budget. It is uh interesting
and good because one thing is we we want to lower that 10% from 2026 that that is the goal of our team because we want all of our rates to go down as much as we can. bear within our budget. If you look at the revenue neutral approach for
2027, the rate would go down to 9 approximately 9.4%. And the revenue cost to the city would be roughly half a million dollars. If you look at the scenario where we're we would reduce 6% of the monthly
electric bill, you're looking at approximately $14 savings to our residents and you're actually looking at a loss revenue of roughly $3.2 million. So, there is a balance there. There is a
conversation to be had as to what number the board would like us to strive to get to, but our staff is committed to making sure that our goal is that we come in at a number lower than what we proposed in 26's budget for 27.
Uh the timeline when that occurs and how it occurs, this is very just procedural with the two ordinance readings for adoption. It has to be at least 120 days before the effective date and we have to notify FPNL at least 60 days before the
effective date as well. Um the P off was something that we talked about a lot in our budget last year. I think we believe we have two of those. And talking about the P off which is the payment in le of franchise fee for solid waste. Um we are proposing and what you
see right in front of us going from 9% to 8%. You see this results in a decrease of approximately $257,000 to the city in its revenue. There's also a peel off on order sales
and when you see the impact of reducing the current rate from five 5% to 4% that's roughly saving 48 cents a month or customer savings of $5.76 resulting in $160,000 decrease in revenue from the
general fund from going from 5% to 4%. Properity tax reform. So, this is sort of uh the elephant in the room, so to speak. Um, if you if you think about last year, last year we left off talking about Doge. This year, we're going to leave off talking about property tax
reform because it's not going to be solved um in this room today or we're not going to get any new information today, but hopefully as the budget process progresses, we will know more about it and then how we will have to adapt to whatever is outside of our control.
I think we all know what property taxes are. We started at the beginning just telling what they are and what they fund. The different departments that they service. Again, uh public safety, quality of life, uh code enforcement, they're all they're all funded from that same bucket that we currently get uh
from property taxes. So, what affects your bill? um you looked at the assessed value of your home which we we always want to it to increase even though I have heard complaints about increasing property values. If your property value starts to decrease that means we are
doing multiple things incorrectly. Uh we want people to want to be here and come here continue to come here but we have to be ready for them to come here and we want to make sure that they uh have the best uh experience while they are here. Um there are exemptions, homestead exemptions that can reduce your value.
Um mill rate is set by our taxing authority which is our board. Uh an assessment caps we do have save our homes that limit sort of how fast the growth can occur. Um for those who don't know what the mill is, the millillage is the the rate of the taxable $1,000 for
your property value. Um our 3.7667 mill rate has been the same for 6 years. And when you look at that rate applied to a home of a cost of $250,000, you get roughly $941 as an annual payment.
So who sets the taxable values? That is set by the property appraiser. Um the homestead property values save our homes as I mentioned 3% whichever or the CPI whichever is less. Uh, and of course there's other exemptions for people who fall into those certain categories
listed citizen, widow, and veterans. The non-h homestead property is a 10% increase as a cap, and the Save Our Homes allows residents to transfer benefits up to $500,000 uh from a Florida home to the homestead exemption to a new home that qualifies
as well. This is just a straight line showing of our millage rate. What you'll see is that it went in 2016 to 2017 it went down and and then it went down again from 2017 to 18. Uh it stayed flat for a
couple of years and then of course 20 f year 20 a lot happened in that year in fiscal year 21. But you you as a we as a city have come out with a flat rate for the last six years which is impressive knowing everything that's happened in
the last five or six years. But again, we are trying to reduce a lot of things in a lot of ways. The millage rate is one that should not go down preferably based on everything that we're trying to do with
the money that we already have. I'll stop there. Um, so who sets the mill rates? So, they're set by you, the school, and other different boards. and they are based on budgetary needs as I was trying to allude to but you know we know that it's it's a tough situation of
changing the mill rate at this point in time and we we will adjust accordingly. People always ask us well how are you spending our taxpayer dollars and so for the dollar that one of our taxpayers would receive this is this pay this is what we would receive. The county school
district will receive 42 cents of that dollar. Um, city of Northfor, we received 26 cents of that same dollar and it still goes to pay for the services we mentioned earlier. Um, police, emergency, medical development services, parks and recck facilities,
charter officer, charter offices and admin and management. We also pay they they also pay 23 cents to the county and they pay for you know different services as well. And then the other 9% goes to for regional services for residents like
libraries, um court services, property appraiser, uh some of the other functions that they are responsible for. But the the takeaway here is that Northport is not the only place that our residents are paying money to and we want to make sure that we all understand that they we all these entities provide
a specific value to them in their quality of life here in the city of Northport. So, what do your local taxes do for you? Um, so $78 a month, we roughly get you $194 per month in city services and for every dollar that we um
get in taxes, we deliver about $2.5 in essential services. When you look at the various general fund departments and divisions, this shows you monthly uh how the services that you receive and some people can better relate to this model because
they're departmental based and they can actually see what they pay per household on a monthly basis. Um the $942 in taxes on that $250,000 home roughly breaks down to $78 and a half per month.
And this is what it would look like as you look to see where you're getting your value for the money that's being paid. Uh there are multiple house bills attached to this um property reform section. Um there's a lot going through. There's a lot to keep track of. Our
lobbyist has provided us a lot of information as it continues to un unravel so to speak. And um Rob Lewis at the county is another one who gives us a lot of good information so that we can hopefully prepare for what's going to happen at some level in some time later
in this year. Um because we need to know one way or the other. And since we don't know, what we do is we prepare for multiple scenarios and multiple whatifs. So in our mind, if you look at the potential impact on this slide of $18 million, that is a lot of money that
will come out of one fund. It is not as simple as um it sounds and when we are told and we know that hey public safety is exempt for that public safety will still be affected by that tremendously
because if we have to reduce every other department or service that send that fund to make up for not reducing our public safety. Then when funds become available, they will go to those different departments who bear the brunt of that loss. And then that will then
continue to reduce our staffing levels in public safety. And we're not a legacy city. We are a growing city. That is going to cause uh concerns as we try to move forward with keeping the same quality of service provided to our citizens.
So the timeline of what we're looking at right now, um so March the session ends. Uh I believe some more special sessions are already being scheduled. Um the election will happen November 3rd and from that the reform determination will
be known and then it'll go in effect January if it's successful of 2027 and then October 1 is when it starts to affect us which is our fiscal year 2728. uh general fund impact. We talked again about our commercial base. We know that
part of the UDC rewrite was to put us in a position to capitalize on the growth and we want the proper growth of commercial in our city. Um the 45% of our homes that are homesteaded, that is why our $18 million number from our total pot is so high. Um, and when you
look at public safety costing $55 million and our pot of general fund revenue is, excuse me, our property tax portion of our general fund revenue is $39 million. We can see on this on one of the
upcoming slides of how easy it is to see that we are going to be in a bad position right here as it relates to how much money we get where it has to go and it not being enough to cover what's left
to fund in our government which again based on the Doge report which is what we're looking at we're talking about core services and enhanced services. the enhanced services that are not in the core services, we would have a really hard time providing that at a level that
is similar to what we do now. But if it if that does happen and we know that again it's outside of our control, we have to we have to adapt to what's in front of us. Um we know that we have a
great level of support from our um representatives at the state level uh locally that we go and see and talk to. We know all of them have our best interests at heart. I don't believe any of us questions that. But if we do have to think about some potential service impacts, you know, we may have to
create, you know, special assessments for parks and wrecks or infrastructure or a dedicated EMS military. These are these are ideas that our teammates have kicked around that would allow us to get closer to the amount of money that we
had to do the job with. Um I think the I think the citizens are concerned about us saying that well we're just going to reduce services and that's going to be the answer or we're going to just implement a local fee or fine that will replace that money. And I don't think either one of those are the answer. I
think that we must adapt to what's in front of us and we can do that by reimagining services that we have done one way for a very long time and we will not be the only ones having to do that. So we won't be alone. You know I think everyone in our region everyone is going
to feel this same sort of pinch. The deferred maintenance we talked about that earlier today. That's one of the first things people go to is say well let's look at deferred maintenance and then something breaks and well what happened? Well you didn't take care of you didn't maintain it. And then you start getting to the maintenance and um the maintenance schedule and frequency
of things and how it catches up to you at some point. Um reduce capacity for capital projects. Um for a city that can't sort of provide its own capital projects, that would be a challenge. Um reducing staffing levels, those are things that we would do inhouse. Um
service levels and quality of life. Again, they would need to be reimagined so that we can adjust to the funding available. the support services for police and fire. You know, I put that one in there because I didn't want people to think that, well, if this passes, our public safety will be fine.
There will not be anyone who will be fine in this scenario. We will all have to figure out how to make this work. Um, and I don't I don't say this in a way that would is driven to spark fear. I just want people to be realistic about what it
means because when people think about, well, I would love to pay less in property tax. We all would if we were able to still maintain the level of service that we all would like as well. Um, and right now, we can't figure out one without having the other. And based
on my conversations with um people at the state level, their plan is for us to figure out with our own plan. So, uh I think that we should always take care of ourselves and think of ourselves and how the future might look if this happens.
But right now, we are just uh in wait and see mode. So, one of the things that we've heard about lately has been the Winchester Rants annexation. Um there's been conversation about, you know, how it would help or harm the city. And we
believe as we have, you know, always believed that when you when you annex um someone into you and they provide a value to your community and you have that opportunity, you know, you should take advantage of it. Um I'm ask Mr. Jarbo to say a few words about this cuz
he's he's managing the project more intimately than I am. But there's always a fear of well what's going to happen if we get bigger too fast? And if it's done the right way and you are careful and you plan for it, then it could only
enhance the city that we're in. >> Thank you, sir. Um, just our burough deputy city manager. So, more or less there are 3600 acre um Winchester ranch is sitting outside our city limits. Um
through through many years u there's been conversations between staff and a developer about what would the advantages be if they were to annex in uh they originally thought they would get their water and sewer from Englewood that hasn't happened. You know a a lot of folks are
of the mindset well if we if we don't want growth to happen we can just say no and the project will die. This project already has its entitlements from the county and if we provide if we're the water and sewer provider great. If we're not, it's not going to stop this project from happening.
In Englewood can go contract with Peace River. Peace River is about to bring a 52-in water line smack dab up the middle of Wellen Park. So, water won't be an issue. The developer, similar to us, um built a sewer plant, built a water
plant. So, there's there's nothing that's going to keep this project from happening. There's too much money at stake. There's been too much investment at this point. uh whether we're pro the provider service provider for various municipal services including utilities nothing's going to keep this project
from happening. So that being said, from a staff uh point of view, you know, it would be recommended that you're going to get whether this builds inside the city or builds outside the city, you're going to still get the traffic. You're still going to get the impact of your school system. You're still going to get
the impact from a crime perspective. You to some extent because most of the commercial properties inside your city limits, you're still going to get um um emergency uh response like ambulance. So if you're going to pay the freight on
the cost of a project whether you know you might as well get the benefit and one of the benefits is annexing them in. So that's kind of that situation. There's nothing that's going to keep this project from happening. they can get their if they stay outside the city, they can get their utilities through Inglewood and ultimately through uh
building their own sewer plant uh for that project site and uh contract have an Englewood contract with Peace River since there's a 52 inch line on its way uh through Well Park. >> Okay. Thank you, Mr. Yboro. And Mr.
Mayor, that's the end of that section and we're happy to answer any questions or public any public comments you might have. >> Commissioner Sts. I go first this time and I'm going to go from there and backwards. So start with annexation.
Thank you deputy city manager >> for explaining that to everybody because there is no downside to this. As you said this is going to happen property rights. This was settled years
ago. They're going to build 7 to 9,000 homes. We're going to we're going to incur cars on the road like you said. We're going to there's congestion, there's this, there's that. There's all the things that come with this growth.
Right now, we provide services and we're really not getting anything for it. There's no reason why this project shouldn't be annexed into the West Villages the same way West Villages grew. We are talking $13
million worth of property tax revenues that will come into this city upon that buildout. There's $180 million worth of impact fees that will be paid by property owners and developers and
builders out there that will go to service and create the infrastructure. It will not cost legacy Northport property owners anything. will not cost existing Well and Park property owners anything to the Well and Park property
owners who live there now, me included, there'll be 7 to 9,000 more rooftops to help support the cost of that district eventually. So that is a good thing. Um, you take this project, you take a
special district out east to build commercial and light industrial. You take the buildout of the medical services industry that will surround this hospital. There's the light at the end of the tunnel 5 to 10 years out for
us. We need to juggle the ball and find our way to that point. There is an endgame here. And that leads me back to the other pieces. You know, you look at only 26% of our tax dollar coming to the city. You look at 65% going to the to
the Sarasota County School Board and to Sarasota County. You can evaluate the services we get and everybody has their opinion on that. So, I'll leave that as it is because again, we all work collaboratively to try to help each other. our county for all the
money they took and have taken over the years. We're now finally getting the hospital. We also got SRQ money. So, you can't just paint somebody with a bad brush and say, "Ah, they're the problem. They're not the problem." But it shows us what limited resources we have to
work with. And then finally, backing into the lowering the fees. You know, I know it seems like a token amount, and it is a token amount, and it's not easy for us to swallow after raising these
fees over a period of years to cut them back some. But even if somebody's getting a couple of percent back, a few bucks back in their pocket, it's a heck of a lot better than grabbing a couple of more bucks out of their pocket, somehow someway, we need
to shift this back the other way. And that leads me to the final piece which is I've said it since the first strategic planning meeting I attended here almost four years ago. You know we have seven pillars and under those
pillars we have series of priorities and very systematically and analytically we created them all. But what happens when things are tight and growth is so astronomical that it's hard to keep up
and we find ourselves not being able to service the top one or two priorities under certain pillars. That's an uncomfortable thought and the only real solution I have or the thought I have on it is that for a period of time
pillars are going to have to help other pillars. There's no two ways about it. There are certain pillars in this city that do not have the ability, I don't believe, to achieve what we're trying to achieve here without the help of other
pillars. And so, it's going to take the team working together over the next period of years. And it's a challenge for all of you. I get it. You can't pit each other against each other. We got to find ways to figure it out together and find the best way to do this.
Recognizing that there's some sweet spot when it comes to amenities, public safety, and cost. So, with that, you know, you are challenged. I get it. And and we
will help all we can. Hopefully, you will do a great job bringing something back that's palatable. and we'll see how much it hurts. We'll see if it's something we can survive with. Maybe there's, you know, maybe we'll have to adjust our our ideas here in our
direction, but, you know, this is what making the sausage is all about. So, don't get frustrated. Don't don't point at each other. Don't don't, you know, fight this. Work with it. figure out the best ways we can do it and then somehow
we'll find that sweet spot that gets us from year to year. Thank you, Mayor. >> Uh, Vice Mayor, >> um, thank you, mayor. I have a couple of specific questions. I've always used the following as a general rule of thumb.
For every dollar we pay in taxes, we consume about a dollar and a quarter of city services. And what I'm seeing in these slides is it's way worse than that. For every dollar we pay in taxes,
we consume $247 in services. Am I reading that correctly? >> That's based on the total general fund expenditures. >> Okay. So, it's not our fully voted. Our districts are out of it. It's just >> Yes, it's just our general.
>> Okay. that that might explain it. Um, is this across all property types or is there a different look when we pull out commercial? What does commercial look like by itself? >> Yeah, this is based on an average
property tax value of >> the entire property. >> It's more of a simple approach. >> Okay. Okay. um on slide 57 um when we're talking about Winchester
and and I want to echo thank you for this analysis. There's been so much conversation about it on social media or in other places. It's good to have the facts. um will assuming the annexation goes through
when once these assets are built those that are detailed on slide 57 will it be like the rest of Wellen Park once it's built the assets are transferred to the city and then we're responsible for operating them and maintaining them >> yes ma'am
>> okay thank you for that cuts I I'm very supportive of even if it is a little bit of trying to put some money back in the pockets of our residents.
When it comes to FPL, um I think it was Commissioner Duval who originally broached this and his suggestion was revenue neutral. I'm supportive of that. I'm really not supportive of cutting it so that money
outflows from the city. However, I'm realistic about it. FPL is increasing their rates. So, any little cut we give is it's really going to be masked by that, I
believe. Um, so we're going to have to be clever about that. And um I I'd like to pick something where people really do feel it. Um I'm not sure people would feel it.
Um pillar priorities. I I want to build a little bit on what Commissioner Stokes said and say the same thing in maybe a little different way. We've been very careful um over the
years of developing out our pillars and the projects under our pillars to not prioritize one pillar over another or to prioritize any particular projects under one pillar over the projects of another.
Um I I think we no longer have the luxury of doing that. um which I think is is Commissioner Stokes point and it is going to be painful and and I echo we're really going to have to work
collaboratively and some pillars are going to donate and other pillars are going to take um and somehow we need to figure out how to make that happen in a way that impacts our residents um the least. and and one
of the factors for me um certainly those things that directly impact the health and safety of our residents are number one, but I also look at historically what areas historically have we invested
in and what areas that are critically important have we not historically invested in? And I think those projects need to be elevated. Um maybe maybe not at the expense of
areas where we've invested a lot. Um and maintenance is just one of those areas. I mean we have torn down how many buildings have we torn down in the six years I've been on this
commission? Four, five. All center the art center. um those buildings should have gone another 10 years at least. >> So anyway, that's just some some general
sense for me. It's going to be very very difficult and I I think we are in a position where we may have to identify some projects and elevate those and other projects that we defer. Um, and we're just going to have to get into
this in a very cooperative way. Um, and I will say for myself, I have my pet things and I'm going to have to be ready to to not get all bent out of shape. My pet things might be impacted. We really
have to approach it from a doing the most the most. Right. That's all I have. All right, Commissioner Dval. >> Thank you, Mayor.
As the vice mayor mentioned, yeah, I was the initiator of the idea of lowering our 10% tax on electric bills, you know, and we also get a a franchise fee added on to that, too. Um, I'm very
happy to see that somebody took the time to actually get into the numbers. 9.8%. Uh, thank you for that. Um, I didn't delve into that that far. Uh, I'm looking at
the the numbers and when I originally brought this up, I brought it up twice. I first brought it up as a city manager after I was ser first elected. I said, you know, charge
a 10% tax. Every other tax that you buy, you know, you go to Walmart and buy something, it's 6%. 7% with the surf tax. We charge 10%. He said, I'd like to see that lower. And the city manager, you know, said to me,
you know, rightfully so. He asked to protect his interest. How would I replace that money? And I didn't have the answer for him right then. But a few weeks later, FPL put in for these increases.
Okay? And that gave me the idea that as they increase, we could lower our percentage of tax so that our citizens don't see that increase in their bills. Now these minor changes in their bills
um it's based on information from FPL where they said a typical customer of a th00and kilowatt hours would see this year a raise of about $2.15 or $2.51. That's if you use a th00and kilowatt
hours. There's a lot of people that use a lot more than that. This year it's $2.51 stacks. Next year it's about $10 and something. Their rates are going up over a number of
years. So in the short term, I'm very happy to see that this is here and we can gradually lower that rate. The first uh lowering it doesn't have to
be to 9.4. If we're gonna, my idea was to lower the rate but keep our revenue neutral. Okay. If we're going to lose $500,000 at 9.4, well, then make it 9.5 or 9.6.
We're still doing the citizens a favor. We're keeping our revenue. And we can spread this out over four years. And after four years, maybe we're at 8%. Okay. Well, after I'm out of office,
I'll be down there lobbying to have it over the next four or five years go down to get to that 6%. Um, I do believe eventually I'd like to see that 6%. Now, as far as the
the peel off on the solid waste, I would just like to see that be taken care of in the long run. as we get that transfer station built and we ease up on some of our costs, we can take care of that then. Um, as far as the water sales, you
know, water sales reducing it from 5% to 4%. Um, again, that's below 6%. So, I don't really have too much of a grievance with that right now. Um, but overall, you know, I think we're
heading the right direction. Hey folks, >> Commissioner Pedro. >> Thank you, Mayor. I have a question on slide 46 and that is that the city of Northport retains 26 cents on the dollar. Um
I took my tax bill and I took the total tax of and I'm rounding the numbers. For example, it's 3,300. So 3,300 the total tax and the city's portion is 1,500.
Um that is ader noner. So the city based on these figures the city retains about 47 cents on the dollar. I took another year's bill. It's the same number slightly higher. So it's roughly just a
little bit less than 50 cents. I'm not sure how we arrived at 26 cents in this slide that shows that the city retains 26 cents. >> It's just general >> it's just general I hear from my commissioner fellow commissioner. >> This is not a good assessment. This is
just strictly >> correct and that's what I that's what I thought. But when we get the or any citizen gets this tax you know they they pay the total tax and that is 9 and so
um so this slide is not correct if you I mean it's not totally correct because the city does retain almost 50 cents on a dollar. Yeah, but I would look at assessments more of service fees. We provide service
um that is specifically for like solid waste and drainage, right? Um other municipalities do it through a utility bill. So you might just not see it on your property tax, but you still get it build for it just in a different format. You're still paying for it. Um this is
strictly property taxes that are strictly on the value of your home. >> Correct. Nevertheless, the city retains about 50 cents on the dollar. Um, I mean, >> you're not getting >> I mean, we can agree to disagree, but
what I'm paying to the city of North for is 46 cents on a dollar and that is assessments that are um, you know, I have no options of not having those services. And if we're talking about the services, city of Northport regular
adaler taxes that that is services as well because the city provides services to the citizen regardless of you know the specific funds or the general u but I just want to point that out because
the when we pay the tax it's almost 50 cents the city retains. Um but enough of that. Um the next question or the next comment is slide 56 and that is uh Winchester
and this is the first public conversation we having as a board um on this and I appreciate the deputies uh comments but I'm compelled to say that you know we've heard even today that
growth doesn't pay for the growth. And numerous times from uh building department and u various staff members I've heard over and over that you know the residential does not pay does not is not justified on the expenses that we
cover as a city. So I'm I'm trying to understand more how is it more how's it justified? Um because and just let me finish as far as you know we've been down through this
um ULC which happened before me and you know we always were saying you know we need more commercial base we need more commercial base because the residential does not justify
the service and the means of sustaining that. So if we this uh Winchester range annexation I believe they're proposing about 9,000 homes uh roughly I think it's uh almost 10,000 homes. I'm
not sure how much commercial is there but um you know I'm trying to understand how is it beneficial if you know we heard numerous times publicly that the residential is not covering the expenses
that the city incurs. So that is my question. Um uh thank you sir Jason Norbo deputy city manager and it is true for the most part residential consumes more um services than the revenue that's generated
up to a certain value of a home. Typically the homes the like the even though we use $400,000 for the for the um the uh the the the scenario, the average priced home in in Well Park's going for about $445,000.
Um um so so if you're if so if you're providing services to a home that's valued at $200,000 $250,000, yeah, you're absolutely right. It's going to cost you more than the revenue generated by the assessments and the and
the taxes. But Wellen Park, for better, for worse, their home values are significantly higher by 150 to 200,000 on average than Legacy Northport. So that's a different that's a different math situation there. So um Atlanta by
all means weigh in if you have but but that but that's just kind of the reality. The the other thing is so most of the commercial is going to be inside um the original Wellon Park. So people are going to let's say this development doesn't get annexed and it but it will
develop because it's they have their entitlements from the county and they can solve their utility issue through um Peace River for water and they could build a sewer plant and deed it over to the Englewood just like they did for us. So, I think it's pretty close given that
it's going to happen. So, even if it's built outside our city, those people are still going to get on roads. They're going to travel. They're going to shop inside of Northport. They're going to have accidents inside Northport. Our police department is still going to
respond to those accidents. Our fire and police, I mean, our fire and ambulance are still going to respond to people who have heart attacks and trip and fall. So, you're still going to get the impact of 9,000 homes on your doorstep. Now,
you're not going to get a single dime. Nothing. You're going to get to offset that cost. So, that's kind of the thought process and the logic behind it. Also, we would have and uh I think you know a financial analysis would have to be done, but at the end of the day, uh
you I think you would probably see that they would be close to breaking even at at the price points and the taxes they're going to pay based off of the home value. But I'll defer to uh Miss Ray. >> The other difference is when we're talking about homes that are in a master plan CDD community versus those that are
not. So in Legacy Northport, in all of the neighborhoods here, the city is paying to maintain the streets in front of those houses and the drainage and all and the open space that the city owns, the ditches, the our ditches that uh
director speak takes care of in places like Wellen Park, we don't pay for that. All of the streets, storm water, their open space, their uh preserve areas, their boardwalks, all of that is paid
for and maintained by the CDD. It is not maintained by the city. So the uh pro res when we talk about the cost of residential and supplying services to residential,
those communities that take care of themselves through their own assessments and taxing districts generally are neutral. Um in some cases they may based on the value they may actually be revenue positive from a from a fiscal
standpoint for the city. Um when we're talking about homes on the regular platted streets within the Legacy Northport, those are um typically revenue negative. So it does cost us
more to provide services to those homes than uh than we get in tax dollars. So, so the math is you got a more expensive home that's generating more in assessments and and taxes and you're doing less for those homes compared to the legacy part of Northport. The math
is the math is the math. It is what it is. >> Yes, I understand CDD um and the advantage of it for the city because we don't really provide as much as we would provide to regular pre-planeted uh dwellers. Um but uh the water issue
alone is concerned but in my opinion the state of South River road is is another thing and that is where is recreation. Um before we say let the developer take care of it that that ship has long
sailed. We cannot by state law we cannot make developer do the worldwide. Um, but >> because of the water safety issues, I mean, >> correct me if I'm wrong,
>> River Road is actually being widened by the county in conjunction, but they're going to probably outsource it to the developer, but the county is the one that's going to be responsible for widening River Road. >> Correct me if I'm wrong. Does the county commission has to agree to that as well? >> Yes.
>> So, it's it's their road. It's a well the annexation. >> Yeah. Well, uh, Mr. Ray, I'll defer to >> I do I do want to um caution the annexation is coming before this body as an an ordinance and a public hearing in
May. So getting into the merits of annexation of that specific property right now is is I'll defer to the city attorney but may not be appropriate uh because it is coming before this body as an ordinance and a public hearing and it does not advertise for that discussion
at this meeting. >> Correct. Nevertheless, it's presented to us in this budget process. >> Not whether or not you agree with the annexation or the details of it. We're telling you what this process could mean to you financially here and you don't have to comment on that. I commented on
that. >> Okay. No, I'm just asking a question because it is presented to us in slide 56. So that's why I'm asking you all the all these questions. Um um but before I finish, I also want to I forgot to say about the how much the
city retains on the on a single dollar on the vacant lots. I forgot to mention the city retains 80 80 cents in the dollar. So non-adilarian and adilarian taxes.
Just want to throw out that. Thank you. Commissioner Duval. >> Yes. Thank you, Mayor. Um, one more question came to me. Uh on slide 50 is
talking about property tax reform and if it happens, you know, the potential impact to Northport be $18 million. What about the fact that I'll say at least in the last year,
property values um I don't know if I want to use the word property values, sales of properties um are going down. based on sales of properties, you know,
at this level versus this level, then shouldn't the assessments from the county property assessor also go down? And if so, how is that going to affect that $18 million
level? What I'm asking is is are we expecting lowered property sales numbers to increase our deficit that way?
I mean, you're still adding additional homes and you're still adding additional additional businesses. Um, I think we planned a much smaller um, increase as a result of um, property
values than we had in the past. It's not going to be growing as much as it has in the past, but at the end of the day, you're still adding what? You're still adding over a,000 homes, maybe over 1500 homes a year. Okay. So, that'll >> as well as businesses.
>> Plus, I mean, I don't know whether you saw it or not, but there was a parcel across from SMH up in Sarasota that went for $25 million. And I'm not saying our four corners of Sumpter 975 or three corners of Sumpter 975 are going to do that. But that hospital has a massive
economic development impact and it's going to cause the property values around that hospital to go through the roof and the things that are going to be built. Now, it's not going to hit our property tax immediately, but it is going to help stabilize our property tax base.
>> Okay. Thank you very much, >> Mayor. Can I jump in just to add to what you said? You know, there's clearly Legacy Northboard property values have been on the decrease. Well, in Park or West Villages property values have been
on the increase. Even though the real estate market's a little bit softer, what's selling and what's being built there are more expensive homes because it's at the upper end of the market
where where the buyer is is less impacted by the economy. So, we're looking at, you know, across from literally those apartments on the lake are a couple of housing developments that are going to start at a million dollars on up to three and four million.
the property tax revenues from those will be huge compared to a like amount of properties in legacy. So that'll help offset. And the other thing to speak to commissioner Petro's comments,
you know, a single family quarter acre lot clearly it costs more to provide those services than what comes in. But when you look at the the myriad and the diversity of housing types and the density changes
that go along with Wellen Park as a whole, you're seeing a revenue positive kind of approach and that's part of I would guess some of the mindset as we redesign the blueprint of this city to
create more diversity and and and of housing types and mixed in with commercial. The whole idea is to bring that revenue number up. So the last thing we want are just single family quarter paper houses in this city. That
is the nightmare that general development left us. All that's being done in terms of new development is really enhancing our revenues ability. So, you know, the the Winchester project is is going to be, I hope, a wonderful
project, but yet that'll come before us in some future time. I hope that helps a little bit. >> Thank you, Mayor. >> Thank you, city clerk. probably too. >> This is a very hard subject to even talk
about right now because you guys got so much up in the air. That is the truth. And I think whatever you guys come up with or whatever you guys do might not be right no matter what you do because so much is up in the air.
It's not because anybody in this room is doing a bad job. It's not because you don't know the numbers. It's because you don't know what's going to happen. That's the problem. Mr. Petrol, the bills when you were arguing about the taxes, those are
called monopolies on the bottom of your tax bill. The garbage pickup is a monopoly. The sewer bill is a monopoly. and the war company's monopoly because if you have those, you have nobody else that you can do business with.
So, I do understand, but I think they're all right about the tax part on it. I am good to hear on this Winchester project, if you guys go along with it, I'm glad to hear that any of the sor lines and water lines will not be paid
by the residents of this city. Because I've been in this room when this room has been packed and you guys are stealing 20 something thousand dollars from people because they you wanted a water saw line in front of their house.
I don't think you guys realize this, but as you go along on this process and if we don't have taxes anymore, you might be forced to sell the water company and privatize it. You might be forced to sell your garbage department and privatize it. And you might be able you
guys don't realize it. Those are the things that you are not supposed to be in the business of. I don't care about the electric. You shouldn't be in that. The water or the soar. And I've told some of you before, I will never pay for your sore and
water. And I will never buy it. Is that's the easiest way to kill me is to poison the water supply. And it's being done all over the world. And it's been done all over the world since before Jesus Christ was born because even the Greeks and all them went up there and
killed 20,000 people by I'm not going to say how but it could be done very easily. So I don't want the war. So there's a lot of things you got to worry about here on this. And going back to the Winchester thing and these buildings that you guys said
you had to tour down too soon. I hope if you're taking these buildings over from these people and these contractors, they're going to cut corners. You're they're going to build these things like garbage. I hope you're in there looking at the plans. I hope you're getting tests done on all the cement and all the other
stuff because if you're going to allow someone else to build you a building and just hand it over to you and say take it over, you better know what kind of building it is. So, but again, I think it's too soon for a lot what we're talking about because we don't know what's going to happen.
Just all Mr. Mayor. >> Thank you. Back to you, city manager. >> Thank you, Mr. Mayor. We are in the last section, which is capital improvement program. Um the 10-year uh capital needs assessment. Uh slide gives you some of
what went into the process of ordering, ranking, listing, analyzing the different projects. I believe was pointed out to us probably last year around this time that we did not have a structured process in place. So, uh, finance created it and like I said earlier did a great job and then did a
great job working with all the other departments and divisions to make sure that we were all included so we could have a very comprehensive process. Uh, it matters because we need to plan our funding as we know the challenges that we have there. The prior prioritizing
items, the things that need to happen first um is important because not every project needs to go first and there are different funding sources and it helps us better organize the decisions that we put in front of you and our community. ensuring um decisions advance. Um
business service reliability, we have to make sure that the continuity is is maintained and regulatory compliance I think is one that's always there cuz some things are outside of our control. And so putting that and factoring those things in, we hopefully built a process of trust through those who are relying
on this information because it's transparent and it's um consistent and then it includes all the different variables that we need in order to make a sound decision. This utilities, water and wastewater master plan is a good example that was sort of created after bill 712. And when you look at it and
you see that it's based on our current rate, it will take until 2019 to finish the project. That's not a typo. That is 2019 for our city. We have to do something different in our city in order to make sure that
we actually get there with the multiple phases of this particular project. And so when people talk about our waste water and our water, do we have a plan? We do. And we do have other plans as well, but you know how they enter into the capital project plan, you think about us identifying the need and the
eligibility and the cost and the funding. You look at these three different categories. You have to talk about, you know, what is the current asset condition? Is it is it regulated by compliance? Repair versus replace. We talked about that a lot earlier already. the eligibility. Some things that are in
our CIP don't belong in our CIP and some things in our CIP we are recommending to close. So those are coming up on the next few slides. And the funding um the cost effective full project life cycle. Um we know that grants as we talked about earlier is a huge help for
projects of this kind. So we're not giving up on those either. uh we keep all the doors open as it relates to the different options of making payments that don't hurt our taxpayers dollars. Um the evaluation and ranking process there was a kickoff meeting. Um they
everyone independently scored the different um projects using the rubric which is very and good comprehensive. I liked it a lot. Um then finance sort of gathered all the scores and put them together in a comprehensive list and
then there was a committee that reviewed the results and went over the allocation of the funding so that everyone would understand um the outcomes of their hard work. At 10 years at a glance we talked about the total amount being out there
roughly $1.2 2 billion and what we have appropriated the unfunded amount of nearly half of half a billion dollars is a lot and as we continue to move forward I don't want us to take our eye off of that number and we do know that other things and other revenue sources will
come into play to that but it does show you that capital planning is necessary in our city where we're at in our life cycle if you want to see the 10-year capital asset plan by division um this sort of
shows you the 1.1 U billion dollars. And as you can imagine, a lot of it is, you know, you go to police, that's the headquarters in there. You got road and drainage, you got the wastewater system. You have some pretty high price items in there that we have to continue to try and solve for.
Um, some of those, as you said, have different revenue sources that come in to help, and some of them we have to figure out through other means. the top 10 unfunded projects. Um, of course, police headquarters is going to be there. That's one that we are still trying to solve for. Um, the other ones,
as you see, the radio replacement and the virtual infrastructure and the US uh replacement and the future fire station. Well, not future fire station, I thought the UPS replacement. Those ones, those three ones in the middle there, I think that we can figure out a way to to
acquire those without actually having to borrow for those. But it is in my opinion as we move forward that we need to think about okay well what what projects can we use for the borrowing exercise. I propose to you that you look at this
potential project list and I would recommend that we do fire station A which we're working on right now which has a potential loan amount of roughly $8 million and the community uh service center that we did not maintain that now
we're talking about removing Awakening the church with that current tenant in that building um that we do go ahead and build a new building there and then once that's done you decide just like you did before who was the tenant and the awakening of course was in there now so I'm using them as the example and then
we also have the building combined in there for Dallas White Park the cultural building that the former tenant was the art center again another building that was our building so if you add those two together it's roughly $9 million so those two together are $17 million um
the waste and wastewater extension are $20 million the capacity fees could be the potential repayment source of that. So, you add those together and that's $37 million that you could potentially go and seek the court's permission
through a bond validation process to borrow for and we would have the money to pay for in our own budget based on the savings that we saw in that $4.8 million number that we talked about earlier. So, it is it is my
recommendation that the board give us direction in the very near future after you've reviewed this information and of course discussed it with the citizens as you choose that we make a decision if we want to move forward with our financial advisor and our legal external bond
council to prepare a situation where we try to borrow for a sum of money for these three projects so that we can then pay it back without raising a millage rate, without asking for more money from the taxpayers. If we do this and we do
this correctly through that process and the road bond that we talked about earlier was done through the same process years ago, the difference was an assessment came along with that that we're still paying now that Commissioner Pro mentioned in the longevity of still
paying that now. This would these are projects that would be paid for through the reduction of your city's budget without increasing any burden to our citizens. The value of this is twofold. One, if you say no and you do not want to go that pathway, then the money that
I just identified in that $4.8 $8 million could be used to put towards a capital reserve uh bucket that could be hopefully help show the citizens that we still are committed to building a police headquarters by building up a reserve that will allow us to say we have x
amount in that reserve when that time comes again for us to have that conversation publicly which we will have but we need to be better prepared when we have it and we heard them when they said last time that we didn't prepare financially at all and this will sort of help them hopefully build trust that we
are moving in that direction. If you do say, well, let's go ahead and borrow, try to borrow for these projects, then again, that hopefully will show the community that we're responsible with borrowing and we can pay for it within our means and it's not a blank check. And look at how they're managing their resources within themselves without
asking the citizens for more money for these projects. Those two buildings that I referenced, they were our buildings, and those tenants are now about to be displaced because our buildings weren't maintained. I feel we have a obligation to actually act on that so
that we can allow them to move forward to service our community or more people depending on what you say in the future to serve our community. These are some projects that we recommend that come off the list based off of what the team went through. Um
the contribution to STC that's uh that's not really a capital project. There's no asset ownership so it shouldn't been on there. Um, replacing of stretchers and chairs, not capital. The replacement of the extra extrication equipment, not a capital project. Uh, routine placement
of tools, which is for um, uh, rescue technic rescue team. Still not a capital project. And the replacement of the park entrance and rule signs. Um, they don't meet the criteria of the CIP. And, um, they we'll submit them as budget proposals in the future for funding.
We're not going to not do the projects, but they need to be categoriz categorized correctly and placed into the right bucket for your consideration. Uh some of the some of the projects on there need to be closed and the activity 6 master plan is not CIP criteria, but
we know and we've talked about that is a priority. That master plan, I believe we were waiting on a timing of that to be in the right place and I believe that's going to be in our fiscal year budget if I'm not mistaken. Um the developer withdrawn on the cranberry and Toledo blade improvements. So the
project is no longer necessary and uh uh renovating the PD for the building division. We're requesting that to be unfunded and to consolidate with um current PD reset for city with city staff. Dog Park East on Blade recommended we
consolidate that project with the Italy Avenue community project. That's just for better efficiency. Um and when we talk about better efficiency, one of the options that we've talked about with um director Funheller is a recreation
district. She has seen this uh work in other places and we think that if we get to this point of having to pay for in a different way the quality of life services or the enhanced services as Doge call it, then this could be an
option we may want to consider. Um, we would have a district for recreation. Um, it would go through the same process, sort of what we're going through with the special district that you're being exposed to now. Um, all the legal um
legal process and procedures will be followed. And then you would get down to making a decision that you want to create it through ordinance and you'll establish your governing body and they will take control of it. And that's how you take that out or take it out or help
the general fund if we get to the position of losing the homestead dollars that we talked about earlier. We we just want to make sure that what we're saying is that everything is on the table. We're just giving you ideas and feedback as we get it. Um this conversation that
we had today is just the beginning. Um, I know that we have another workshop scheduled in June, but I recommend that we meet at least monthly so we can hear back from you or get more direction. We'll update you on either numbers or processes or information that we have so
that no one's in the dark. I also want to remind you all that you can have one-on- ones for this budget. Any budget topic conversation whenever you like, just let us know. We will make it happen. We can add them to our one-on-one. We can have them separately. whatever makes sense for people's
schedules and calendars. But we want to make sure that you have the best budget experience possible. And I want to thank again all of our team and the staff that put a lot of hard work into what was a very tough exercise. And now that we have these numbers and we can get some
clarity on some other things, I think we have a pathway forward. >> Thank you, Mr. Mayor. >> I want to thank you very much. This was a very, very nice presentation. It was well thought through and very informative. Appreciate all the time and effort that was put into this and it was a great
great start rolling forward. All right, we're going to move on to the final public comment. >> Do again a very difficult subject because you really don't know what's going on. The one thing I noticed about some of the slides up there and the money being
spent and the projects 37 million that they want to maybe borrow does go to the utilities. Utilities done nothing for me in the community. Utilities are utilities, the private companies. That's why you're
incorporated up there. You have all these companies. Cuz if you weren't in didn't have a company, I don't think you need to be incorporated. The Cranberry Toledo blade was bought up here. I know nothing of
that project. I know nothing of what was supposed to happen on that corner. All I know is the other day when I was here, you made new commercial area in that area that will bring more traffic to that area. And ever since they've been doing
work to Price, that intersection is backed up all the way to Chamberlain in the morning. It's a disaster. If we get any flooding, I don't know what the heck we're going to do. So, again, I'm not here to cause
trouble, but I obviously someone noticed that something need to be done at Granberry and Toledo. And I personally think it does have to be done. Something has to be changed there, but that's a different subject. And I want to go back to utilities.
I know people are going to crucify me on this and not agree with me on this, but your government is not put here so I have electricity or water. This government is put here to protect
me. I I I don't like the utility thing. I'm I'm telling you now, when you guys really get into the nuts and cranny and you guys figure out what the real numbers are and how much money you will be able to come in, don't pass no backdoor law and put a tax so you can
get that money a different way and just not call it a back door, a property tax. Cuz that's what I think I just heard here. You're trying to do back door taxes now. I'm sorry. The utility department have to go before the department of rex.
We have to support the children in this community. They are the future. I don't want them running around the streets and not have a place to go. That's my personal opinion. And everybody can disagree with me that
you might want the utilities or the kids. The utilities are going to be there either way. The way I look at it, it's just a matter of who you send a check to. And I don't want anybody ever coming down my street again or any other street
and say, "Oh, we're going to put sore here. We want $30,000 and then we want another 20,000 to thank you. It's 141. I adjourn this meeting." Thank you.
Hello, I'm Jerome Fletcher, city manager of Northport. I'm on the job with the solid waste division of public works. Let's go.