Please rise for invitation by Pastor Nathan Bucher of Victorious Life Church followed by the pledge of allegiance. Pastor, welcome. Hey, thank you so much. Let's pray, fellas. Father, thank you for this evening. Thank you for uh Lord, this city. Thank you for these leaders that
take good care of the community around them. Thank you for this meeting tonight. We pray for your wisdom, your guidance, your direction. We believe that God, you have your eye upon this city. Your kindness, your favor, and your goodness is evident. We thank you for what you're going to do this
evening. God, go with every person that speaks. Lord, we pray that your heart would be uh evident and that God, your desire and your wishes would be uh pronounced over this city. We thank you for what's going to happen this evening and then for the future. In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.
Amen. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you, pastor.
The clerk call the roll. Councilman Foley here. Councilman Ger here. Councilman Green here. Vice Mayor Grubs here. Mayor Stilner here. 5 or all five. How about that? Do we win? We passed being here. 5. Very good. Great job so far. We're
off to a good start. All right. Item four, public comments on consent agenda items only. Any public comments on consent agenda items only? Seeing none, can I get a motion to approve consent agenda items 5 through 11?
Move to approve consent. Hold on. Good. Uh, move to approve consent agenda items 5 through 11. Second. Have a motion and a second. Take a quick peek. We have uh, yeah, clerk, call the role.
Councilman Foley, yes. Councilman Gert, yes. Councilman Green, yes. Vice Mayor Grubs, yes. Mayor Stilner, yes. Consent passes 50. Moving on to item number 12, parks and recreation appreciation month. How about that?
We're going to have our parks and recreation director and one of the most famous characters of all, recre come on down here to the front while I read this proclamation. First of all, I just want to compliment uh you and your staff as well as everybody in the city that
participated in the Fourth of July festivities and event. It it takes a lot to pull off an event like that at the city center complex and it was it was fabulous. Um the weather held off which was great and uh it was a very well attended event. So thank you guys to for
for everything you do for that. All right, let me read this proclamation real quick. Whereas parks and recreation programs are an integral part of communities throughout this country, including the city of Port Orange. And whereas our parks and recreation are vitally important to establishing and
maintaining the quality of life in our communities, ensuring the health of all citizens, and encouraging physical activities by providing space for popular sports, hiking trails, swimming pools, and many other activities designed to promote active lifestyles. And whereas parks and recreation programs build healthy, active
communities that aid in the prevention of chronic disease, provide therapeutic recreation services for those who are mentally or physically disabled, and also improve the mental and emotional health of all citizens, and is the leading provider of health meals and
nutrition services and education. And whereas parks and recreation programs increase a community's economic prosperity through increased property values, expansion of local tax base, increased tourism, the attraction and retention of businesses, and crime reduction. And whereas our parks and
natural recreation areas ensure the ecological beauty of our community and provide a place for children and adults to connect with nature and create outdoors memories. And I add that part and is fundamental to the environmental well-being of our community. And now
therefore, I, Scott Stilner, mayor of the city of Port Orange, Florida, do hereby recognize July as Parks and Recreation Month. Thank you guys for everything that you do. Director Lavalo, you you are welcome to have any comments you want to make them.
I know how much you like getting I just want to thank the council for always supporting our parks and rec programs um and initiatives in the city. So, thank you very much. He's always spot on. How about man? Hey, Red Man.
Starks and parks. Okay. All right, public participation non-aggenda items. I think some of these might have been on consent, but let's go through them real quick. Um, Lori Becker. Hey, Lori. How are you?
Come on up. Good evening, council. Lori Becker, 865 Christy Drive. Um, I wasn't planning on speaking tonight, but I did notice something on here that I wanted to mention. Right ahead. Uh, I am a representative of the Sugar Forest community, not just Sugar Forest, but around it as well, because I live on
Christy Drive. And I am very happy to see that we now have some money for buyout program. And and there is a property, two properties in particular, Bears Trail, uh, that substantially flood every time that we have any kind
of high water. And so I just want to at least uh I want to encourage everyone up here that when you see that property come across your desk that that is a property that is critical to trying to
solve some of the flooding issues that we're having in that area. It borders uh it's like almost 4 acres of property. It borders the ditch in question that's always back and forth between county and city regarding who maintains it. And even today, it's flooding with the
amount of rain that we had. So, if the city can buy that property, then we'll have some control over cleaning the ditch and it could be a big part of trying to save the at least 100 homes that we are all working towards with the other money that we attained from the
state. So, I just want to say how important, how critical that property is to attain for a buyout. That's all I have to say. Thank you, Laura. Thank you, Laura. John Cameron. Welcome, John. Evening, council. Thank you for allowing
me to speak. Uh, I saw an item on the agenda tonight that, uh, came of interest to me, and that's about the golf course, uh, bunker renovation project. Um, I believe you just redid the greens, uh, maybe five, six years ago, and at that time, uh, the bunker
renovation project was on that menu, but it was taken out. Value engineer. Well, now here we are tonight. you've already approved the the process getting ready to spend $280,000
to do bunkers when we could have done it for less money at the time we renovated the greens because we had all the staff there, we had all the materials there, we had the expertise there, we had the equipment there. So now we're getting ready to do TE's maybe.
So, I'm just saying better planning needs to be done so we can save money on these projects. And also, we should consider asking Keer to try to do some of this stuff for us. They can renovate bunkers. I know it'll cost the city, but maybe we should do a
cost comparison. I know Darren is very experienced and he's got great expertise and I have great confidence in Jeff. Darren is overseeing this bunker project according to the contract. He will be the on-site administrator of it. So his
expertise is already there. Now the money is already ready to be spent. So I I think that a person like Darren could oversee the tea project and we could ask him about Kemper what it would cost to look at these TE's and which ones they could renovate themselves inhouse what
would be required. Now, to me, playing that golf course several times, many of the TE's just need to be stripped, leveled, reshaped, reconfigured, maybe expanded. Some of that requires a different expertise, but some of the TE's might be
able to do done in-house. And also, other things to be considered should be removing some trees in shady areas. That's a big problem out there in a few holes. That's why you've got problems. The TE's aren't big enough. They don't get enough shade. So that's why you're having problems
with some of these TE's out there. So I just ask you to consider that and pass it on to staff. Hopefully we can do a little better job of putting this all together. My way of thinking is when we closed the course several years ago to do the greens. We could have spent the money at the same time to redo all that
and saved ourselves quite a bit of money because we were closed. So now we're going to interrupt play with these projects. Now, I know it's going to be minimal, but still it's interrupting play and you know, we never want to do that. So, thank you very much. Thanks, John. Thanks for your pleasure. Thank you,
John. I have 13 council member comments. I'm going to go first on this tonight. Um, I'm going to ask the city manager to uh give us some feedback here. Um we we
recently received some really really good news out of Tallahassee um about our city receiving some appropriation uh funds this year. And um you know, we we definitely have to take an opportunity to thank our state representatives
um Representative Chase Traymont and Senator Tom Wright as well as Senator Tom Leak as as being heavy advocates for us in Tallahassee and and and I certainly want to make sure I take the opportunity to to thank our staff. Our staff put in a tremendous amount of time
this year. I I don't know in my time that we've ever received as much state appropriation money as we've received that we received this year. Um but we received $4.4 million in appropriation funds which already have matching funds
ready to go with that. So, it's close to $9 million that's going to allow us to advance some projects forward and also um start focusing on funding for projects to follow those or even parallel them. Um, and we've got a lot
of other there's a lot of funding sources and there's a lot of strategy involved and there's a lot of cities in the state of Florida that compete for the same dollars and and as well as here in Valuchia County. Um, so it's a very competitive process and and um I want to thank uh our city manager and our staff
because after Ian before we even heard the the dirty name Milton, they already were working on a strategy on how we would put the city in a really good position to be able to compete for these dollars and and getting a a storm water master plan done was right up there. Um,
in fact, I I believe we were the first city to get get it going and get it done. So, I know a lot of other cities um that didn't get funding at all. Some of them were even asking for funding to to get a storm water master plan going because they haven't even started that. So, um you know, I truly appreciate our
staff getting us ahead of the of the curve. But I want to give the city manager a chance to weigh in on this. If you could, Wayne, make some comments. What does this mean for us? What what are the next steps with regard with these two projects? if you can just touch on them and and I apologize for putting you on the spot, but um I didn't
want to pass up an opportunity to let's just have a brief conversation about that. We've got a slide in the budget presentation, too, that'll show some of that with the extra dollar. So, it is, as far as I know, the largest appropriation we've had at 4.4 million. So, it's 3 million of it is in support of construction of the Sugar Forest
Pepper Hill area storm water project. And the other 1.4 is the master lift station that's over in Pon Inlet. So we have the the regional stations that people drain or the sewer drains to and then it comes back. So that's where that one that's the other project. We've gotten three and a half million in a
prior year. One 750,000. I think there was one other 1.5. So it's the largest that I'm aware of in and certainly in in modern history. I I think the storm water master plan had a lot to do as we were sitting there meeting individually with legislators and their staff and showing them an engineered plan where we
had modeled these programs and showed them this this will work. we had already acquired a piece of land in the area that we were intending to use as the storage area to put the pumps in to work from and and showing them that with that much level of of direction. They I think
they respond well to if you get money from the state because why is this a state issue to solve not a local you you better use it and and so being able to show to them we we've committed all of this. We have plans. We know it will work. We own land. We have money aside.
I think that's what pushes us to the top is that they know if they put money in Port Orange, Port Orange will put it into their community and make a difference. Uh, one of the prior ones we had was the Commonwealth area water lines and we went in there and we have we've upsized 2-in water pipes to 6 in, put fire hydrants in there, and we were
showing them that this year as part of the visits is you we we actually took them pictures of those areas where we've upgraded the water lines and and shown them that. So, I think that's a a major positive. The design is underway for that the the project in Sugar Forest.
It's a fairly complicated project because you've got to take the water that's in that area and it kind of splits in a basin. Some of it goes to the east to Nova, some of it goes to the west and push it towards that pond and then pump it back towards the east. So, the design's a little complicated to do
that. That's going on now. Uh the anticipated construction start would be in the first quarter of 27. So, it'll be designed throughout now and 26 with construction to follow. When we get to the budget, I have I'll have a slide that shows you how we break down the total cost of paying for that project.
Okay. Yeah, that particular project is going to be one heck of a construction project for sure. Um, can you also touch on for the for the benefit of the council uh there there was an email that came I don't know if everybody got it about additional funding sources that
may be available for municipalities to uh to pursue but is exempt because of the amount of money that was provided into the transform 386. Is that right? So so that particular money that they're referring to is already allocated to Valuchia. The federal government
provides a lot of money passed through. Some of it goes to the state, some of it goes to the counties. And so the the CDBG program allocated a good amount of money per storm to Valuchia County. And then they have their their programs which they call transform 386. So as an
an entitlement community, they get this money and then they choose how to distribute it. And so that's how Felia County is getting the funds out of that program and then our applications will be through their transform 386 as opposed to Port Orange applying for it directly. Some of the benefit too is
that they they have much bigger staff in in larger areas. So they can assist us in all the contracting and all the paperwork to set it up and project management. So there's a there's a benefit in working with the county and that one they they can help with the cost of the things that are multi-jurisdictional. They also help
with the management of the projects. But that's that money is something we're going to get our money through the CDBG transform 386 program. Okay. Anybody have anything they want to add or weigh in on those on that particular issue? Good. No, I I I just want to say that um
I've been to Tallahassee for other issues through the Florida Realtors Association and you got some I think there's a million members strong and they prepare all these talking points to go to see your legislators and uh I was
more impressed with our staff's presentation than I saw from the Florida Realtors back in 2006 and 2005. Uh thank you Junos's and uh obviously our city manager. Um they worked their tails off
and uh I got to witness um how they represented Port Orange uh personally being in Tallahassee with with Scott and the two of them and it worked and it's not always going to be there but we got it and now we could start working
towards the relief that our homeowners are asking us for. So, I just appreciate that work that you've put into it. And then the county, our city council prior to us being elected making decisions, hard decisions to put money into those
studies. So, we were prepared uh to go there and and that's and we're going to talk a lot about tonight. We're going to talk about money and and preparation for future events and how we prepare ourselves. And this is exactly
uh the benefit of being prepared. And uh so I appreciate that that our prior councils had the foresight to be prepared and and and the benefit was the receiving of those funds. And that's going forward too with asking money from from the county. We're prepared. Our studies are done. We know what we can do
with it. We're in a better position. So I appreciate y'all doing that. Yeah. And and I also I I don't want to forget I also want to thank the residents and the business owners that also reached out to our our state representatives and and and senators. That makes a world of difference to have
that kind of support and help from the residents as well. And I know quite a few did that also. And it was a it was a very interesting thing on the final day as uh we were all sitting there watching our laptops and and and and Wayne and I were touching base a couple of times. I
touched base with Robin and we saw the the word that the governor had vetoed almost $600 million and I'm like, "Oh man, this is not going to be good." And and uh and it was right up almost till 5:00 before we got the final um confirmation that that we had been
awarded that money. So is I it just it's really it's a good thing. It's a good start. Um it's going to be very beneficial and and hopefully we can get that money to good use as quickly as possible. All right, moving on. Uh the only other thing I had is that um Friday night, this is a a a good news part.
Friday night, July 25th at the Dayton to Tortugas is going to be uh Port Orange Night, Pon Inlet night, and Daytona Beach Shores night. So there should be uh ticket offers on the website for the Daytona Tortugas. Again, that is Friday
night, July the 25th at 6:30. So Lance, how about it? Nothing tonight. So nothing, huh? All right, Sean. Yeah, I want to talk about the parks and recreation department and and the staff from our safety and firefighters, police officers, and anyone who participated in
our July 4th event to pull that off. The most remarkable thing that I witnessed was how we got so many people who had been taken all day long to get there out of there in a matter of about 15 minutes. It was amazing. So, I I appreciate that. I also appreciated one
of our citizens calling ended up calling uh Lakeside Center just to compliment uh the city and and we don't get many compliments us on this council. Um that was a real nice one and that's just testament to the hard work that went into that. So it
was phenomenal show and uh I appreciate everyone doing that. Also wanted to make a suggestion. Someone had brought it to my attention that a good opportunity where we have events at the parks, baseball games, soccer games. Would there be an opportunity for us to have
charging stations for electric vehicles at those locations where we could generate some revenue from them? I just think that's something maybe we could look into because they're there for an hour and a half, maybe two hours, and it might be an opportunity where we can provide a service to our citizens while they're sitting there opposed to sitting
over at Target or um you know, one of the other pavilion. Hey, I'm going to the park. I'm driving a Tesla. Enough people are doing it now that I see them parked over there. Maybe we can look at providing that service and for a fee, of course, and maybe it helps generate some
revenue. I don't know how that whole thing works, but it's just an idea someone posed at me. I thought it was a really good idea. That's all I've got tonight. Tracy, go right ahead. I say I know y'all touched on this, but the fireworks display was absolutely awesome. And if you missed it, you
missed it. It was it was spectacular. But I definitely want to thank Parks and Rex. Um, but parks and reccks did a phenomenal job, but police department, fire department did a phenomenal job also keeping everybody flowing uh out of the areas they're not supposed to be in
and keeping everybody safe. So, thank you to everybody involved in in that process. Um, Park and Rick's going to get a bigger shout out also here is uh the Willow One Park area where we had the community come together and put some
voting in on the park and how it's designed. Uh, went down there to that event. um over 50 60 uh citizens showing up to that, walking through and seeing the boards that the contractor put out for them to see how things could be
transformed and being able to vote on that. It's a phenomenal ideal and I think hopefully with the other parks initiatives coming up is that ideal moves forward because you got to be able to look at a concept, put a dot on it of which concept you think is going to be
best for that area. So very great way for input from the the citizens on that. Um on consent agenda tonight uh 6E and 6F uh was talking about sourcing of striping. Um something to think about uh
this is what we did uh a year ago for concrete work uh where we actually have two stripers now involved to come out to stripe. That way we can get ahead of that process so we're not lagging behind. Um, one of the things that I
want to make sure that the council knows is, you know, is $80,000 budget, not to disc $80,000 budget. That's a small penance of what needs to be done for striping uh for improving crosswalks and safety for the kids and the stop bars.
might be something that we look forward uh next year, not this year because budget's already tightened up pretty good. But we have the two striping sources that are going to go through that money and have that done within the first two months. So, we definitely need
to look at that budget and refining that so we can get safety done in the crosswalks. Um and then uh big thanks to Juno for staffing uh out at Lakeside uh community center with
storm water management for um sugar forest and um having everybody out there. Uh he did a phenomenal job presentation wise on that. Uh he still standing didn't get beat up. Uh I was
there uh watching it all play out and community coming out having some fantastic uh talks on that subject, but ultimately it gets down to dollars and cents. And I know we've talked about this, we just
had Wayne talk about this, but one of the other funding sources is Resilient Florida coming up. Uh want to point out to council just some quick and dirty raw numbers uh for Resilient Florida.
They're they're matching 50%. We have approximately nine major projects that storm water management plan came out with to a tune of about $76 million. So if we take $76 million and you divide
that into half, that means 38 million the city has to come up and figure out. We right now sit on approximately $12 million that has been 4.4 from the city selling of properties and other avenues and hurricane
um Milton and our first one that's still stuck on Milton coming out. So, we have about $12 million sitting ready to go. We take that off the 38 million, that means we have about $26
million the city has to figure out. Not saying this is the direction to go, but it's an ideal for us to move forward. Out of $26 million, you got 26,000 homes and businesses. If you take that number divided out by a 20-year
bond, it's 50 bucks. $50 a year for 20 years onto the citizens would take care of the $76 million that we need to do all nine projects. So as we move forward, keep those
numbers in your head of how we can get about doing it. Am I saying going forward with the bond? No. And so let's look at how much money we can gather first before we have to go towards a bond. That way, we can take as much money in from other entities first
before we have to move forward. But right now, on a 20-year bond, we're only talking $50 a residents to be able to take care of our citizens. That's all I got. Mr. Foley, go right ahead. All right. Well, I want to make sure I
also just say thank you to our representatives in Tallahassee, u you know, Chase Traymont, uh Tom Wrightton, Tom Leak. appreciate their hard work and staff, everyone going up there. Um, wish I would have got to go this year. It's the first year I've missed and and you guys still did fantastic. Four 4.4
million is not a small amount of money. So, uh, kudos to everybody involved on that. Um, want to let you guys know that I will be out of town for August 5th, although that will be my last one. I think I'm going to miss the entire year. So, I'm excited to have life get back to
normal for me here. Um, I wanted to give a shout out to staff as well for today. As y'all know, we've had some pretty heavy rains. And, uh, when I met with Wayne for lunch, we had crews all over the city going around and seeing actual hands-on in the field, what was
draining, what was not, where was water moving. And I really appreciate that we have a staff that's being so active and going out here and monitoring these things, uh, especially as we're moving forward with everything. But we had crews all over the city checking out all the problematic areas today while it was
still raining and I think they deserve a shout out for that. Um, and the last thing, um, I think you guys may want to just ask Matt one about this at some point. Um, during a fire pension meeting recently, um, there was something the
attorney brought up about maybe a concern that the ordinance didn't match what was agreed to and that it needed to be edited. Um, Matt has since looked at that and gone to outside counsel and and has an opinion on it, which uh he has shared with me. He may have shared that with you guys already. I'm not sure, but
just uh you may want to get with him one- on- one because um I found out today that is going to be discussed at the next fire pension meeting. So, just something to have on your radars. All right. Anything else? That's it. Wayne, on the uh on the
striping budget, I is that something in future years that we could perhaps get with other municipalities in the area and and put together like a like a three or a four city, hey, unique because I'm assuming that gets priced out by linear feet, right? So, you know, if New Simrna
and Jamie Shores and Pon Inlet and Port Orange all have so many linear feet, uh maybe does that make it more attractive in the bidding process, save all four cities a little money? Is that something we could look at or can that even be done? I don't know how it works. It it's possible. It's going to depend on on workload because in some cases if
you do it the dominant city takes the the work and they and if we don't spend enough we don't get there. So it depends on how how well we balance the total amount of budget. We have done like our debris management is we do work with Daytona Beach on that and that has brought us a little more power and debris management. So to the extent of
any way we can get more done with that 80 grand, uh we'd be happy to talk to somebody about it. But uh well, not even so much this year. I just mean, you know, in in future budget years, uh because that's that's always an ongoing expense and there'll always be that to do that. But anyway, just put
that out there and if that's something we can do, I think council will probably support that for sure. Okay. All right. City attorney. Nothing further tonight. That's it. Huh. All right. And back to you, Mr. City Manager. Just wanted to update you guys on the
the causeway boat ramp south ramps project. So once we selected the contractor a few meetings back they did the precon meeting and in part of the conversation about the project it came up that the lead times on the floating docks uh and the gang ways there's a
couple lead time items it's going to take about 6 months to have made and delivered to us. So where we were originally looking at a start date in August of this year, based on that, it's our recommendation we don't start until first quarter of next year. So it would be January to allow instead of starting
a project and then demobilizing and then bringing them back in there to to let the season roll and then bring in January. And one of one of the benefits too of coming to this point is we had estimated the time. We try to be conservative because you don't want to overpromise and we had estimated it at somewhere 9 to 12 months or so to finish
the project and then the precon they're saying it's probably closer to the 6 to9 month range. So it's probably going to take a little less time to do it but I don't think we should start it until we have the stuff ready to go. So you don't start and stop on it. You just start and finish. And I I I had uh mentioned to
the city manager, I would really like the staff to stay on the hunt for a temporary solution to try to at least get one gang way open would make a world of difference on the the uh southside ramps. I know they they looked at this before and and they just couldn't find
anything. But even a temporary solution, temporary floating dock, whatever, to be able to get one additional gang way open on that south side, uh would be would be very beneficial. Bo boating is not a really a seasonal thing. It Well, it is. It lasts for 12 months in Florida. So,
um there's never a a downtime. Whenever the weather's nice, people want to get out. And it it is definitely quite the challenge. Do do we currently have a safety issue down there at all, though, Wayne? I mean, are we safe with what we have that we're going to now continue to use for
six more months? I mean, that was my only concern is is going into the bid, we were we were going to go basically going right to work pretty quick here in August, and so now we're not. And my my whole worry was safety. Are we safe? I don't know that I want to say that
it's unsafe. It's not ideal. Okay. Well, I I I think I mean I I could speak to that a little bit that I think that the folks that go down there where you've got somebody in the boat that's driving the boat on and off the trailer and somebody is just literally backing the trailer into the water that you
don't need the gang way for that. But it's the folks that are going to go down there by themselves that have to be able to back down, walk down the gang way, step into the boat, so forth and so on. But and we do have a a place to still do that down there, but it slows the whole process down. People get aggra
aggravated. we get backups and things like that. So, it Yeah, I I I mean, I think it's incumbent on people to to stay in their comfort zone and their skill level when they're launching boats. I mean, we see no matter how nice the docks are, some of that's yeah, a little scary sometimes anyhow. But
whatever we can do to to try to improve that, I'd just like to see staff try to stay on that. See if we can find a uh a temporary solution. Blue bar blue barrels and some plywood. Yeah. Right. What else you got? Anything else? All right. Good. All right. Moving on to item 16. It's a It's a parks and
recreation theme. How about parks and recreation advisory board report? Good to see you. By all with the parks and rec board. We had our meeting tonight. Obviously, you guys have had a lot of parks and recck talk. So, I'll try to make it quick and not repeat a lot. So, um we didn't meet
last quarter, so we had a lot a lot talked about and really the focus of tonight. Uh well, first I want to mention we had a lack of a quorum last uh meeting which is because we were lacking two members and now we have two members and I think they're both in the audience tonight. So thank you Jeff and Brian for for joining us. Um we did get
uh uh Quantum Volleyball is going to join us for be another partner with the city um like some of our other groups like Pop Warner and and soccer and baseball and so we heard from them. Um Jordan and Trisha, husband and wife combo. They're um they're working on
developing it here in in Port Orange and and help fill the gap that was left by our last volleyball group. And uh they're super excited. They are Port Orange residents. They are, you know, been here before. Um Jordan was with Pop Warner board, so he's familiar with the programs. It's just nice to have u have a little give back in the community. So
good to have them. Um we we approved a recommended approval, so hopefully that'll come before you guys at some point. Okay. Um, we got a bond update from Sue. Uh, lots of good projects that have already started. Willow Run, as you mentioned, had the had the neighborhood meeting, so we'll have a plan to show
pretty soon. Uh, Silver Sands Land Swap you guys are familiar with as well. So, that'll that'll turn in a couple soccer fields. The train depot park that's going forward and maybe some additional lands being brought in and couple another train piece and just all kinds of cool stuff there. And then White
Place is also starting is probably going to do something similar to um the Will Run Park as far as neighborhood input and and whatnot. And then we heard from Jennifer on some of the um programs and uh baseball's ended, volleyball started
good numbers above what their expectations were. Of course, the mayor's golf tournament was not too long ago and we had met our goal of 10,000. Um and uh I guess there's some other ongoing capital improvements projects which you're familiar with. Uh the playground is starting here at city center. The soccer fields are going to
go out to bid. Um all kinds of stuff. So with that, I'll be quick. Unless you got any questions, your second place trophy's in the back room back there, Bobby. I already got it. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Ben delivered. Man, that's hard.
That uh that train depot project is really shaping up nice. If you haven't had a chance to to go down and see that, um it's it's pretty impressive. And they've got a great little social media page where they showed how they literally got these one of the one of the the the caboose
is I believe 80 years old. Oh yeah. And they brought that thing in on a on a It was great. Yeah. It was amazing on on a flatbed semi and got that thing off that thing onto the tracks and the I mean it's amazing. And then uh I think the following weekend
they brought in the the uh the rail car which I think is 75 years old. So the history and how that thing's shaping up and how they're laying it out is really really neat uh that that's going to be a permanent part of our city. So pretty cool history there. And if you get a chance to talk to any of those people,
especially when you're down there and they they've got some really cool stories and history about just all of that stuff. Anything that has to do with the railway that passing through the city of Port Orange and Valuchia County, it's pretty neat actually. So anything else for us? No, sir. Thank you, sir.
Thank you, Bobby. Item 17, first reading of ordinance number 202517. How about it, Mr. City Attorney? An ordinance of the city of Corin Felicia County, Florida, amending the land development code chapter 16 relating to local government regulation of homebased businesses to ensure
consistency and compliance with recently adopted state legislation amending section 559.955 Florida statutes limiting local government regulation of homebased businesses providing for repeal of conflicting ordinances, severability, and effective date. Move to approve ordinance number 2025-17.
Second. We have a motion and a second for the item to be on the floor. Welcome. Tim Burman, community development. Um about two or three years ago, Florida statute of the state passed basically the ordinance here that we're kind of adopting here basically on homebased businesses. It required all local governments and counties to use the same
unified requirements when applying to homebased businesses. Um once that went adopted, the city did use that when we issued homebased businesses the past two or three years. However, we did not codify in our code because we want to make sure that it stuck and there was no changes there. It's gone on a number of years and there's been no changes. So,
we are adopting those regulations into our code, removing our old language so there's no confusion moving forward with it. So, staff is recommending approval of the code amendment. All right. Any questions? Sounds like just basic housekeeping.
We're just going to put on the books what we've been our policy internally anyway. So, Okay. All right. No questions. Any questions? Well, I mean it does differ from it differs from our code somewhat and it's it's it's less stringent than our code.
The kind of the only one that basically there with our code had more restrictions on the number of use type of uses there. This does not. It still allows us to monitor the number of cars that can park in front of there, the screening of the equipment. Um it does allow for two additional employees from outside to come to the house in but does
have those regulations that we still in terms of the aesthetics of the neighborhood still monitor those. Does it affect our our code enforcement department or how does not affect the code enforcement in terms of you in terms of noise ordinance um if they're if they're making noise above the ordinance allowed for the
residential code can use our current codes on that then so does not affect in terms of code enforcement. It just actually being in our code just eliminates confusion. When you look at the code, it says one thing and then we're forcing something else then. So I think it almost helps in terms of code forcement going forward then. But it is less lenient.
There is less requirements in terms of the uses and the number of employees that can be at that location. See this is this is called control from another area. Yeah. Getting in line. It's because
other cities, not us, come up with rules for home businesses. And so Tallahassee says you're not going to do this to our local business owners across the state of Florida and they're going to tell you how you're going to run your city. So thanks, Tim. Any any public comment on
item 17? Seeing none, back to council. Lastly to the apple. Clerk can call the role. Councilman Foley, yes. Councilman Gford, yes. Councilman Green, yes. Vice Mayor Grubs, yes. Mayor Stilner. Yes. 50.
Item 18, first reading of ordinance number 2025-18. An ordinance of the city of Cornsw County, Florida, amending the land development code chapter 20 relating to additional incentives related to permit fees and mitigation for wetlands, trees, and gopher tortoises for targeted businesses. Providing for repeal of
conflicting ordinances, severability, and an effective date. Move to approve ordinance number 2025-18. A second. A motion and a second for item 18 on the floor. Take it away. Tim Bourbon. Over the past several years, the U staff and the council has basically tried to make more efforts to improve the um
incentives that we can offer in terms of redevelopment in our Eastport CRA and Town Center CRA and along with the east side of Port Orange there. One thing that we started looking at in terms of the options available was um you know the incentive there is that if someone wanted to ask for fees to be reduced
related to state or federal um agency sort of mitigation payments or permit fees there. Our code did not allow us to offer that as an option for developers to come and ask council for those assistance there then. So what this does it allows that option to be put into the code. they still are required if they
are going to ask for it to provide an economic incent which comes before the council for approval. So this is more or less just putting the option into the code the ultimate approval of this option would come back as a separate agreement for a targeted business to council on its own agenda item. So staff
is recommending approval of this item. All right, Lance, we'll start with you. Anything? Um I'm not going to lie, Tim. This is confusing to me. Um, and so, so do do you feel this is something that's necessary in Eastport as an example? I
mean, aren't we aren't we close to being done in Eastport? No, we have 78 lots that are basically that are in development in Eastport and four of them have basically been kind of in the holding stage for development for the past four years. So, there seems something that we need to get them over the hurdle. But I mean this is something
that we've imposed on everybody before him before us you know beforehand and now to to to try and get the end we're going to give away gopher turtles or we're going to give away trees or or basically I mean we've that again basically an esport one of the target
businesses also too that is in our CRA we do have funds that are now available to use for economic incentives so that's basically one of the reasons why we're putting that there prior to that we did not um there so this is kind of something that you know over the course at the time was not available there, but based off the new um funds that we have
available in the TIFF for Eastport CRA being paid off, this is an option that we can use. And again, we want to try to get those lots built and developed. Also too, in Eastport, there could be a redevelopment opportunity then um on existing properties, which is could be basically utilized for them. So um it's again just one more tool to put in the
toolbox um on there then and we just want to give that option whether it's used or not, it may not be, but we just don't want to be able to tell someone no. I think one of the challenges we had these these CRAAS are sunsetting in 2036 and unless the county changes tremendously, they're not going to get
extended. So, we got very limited window to get this stuff done. So, I I know we hadn't done it in the past, but I think the lesson was whatever we were doing in the past wasn't working because they're still sitting there undeveloped. So, trying to come up with a couple other ideas to get somebody going down there is going to help because we got two
CRAAS, one of which still has debt that that are about to run out of being a CRA. So, this was just an effort to see maybe these three things or two things that will help push it over the over the line. But that that was part of it just the evolution of okay, we tried this, it didn't get people to build there. But RI
Ridge Ridgwood's another good example. We've probably tried 50 different ways to get people to go redevelop Rididgewood. We're fighting the market, but we have all kinds of different incentives, but every time we try something, if it doesn't work, we'll we'll keep keep plugging along till we can get it right. Okay. All right. Good. I can appreciate that. Thank you,
Sean. Uh this is uh fantastic that this is on our agenda tonight because I had a conversation today with a developer of a lot in East Park, Eastport and uh it's an issue with many gopher turtles and
the cost of it. So, it was it's ironic that we're having this conversation tonight and uh and at the end of the day, if we make it, it's not like we're we're making it easier for people to do something on a vacant lot that's not generating any revenue for us other than
the taxes. The person who owns a lot, it's paying. But when they put in, you know, they improve that land, then the value of that property goes up. The money starts rolling into us and and that's we've got that land there to develop. So any way we could give
someone an incentive to get it filled, it's been there for I can't remember. It's a really great location. It's a kind of a hidden location. So I think it takes the right kind of business, but it is a really good location that doesn't provide a lot of stress on our services or negative impacts. And I I know that this particular
developer is doing it for himself, but he's also adding four maybe units for other businesses that can move into those spots because they're not available now. So, I think it's a a great opportunity for us to to move Eastport along and anything else around
that. Sure. While we have the time to do it. So, thank you, Tracy. I'm going to say same, you know what Sean is talking about. We had a conversation about a month ago with a developer out there and they toured the property and there's over 31 gopher
tortoises on one single track. And when you start looking at that, you're in the tune of about $80,000. That's a big bill for gopher ta tortoise. I'm not saying relocation isn't something that needs to be done. It it definitely does and we need to protect them. But at the same time, when
you're trying to sell it and develop it, that's another chunk of change that a developer has to look at. So if we can help incentivize and for that to be moved properly so we can protect the gopher tortoise and this is one way to do it. It it helps twofold you know
helps the turtles for sure helps us develop the land but also helps us as tax base be developed on property that's been sitting for 30 years. So yeah no I think you guys are right on with
it. You know, it's one thing about it when when we approve something like this, it's going to come before us. If anyone wants to develop, they're going to ask. But like I said, $80,000 and move some some tortoises is a lot of money. And you know, anytime we can be pro business, I think that's the right
approach to take. I think this is good for pro I think it's good for businesses that want to come in. It's good for the esport. And with the CRA, you know, 10 years away from sunset, we want to try to get as much in there as possible before that happens. So, it's probably got to be something that happens in the next.
This is almost a no-brainer for me. So, thanks, De. Appreciate it. Anybody from the public want to comment? All right, back to council. Last bite. No. And we just on our consent agenda just approved something in reference to go to
paper to so it all makes sense to me. Clerk, call the role. Councilman Foley, yes. Councilman Ger, yes. Councilman Green, yes. Vice Mayor Grubs, yes. Mayor Stilton, yes. 50. Onto the regular agenda items. Item 19, discussion of the fiscal year
2025 2026 operating fund budgets, capital outlay and capital improvements program. Tracy's getting the tech ready. Uh, all right, we're good. So, this is set up the same way, very much like we did last year. Same kind of format on the
budget, going through it, focusing on the budget at fund level. Uh, introductory slides, focus on the budget, and then at the end, discussion on the village rate. uh should council choose to do that tonight. You also have next Tuesday as a backup night. It's scheduled as a special meeting next
Tuesday at 5:30 should you prefer that as Max Millage or we can do it tonight. Uh I'm going to talk through the slides. There's obviously some technical stuff. Uh these are structured as you have questions just stop and ask them along the way. Uh there are uh the finance
staff is is here as well as all the other department heads. So questions that go at any level of depth, somebody will come up here and answer the question if it's something I don't have the answers for. So with that, I'll start going through the the presentation. Background slides that open it up. Uh we've used these se three
key priorities for years. The the big three, public safety, infrastructure, and parks. Uh that that's been what's driven Port Orange's budget for a number of years. It still does. Uh hurricanes have kind of pushed that. infrastructure is really part of the emergency preparedness, but that's what we've been
driven by. There's a different way to look at that. The the keys in this budget are those storm water projects. And then there's a couple of parks things that are coming. One of the things that we have here is is a pretty hefty investment in public safety this year uh with the additional officers and
some fire trucks. Um we did not reduce any service levels. So, so what we've done is maintain the rest of the service levels. and then I'll go through the budget and show you where we've we've requested funding to enhance the service levels. Uh this quote was in last year. Uh it's important I think that that it
shows proactive approach on behalf of council to invest in the infrastructure now so that it doesn't end up being an emergency where it tends to cost more money. I think we had one of the citizens get up talk about that earlier. Uh the idea of proactively fixing things in ahead of time and then the second
half of that quote related to the people who provide it. So we are a service organization. We don't sell cheeseburgers. We don't sell cars or cell phones. We provide services to the community and those services are provided by our staff. Uh our staff does an outstanding job. And in the next
slide gets into that and we did this last year too, but I think it's important when you when you come and ask for money to do things and it's the public's money that we're using to do this. U people will want to know, well, what are you doing to maximize what you have? How do we know that we're getting
good value for the money that you do have? And this is this year's list of things that have been done. And it's split in half. Depending on which screen you're looking at, the top's green and blue. Bottom's blue. Different looks different on some of the other screens depending on the quality of the resolution. But the top part are things
where we have had success in getting other revenues to support our project. So where we've been able to leverage funds from whether it's the state uh the state government, the federal government, in some cases it's bad guys we arrested and they they we took their stuff and that that's helped pay for
things. So there's a variety of things that we have used to do that. It was it's been a particularly solid couple of years and leveraging local money. So the the people of Port Orange aren't 100% paying for this. We're getting contributions from other places. Uh the
two plans open up the door for a lot of grant eligibility that's been talked about. Uh we had a really solid year in state legislative appropriations as well. Uh that's putting us in a really strong place for transform 386 and resilient Florida money going forward. So we will always continue to try to
find ways to to to add other dollars to the Port Orange dollars to get things done. The bottom half is is your staff basically saying what can we do to if can we increase the service level but we don't need more money to do it. Is there some way to be more efficient at it? Is
there some way to do what we're doing for less cost or do more for the same amount of cost? A lot of these things we have already talked about. We've talked a couple of times about the land swap related with us in the schools putting the soccer fields closer here so it's it's easier to maintain, easier to
manage. Uh we've talked about the utilities department. They they've g you a presentation on how we manage chemicals at the plant to save hundreds of thousands of dollars and how many chemicals go in every year. We've also had a conversation about waste products in the treatment process and how we are able to look at a pilot program that may
save us from having to pay disposal costs for parts of the process. You end up with something useful like sand as a result. So these things have been going on. There's just two others I'd like to take some time to talk about here. One is the Tyler asset management process. We have not had in in Port Orange's
history a a real formalized asset management program. U when we went over to Tyler, Tyler has this program. What really drove this for us is a number of a couple years back and and you remember these items. We have an air conditioner at the police station that had a long life and it broke before it reached its
long life. And and that frustrated me tremendously because we're spending money in current years for something that we should have had about another decade before we needed to spend that money. We could have used that money on other things, but it was it was not part of an asset management program where there were formal training. Uh and so
what we're going to do, and it's going to go all throughout the organization, but starting with the big stuff. So major air conditioners, roofs on buildings, generators, you know, all all of the things that cost tons of money all the way through fleet or heavy equipment. How often is it down? Why is it down? What can we do to maximize its
uptime and being used? Uh all the way down to smaller fleet. Just how do we handle making sure that if you buy a truck that's supposed to last 10 years, it lasts 10 years. Uh sidewalk management. We've talked about the striping, paving of streets, fixing potholes, all these things can be managed. The more data you have, the
more the more we can come to you when you say, "Well, how much money is it going to take you to get all these neighborhoods striped in five years?" I'll be able to give you that number going forward. And this will sa save save us money because we won't take things that should last six or seven years and replace them year three and four. So that's an important thing going
forward. Multiple departments are a part of that. That's a real key thing. In addition to that, the other one I want to talk about is related to the hurricane debris monitoring site. And so in the past, every time the storm comes near, there's always let's go get sandbags out. Well, in the past, it took
us a day and a half or so to get fully set up with sandbags. We had we had to go get sand from locations out in Sanford area, truck it in, set it up, uh go get the bags, pull the people over, staff it. It was really not a very efficient process. And and the staff, to
their credit, nobody told them to do this. They came in and went, "We can do this." This we were wearing out public works staff, having people who drive trucks spend, for some reason, they always seem to come on a Sunday. So we'd spend all day Sunday preparing sandbags and getting ready. the hurricane would
hit and those same people who we made work 10 12 hour days prior to the storm had to turn around and work another month and a half to two months 12-hour days picking up debris and to their credit they came in and went we can do better than this our debris management site out there was about there was about
three acres of usable land to store debris on and last year we we let people come by and do their own drop off so as part of that learning process they went well why can't we have them come by there and pick up sand under the same efficient process so we now have a sand pile out there three times the size of
any sand pile we've ever had before and and we have it it's we have basically stabilized the road so you can come in you'll come in from the south by the police station come in get in line we have acquired two machines that will make 20 bags at a time so we'll pre-make tons of bags the night before have them
ready make them throughout the day so you're not you don't have this chaos of everybody getting out of their car and trying to shovel sand the bags will be there they come up pick up load them in the car they move on, go up north and get out. So, we'll be able to move people through at about a 4hour setup time doing it and get our people in and
out. And we have we don't have to send trucks now to go get sand. So, the truck drivers will be able to rest so they'll be capable of running he heavy equipment when the time comes for for posttorm. In addition to that, they did a ton of work in-house, all all of our people in house and took that threeacre site and set it
up for six acres. So we have last year we were a little nervous with some Helen debris on top of Milton that we were going to run out of land to put all that debris and then we'd end up having to pay money to somebody else to lease a site to do that. So they've doubled the size of the site to the point where we
can split it if we end up with two haulers to speed up the process. So you put the two hollers there with the monitoring comp company in the middle and then get both of them going at the same time and speed up the debris removal site. And then when the storm's done, the same people can come through there and you can do citizen drop off
while we're doing truck drop off on the same efficient route. So that was all done by staff to to save staff time and save taxpayer money and be more efficient, provide better service to the customers completely on their own. Wasn't something I told them to do. They came in and said, "We don't like the way we're doing it. We can do a better job."
So those are the kind of things that the people work here are doing to with the money that they're already given to to make sure that it's not being wasted. It's a good value and it's good use and that we have a we have a lot of people that work like that here. And I just a quick comment on the on the citizen drop
off stuff and that that's an idea that was way late in coming to the game, but man, when it did, I mean, a lot of people want to do that and and they are they they don't they understand that when you have these natural disasters, things take time. And a lot of the neighborhoods that that are fortunate
who don't get impacted tremendously, they're okay with taking five, six, seven bags of yard debris and hauling it down there and just we just got to give them that place. So kudos to to staff for for doing that. And I know Waste Provided uh some resources on site to
accommodate that and be able to do that. And I think that is a really good thing to make sure we keep in the in the books. Hopefully we never ever have to do it again. But if we do, uh certainly I think that that those are helpful. So leading from that into the actual
budget. So uh this is an overview of broad overview. The total budget's 222, general funds at 60 around 63. The the general fund is relatively close to what it was last year. So that's the part of the budget that's funded mostly through property taxes. The total budget, the
largest part of our budget is actually enterprise fund, and I'll show you that there's a there's a larger increase there, but it's driven by the capital projects and and predominantly funded by outside sources to support us. There's some other information in there. uh the the where we have balanced this budget
at the draft level for tonight uh is is one of the lowest percentages over roll back we've seen in a number of years certainly the lowest in the last five to six years. So this this is hard to see on the monitor. It's easier to read off of your piece of paper and I think the bigger
screens are easier to see for the audience than the the the higher resolution smaller screens. So these are our key funds. So this is the six major funds and some smaller ones and and the funds are structured. It's it's interesting I think when people see that the general fund itself is not as large
as the enterprise funds are. Uh the the point of this is just a broader overview. Down at the bottom is where I listed the enhancements. Uh so the enhancements to the general fund are principally staff. Uh the police officers that we talked about we have the grant that we've applied for to cover the first couple years of those.
So that's in that's shown in there. Uh the as in watching the parks projects coming along later in the year, the parks people would be a they'd be allowed to hire a few people to be ready for the parks projects coming forward. So those are the enhancements to the general fund and the enterprise funds
which is mostly the the utilities department with water and sewer. Uh we're adding a crew that we've looked at from way back before CO, but the rules for maintaining fire hydrants have have gone up. There's a much more stringent process for fire hydrant maintenance. really it shouldn't be a rule needed because it's really important if you
live anywhere when if something catches on fire you want to be able that fire department be able to hook up to that hydrant and put your fire out. Uh so one of the things this crew will do is focus on 3,300 fire hydrants and making sure that we meet all the requirements of that plus the valves near it. Uh they
all all of them are part of that field crew that works out there maintaining the distribution systems whether it's water going in and sewage coming out and the fire hydrants they all work together. But a few years back when they were originally considering these teams, the the we had a lot of vacancies and
with with council support and the wages coming up and the union agreements that we've had, we've been able to fill all the vacancies in the field crews and with them fully filled, they still are. Same thing with police. When when when you don't have vacancies, it's hard to ask for new positions. When we're all full and you realize you still need to provide better service, that's when you
see the request in the utilities. Even with this inquested enhancement, the operating costs actually went down because it's such a huge fund with other areas where there are lower cost. Uh if what you what's really the notable thing on this slide is if you look at the capital numbers, you see how those are
those are where your big changes are. So you got 13 million and 11 million, you got you got fairly large changes in capital and and that's when we get to slide 18, that's where the breakdown is going to show you why those changes are there. But this this is the broad overview by fund.
This is the funds with what's underneath them. We also have this in a pie chart format. Last year, everybody preferred looking at it in pie chart, but I've got it here so you can see what makes up the parts of it. And if you want to go back to this slide at some point, we can. It really kind of just shows you water and look how big water and sewer water and
sewer is bigger than the general fund. That that that's how large our enterprise is providing this utility to to various people in the region. These are the smaller ones on on this page. So going into the pie chart section of this the the we do this every year to
show you that the general fund. Where's the money come from that drives the general fund? The vast proportion of it comes from the property taxes. That's the big part of that. The intergo the intergovernmental resources. Also there's an explanation down in the corner as to what those are. The sales
taxes is a decent part of that as well. Uh we really had thought this year we were going to collect less in those other revenues. Uh we had been told most of the year that the state was collecting at lower levels. Uh it apparently it's possible that the the tariff caused people to spend more money
and so we ended up getting a better more positive revenue stream out of this than we thought because people apparently went and bought more things than they were buying earlier in the year. So that number is a little higher. It it's helping us work with the negotiations with the uh with our labor unions going forward. So the extra revenue has been
positive to help us with them. Um this is how the property tax comes to us. Similar ratio to what we've seen in the past. We always have about twothirds of it coming from the residential. We we do have a reasonably solid commercial
tax base. Uh over 20%'s good. There are cities that have a ton of industry and major amounts of jobs that can get 30 and 40%. Uh but but this for the suburban type city that we are that's that's fair. We have some fairly large
commercial players here. Uh Blight um US Foods, uh Target, Walmart, BJ's, LA Fitness, Pavilion. So we we have a decent because we're one of the regional leads in the area, particularly around the interstate. So that really helps quite a bit with with that because we
have a tremendous amount of homesteaded properties in the residential side and a lot of long-term residents. I actually have a question because I'm just looking at this slide here. How how can a commercial property be homesteaded? Commercial's not. Okay, I see where those are exempt. I think it's covering
exempt. So, some of them may be churches. I think what that is. All right. Yeah, we just didn't change the word to show that. All right. That's I saw that like, wait a minute. Somebody's sharp here. Yep. Hurry up. Thank you. Paying attention, aren't you? Details, my friend. Details.
So, and so this is how the general fund gets spent by category. So we start by showing this. This is one of the things we do as part of the the the budgeting process as well as when you look at audit at the end of the year. But personnel is the largest cost out of the general fund. Uh then you can see the other things that are in there that the
uh contract services is really also personnel. It's us paying other people. So we pay some people to mow things. We we pay people to do services. So those are your that's your cost of people to do work. The dominant uh expense. And then this is when you look at it by
department. Uh and and this pie ratio is is fairly similar to what it's been for last several years. It's dominated by public safety. This year, the piece of the pie that is police is a little bit bigger because of the additional officers going in there, parks being the third. So, back to that first slide,
when you look at the budget drivers and what's the key to our budget, the big three, the the infrastructure you saw in the enterprise funds, and then the two parks and public safety. So, those are the big three. The big three are where we put the money. If you're going to have a strategy, usually put most of your money in your strategic priorities,
and that's what we do. We put it into public safety, parks, and infrastructure. [Applause] These are the enterprises uh dominated by water and sewer. We said before this re this ratio hasn't really changed. The water sewer is so large that even small
changes to it with with staffing and you can see that number was actually fairly small. That's that crew doesn't cost a ton to to operate. So that's their breakdown. The special revenues are even smaller. Uh the building department, so that's the building inspectors. It it it's
interesting. So in this pie chart to show you how small the special revenues are, the the building fund is about $3 million, which is the same size as the golf course. On this slide, that $3 million is over half of our special revenue. The golf course is only 3% of the total in the enterprises. So this
just the scale of the difference between the enterprises which are fee driven parts of the budget and and this is also fee driven but it's got a little different rule as to how it works. The the notable thing on here the two CRAAS uh that that we've as we talked about Eastport earlier Eastport is now uh it
it's debt it's paid its debt. So, uh, I don't know, probably right before I got here ear originally, like two early 2000s, we went in and extended the road to the south and built a pond system to support the development in there. So, the debt's now been paid. So, all the tiff revenue that's being generated is
now going into a tiff savings that we can then use to do infrastructure improvements in the area. You can use it for incentives well as well, but it's it's now operating the way CRAAS are supposed to operate where the the the additional growth and tax revenue is paying for its improvements in that
area. the town center. The big change there is while we still have debt and that the payment schedule is scheduled to not be paid off till the the CRA sunsets, it is now low enough that and and with new developments coming up in the CRA and there have been four or five pretty nice developments down there,
it's now generating enough revenue to at least pay the debt down every year. So, we used to gener we used to send $250 to $400,000 a year out of the general fund just to pay those loans. Now, it's paying its own loans. So it it'll take till 2036 to pay them off, but there's
that's a pretty good positive improvement out of that CRA to see us. And that's without Riverwalk down there. That's on its own with those smaller projects. We talked about capital in great detail back at June. So I won't go through the full hourong presentation on that, but this is it summarized broadly. Again,
you always see the dominance of the the utility, the water sewer in there. Um, so this is the slide I wanted to to draw attention to the the capital project. So when we were looking at the the budget increases on the the first slide. So you see these dramatic, you know, $20
million increases in your budget and people are like, how are you spending that much more money? So if you look at this list of the top eight on this list, uh, six of those eight items we have substantial outside revenue for. So the year came in that we these projects are
now ready to be funded. we move them into the budget, those dollars show up. But you're not increasing your spending of the public's tax dollars by $20 million. You are simply allocating money that we got from the legislature or that we got the the the utilities project on
the top, the 15 million is a 100% forgivable loan. So, of this the six of the eight on the top that are the dominant this is why your budget changes only two that we're having to pay for is the second phase of the the sewer plant upgrade which is the $6 million and the
city center ball field and that's the project back here where we're going to lift and put and seal it off. Uh so that one we tried hard in Tallahassee that that parks improvements like that just weren't what was getting legislative appropriations this year. But that that's a pretty solid support from other
people to do a lot of good work on infrastructure here. And then the projects below it are the smaller scale which are probably more typical of what you'd see you know in any given year in Port Orange. These kind of improvements whether they're to uh lift stations or to parks or things like that. So this is this is really probably the key slide to
the whole budget. This is driving what's changed the most part in here. And and again, thanks to the legislature and all the people who helped us with the funding to to not have that be all on our taxpayers. We get this question sometimes too with capital projects because they span
multiple years and they they get funded in certain years but they grow. Somebody will go why why isn't Cambridge on this list? You know, isn't that an important project? Cambridge was funded in a prior year. So, we just put these on here to show you these are existing funded capital from prior years. They're still
there and they're still moving forward, but they're not in the current year. So, they don't show in year one of the budget. They they're they're just out there from the past. This is the stormwater slide. We had this in there in the June presentation, but we realized after some of the
questions that we could do a better job on how we put it together. So, we we put the the top five projects from the the stormwater master plan are in here with how much they cost, what the estimate, where the money's coming from, what the breakdown is, so you can see where all
the outside sources are coming from. Transform 386 through the county is going to be very important as as uh vice mayor mentioned too, the resilient Florida dollars are critical to these projects. Um, we've put some construction estimated times and design estimated timelines in there subject to
the grants being available. Uh, the benefit here is we we just recently Palmer bought the Allen Green Center from us and we acquired some money from Irma, reimbursements from Irma uh, last year. So, we've we've that money's been set aside to hold. We still have a full
quarter left in this fiscal year, but we do expect there will be some money that doesn't get spent that will roll over into the fund balance. your fund balance is healthy. It is above your 25% minimum. It's closer to the 40% with this what we think's coming in. That money would be held on to 35 is what
your cap is. So, you want to be right around the 30. It was about 20 million, $25 million. So, you want to take the what what we're suggesting we do is anything that we rolled over into it, we hold on to for these projects is as backup in the event one of the grants. It's possible we get transform 386, but
maybe we don't get the whole amount we asked for. So that money for now would be used as backup for these unless you'd like us to put it into something else. But it because it's one time only money, you don't use it for ongoing operating. You just have to either leave it there or pick a project that you want us to to
fund with it going forward. We we don't know yet because we're not quite that far enough along. Uh but but this is I think it was important for everybody to see those projects when they start and how they're being paid for because there's been a couple questions of what's the likelihood of the the project
actually getting underway. So Cambridge which was on the other one and also shown here is is one FEMA reimbursement from starting in January once we get the permit. So that's the first thing people will see construction on. I know that's that is a critical area of our town to take care of and that project's very
important. And then we follow up with starting construction the next year on the the Pepper Hill Madlin one. And then we get to Sleepy Hollow's design at the same time we start that. So those are the three largest. Partona is a little smaller scale in that area. And the
Purchases is really trying to focus on the area down there by the post office and the FPL and in that whole area. And the other thing while we're doing this, the county is leading the basin studies for us. And so they're doing V19 and Cambridge and Spruce Creek and those
projects could lead to additional funds through transform 386 and other county sources and and I think there because they're doing these that these are regional projects and not Port Orange only. So there there's definitely challenges beyond our borders for all of those projects. And so we look for those
when those projects come forward to get funding beyond just us to do those as they come forward. Wayne, the um the projects that get the transform 386 funding, if we're fortunate for that, I I know you had said that they theoretically kind of become county
projects now, right? The county is going to oversee them through that process. Those projects then come off of our budget off or how does that work? Is it just we show a transfer of funds? We would transfer our funds to their project to them and then it comes out of our budget and it's it's off our books, so
to speak, or But the county wise it goes we just give the money to the county. Okay. Scary. All right. So this debt slide. So we had a we had experts come talk to us. We had our
financial guidance people talk to us in November of last year and April of this year. They came back again in May before we went out with the parks bond. So we have we have talked about debt for hours and hours up here and how it works. Uh I won't go into the detail unless you guys have questions on it. The the main thing
from all of that was that we are using it judiciously. It is not a weakness in how the government's run. It is being used purposely and effectively to get better value for money. Certain things are better cheaper to do it that way. In other cases, it's a it's a choice to have the people who benefit from
whatever we're buying be part of paying for it throughout its life. is as an evidence of of us being good with and being good stewards of when we do use debt as we went out to get the bonds for parks. We went through a Moody's process for bond rating and they upheld our AA2
rating as part of that by noting how well we handle our our debt processes and how solid our finances were. So, uh it's not a it's not an issue that we just show this slide as part of the budget every year because you can see as it pays off going through the years. uh and it's also part of the overall tax
bill that people pay the separate geo debt when it goes forward. So, it's important to be transparent that it's out there. [Applause] This is just future years. I won't spend a lot of time on it, but it's better to tell you ahead of time than than surprise you at the end of the year. There's there's still more police
officers. We are we're you know, we're not the highest in staffing for the crime rates in the population. Uh there's that conversation with the with the county of having a second ambulance at some point in time and the estimate to finish by the time all the parks projects get done is 10 more employees
to run all those parks by the time that they're done. Uh the sewer plant we we're showing it in phases, but that's the total cost of it when we do that major upgrade. So a lot of that will be grant fund eligible from the similar sources to where we got the refundable loan from. So we expect not to have to
pay that much money. That's just what it will take to get there. And then city hall, which when we talked about that, it was before the hurricane. Uh but it the the building the walls are stable. It's not going to fall down. But the the plumbing, the roof, the electric, uh the
the energy efficiency of it, the technology, we we've got this wonderful 1980s VHS technology in the council chambers. Uh it is not a very efficient building. We we can we will need to at some point in the near future do something different than this building.
It is willfully slowed down because the priority is making sure that we have our infrastructure taken care of and take care of people related to storm water and hurricanes before we build a government building. At some point in time though, it's not a good steward to keep working in a building that that's costing more money than it would be to
switch it out. But right now, that's not the right thing to do. So, it's it's there. Be aware of it, but it's not it right now. We we we have other things people I think expect of us than building a city hall. the the ambulance thing, I tell you, is still a it is such a hard thing to get used to. Yesterday
afternoon, uh I our fire department was responding and handling a medical call and the ambulance that was on scene in our city was from Edgewater and it just it just every time I see it, I'm just like, man, oh man, you know, I mean, it's great. We ours is has proven to be very efficient and effective and
have been a a true plus 100% for our city, but it's still just crazy to see that uh sometimes that the way that the ambulances are distributed around the county that those resources pulling an ed an edgewater ambulance all the way out of, you know, Edgewater to come to
and ours used to spend some quality time all the way up in Orman and and and that we probably at some point in the future have the chief because he loves talking in public come up and and talk about it, but He's he's done a really good job of of making sure that we get the best deal we can have and and they have worked on
trying to make sure that our ambulance doesn't get sent for non-emergency purposes outside of our jurisdiction that we get more of the collection rate back. Uh I think they've done a really good job the the division chief that we have put in there has done a really good job of making sure how we do inventory, how we make sure that we have all the
right equipment in there. The the IV program that we did where it's a partnership with Halifax was was something that came out of of that new chief. So, at some point, it's probably worth a presentation to council on how we're helping protect our citizens through through what we do with our medical services. I think it's a great idea. Let's not if
the chief's okay with it, let's not do it tonight. So, if I don't know if there's any questions on the budget in general before we go into the millillage slides, any questions about the general budget plan? Do we have an actual number as to how much money we have in general fund uh balance? Do we have the
You do. What is the number right now? Like what is You talk about the unreserved fund balance. Yeah, fund balance. What what do we have right now? Approximately 4.1 and then there's the proceeds. The overall the the the 20 million that we keep that number
excess. Yeah. Four. It's 4 million over. So we have 4 million right now in excess of the 35% counting the Allen Green which which I think we've started to have a consensus up here that 35% may be a little arguably high but that's that's
a different conversation for us to have amongst ourselves but okay so so that's definitely that's definitely going to be a workshop conversation soon. Yeah it's going to have to be I agree um because so so we're 4.1 million above the 35% right now not counting the
proceeds from the Allen Green Building. That's correct. Okay. Thank you. Just keeping in mind that those kind of dollars are onetime spend and dollars. No. Yeah. We can't use those that can't be used for and and actually
you you did a great job when you're in a different seat explaining this from this DAS is that we don't want to use those dollars for recurring costs. You know, we've seen other administrations that neighbor us who have done that and now they're having to play catchup because
they paid for recurring expenses with one-time money. But 4.1 million plus whatever we get from the sale green center is a lot of one-time money above 35%. Yeah, that is a lot. And and we can have the list of capital projects total that you can we can
basically bring you a presentation and say of this where would you want to allocate it if you choose to do that? Yeah. Yeah. And I think what we do is we get we see how we let transform 386 play out and then somewhere after that it's time for a workshop and a strategy session and figure out what we want to do because we don't and we should hopefully
know before adoption but we we we're hoping to know on that. We we don't know that they will give us everything. They we we had probably had some hints that they may not give us everything we've asked for. So I don't the totals that we were showing might be lower which may require a subsidy. But do do we have any idea at all what
the Allen Green Center might sell for? It already has for 4.1. Oh, that was that is the four. So, it's from that. Okay. That's addition to So, so then there's a total of 8.2. Correct. Thank you. All right. All right. So, this this one you've seen
before is a conversation about the over roll back numbers. The reason we were showing this is just it shows the trend that uh the the way we've balanced this budget's balanced with a millage at 5.03 and the decimals. uh it's it you can see the downward trend. So after the spike
in 24 and that was the year where we had the police officer raises and it was the first time we allocated three and a half million from the last time we got major amounts of revenue from the state. So that was when we had the the money for the river crossing the force main river crossing and the money for Commonwealth. It was also the same year the year
before we had taken out vacancies. We had so many vacancies, we didn't budget for it and then the the staffing went back because of the the assistance to the police department and we had to put all that back in. So after that spike, you've been doing less and less and less. So this becomes the lowest percent
over roll back to balance the budget and the less total dollars over roll back to balance the budget. So just this was more relative to the thing. The issue is because we are we're reaching buildout. We've talked about this before. When when I got hired, when I was standing out there doing the interview, the council was saying, you know, we're
we're switching from a community of growth to a community of of buildout. And it there may be redevelopment, but we're just filling in small gaps. Now, I moved here in in 2007. We have had less than 10,000 people added to our population in the almost 18 years since
then. It's 500 people a year is is virtually no growth. It is really slow, really flat. What people are seeing, I think, is the infill. So they'll see a self- storage facility or a car wash that drops in. But as far as population, which is driving the need for fire and schools and really expensive
infrastructure, we haven't been seeing a lot of growth. Well, you can live a city off of growth if you're doing well. That's how you pay for inflation and keep up. When you don't have growth, you got to find other ways, which is really nice that our staff's out there trying to do that by finding other funding sources and finding better ways to do
stuff. But we're we're tightening it up. You can see the tightening from this chart and this is the this is this year. It's not it's not the proposed 26 budgets because we don't have that numbers from everybody but at the balance rate of the 503 you don't change your position on
this chart. Uh Pearson's the one closest to us. It it would take a decent cut from them to get to us. I don't think any of the 58s are going to cut enough to to pass. We may end up in the exact same spot at that millage rate. I I just put this in here cuz I don't
even know if this is true, but everybody's seen the shrinkflation stuff all over the internet and and businesses sometime get to have their response is what what do you do when the world gets tougher and what happens when you quit having growth and uh and they can sell
you less for more you which is what that example shows in our case. That's not something the government gets to do. We get to do more for less. The exact opposite of that. So, we even have a couple local restaurants here where we went in, one person very familiar with the beer cheese soup where you used to be able to take the spoon and lay it
across the top and it would barely it it would almost fall into the bowl and since co the spoon hangs out over the side of the bowl and they they charge more money for it for a smaller amount and and that so I know it's happening. You've seen it happen in buy a bag of potato chips and or get get a thing of
fries and now there's like six fries in the bag instead of 20. uh that's what people do to make profit in that world. We're not in the profit business. We're in the service business for our people. So, it's not really something that that our public expects us to do is to shrink the size of the services and charge them
more money for it. So, our challenge is to figure out how to keep providing them the stuff they want without getting the price too high. So, that that gets us to the key the key slide here. Uh this is the millillage scenarios. This is something format we use every year. The
upper orange bar is how we have the draft budget balanced. The lower orange bar is the current millage rate. And then the bottom is the roll back rate. So, and then the dollar amounts are in here in that one column on the far side is the average increase that would to be
to a it's a typical house that is assessed at 250,000 or 230 I think it is 230,000 with a $50,000 uh um pump. Yeah. So that that property it it's a where the millillage is based
it's a whatever that number is it's about $11 over current right now. So what we if we left the millillage where it is or we moved it up you'd be spending about 11 more dollars for a typical house in Port Orange. So it's a relatively small amount to go to that
503. And I said it's it's small because it's it's only a little over like 5% above roll back right now. So at this point we we just leave it up to council. you guys have a conversation and tell us what millage you want. Remember, it's max millillage. You can always lower it. Uh it's it's really difficult. You can
go up, but it's really difficult. I don't know I've ever seen any city in this area ever try to go higher. So, whatever you set for max, three of the last five years, we've actually lowered it since you set the max. Um we we have from now until September when we actually vote on the budget. So,
anything we haven't provided, any questions you have, any other information you want, we've got a solid month and a half to get you where you want to go before we vote on it. Uh, again, we we do have to turn in a max millillage by the end of the month so that it can go in the trim notices that all the citizens get. Uh, but you can
always go lower than that or or keep it the way it is. So, so at this point I'll let council if you have any questions or be happy to listen to the conversation on what millillage do we need to close item 19 and move to item 20 for this rest of this discussion.
It's it's set up for that unless anyone has any questions. Anybody have any questions where we're at right now? I guess I have one more question just uh on the capital projects uh specifically the two that we're paying for. So, we have water reclaim uh reclamation safety and we have the city center ballfield
rehab. How much of the three million is expected for us to pay in year one? Is that 100% in the or and where is that money coming from? Is it coming from the millillage and the general fund? It is 100% general fund for that one. So, so $3 million
it'll be allocated in year one. We may not the project may span that year and it may they may bill us beyond that year but it will be allocated in that year one. Okay. It's being designed now. So that's the construction cost. Tracy
Wayne, I know we talked about this earlier and I just want to recclarify. Last year when we got to this point, we were looking at uh tax base as far as income coming in from the state for gas tax and things of
that nature. We've got that all acred into the numbers now or we have them all. So for for some reason in years past they they used to they used to do this early in in July and then the last three or four years I think the co era they were pushing it to the last possible.
This year they beat the timelines and got them into us. Okay. So we won't have anything outstanding then. Nothing that would be notable to change the okay revenue streams. It um I don't know if I have anything right now at this time. I just kind of just
kind of, you know, I've been looking at this for a while now and I don't really have anything right now. Okay. No, I'm good. So, yeah, this is a um so this is a this is a starting point for us as a council
and and staff working on the budget. They've done the staff's done a lot of work obviously already, but the all reality of it is is that what we're charged with tonight is setting a max millillage which is the starting point. Um there is still a lot of work that
gets done between now and and September um before we will approve the the final budget and all that stuff but we have to give them the starting point to work from and then work down from there. So um we've got you know the fourth quarter left of this year. It is it is good
because the last few years like Bla was just commenting on when we got to this point we didn't even have all of the projected revenues in and here we were sitting here trying to make this decision hoping and assuming we knew what what the field was and so that's not a good position to be in. So it's a
little bit of a better starting point that we have this year. So we'll close item 19 and move into uh item 20 for setting the max operating millage for the fiscal year 20 2526. Um
city attorney is there anything you have to read on that or no? No not at some point we'll have to take comment. Sure. All right. So Wayne, you just want to do you want to comment any further on on what we're what we need to do for staff tonight? I mean, I I I feel I know
we have next Tuesday set aside so that if council didn't want to set a max tonight, but I think we can get it done, guys. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I have I want to Yeah, I want to uh you know, recognize the work that staff has done to get us hit tonight and and let's do
our part and and get this done tonight. Any other comments? Wayne, you want to Nothing further until you have questions for us. Okay, Lance, we'll start with you then. What what's uh so how so how's this go? We just all start throwing out numbers. Yeah. So we we we got to we got to come
up with a with a max millillage. And so this page 27 here on the chart is kind of a good guide. Um if you have questions on this guide then then the city manager and finance staff can kind of chime in. So we currently sit at 4.975. Uh that is our current millage rate. Um
obviously roll back would be 4.7657. staff has done a draft budget to bring forward tonight. Uh like the city manager said, you know, they usually will come down from there anyhow, but they're sitting currently at 5.0325 with the draft budget that we have
tonight, which would be about a 5.6% increase. Mayor, do you want to take public comment now or wait until you have a motion and a second on the floor? Well, yeah, let's we'll we'll have a little discussion here first and most in the second and then um we'll have some public comment on it.
So, so I am uh of the mindset and again I I' I've put a lot of time into this and and I've met I've met with these guys on this a lot and and I don't see why we can't make it and continue to be at the 4.975.
That's what I have. Okay. any any additional comments about any of the budget stuff or No. Okay. All right. Sean, uh, so I've done my research with this and um, you know,
this is going to be probably one of the tougher decisions we make because this is the most well, it's one of the most important decisions we make and it's the funding of our city for our citizens and it's probably the most m I mean, I don't know. I haven't had one person come to
me and complain to me since I've been running for office and I got elected about taxes. They've they've all talked to me about the lack of services and the diminishing roads and striping and uh the lack of staff or um issues with um
you know not enough space for parks and wreck. uh where we have a a waiting list of of kids that want to participate. People love Port Orange. I've been a realtor for 30 years and I chose to live
in Port Orange. When I got to make that choice where I said, "Hey, I want to live in Port Orange." I moved to Port Orange and absolutely love it. And I ask people when they tell me they live in Port Orange, I said, "What made you choose out of all the locations in East
Valuchia County, what made you choose Port Orange?" And they pull off a 95 and they head east and they're in awe of how beautiful it is. And all of that has
come with a lot of uh discussions that I've been a part of as a as a a guest in this room about why we wouldn't why we should not build where BJ's is now that I get my gas almost every single week where I shop there. Uh
why we should leave it the way it is and no one's complaining about that. They're just in awe of how beautiful Dunlot is. when we pull off the the interstate. You guys have done such a fantastic job of of building something that attracts
people to this city. I get that all the time. That's the number one thing they say is when they pull off a 95. And you don't get that everywhere when you pull off a 95 in Florida. But all of this that we've done
costs money to maintain and people want it maintained. And when a business goes and builds a building, if they don't collect enough money, they can't maintain it. And it shows real quickly in the quality of their food and the quality of their
employees, everything starts to decline and next thing you know, they're out of business. Now, we're not a business that's going to go out of business. But we can't go uh backwards when it comes to funding the most critical aspects of strengthening our community with
safety, with parks and wreck, quality of life, with infrastructure that me I've sat in this room last year when it was full standing room only of people complaining about flooding
and and I understand why it flooded. It wasn't because of our failures. It was because of mother nature overtook us. It didn't happen today. It rained like crazy today for hours. And I drove through that same neighborhood in the middle of the day when I left this my
meeting here today, my meeting here today with city manager. I drove through that neighborhood. It wasn't flooded. Now, there was puddling between houses. And if it would have continued, there would have probably been some issues. But we're working on addressing that because we have now resources that we are raising and we got to continue to do
it. And I don't I watch this city I wouldn't say not raise taxes because you can see that we have raised taxes and that's basically what we're we decide. Do we want to increase our funding to provide the services that are most important to the people?
um will it create a better place for the people that are growing families in this area if we can properly fund the services that we need? You know, you had mentioned something uh Reed about where a city used resources
from a sale of something and then found themselves back in a corner. Which city was that? Was it a city that already charges higher millage rates? Uh It's I'm actually not referring to the city. Um I'm referring to actually during the co years um the Valuchia
County School Board took some one-time funding and hired new teachers and created new programs and now they're having to eliminate those teachers and eliminate those programs because they cannot raise they can't raise enough funding to continue them. And so that's why you have to be extremely careful
that you don't employ new police officers with general fund balance or sale of something because it will go away. And so you never want to purchase recurring items with one-time cost. Gotcha. Or or recurring labor with onetime
costs. And uh my wife is a retired educator from Valuchia County 31 years. And how frustrating is that when you're in leadership and don't have the funds to uh provide the services that our families want? It's very frustrating. Um
I don't want to ever be in that position. I know we're uh a fiscally sound uh city. Uh our prior leaders have done a fantastic job, but things continue to go up. uh the need for fantastic engineers and city managers
and fire chiefs and their staff and utilities continues the the demand for those quality people continue to rise and for us to remain competitive. We got to remain competitive by being able to do it financially and sometimes that's
going a little higher on our millillage rate to generate those revenues in five years if we're in a better position because Riverwalk is out of the ground and people are occupying it and we're generating revenue through redevelopment. Redevelopment comes when people see that we've invested in our
city and they want to bring money to it. But if we go just getting along and we don't invest in our city, no one's going to want to invest their hard dollars in redevelopment because that's all we have. We're about built out. We we were
lucky to acquire the 56 acres or so in our last meeting uh to, you know, see some housing go there, generate some revenues. We got Wood Haven, you know, that's going to generate some revenues. Then then where do we go? We don't go anywhere except for redevelopment. And
where I'm from, that's what's generating a great economy right now in Fort Lauderdale is redevelopment east now instead of because they can't go any further west. And you know, yeah, they all went out there, now they want to live east. And it's amazing uh what's
going on in the investment, but they those cities have done some fabulous things to create incentives to make people want to be there. And how are we going to do that in the future? You know, upgrading our infrastructure. We
just spent a lot of time and effort uh in Tallahassee. We got lucky. We really got lucky. We have a demand from our citizens to take care of our infrastructure and we got lucky that we had the money and we're
able to get some money to match and had the experts to do that. I want us to continue asking our citizens to continue to invest in our city. I'm willing and I do the average. You know, when you take this, if we went up to and I I'll make a
motion eventually that we we give our staff, we give our city an opportunity to be successful. Um that's I think what the citizens want.
Um, and it's not roll back and it's not I mean they're very generous. Um, we we're going to be um very competitive I think with our safety um with our negotiations this year. Um,
but we got to give our staff the tools to be one of the best cities in East Fushia County, uh, Central Florida to get people to invest here. It has to be
our strategy really to give our city staff the tools they need and its finances. It's always comes down to money. Now, Robin is our assistant city manager. Since I've gotten elected, I've been harassing her about these ugly
flamingo signs on Taylor a Taylor Road because everybody makes a left-hand turn and goes east and they love it. You make a righthand turn and go west and you see some corny things uh light poles without lights on them. And I said, "What? We
got to do something about that. It costs money, Sean. You know, is it in our budget?" Well, if it costs money, how are we going to have businesses invest out there if we're not taking care of that those things because of money? So, I think our citizens have shared with us
through the parks and bond vote, the parks and recck bond vote that they are willing to invest in our community. It was several years ago they invested in public safety for us to get a police station out there on Clyde Morris. I think that um they're
entrusting us to make the right decisions which are hard and we can always lower rates if we get in a better position. We have several cities around us that are debtree but have no money to do anything. None. So I'm not worried about the debt. We're
going to take care of that and redevelopment will take care of that if we make the investment. So I don't want to repeat myself. My wife is probably going, "Oh my god, you said the same thing 10 times." But I'm passionate about this and I'm passionate about Port Orange and I want to make sure it heads in the right direction. We need the
funds to do it. So, um uh right now that's all I've got to say. You got a number that you're thinking? Um I'm looking at the um the 5.075. Okay. which when I did the math, it's
$2.60 a day, I think, for the average homeowner. Okay. That's a huge investment into our community to give the tools to our staff. Reed. All right, jump in there.
Yeah. No, absolutely. Um, so sorry, my mic was off. Um, just I appreciate what Sean's saying here. Um, I got to come right out of the gate and
say I don't see a reason for us to go any higher than what staff says they need knowing that you've already been in shade meetings and negotiations and and that they're saying they can get things done at that number. So, I I don't see why we'd push any higher than that. Um,
I will say that staff has rewarded our confidence the last four or five years by giving them what they asked for at this max millillage meeting and then bringing us a lower number by finding something coming along the line down the road, something that there was more money somewhere in one of the buckets or
whatever it may be. Um, so it's kind of a a balance here. This is not where it's not where the final millillage gets set. This is where we kind of put the roof on the house, right? And so I'm a little more lenient at this meeting than I am in the others. With that being said, and Wayne, I'm going to let you if you want
to weigh in a little bit here. I want to make sure I understand this. I'm struggling with a 503, which is 5 and a half% 5.6% above roll back. If we already have 35% in our UN um in our general fund, in our
savings account, if you will, and we supposedly have another 8.2 2 million on top of that 35%. I'm having a hard time understanding why we can't at least stay at the same rate. And I I want to make sure I got the good
the correct information when we were just doing this uh you know presentation because that's that's weighing on me heavily. We're starting to have if that fund starts to get too large even with the flooding projects and everything else that we're trying to accomplish
which are are very very important. It's obviously the most important topic amongst our residents and their biggest concern. But if we're at 8.2 million above the 35%, I can in good conscience have a millage
rate up here that's 5.6% of a roll back. So that was not what I understood and the staff had a conversation and clarified we don't have 4 million extra over and above. That was what we use to pay for the general fund projects that are here. So that's what is accounting
for that. It will slide it back down to the top. It's still the top end of the number, you know. So you you can go 17 I think it's 17 or $18 million is your 25%. So it's it's in the 20s, but it's not 4 million plus 4 million. So we use
that money to to pay for the general fund capital in the budget to keep it at 5.03. You do have Allen Green revenue and the other there. I again it's it's your call but we we're not sure those transform 386 are going to come through at that
level and and that may be necessary to complete some of these projects because they're they're big dollars. You saw that that chart. Absolutely. So that that money that's that's what we were thinking would happen is that that that that Allen Green money and the and the the
Irma would sit there as a backup and and if in the event that we get all the grant money and we know we do, we can come in and do something else with it. You can always adjust. You can adjust midyear. Uh we we will hopefully I don't know when the county is going to vote. I think they were supposed to at least this we would know the staff
recommendations before you vote to adopt the budget. I think so we're pretty sure we'll have something from the the staff going forward. In that case we could adjust again as as Councilman Fley said you can always the max millillage isn't something you're stuck with. So if we we
get more information we learn more just like we do with incentives and anything else. we get better educated, we have more information, we can revise it. Okay. Yeah. Because that's that's that's extremely important to have is information. But, you know, um having been a feels like I've been here, it's
been nothing but hurricanes. But, uh having gone through that, we've never been in a position of of jeopardy as far as our fund balance goes. And so, but if we don't, but not having 8 million or you know, having 4 million over versus 8
million also changes that a lot. Um my my initial thoughts right now, I'm still just not super comfortable going quite that high. I like a millage rate right now, max millage of a flat five. That's where I'm at. Um which is 4.92% above
roll back. Um, I do think staff has done a really good job working from where they started and and moving some of this around, but I still think we need to take more money out of that general fund balance to pay for some of the one-time capital and get this millage rate lower.
And so that that would be my heart's desire and the way I'd like to see us start start moving. So, anything else? That'll be all. All right, Tracy, how about a discussion from you? Okay. So, looking at the millage rate, uh, as of right now, I
think one of the things to to point out your your two budget with the fundings and everything, $222 million. When you go from a 4.975 where we were before, and you go to the
5.03 three for max of what we're requesting and that being asked for. You got to understand that that's less than 1% of where we were as far as dollar amounts. It's actually 65 of a percent.
Say that. I'm sorry. Yes, you lost me there. Let's clarify that and talk about the two margins that you're talking about. 1% you're going from 4.975 to 5.03. You're talking about current millillage. Yeah. Okay. Not roll back. Not roll back. Okay. I understood. Go ahead. I'm sorry.
And when you look at that that dollar amount and all of us know everything is going up, cost of living, you know, they always do an average of 2%. We know it's been more than 2% this past year. So for staff to come back to us
and put a request in for the 5.0325, 325. I want to say thank you big time. It's it's less than 1%. From cost of actual living. So you guys have done a phenomenal job.
I I have to resonate Councilman Foley on the fund balance and how that $4 million and looking at that that that's that is a concern. Um we we hold a a lot of dollar amounts there. At the same time, we have a lot
of projects coming on right now that that fund balance is going to get absorbed up as we move forward. We all know that we have $53 million in projects. Somehow someway we were hoping Resilient Florida pans out. We hope
Transform 386 pans out. state gave us a crunch of money, $4 million. It's just absolutely amazing. But we got two other entities that were we're hedging on. So, there's a lot to this as we go. I
think council needs to keep in mind though, this is this is the max that we're talking about right now. It's not what we hopefully have to set it for, but it's it's the max. So if we're underneath 1% which is a
whole sum of what they are requesting at 5.0325 that's $1061 difference from where we were last year roll back actual last year's monies that we did.
So my request will be splitting the difference in there. Um I agree with Reed and us looking at the 5.0. 0 and that's splitting between the two and I think that will allow us to get to
the monies and also uh look at what our general fund is as far as the fund balance. Okay. Anything else? That's it. So my my thoughts are and and we'll go to public comment here in just a second.
So, h having been through this several times uh up here, um I I can tell you that, you know, when the when the staff lays out a budget for the year, it assumes a lot of things. It assumes every position is full, stays full at
all times, every operational cost runs at 100% at all times. It doesn't really happen like that. Even even things that have to be purchased will have will take time to come in. hires will take time to process through. You'll have retirements. You'll have uh people who
decide to go find other occupations. All these different kinds of things. And thus is how a lot of times we end up with money carrying over from one year into the next going into your fund balance. Right? So just from a historical perspective, I will tell you guys when I when I got on the council
for the first time, our fund balance was over 50%. It was the one of the highest in all of Valuchia County. And at the time we one of the reasons it kind of got like that was and it wasn't that anybody had done anything wrong. It was just that the council hadn't established a policy to
say you know hey we want to have a a comfort level so that if we have critical incidents we can respond to them accordingly but we don't want to stockpile money indefinitely uh that belongs to the taxpayers. And so we set we came up with some margins. Now
you have other cities like Orman Beach for example, they follow the minimum GFOA recommendation. They sit at about little over 16%. Sir, that's it. That's their comfort level. We decided being a coastalbased city that we didn't like that. We wanted to be a little
higher and we came up with 35%. And we set that 35% more than 10 years ago. And we've had time to kind of look at that and and digest it and evaluate it. And and I was actually kind of glad to hear Councilman Foley say this tonight.
We may be a little high on that because we set that margin at 35% and and it we've gone through two major historical storms and we're fixing to flip the calendar over and we're going to be way over it again. And so it's just
something to think about. Um and sometimes too I think it is incumbent on us to take measured risk and there's nothing that says that if if the need is there that we can't take a measured risk and go below whatever our line is
whether it's 35% 30% 28% whatever that line needs to be and and and that part of the discussion is not going to happen tonight that's going to happen soon in a workshop where we can evaluate where where do we want to be talk about the historic and then see if we want to move
that bar a little bit and then what is left over. My point to some of that is to to to also say that I think our staff has done an incredible job. We have asked them for several years fine savings, fine efficiencies. Wayne touched on some of those tonight. They
that's that's awesome, but it's also their job to do that, right? And we want them to do that. We appreciate that they do that. Um and and it's our job to find savings and efficiencies where we can as well get the biggest bang for the buck.
Um I would also say that it's you know and I and I and the couple of the charts there that that the city manager provided us at the end are are kind of the ones every single year we focus on quite a bit. this one that we're looking at a lot which is showing us the different mill options and what does
that mean and percent over roll back and what are the actual dollars is keep in mind that when our residents get their tax bills they're not just paying city of Port Orange taxes right so even though we might have an increase that measures out to $3863
a year they're liability to get an increase on the school board the hospitals the county so forth and so on all those entities So you I I caution to just think that you know what it's only $10 more a month or $11 more a month or whatever those things are. Just keep
that in mind. And and by the way, I will tell you that some of the best discussions happen this time of year on this diet up here and they're going to happen again tonight. I can already feel it. So and it's and it's good and they're all very respectful. My my my thing is tonight that I I I'm a little
bit more in line with uh Councilman Green. I think we can stay at our current millillage and allow our staff to find efficiencies and work from there. Um I don't I I they have done an exceptional job and I feel comfortable in that having seen years and years and
years and years of money rolling over rolling over rolling over that we budgeted for that we went through the pain and the anguish of this and ultimately we didn't need. Now we do need some of that. So, I have to say that with an asterisk because if we if we ever cut that to zero, then we're we we're never going to have money for capital projects, right? And and there
are going to be capital projects. Some are going to fall off the priority list. You know, I I I like Sean's comments. I I see those same street lights that you're talking about. They couldn't be any uglier, but that's a that's a one-time expense that we need to figure out how to address that. Um
because they're they're horrible. But I don't know where those are on the priority on on on a single purchase capital expense right now. Um or even if we're in a position because I don't know if if if you know what that's going to take uh in terms of having those pulled out and
redone. But um that being said, I I I'm more comfortable in the 49 leaving the millillage where it's at currently and working from there. I'm not interested in in increasing the millillage at all. Um I want to see us working towards rolling it back to some degree. So my my comfort level right now is at the
4.9750. But let's take just a moment. Anybody from the public wish to come up and speak about millage rates? Come on up, Robert. Robert, I'll take you first only because man, it's strange for you not to get up before 8:30 and have a comment. Welcome.
Thank you, Mayor. Uh, council members, mayor, um, when, uh, Councilman Keart mentioned uh, maintenance, it reminded me about how I bicycle around the town.
And I noticed over here in front of the um, chiropractic school, they're starting to use asphalt to to fix the sidewalk. And um I know I've heard other comments for
over the years about uh all the concrete that uh somebody runs around and repairs sidewalks. And I've noticed that South Daytona they have a a rule that uh or a law that uh you can't park on the
sidewalk. And I think we should do the same thing because these outfits use the sidewalk as a a work platform. And um we keep getting broken concrete slabs and uh so that's what I wanted to say. Thank
you. Thanks, Robert. Who's next? John, did you want to speak? Come on up. Well, my concern is uh drainage.
I want to hear some comment from the dis that this is going to be handled and taken care of. We struggled with increasing incentives for Eastport which has stood stagnant for many years. We had a major discussion about that and finally got
something passed so that we can do something with that property. This is historic Port Orange. We sit and we deliberate and we talk and we don't do a lot. So, this is a time to be dynamic and to really make a decision. That's
what we elect you for. We don't elect you to put these initiatives on a ballot and let the voters vote to tax themselves. That's what we pay you for. So, I want you to be bold and dynamic to plan and tackle these problems. They're
big. Some people in this community have been flooded out three times and FEMA tells them that they got to leave. I don't want that to be me. And you should not want any resident in Port Orange to be that way. That's an abject failure of your core initiative
for this city. We just can't hem and haw about this stuff. So if it takes a couple of more dollars, like Commissioner uh Councilman Grub said, that's what we need to do. I don't I'm not real concerned about the school board and other towns and what
they're doing. I'm concerned about here. I don't I don't care what my my tax bill is is crazy low compared to so many other communities. So, I just want to see these initiatives tackled. Staff needs the help. They need
the work. They need the money to do it. And as I said before about the golf course, costs are not going down. They're going to go up. Yeah. So, we need to plan for that. So we can't hem andhaw over another 20 bucks that somebody might have to spend on
their tax bill and worry about other districts and hospitals and things like that. They're going to do what they do. If you want to live in this county, it's cheap to live here. We get excellent service. We need to maintain that. We need to fix stuff. I ride around the town all the time. I
look at all the parks. I look at the stuff that needs to be fixed. I just put in a request through about park benches on Herbert Street. They're in terrible condition. That's a small thing, you know. So, I don't I
don't get to struggle. So, anyway, I hope you'll all sub it. Thank you. Thanks, John. Thank you, John. Anyone else? Lori, come on up. I'll come to you next. Hello there. So, I like to talk about priorities.
Public safety, parks and wreck, and then storm water. No, it should be public safety, storm water, and then parks and wreck. If you look at the numbers that you posted, you have half a million
dollars more going to parks. All right. So, let me just remind you that we had a well over 500 homes flood, $51 million in damage, 750 homes on the
market in Port Orange. I'm sorry, I disagree with you, Commissioner Ghart. There is a morale problem in Port Orange, and it's because we are not putting enough effort into the storm water. You can't say that we have 25
miles of black corrugated pipe that needs to be replaced, but yet we're still pushing parks and wreck. I like parks and wreck. Don't get me wrong. My grandson plays at parks and wreck, okay? But my house has flooded
too many times and all the residents around me have flooded too many times. Over 500 homes. 764 homes for sale. I'm looking for another property right now. I have plenty to look at. Okay. But
people's property values are tanking. Okay. And so it's a little easier for me to find a property now because of the inventory. But it shouldn't be that way. We should not be worrying about that right now. We need to put more emphasis
change in a different way. Like Mr. Cameron said, there was some recommendation of an advisory board. Maybe all of you can't handle it. Maybe we need more than just you gentlemen up here. Okay, I'm sorry, but if you go to
social media, which clearly some of you have not, there are coalitions popping up all over this area. Okay, people are pissed off. They want more. They want more money. I get it. You're trying really hard. And I give you a lot of
credit for that, for what we did up at the state level. and I don't want to see my taxes raised, but we got to figure out a way to get it done. You cannot continue on with this many homes for sale and this many people continuing to flood and say that we have such a great
city here. There is a morale problem and you need to face that. We need to do more and it does need to be different. Thank you. Thanks for Thank you. Come on. Fine lady stole my thunder. But go right ahead. Introduce introduce yourself for the record.
Uh Bob Manganello. Thanks, Bob. Trailwood Drive, Port Orange. Uh she's absolutely right. There uh in the Wood subdivision, there are now six homes for sale. That's never ever happened. Uh on Trailwood Drive, there are three three
for sale. Uh we somehow we've got to maintain and advance our quality of life in Port Orange. If it's spending more money, increasing the millillage, by God, let's let's let's do
it. You know, we're kind of like you guys are kind of like pushing the snowball uphill, you know. Uh today the money's good, you know. Uh what about two years from now? What if we get another hurricane? God
forbid. But you know, it's it very well could happen. Um I'm okay with uh you know, like like the gentleman said, our property taxes are low. Uh if you can increase my the quality of
our life, raise them. you know, I I don't you know, Parks and Wreck, God bless him. Uh I worked for him for three years when I retired from the school system. Uh you talk about waste, you got to look at those folks. But um
we we got our infrastructure should dominate all our discussions. You know, we need great cops. We need great firemen. We got to alleviate that that traffic problem on Dunlton. I know you you you've heard a lot about. Of course,
you we all live here, but something's got to be done. Like she said, there are 750 homes for sale in in Port Orange. That's never ever happened. How do we How do we stop this? How do
How do we How do we get a grip on it? Increasing the millage. I'm all for it. I'm all for it. But we we've got to, like I said, we've got to maintain and and advance our quality of life for ourselves, our kids, our grandkids. You
know, you guys got a great an awesome responsibility. Uh take the bull by the horns. You know, you got to make some bold moves. Uh some are going to be unpopular. So what? You know, what are you going to do? But
we all live here. You guys see the same things I see. you know, and the lady was right. They're killing us on social media. Uh, you know, comparing us with Venetian Bay and all the trash they got over there, you know, and all their their monumental problems. I don't want
to be like that. But thanks for listening. Thank you for talking. Thank you. Anybody else? Stan. Come on, Stan. Got at least stretch the legs a minute. Dan Schmidt, 5574 Trailside Drive.
Good evening, folks. One of the things I think you need to remember, you've heard people say, you know, we should be investing more in like maintenance or storm water, drainage management, those type of things. And I know the staff has done a great job. I know the staff is probably trying to get squeeze things
down as much as we possibly can. Just want to remind you this is just to set the maximum rate. So, you can't go higher than this, but this sets the top and you can go down and you always will. By the time you get to September, whatever you pick tonight is going to be
the final deal will be lower than that. So, you've got some time. Give yourself a little bit of time and see if there's anything more you can do for maintenance. See if you can do, you know, we've got broken sidewalks that we've marked as broken for the last seven years. Let's Can we do anything on
that? We've got uh the corroded pipes. Can we, you know, is there a way to slide more of that in there that will make the quality of life a little bit nicer in the city of Port Orange? Um, so you've got time. You don't need to feel like this is a pressure that, you know,
this what we're going to do. And there will be people who will beat you up on social media, but guess what? Doesn't matter what you do, you're still going to get beat up on social media. Amen. That's just the name of the game. But don't think that you're locked in here. This is this is just setting the
most you can go. Okay? It's all you're trying to do. And you can come down and you you'll have two months to go ahead and work on this and see if you know you can have talk to your staff. You can have a talk with the city manager. You can do all these kinds of things. Come up with ideas. Maybe there's ways we can
do some of these things that people have mentioned already. That's it. Thanks. That's it. Anybody Anybody else would like to comment? Come on up. You can't let him have all You can't let
him have the last word. Welcome. Go ahead and introduce yourself. Plet Manganelo, 5930 Trailwood Drive. I live next door to Jim Ward, who used to be the mayor. We I've lived there for 44
years. uh raised my children there, my grand my grandchildren there. Um taught school at Holly Hill Middle. I'm a Flidian. I've been through Hurricane Donna when I was nine. A five generation Florida person.
I like I said, I've ne the last two years we've flooded. They said, "Oh, you're not in a flood district. You don't need flood insurance." So, I I had the flood insurance, but I dropped it. I paid my house off. I dropped the flood
insurance. Our house flooded. We lost everything. We had the walls cut out, the floors cut out, and we we've lived there a long time, but we remodeled. We put new floors in, new paint, new everything. It was expensive. Worked two
jobs. And, you know, that was just everything was wiped out. All of our stuff was stuck on the curb. Our neighbors were like, "Oh my god, some over here didn't get flooded. We did. The whole canal came up." When we first
moved there 44 years ago, we had a little canal on the side. Uh he taught at Spruce Creek High School for a long while. 38-year teacher, me, 25 in in Valuchia County. We had a little canal there before they built the big thing.
And people would go by with the little uh canoes. Hi. Hi. We're going to Rose Bay. We never had a flood. We had hurricanes then. Never happened. Now, the last two times we've had hurricane uh Ian and Milton, we flooded both
times. We've got to stop that. Our neighborhood is like, "Oh my god." They used to say, "Oh, do you want to sell your house because we love your house here. We never knew Trailwood was back here. This is gorgeous." Now they're like, "Did you
flood?" And we're like, "Yes, we did twice." They're like, "Oh, I wouldn't want your problem." So, our house has gone down in price. We worked two jobs to try to make it beautiful and wonderful. He planted every bush, every
tree in our yard, and now it's like, it's got to be fixed with this flooding. I don't care about broken sidewalks. I don't care about people getting extra money. We work two jobs at at the school system. I care about my home getting
flooded for a third time. You would too, right? If you came home and your house was full of mud and water, you saw your kids pictures on the floor. You your your whole thing was outside. your furniture, your beds, everything, pictures, albums,
everything you've had collected over 40 years on the sidewalk. What would you do? Thank you. Thank you very much. Anyone else? Last chance. All right, we'll come back to council. Uh before we start making
motions, anybody else want to make any comments? Absolutely. I'm going to I'm going to go and get started because um I flooded twice. I think most of you have been in this room before. You've heard me talk about this. Um I I've had a great deal of of concern today
actually with just all the rain because the canal behind my house, the ditch behind my house started to rise and it immediately puts me back to being in, you know, ankle deep water and and my kids toys floating around and it's not a not a memory I want to keep reliving. So
I understand that. But I want to also point out here with what staff has suggested at 503 and at 497 which is being talked about which seem to be the two numbers where we're kind of getting in between is $300,000. It it's not
going to affect what we are looking at from a storm water perspective. We already have this master plan that has been paid for. We're already implementing that process. We know in order to do all those projects, we're going to have to get outside funding. So, while it is my number one priority
sitting here in this seat, especially not only because it affects me personally, but so many of my neighbors and family and my residents specifically because I'm in the older part of town, which has had the the bulk of the flooding. This this money does not set the whole
$222 million budget. This is a very fourth of it. And then you're talking about the actual tax levy is 28 of the 61 is a very small amount. in terms of fighting the storm water problem. We could jack this thing to 6.0 and it's it's not going to change what we're
doing with that. So, I want to just make sure I kind of explain that part away. There might be little things we can do, but but it's not it's not going to be significant. So, just on that thing, I also want to talk about the 35%. I'm going to keep going back to this because this is my reason for not wanting to go
to the 503 is again general fund balance. Like Scott, you made a a really good point. You guys set 35% as a policy 10 years ago. That was a much smaller dollar amount. When you think about what the budget was compared to today, we are
10 years removed from that. That back then might have been gosh, I don't know. I'm going to guess I'm going to guess $10 million if that. But no, not even. It would have been so low. um versus now 35% is a much larger amount. And then I
also get concerned when you're you know it's only $38, right? It's it's only $49 over roll back and then it's that's fine, but then the county does it and the school raises it and then the electric bills more and your restaurant bills more and this and it all adds up.
And we have a lot of residents, believe it or not, that are on fixed incomes and and that live paycheck to paycheck or social security check to social security check or VA benefit check to VA benefit checks. A lot of us are very fortunate and there's but there's some of us who
live here who've been here a whole a really long time and and they don't have that same fortune. So, we have to kind of keep all of those things in mind. But, um yeah, I'm still I'm still pretty comfortable with what I said originally. I just want to make sure I want to put a
little bit of calm into people who are worried about flooding just knowing that this millage rate we set and what the numbers we're talking are not going to be the deciding factor in what we're able to do for our residents from a flooding perspective. I want to assure you we are
doing everything we can as fast as we can for all of that because there's not a single one of us up here that haven't had a family member or a very close friend who's been affected. myself like I said personally twice and I have no concerns about this millage rate affecting those projects. So I just want
to say that comments I'd like to ask you a question Reed. You just talked about uh several entities raising rates. Why Why are they doing it?
I don't know that that's fair for Councilman to read that. No, I'm serious. Why Why would Why would anyone Some of them aren't very good at managing their budgets. Some of them have made horrible past decisions. Some of them have been impacted by We We've had I've had to sit here since I was elected and I've had to vote for
in incredible increases and put them on my voting record because of years and years and years of kicking it down the road. And we had underpaid police, underpaid fire department, underpaid nage general
employees. And I had to support extreme tax increases because it wasn't fair to staff. It wasn't fair to our residents and we deserved a better quality of life. Okay. And and so everyone's situation is very different. Yeah. I think we have moved that ball a long
way down the road. I agree. So I I was listening to some of the history and we were talking about the 35% how much money that was and and then Scott mentioned that we were at 50% at one time. Okay. within the last 10
years. But in 2003, we had to actually was is the largest jump on this chart right here when we were at 50% of that money. So what happened there? What explains way back before that? Okay. And that and that and that that is not
reflective that that chart is not reflective of your fund balance. That chart is reflective of your millage rates. Okay. But we brought the fund balance into this conversation, right? But you got to be c again. And I got to caution you to think about fund balance as money that can be used for
oneoff expenses. These numbers that you're looking at, what we're talking about tonight is typical operating funds of the city. Things that this cost goes on and on and on. I agree with you. It builds onto this. I I agree with you 100%. But the fund
balance came into conversation of why we should not take care of the things that need to be taken care of by increasing our millage rate just a little. That's that's where my confusion is. All right, let me let me try. I have no problem. Let me finish. I have no problem reducing our fund balance. I I I really hate storing a bunch of money
when there's needs out there in a city and we're not using them to fix them and cash only goes down in value. Okay, inflation. And guess what? Real estate goes down in value. So, um I want to ask the staff city manager this question and I apologize for not asking this earlier today. Have our assessed values for the
real estate in Port Orange, is it going down for 2026? Have we gotten that number yet from the tax assessor? We have gotten the number. It didn't go down. It didn't go up as much as it has in the past, but it did not go down. It didn't go down. So, it's it's it went up a little. So, our assessed values
have gone up a little. So, assessed values and our military will increase our revenue. Correct. Okay. And but they have come down before in the past and 2008 with Yes. So, and and this is and this is what I want us to to consider. Um, and
one of our uh citizens came up and talked about the number of the inventory going up in real estate and it's going up it because I've been a realtor for 30 years and inventory is going up. This isn't a hot real estate market. What happened was interest rates went from 3
and a half% to 6 and a half%. And it immediately put uh a slowdown in in refinancing and then it put a slowdown in new purchases and they tighten up the money. It tightens up the inventory. The values actually start uh the new sales,
the pricing that they were getting back after COVID that that's no longer existing. We're starting to see houses stay on the market much longer. And I've been in that business since 1995. And I've watched houses stay on the market not for six months, not for a year, for
a year and a half, sometimes two years before they they sold. So we could be there again and then what do we do funding then? Do we say, "Oh, we can't cuz I'm guarantee you our expenses are not going to go lower because the assessed values go lower because real
estate market cools off and it's cooling off big time." And uh so I want us to make sure we're prepared for two years down the road when we're in a real estate recession. I'm not saying we're going to be in one, but I owned a real
estate company in 2005. It was wonderful. In 2006 after Katrina, it was nothing. And everyone talked about the crash in08, buddy. That stop started right after Katrina. It just didn't make the news because it wasn't popular. But
we had stopped. I mean a 75% drop in sales. So, and then it took forever and then I tales I sold for uh 265,000 were resold after the bank claiming back for 150 and those assessed values changed. So, we have to be prepared for
that. We've got through the glory years of low interest rates and assess, you know, increased demand on real estate for COVID. It's completely different right now. So, is that going to affect our revenue down the road where we need
things done? That's that's that's where I'm at. I I we're setting a maximum millage rate. If we do that, we that gets sent out to our citizens. We have time to look at what the consequences are and then we can come back and have that decision and decide
what our millage rate will be. We don't want to set it at what it was last year when we know we need those financial resources. Let's let's set the high and and go back to what I suggested or at least go to
5.3 or 5 point I'm sorry I'm not on that page. Yeah. 5.325. What's what the staff suggested 5.035. I suggested 5.75. Let's go to 5050 as a maximum and then maybe we have to come
back to what they suggested. We're asking them. They're telling us what they need. Why would we not give it to them? How do I explain why I did not give my staff what they requested and houses are flooding? This isn't about fixing it. I
It's not about that. I know that that's misleading. That's with all due respect, that's misleading. the four people that's implying that this number is going to affect flooding projects and it is not. That is not what this money is going. Explain that to 65,000 people or the the
800 homes because tonight one two three people came up and talked about it's it's it's a perception is the perception is we can come we can raise this money for that. I don't know how
you change that perception, but I also don't know how we don't give um at least a 5.0325 to them, but let's go a little higher to set the maximum. Let's debate this more. Let's look
further into it and see. I I don't know. I just I think that when we go to make the final decision, this room's going to be full. It's going to be different. And I don't want us to say, "Oh, well, we locked in at uh at 4.975 and that's the maximum we can go." That's that's crazy.
Tonight is about setting the maximum millage rate. Let's go at least to where the staff is recommended. At least give them that. Lance, go ahead. My turn. Yeah, come in. Wow.
Um I I look at this a little bit differently. Um, and for one, I I don't look at fund balances and I'm not looking at the sale of the Allen Green building. Uh, I look at uh the cost of doing business here. The the the things like the sale of the Allen Green building, in my opinion, go directly to
a one-time funding of a storm water project or going to something that that that's going to be there. Now, fund balance, that's a different discussion, but I don't put that into my calculations of where I'm here today. So now the other thing that we don't talk
about here on this council though is is obviously the is the additional millage that we already have in place for our general obligation bonds. So that adds another 4864 to where we already are. Okay. And those
are for what two things storm water and recreation. I would be of the mindset and say look storm water is a big deal. Okay. And let's just separate the two. Let's say the cost of doing business is X, Y, or Z. And and and let's readress
the storm water fee if that's what we have to do. That fee is a revolving fee. I don't know if is it is it capped out now, Matt? U it's not capped out, but it's going to cap out at $150 per house, right? We recently increased it, but you you could increase more if that's what
counts. And I would rather say, look, you know, if we're going to pay an extra 10, 20, or $30, let's put it to a specific thing and let's let's readress the storm water fee then. And I don't know if it's some kind of thing that can be in a millillage thing because I don't
know how it's fair for a little tiny house to have the same fee as a great big house when it comes to a storm water fee. But we already have one and maybe we need to take a look into that. So we say, look, if we're going to raise funds or we're going to go out and you know, because again, you're going to have
pissed off people here and there and there about this project project. But if your tax says because that tax right now, that storm water fee, Wayne, if I'm correct, is strictly for storm water. And and and again, when it maxes out at 150, I don't know how much we'll
generate per year on that, but it's about $5 million, right, Wayne? Roughly speaking, I'd rather look into that and say, "Look, you know, the rest of this millillage is all about the cost of doing business, okay? Police, fire, etc. But if we want to talk about storm water, I'd like to keep it separate and
say, let's just look into the storm water fee, okay? Because we're already adding an additional millage to this millage rate already with wreck and with the storm fee. out. So,
we have those two bonds already in place. It's 30 years to pay back the the the the these general obligation bonds. That's a long time for each and every house. I would rather look into saying, look, let's look at the storm water fee
so we can directly apply that money to a direct project. Can I make absolutely ask you a question on that? So, the storm water fee, if we increase that, doesn't that hurt the people who live out west who never had a problem with flooding? Their storm water
fees going up. There's 25,000 homes that are homesteaded. I think that's the number. And a thousand homes flooded. And why would we raise the storm water fee for all those other homes for an area that was developed prior to 1996
that's going to had, you know, the tendency is to flood. It's unfortunate that back then we weren't doing things that we do now to prevent flooding. I don't think that's a smart idea to levy uh for everybody who lives out west a higher storm water fee that it doesn't really affect them because they're not
flooding. What's the difference? You're you're going to put it into the millage rate or you're going to put it somewhere else. We're not increasing our millage rate for storm water. We're increasing our millage rate so we have But you're sitting there saying you're going to increase the millillage so that you can do these projects. No. No. I I have not talked about storm
water with the millillage increase. I I I know that we have uh fire, we have public works, we have the water department, we have recreation, we have employees, we have roads that need to be resurfaced, we have sidewalks that need to be laid and fixed. There's a lot of
things that that money we always hear I don't have to do. I'm not talking about storm water. I look, we could we sat up here and talked about uh a project that we've invested a lot of money into to work towards to fix that.
We don't know if it's going to work. When you get that much rain, I'm telling you, if you get 22 inches of rain, I don't know how much we can do to prevent what happens on Dunlotton. It's I don't know if it I I would hate to say to you all that we're going to invest this $56
million that we're going to get somehow someway. we're not going to give up trying to get it that it's going to be uh the solution to that area. We're hoping it is. So, I don't want people to think that I want to raise the mill rate for that. It's all the other stuff that
we struggle with to move forward. But just like you said, you had one, two, three people who came up here and said the first thing was about the flood of their own. That's their perception that the millage rate will help their storm water. We can't change that. But part of our job which I think Scott has done a
phenomenal job since I've been on this DAS in fact one time I was on vacation in Boston I sent him a quote is that it's not only a leader's job to lead but to educate and we it was and so we have to make sure that when we are up here and we're
making decisions we are transparent we are accurate we are knowledgeable and that we are telling people the whole truth and that's why I said what I said earlier is that no matter what number we pick off of this sheet, it does not affect storm water. It's not going to
change that. Now, that's probably actually in being in an effort to be transparent, that's probably not entirely true. If we were to go down to roll back, it is going to affect a lot of things and I would am not suggesting anything like that. So, I want to make sure I make that really clear.
Sorry. All right. That's okay. Okay. So, let me ask one question. Let me ask one more question. So, so Wayne, in in this general budget, okay, or in this millillage rate, is there monies that will go to storm water?
There's indirect it it it's most of the capital. The storm water fund covers a portion of of what we not talking about the storm water fund, but any other funds within this budget go to storm water. I I don't think that there's any direct in there, but there's
a lot there is money that goes to capital improvement projects that entail storm water. Correct. No, it's all it's all from other outside funding sources or the storm water fund. Or the storm water fund. Okay. All
right. Thank you. All right. So, let me just kind of bring this back to circle because we're not done. We're going to be getting into some we're going to have a moment here in just a I can already tell. But first of all, I just want to say for everybody that got up and and and spoke and and
and talk to us, truly appreciate all of the comments and respect all of the comments and and and first of all to comment on the real estate thing that is a national thing. That is not a Port Orange thing. I can appreciate those comments. That is going
on all over the United States and predominantly it's Florida is a big real estate market. It is a thing all over the state of Florida. That is not a thing unique. Now, do we have folks that have gotten very very unfortunately impacted by two historic storms in the last 3 years in our cities that want to
sell their homes? Absolutely, 100%. And I get that that can be the factor of that. So, I I can respect that completely. But it to to allude that Port Orange is having some kind of a a real estate market thing that's not going on elsewhere all across the
country that I just I don't think that that's the case. In fact, I know that's not the case. The the the other thing is is is is I want to caution the council. Our our job up here tonight is to set a millillage based on the budget that is attached to this, not perception of what
might be attached to it. And we should be very cautious about that because Bob Ford used to say perception can become reality. And if you create this perception that you did something and then you didn't execute it, you really are in deep water. Pardon the pun, but
you're in trouble with your with your resident base. So we cannot do that. Absolutely. We we understand the the public concern and demand for storm water. I think that if that's not evident with everything we've been working on and doing for o over a year
now and what we can continue to work on, I I don't know how else to make that any more evident. This millillage discussion, this budget doesn't fix that stuff. That is a totally different thing. And and I appreciate Councilman Green bringing up the storm water fee because I had that on my note to bring
up. the the storm water fee is a discussion that we can have and and that is something we have had and we have increased marginally and perhaps that is another discussion that we can look at. But you got to also keep in mind that those increases
while we can make them and it may be the prudent thing to do they don't generate that massive amount of funding that you need to execute funds immediately. Councilman Grubs talked about possible bonds. You know, that is a discussion that we can certainly have. I think the
timing for that is after we see how all of these other opportunities shake out. Funding hasn't even come from Hurricane Milton yet. All of the funding, the transform 386 Wayne, that's all from Ian, right? Yeah. The Ian the the new thing we just
denied was Milton, but the other stuff was Ian. Yeah. So, there's they're they're likely they're mixing the storms on us. I don't want to be 100, but We just got funding tonight from Irma or recently from from Irma. So, so I I just think you got to keep all that in perspective. But what I want to do is I want to bring us back to
what this mill discussion truly pertains to which is the budget that staff has prepared the con the conceptual budget and I think that that's really important. I also just want to comment this. I get that we live in a community that
is very diverse especially from a financial perspective. There are folks who can afford to pay an extra $100 a month in property taxes and it doesn't affect their lifestyle at all. We also have residents that an additional $25 a
month, it impacts them. I hear from them. I have heard from them in past years, these past years. I promise you, you will hear from them. This will be the sixth consecutive year that we have had a tax increase by all
by all considerations. um it and not as significant as the past five tax increases thankfully, but this will be the sixth consecutive year of a tax increase on our residents on top of increasing water rates and storm water.
So we do have to be mindful that it is a cumulative effect and that the other agencies that are taxing authorities for our residents, it does matter because you know if you if you increase a tax on somebody and maybe that only falls to 12
or 15 or $18 a year. I remember this just recently a few years ago having a resident say well my Port Orange taxes only went up $9.50 but overall a month but overall it went up almost 40. Mhm. Yeah, that's that's significant for some people and I appreciate the ones that it's not significant for. It's it's the
same discussion with what's the priority. Look, some people storm water is not their priority. It is parks and wreck, it is police, it is fire, it is roads, it is sidewalks, it is different things and and and so we have to keep everybody in mind and try to come up
with the best decision. And I appreciate all of the discussion and all of the comments and all of the passions. They are all incredibly valued. They are all they are all respected immensely. So it's it's never an easy process when we get to this. All right, that being said, it's it's it's time to entertain a
motion. Does somebody want to make a motion? So what's going to happen, guys, is we're going to make a motion. It has to get a second. If it fails to get a second, somebody's got to make another motion. Get a motion and a second on the floor, we'll vote it. If it gets three votes or more, that's going to be the
max millillage that we set tonight. If it doesn't, we'll open the floor back up for another motion. And you guys are welcome to kind of have some uh healthy conversation as we go through that process. All right. Does anybody want to make a motion to start? And to be clear, we can come back after we've set the max millage rate and
reduce it. You certainly can. Absolutely. Good point. Mr. Mayor, I'd like to make the motion to set the max millage rate at five. I'll second that. We have a motion and a second on the floor to set the max millage rate at
five. 5.00. Right. Correct. Or one more zero. 5.0000 because the city attorney is already looking at me. Just make sure I got all the digits. Mot motion in a second. Any discussion on on council?
I think we've hashed it out pretty good. Okay. Clerk, could you call the role? Councilman Foley? Yes. Councilman Gford? No. Councilman Green? Yes. Vice Mayor Grubs? Yes. Mayor Stler? I'm a no. Motion passes three to two.
The max millage rate will be set at 5.00 mills per 1,00. Mr. City attorney, did I get that right? There's four zeros there. So, one more zero. 5.0000 mills
per 10,000. Anything else on that, Mr. Attorney? That That's all. You sure? Okay. All right. That I I thought that was going to go back and forth for a while, so All right. Any other discussion to come before us tonight?
Thank you guys for great discussion and input. We appreciate it. Have a good night.