Good afternoon. I'm going to call the Meet the Budget Advisory Committee meeting of May 22nd to order. Could we have a roll call, please? Chair. Bergman. Chair. Vice. Chair. Hall. Here. Miss Hale's here.
Miss McKinney. Here. Mr. Marcus is not here yet. Maybe he's trying to find parking before we get into the agenda. I want to welcome a new member. Welcome.
Welcome, board. Okay, first item on the agenda is the old business. The mayor and commissioner salary survey. Okay. Thank you. Chairman. You
all had a couple questions on the salary last week. Something on the number of hours that may be. Estimate of that. Commissioners and mayor put in
during the year. You also asked about mentioned the budget. I wasn't going to put another presentation together but also okay, let me just put put the
numbers back there. There might be easier to read and look at. What. Also, I found out when I contacted Dunedin and Green,
they just recently increased their mayor and commissioner salaries from mayor one for 15,000 to 19,000, and the commissioners went from 11,000
to 15,600. So that's a change from what I showed you last week. Also, I noticed that in our for the Tarpon Springs, I had we had a pension. Well I go that's not right. So we don't
provide a pension for the for the mayor and commissioners. So I struck that out there but just said no pension provided. This
is the same slide as last week. The only change is the need now has that their increased rate of the 19,000 for mayor in the
15,006 for the commissioners. This was just trying to talk to the commissioners and mayor on their hours. I just went through the I run through the history of the agendas last for the last
year. And obviously there's a regular sessions, there's two a month. They sent me average of five hours of each meeting. There's budget work sessions, about four of those a year at
three hours each. Budget, public hearings. Those are in September on the budget. Two of them at one hour each. CRA regular sessions. I put in an average of six during the year. Special
sessions for executive sessions five. And then I was talking to them about time outside of their meetings during the 52 weeks, and I was getting between 5 and 10 hours a week. So for my
calculation, I just took the average seven and a half times the 52 weeks for the 390 hours. Same for the mayor. I was getting between 10 and 20 hours a week, so I just took 15 hours
times to 52 weeks for the 780. And then down below I get the total between the actual meeting dates and the time outside of meetings for the 539 for
commissioner and 929 for mayor. And as I say, these are estimates and. You asked about the budget for Dunedin. Their current budget for 2025 is 138
million. Tarpon Springs is 86 million for the current year, and I just put down the percentage of 62%. The Tarpon is of Dunedin's. This is my last
slide. I just threw in an example of. I put in, you know, the city did what I found out. And also looking at them had the slider. I just thought it might
be helpful for trying to figure out the commission as a part of the mayor and I went through all the cities, it averaged that the commissioner salaries were about 75, 85, 70, excuse me, 75% to
80% of the mayor's salary. So I threw in a slide here. Just an example. If you decided to pay the mayor 17,000 and then the
commissioner would be at 13,600. And with that, thank you. Ron, before we talk dollars and cents here, I went back and looked up
the Suncoast article from the Tarpon Commission when they talked about salaries. And there was a there was a line in here that they, it was suggested that
advertised that offers health insurance for the elected offices. But I got to thinking, where do we actually advertise that there's commission seats available? I mean, if that
information is not getting to the electorate, they don't know about it. What good is going to be throwing money at it? Because I, I can't remember the last time I've actually seen an ad,
so I was wondering where they advertise that. I know about it because I'm involved, but I haven't seen an ad per se. I can answer that. So it's not really a legal ad, but we do post on
social media and our web page. All that information and what benefits go with running for office. So in other words, there's no formal ad other than
going on to the website and looking for it. That's that's correct. Or calling us or one of the interest they talked about increasing it was to entice younger people, but I'm not sure how many of those people are
seeing that information. So I'm I'm questioning whether money itself is the incentive they need. So now I'll open it up to
that conversation. Back to the budgets. From my side. It does look like we are falling a bit behind, because we usually do
try to compare ourselves to the comparable cities that even Seminole. So it does look to me like we're falling behind, and I appreciate the recommendation,
Ron, that you gave. I was trying to calculate quickly what would make sense, sort of on that trend line. So it's kind of an example. Yeah. No, I think it's
a good example. Made a nice slope there. Yeah I think yeah I think my point would be it does look like we're falling behind it. Yeah I think recommendation
might be worth considering. I do agree we are falling behind. I think Ron was a little more generous than me though with his numbers. I'm just off the top of
my head. I'm falling with 15 for the mayor and 11 five for commissioners, a move I was looking at. 16 three for the
mayor and like 11 or 12 for the commissioner. So I think that's pretty close. Say your number one more time, 15 for mayor and
11 five for commissioners. Okay. I think the 11 five makes sense. And I went 15 on mayor because
that would make the gap the 3500 same as. Than it is now. Okay. So maybe 11 five makes sense for commissioners. And then maybe somewhere between 15 and 16 for
the for the mayor I can go 15 five. Any other discussion? I know at the commissioners meeting they have said that they
don't necessarily need these raises for themselves, but it would be a way to entice new people to, you know, consider
running for election. So I don't know if when the start date would be for that since they're not looking for it. Yeah. If I
made a motion I would make it effective ten one with the new fiscal year. On that note, and the note you said about advertising, like, do we have
any sense of how other cities attract their commissioners? Probably not, but I thought I'd maybe just ask. It all varies. Yeah. It varies. Okay. So like
in order for someone to know that there was a spot available and the benefits it would be, you remind me what you said again. Well, we throughout the
year we have the requirements posted. But then all those information on our website that's updated when, you know, I'm getting ready to update for
the new election coming up in next March. However, we don't have to place a legal ad. There's no no. Yeah, I think currently place a legal ad. I'm
not sure with the new person if some other new thing coming on board, if some new things will be taking place. But we currently and on the web page it
lists the benefits, right? We have an information. We have information packets that they get when they come to the office. Mrs. Hale has been through it as somebody that ran
for Commissioner. I my perspective and people that I talk to. The salary was not a motivator for me. Yeah. That's not to say what was your motive. Is it more like just improving
the community? Yeah, yeah, that's what I was thinking. So I mean, now it's, you know, it's helpful to have it. And really from my perspective, having a full time job, the salary was
secondary to the health insurance was a draw because it would be would be better health than what my current employer offers. So I think having that benefit is more important than
the salary itself. Although I do think the salaries are a little bit behind. Yeah, that all the time. So does someone want to
make a motion for a recommendation from this body? Well, I would make a motion to increase the salary of commissioners to 11,500 per year, and the salary of the
mayor to 15,500 per year, effective ten one, 2025. I second that. Any further discussion on the motion. Could we have a roll call, please, Mr.
Marcus? No. Miss McKinney. Yes, Miss Hales? Yes, Miss Hall? Yes, chair. Yes. Thank you. Now we'll
move on to new business. Do we want to just cover how we would communicate the recommendation? We communicate to the board?
Yeah. Then we have to. That's a motion to go to the board. That's our go to recommendation to the board. Okay. That's just a recommendation from us to the board okay. And it'll you'll just we'll type it up and. Okay
okay. Good good good. For Mr. Bergman's review. And before we move on, I want to make a second motion to this, that I want to make a motion to review the mayor and commission commissioner salaries compared to other regional municipalities
like we just done every three years. This board to do that. Do we have a second on that motion? I'll second that. Yeah. Could we
have a roll call, please? Mr. Marcus? Yes. Miss McKinney? Yes, Miss Hales? Yes, Miss Hall? Yes.
And chair. Yes. Okay. That concludes old business. We'll move on to new business, which is primarily going to be the departmental budget
presentations. I am going to ask those presenting because we have one new member from this week and one new member from last week, to give us a little idea
of what your department is about for their benefit. Okay. Are you ready, Irene? I am all yours. Good afternoon. I think you all know me. The city Clerk's office
consists of the clerk's budget, which is out of the general fund, and the collection budget, which is which is out of the water and sewer fund. The clerk's budget can be found on
pages 47 through 50. The clerk's operating budget for the current fiscal year is approximately $74,000. Election cycles are held two years in a row, allowing a rotation of seats,
with a third year having no election unless there is a special referendum. Election. For a standalone election, the Supervisor of Elections cost estimates are approximately
$40,000. That's just the base charge. Whereas an in conjunction election, which is an election held with other citywide countywide elections, that cost estimate is between 3
to $5000, depending on if it's a 1 or 2 card ballot. In addition to those figures, there could be additional costs ranging anywhere between 3 to $15,000 for such things as legal
publications, bilingual language compliance requirements, re printing and mailing of ballots and poll pole place change mailers if they're needed. In
fiscal year 2024 budget. That was supposed to be our off year. Our third year, however, we had three elections between the 24th
and current 25th budget. There is August 20th 24 election, which was a special election for unexpired term due to the
resignation of one of the commissioners on November 5th of 2024, there was a referendum election for the Stanley's property purchase, and both those elections were in
conjunction with countywide elections, and the costs were an eighth of the cost of a standalone election. This past March, we had a municipal referendum election standalone
for mayor to commission seats and for one unexpired term of a commission seat for one year. That occurred when a former mayor resigned in August of 2024. In addition to the regular
municipal elections, this year was a charter year. I think some everybody's aware of and the Charter Revision Commission post 23 charter referendum questions, along with the Board of
Commissioners posting posting one opposing question to their proposals. The total cost for the March election was $52,455.
Those expenses are taking their split up into various funds, such as professional services, other contractual services, freight and postage, rent leases, promotional activities,
legal advertising and operating supplies. For those elections. Election costs are more than half of the City Clerk's operating budget. During the recent election, the Charter Revision Commission posed a
question that was passed by the residents that a notice by first class mail shall be sent to all, and I emphasize all city registered voters 30 days prior to the qualifying time,
identifying all commission seats open for election and indicating who currently holds the seat and their eligibility for reelection. The intent of the question was because some
members of the charter felt that residents were not aware of elections, and felt that this would be a way to have more residents run for office. Now, this wouldn't be saying all the
details, but it would be posted in a different way. When this was discussed, I explained the impact this would have on our budget, and it did matter to me either way, but I felt, you
know, I had doing my job. I had to explain that. I further explained that even though it was not required by law, I do place a legal ad notifying way in advance on the qualifying
dates and the election information on our web page and social media, and at any time they can call us, we can have anyone run way in advance.
There's no. Even though the recently the charter increased the qualifying time, we pre-qualify, whereas some cities don't allow you to, you know,
they they don't allow you to do anything until that qualifying period. That's the difference. We allow you to do everything except you just can't pay your qualifying fees until that
qualifying period. In addition, I made them aware that there would be a larger impact if there was a candidate election that had a pole place change
requiring two mailers to go out for that election. These both of these mailers cannot be done at the same time because for the qualifying one, they wanted 30 days prior to qualifying that
passed and the pole place change. If there was a need for that. Law says you have to, you can't send it out more than 14 days in advance of the election.
Therefore, I increase various funds of the clerk's budget this year by $21,540. At this time, even though I do not have hard
costs due to the variables on the size of the qualifying mailer and the final number of registered voters to how I came about, determining an estimated
cost was I took the minimal cost of the first class postage and plus the minimum cost for printing. Just a postcard size of mailer times the number of an
estimated amount of registered voters to get that charge. So it could vary for this department for this budget. Other large items that make up the clerk's
budget are recording fees, code book supplements, our printer rental, and especially our legal ads. We had a lot of legal ad costs this year because of the
size of the because we had so many questions. And law requires that you get them in Pinellas County, and you also have them translated in Spanish. For
collection budget. That's out of the water and sewer fund. The collection operating budget is approximately 55,000. And for this operating budget, I am
happy to say that there are no increases to the highest expenses, though in this budget, that total about 44% of my overall operating budget are maintenance of equipment, our
drive thru window, our interactive voice recognition software which allows customers customers to make real payments by phone 24 over seven, and
postage of our delinquent letters. Charges for those postage are paid through the non-departmental fund throughout the year, and then at the end of
the year is taken from that fund. And if you want to know a little bit more about my department and what we do. Just
real quick overall, you know, we're a department that wears many hats. I always say we could we don't marry you, but we
could. We could bury you. We can. We're we're the only ones that I'm aware of still in Pinellas County that still have collections in the clerk's
office. And that was due to an issue they had way, way before my time that occurred. And it's more of a check and balance, and it works great with audit and
everything else to keep it that way. And I thank you for allowing me to make these presentations, and I'd be happy to answer any questions,
questions or comments. Just one. Remind me in collections, we've got temporary staffing in the contracted services 17,000. What's that for? So that helps
out if we ever need to fill up, if we have someone out and have to fill a temporary position. It also helps some with if we have someone helping us with minutes,
we're trying to get caught up pretty much after Covid. We just kind of it was like someone sprinkled the dust and everything just went. So we're working on that. To get caught
up in some of that. Cost comes from there. Okay. Any other questions? Comments. So you said our fiscal year starts October
1st, correct? Correct. So the financials that are through first quarter 25. That are that are posted in the budget is six
months worth of financials and correct. And the budget book, we have the first six months through March 31st. All right. I just want to make sure that I'm reading things correctly
because. I don't I don't really have any questions. I want to make sure I'm processing what I'm listening to correctly. Yeah. And I don't know about other departments, but in some
in ours, some we do just at the end of the year and buy in bulk or something like that, or DOS or things like that, you know, are toward the a certain time of
year. So not all show during the. All right. Thank you Irene.
Thank you. H.R. Is next. Not really air I was going to say. Rene Vincent, planning and
zoning director. And for since our HR director, Miss Kniffen, resigned or retired, I should say I've been pinch hitting. So Lynn Goldstein really kind of
developed the budget. I assisted as much as I could. So I don't I think everybody knows what HR does. So hopefully I don't need
to try to pinch hit on that. The you do see an overall decrease in the in the annual budget for next fiscal year. That's largely due to change in salary. With
the new director coming in. I would like to introduce Tabitha Atkins. She started today. So. So yeah, not expecting her to be
to want to jump into this. We did we did have a small increase in in a few of the line items, professional services as well as
training. Training's really been a very under budgeted in my opinion, line item for HR for a long time. So we did ask that to
be bumped up. We even this this fiscal year did enter a transfer inside of the budget to get some additional training dollars and got three of the staff members
attending. HR classes for HR, certificate management or management certificate through USF. So they've been really, really excited to have that training. So it's going well.
We'd like to be able to continue that. So I'd like to see more than 2000 in there. But I think, you know, budgeting as best he can right now. So maybe maybe we
can pick that up later. But I'll be happy to answer any questions if I can. I have one here as well. So. No, it looks like
overall a decrease and not too many changes. Otherwise no questions for me. No questions. Let's move on to youth employment program. I'm sorry, I
do have a question. I do have a question. I know that the last couple years, as far as the employees insurance premiums
have gone up, I think it was 7%. Then last year was 8%. And this year we're looking at possibly 10%. And I understand that I get that. I also understand it's a
perk to be an employee, to get your insurance paid for. Totally agree with that. What I'm having a concern about is when is the
last time the employee was asked to pay more? Because the city has always absorbed the initial
the cost increases. And so it's like I believe and I don't remember the numbers because I did it a year ago in my head or on home. And it was like, maybe
let's just say the employee was paying $600 for family coverage, and the city is paying like $1,200. So and we keep absorbing
the over the increases. So when is the last time they had to pay an increase? I'm going to defer to Ron. Do you know, I think it was about two years ago that the
last time that they had when there was increase in the health insurance, we passed that on to the employee, and that's about 54% is what the employees pay of
the total for the family. Must have been the year before I started, because I know it was 7%, then 8%. And so it must have
been the year before that. Okay. Came up to a lot of money. It does. Anything else? Okay. The youth employment program. I have
no idea. That's not my wheelhouse. That's just the money for me. So I sometimes have to hire the high school kids during the summer. So that's that money set aside for
youth employment during the summer. Okay. Now for planning. Thank you. Okay. Something I know a little bit more about. So just to give you an overview. So
the planning department we have a staff of five including myself. We are responsible for administering the comprehensive plan, which was just completely updated last year. So it does
call for a lot of new new initiatives, amendments to the existing Land Development Code, the Special Area plan, smart code and things of that nature. We also provide staff support
directly to the Planning and Zoning Board, the Board of Adjustments, and the Historic Preservation Board. And we also coordinate the city's Technical Review Committee, which reviews all development applications
that come through through the city. So if you want to build, you know, a new whatever, CVS somewhere or anything like that, you know, the Technical Review Committee is the first review
body and that consists of staff from various departments. We also now use an external stormwater consultant to review site plans, to make sure that we're getting the best that we
can for stormwater control. So we did for the overall budget this year, again, you'll see a fairly significant, significant decrease. That's because we decreased the consulting budget
pretty dramatically. We're trying to do as much as we can in-house moving forward, but we do retain a budget there for professional services, for something that's technical that
maybe we don't have the ability to do, we'll go out and get a consultant for specific tasks. We do have now a. What I want to
say, we have a group of consultants that we have pre-qualified across various disciplines. So now if we need a consultant, we can get to them very quickly. They're pre-qualified. We can get a scope of work, go directly to
them. So we have to go through a bid process. So that's been been very good for us. We let's see. We've we decreased the
professional services we did. We have a decrease in our in our travel and per diem. I find that most of the time a lot of us are just doing a lot of online
training rather than traveling these days. Let's see. We also we also have a decrease in. Our books, publications and subscriptions and a little bit of a decrease in our training
budget. But overall, we have a pretty dramatic increase in the overall budget. So any questions I see. Connect Tarpon Springs books. So yes, 12,600 annually.
That's just for that's the software as a service. Right. Have we done any analysis of the usage of that website. And is it
is it beneficial to us. We do. We there's a plethora of statistics that you can get on the back end. The biggest increase in usage and, and people tuning into that and
using it really came out of those the two hurricanes fortunately or unfortunately. But we started really pushing out a lot of information through Connect Tarpon for post hurricane information, because
it was a really good resource for us. We'll also be putting out ■a budget survey through it in probably in the next few days to get input on the annual
budget development. So it's I mean, I think right now we've got about I want to say 1200 registrations, but we get a lot more views than that. That's
just people registered. We don't we don't make people register to participate in surveys and things because people sometimes just don't want to register. But if you're if you're interested,
we can run a report on like annual usage for you and get it to you sometime after this. Yeah, I know during the hurricane it was very beneficial. I'm just wondering long term, do we need a separate
website or is it something we can incorporate into the city's website? We will definitely look at that because I, I for one, would prefer not to have as many
as to exactly what, what that particular website does for us though is it's very well built for doing specific engagement. So that really kind of
parallels, like if we have an open house for planning project or we want to have, you know, a community workshop, we can parallel that and push that, that those surveys and those
activities out through that website a lot easier than we can trying to build that from scratch for doing things like surveys and map exercises and stuff. So it really is geared toward that type of community
input and community development projects. So it's, you know, but if we can find a way, you know, and or find something else in civic clerk that that is part of that that might be less
expensive. We certainly would do that. Okay. Any other questions or comments or planning. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Chairman. Can I just throw
something in please, about the health insurance? That 10% is an estimate, right? I knew that, yeah, yeah, I heard you say that last week. You know, last year
was an 8.7% increase, which you said the year before that was 7% and before that was 5%. So hopefully it continues that trend that's under under. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll clarify because I
don't remember the employees is fully paid right. No no. The employee oh no I'm sorry. The employees fully paid. But if they have family members then
that's a shared cost okay. Tell me. Okay. You're up sir. Yes,
sir. John. No, that's not it. I'm going to
turn this on. There we go. Thank you sir. All right. Okay, great. All right. Thank you very much.
I'm Thomas Geiger, the public services director, and we've got some of our staff with us today as well. We've got Holly Langston, our sustainability coordinator, Ray Paige, our utility superintendent, Howard
Hunt, our golf course manager, and Jamie Taylor, our recreation superintendent. So we've got a quick overview of the budget just to help you guys get acclimated. So here's the general org chart of the department. Right now we've got
sort of a few key operational groups looking at utilities. We've got some recreation programing. And we also have sustainability. And these are a little bit of a mix between general fund and enterprise fund. We have several enterprise
funds, golf courses, its own enterprise fund, utilities enterprise fund, recreation cemetery. Both have their own special purpose funds like perpetual care. But our day to day funded out of general fund
and sustainability is a hybrid. Recognizing its responsibilities kind of across the board. Again, quick snapshot of our leadership team that we just introduced. And so here's a quick overview
of all the budgets within the department. So in the past my usual spiel for this would be we're roughly one third, one third, one third between operating personnel and capital.
We've actually got some this year. It's a little bit more heavily weighted towards capital, which we think is good, especially in utilities. The last few years have been a bit of a catch up year on capital expenditures, and we're starting
to get back in that mode of like starting to stabilize the enterprise fund and starting to reinvest in utility assets. And we've also got a pretty big line item in there for the golf course clubhouse, which we'll
get to later. So but as you can see, overall, about $7.5 million in personnel, about $8.1 million in total operating and about almost 13 in CIP coming up. So
quick highlights for the recreation division. Key costs here are personnel. We do have some interesting programs here with contractual services. So some of these items are they
show up as expenses but they're also revenue generating. And then operating supplies is another key thing. So that goes into like a lot of our Jamie's awesome programing for senior
programs, summer camps, running, you know, the youth leagues and all that sort of thing. And you can see a quick snapshot of some of the different programs that are run through this department
on the right. Acadia Cemetery is another interesting one. We do have some interesting news coming up for the next year, which has resulted in some minor changes in the budget. So next year we're planning to have the
Acadia East Cemetery expansion open, which will essentially increase the operational cost a little bit, particularly on the contractual services, because we're anticipating having more burials, and that's a service
that we pay for, but it's also reimbursed. And so it's another revenue generating activity. So you might see a little bit of an increase on some of the operating costs or the I'm sorry for the contractual services,
but that will be that's anticipating the opening and additional revenues coming in to support those expenses. And one kind of interesting one, we do have a capital outlay for the new ride on mower, and that's
going to be funded through the perpetual care fund. Long term. We do have a goal as we start to sell the new graves in the cemetery, to use that to build
up our fund balance in the perpetual care fund and use it more as a traditional perpetual care fund. We've historically used as a bit of a sinking fund to, you know, fund, like the cemetery expansion itself. But
now we've got this opportunity to start collecting some money and use that as a long term funding source to, you know, shift some of the burden of the operating costs from the cemetery off of the general fund
and back onto perpetual care fund, which would be a little bit more traditional for cemetery operation sustainability. Very interesting. Very it's a little bit of a smaller budget. Again, recognize it's more of like a
policy and outreach program and a lot of the individual sustainability things are accounted for in other individual budgets, you know, like solar and things like that.
So we do have some, some programing. This is also interesting. We do have our sustainability intern program, which has been very successful here, and we've got a little bit of professional services to support our ongoing
sustainability program. We've got a lot of action items in for next year from the city, adopted sustainability plan. So that's one thing that you will see in
that budget. And next we have a quick overview of water and sewer. So kind of two general operational groups here. Right now we've got water which includes the water wells the reverse osmosis plant. You know
the pipes take the water from the plant out to the customers. And also the meter shop which prepares the meters, which are like the cash register for the utility. We've also got the wastewater plant side, which is, you know, the pipes to bring the
water back to the plant, the plant itself, the lift stations, the pumps that move the water from point A to point B. Some of the quick highlights. Again, on the water utility budget, the
big drivers are kind of across the board in the in the utility funds is, you know, on the operating side is really staffing and you know, electrical and operating costs,
depending on what area you're looking at, you can see here just the water plant itself is, you know, it's got a it takes a lot of pumps to move water around and to do treatment through the reverse osmosis process. So we've got about $1
million in electricity there and about $1 million in operating costs. And these are largely fixed costs. They vary with water production. But, you know, they're largely like
non-discretionary distribution. We've staffing is the big driver there. We're focused on getting folks out there, having rapid response time, doing repairs, taking care of the system and
maintaining public health and safety. And we do have one kind of deviation from the current rate plan that we've been working through with the finance department, and we're in the process of doing new CIP, which
is to do about right now. We've got a pencil placeholder for a pretty large phased meter replacement program. And the intent of that is to do some revenue recovery. The meters are aging out. They're not capturing
all the revenue. So we want to make sure that we're everyone is paying their fair share for the services provided. One question we always get. And this kind of goes across the board throughout
public services, is we do really encourage people to look and itemize and break down as they develop their operating budget. We're not one of those. We're not a group that, you know, goes in and looks at 5% or 10%. We
try and go through and do a thorough review of all of our line items that we spend, especially out of the operating accounts and forecast those and say, all right, what what did this go to last year? Is there
anything that changed that would cause that to change this year? And so you can see here the level of detail that say our reverse osmosis, our water division manager has gone through. On building his 52
account for operating supplies at the water plant. And one interesting thing here, just to give you a little sense of utility operations, is the all the items that are in blue are
basically non-discretionary. These are contract pricing. They are basically tied exclusively to the level of water production we need to do. So people buy more water. We have to add more
chlorine to disinfect that water, for example. And then you get into the some of those other items that are not directly tied to production. So like, you know, things like you still have to buy screwdrivers and pipes
and rubber gloves for the labs and that sort of thing. So is that largely the rationale for the increase is like increase water? Processing or. Yes, that
we kind of we do have them go through and look at, you know, year over year like production and our and then forecast like what is going to be for. No. Okay. Exactly. And they'll actually go through line by line
so they know what the new unit prices are for carbon dioxide. We've also had some examples here. You can note sodium hydroxide which there was a reduction. There's we're not going to make less water. But that contract floats on the open
market. And so there has been some movement in chemical markets over the last couple of years quite a bit. So whenever we do see a change in contract pricing, that gets reflected
back into the budget as a savings. This is kind of a broader thing. Knowing that we are in the middle of doing our rate study this year. We just did this a couple years ago, so
this is a little bit of a carryover from 2023. But we'd like to show folks like what's driving the cost of, you know, operations. And you can see here on the left we've got the National Water Treatment
Chemical Index. And you can see, you know, big spike from 2021 up through the post Covid with the supply shocks. And then we had a little bit of stabilizing, you know, into 2023 2024. And then
it's starting to pick back up again. So we're continuing to monitor that. We're kind of hoping it would stabilize, but does seem to be a little bit of an uptick in that market. On the opposite side you've got plastic
pipe had a really big shock. This is something that goes across the board not just in water but wastewater. Everything uses plastic pipe, even the golf course. We have irrigation materials in the cemetery and
things like that. So that had a huge jump 123, 130 plus percent. And since then it's come down about 18%. So it's not quite got back to normal. Prices tend to
be sticky. And so they have to have a big driver to push them one direction or another, but continue to drop. So that's been reflected in some savings on the operational costs and repairs
and materials on the wastewater side. Again, staffing at the wastewater plant is a, you know, a big cost sector for us as well as electricity a little bit less. So it's a less energy
intensive process than reverse osmosis operating supplies. Again, you know, you're talking water treatment, wastewater treatment chemicals and a lot of contractual services to support the treatment operation. The
sewage collection folks are the folks that repair the pipes. That's a very staff intensive group. You know, they've got to get out there when they're, you know, maintain the system. DEP has put some new regulations in place that require us to be
proactively investigating a certain amount of our system over time. So we're going to need to continue to maintain that staffing and then smaller amounts for repairs and maintenance and things like
that. That's a largely capitalized repairs area. And lastly, with the Lift Stations and Utilities maintenance group, which is sort of our jack of all trades, go fix all the stuff type of group and they're doing
an outstanding job. They're the ones who help restore wastewater service after all the hurricanes. So I'd like to acknowledge that. And again, you know, electric service for all the pumps and things like that and continuing to support
repairs and maintenance throughout the group. And I do like to talk a little bit about our CIP needs and goals. This is something that's again a carryover from the last two
years. But just to have folks have a sense of where we're headed and what our priorities are, you know, continue to build out the well field for the reverse osmosis plant. It will be a large driver for us over
the next few years. We've been working towards a large metallic pipe replacement program, which will be a 30 year program that's scheduled to really accelerate in the next couple of years. The
wastewater plants getting a little bit older. It's 40 years old now, so it's getting into sort of these two phase like life cycle rehab that's over the next in the 2030s, we're looking
at 25, $30 million and we're working on reassessing those costs currently. And, you know, lastly, again, to focus on level
of service and being proactive in in maintaining our existing assets. So like for example, the sewer system, we've got 4000ft of pipe lining annual budget and
target. And we've been hitting that. And that will result in lining 70% of the lines in the city over 20 years. So again, trying to be goal based, what's the intent level funding is needed to support that. And
where are we going next. Golf course another enterprise fund again personnel is one of our two big cost sectors here. Our personnel and the contractual services. We do do use a
contract service for all the golf course maintenance. We don't mow, mow, mow our own greens and fairways. That's subbed out through down to earth, which is our contractor.
And again, we've got some more fun news here that we're going to be focusing on reinvesting in the course over time. You might have seen the presentations at the earlier board meetings, but we've got a really good story to tell how it's done, an
exceptional job here, you know, continue to have record levels of play at the course over the last few years and participate in the post-Covid golf boom. So reinvesting the facility and making sure that we don't, you
know, accidentally kill the golden goose when it's making money. So we're looking the board supported us through reinvesting in new clubhouse. It's going to be about $4.1 million, and we have a business
plan for it. So we've got yeah. Thank you. And again to Howard for making it possible with the good management. You know, again, we're looking at completing the design this year
starting in construction. The plan is to self-fund within the enterprise fund wholly the clubhouse $500,000 cash financing. And then we've got a current plan for a ten year
construction loan. And you can see here we've got our projected annual income and projected annual expenses. And we've also developed a little bit of a does income cover like not only like,
are you still going to have in your business plan like the rental space that the venue space I think we were kind of talking about. Yes, that that is included. We did include a small bump in future revenues. You can
see here for a 3% increase in revenue in 2027, which would be about $80,000 as a new revenue stream for the event space. So okay. Oh, yeah, this is nice.
This is really nice. Thank you. And again, the goal would be long term to maintain about $50,000 at minimum in our, you know, as a matter of policy, but
as a as a financial goal in that enterprise fund at about 55,000 rounds of golf a year, which that would represent a pretty significant drop off from the level of play we're having right now. One other question. Do you
have any sense, like, I know, after Covid, there was an increase in people golfing, but is every golf course kind of like experiencing that, or is or is it special here because we
kind of have the historic or, you know, we have some special rating on the golf course, but do you have any sense on that? Like, absolutely. Yeah, we're we're definitely in the vein of, you know, there's this hole
municipal golf renaissance that's happening. Okay. You have to have be well managed. And Howard's done exceptional job at that. But you're also seeing record new golfers getting in the sport and stuff like that.
So it's an industry wide trend. Cool. And here you can see our year over year revenues there. That's pretty interesting. And you can see even this year with the with the hurricane this is
up through January. We'll have to get new slide for this at some point. But you can see the blue line is that's month over month cumulative revenues. And this would be the third or
fourth year in a row that we're on track for beating last year's revenues. So that's a very positive trend. And we didn't go out and build this plan around, you know, sort of one scenario
or particularly rosy scenario. We did a sensitivity analysis and we looked at all right, what happens if there's a drop off in play. Would this put the course in a bad situation or a positive. Or if we had a drop
off. And so this is a quick scatter plot basically of what happens at different amount of rounds played per year, and how would that look like for the fund balance over time, and can it sustain that level of debt,
you know, into the future? And I think the answer is yes. So that's great. Yeah. All right. And I guess we already had some questions. But with that we've
got our staff here too. And so we'd be happy to entertain any questions about the budget. Any other questions. No questions I had a question but I think you answered it already. So I was
wondering if there's going to be any impact on the tariffs on operating supplies. But I see you've got it sort of pegged to CPI. So that will account like
the cost of those supplies. It sounds like you've got that kind of incorporated in, in the budget. And then you covered the golf course question. So that's that's really all I have. Yes. That that is the million dollar
question is cost inflation. Yeah. One question for Howard on the golf course though with the increase rounds of play, how does that affect the pace of play. Pace of play. Still very
good of course. Obviously peak season January through middle of April, end of April. You'll have your days where it might be a four and a half round of golf. But we've been noticing and we
keep track of it every day. Starter does, Ranger does, I do. We're still in the four hours, the four hour and ten minute range. And of course summertime. You get out there, you know it's not busy playing 3.5 hours.
Yeah. But then the summertime you're dealing with the heat too. It's not that bad. One other question. What are you what are you most excited about once you get the building built and all that? What I'm most
excited about is what we can offer our customers beyond what we have now. So we've just outgrown the building we're in now, right? Yeah, it's very
limited space for food and beverage, very limited space for events. Right. So we don't really host many golf tournaments or golf outings. You
know, your Rotary clubs and Kiwanis clubs fundraisers. Right. Because we don't have the facilities. Yeah. So now we're going to be able to market and go after that within the
community. Nice. Nice. Really. Nobody calls us because they know, hey, you can't we can't put 100 people in there. Yeah. So that's what I'm most excited about. But even beyond that, I'm
excited for the city because this is going to be a great asset for the city beyond just the next five years. Yeah,
absolutely. So. Any other questions for Tommy's group? So I know if I recall correctly, there was an increase in the
cost of play last year. What are the projected increases in costs of play. We in the business plan it calls for a 4% annual increase in in rates, which, you
know, when you look at kind of the bin of services and you know what the course uses, you know, we're usually in that three and a half to 4% annual increase on
expenses. So that's kind of just pegging along with like, you know, making sure that our prices are keeping up with the operating expenses. We're not we're not envisioning any like large one time jumps to like
fund the course or anything like that. You know, just keep up, maintain inflationary levels, you know, that sort of thing. Three books a year, maybe somebody at 2 or 3 books. Yeah, yeah, we've been talking about
around $2 around something like that. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? Thanks, Tommy. Thank
you, thank you Scott. You're next.
All right. Good afternoon and welcome the new members to the board. Appreciate you volunteering and doing this for everybody. So my name is Scott Young. I'm the fire chief. The
fire department here just give you a quick synopsis of our budget and then answer any questions. As you can see, our proposed budget is about $7.7 million this year. Here's a
breakdown of the last few years. So you can see in 2022 our budget was about 6 million, and this year we're at about 7.7, about a $1.7 million increase. The majority of that increase is
salaries and benefits for the employees. Here's a breakdown of our vehicles and our vehicle plan. Right now we have two vehicles financed 2022 squad
with one payment left. That was five year payments. We have one payment left next year. New engine we just received with three payments left on that one.
And then below is a list of all our all of our vehicles that we have and the status. What we do is fire engines squads. We keep in service frontline for ten years. They go into a reserve
status for another five years. The ladder trucks are ten years of service and they're out. The reason we do that, there's two reasons. NFPA requires us to recommends that we keep this
type of a plan for the service of our vehicles. The reason we don't keep a backup ladder truck is the maintenance, and the cost of maintaining those trucks are pretty high. We'd love to have one. It would help our ISO
rating, but it's probably not cost effective in that manner. As you can see, the 2020 ladder truck is five years old right now. It needs to be replaced in 2030. We are talking right now
with the company, the Pierce Manufacturing Company, who we buy our ladder truck through right now about ordering another one. The reason we would order today is taking over 50 months. Once you place the order for the
truck to arrive, so you have to forecast out. When do I need to put the order in? And by the time it gets here, the one will be ready to go. The other reason is the cost of the vehicles are
skyrocketing faster than we can keep up. So we're looking at options of financing versus just putting money aside and paying cash when it gets here. So the finance director and I have been
working with that scenarios, and we're waiting on some information so we can take it to the board to see if they're ready to at least place the order. So we would have it at some point, you know, close to
2030. The rescue at the very bottom of the page. We got that last year. The county paid for that vehicle for us. And they will replace that every five years. For us. It's another
vehicle that even though we just got it, we're going to have to start looking at when do we start ordering another one? Because it takes 2 to 3 years to get that. But it is funded. The
county pays for it. It's about $300,000 truck. So we do have some CIP fund money that we're proposed in the budget. Whether this will come to light, we don't know yet. We're still in
the mix of the budget staff vehicle. We replace a staff vehicle every year, usually the diesel tank at the Public Safety Building is due its end of life. So we're looking at having to
replace that. The bathrooms for the firefighters over there, they're 25 years old. They've never been remodeled. We have some water leaks and stuff that we are patching as we go. So we're looking at trying to do
that. Thermal imaging cameras. Those are the cameras that the firefighters take inside the building that can see we call them eyes and the smoke can see things in the building. And then the alert system over there at
the big public safety building, it's 25 years old. It's at the end of life. The Motorola saying, we don't have parts or we won't have parts to replace it if it breaks. We're trying to
look at seeing a way to replace that system and come up to the current standards of what the county is looking for. So those are the prices, the projected prices. We're working on some of the more detailed numbers for
all those, but we're waiting on some quotes and stuff for that. So how the system works for us, Pinellas County EMS provides us
12 paramedics staffed. Okay. Now we have more paramedics because we only hire paramedics, but they fund 12 paramedics for us. So you can see there the county
provides $3.1 million a year for EMS that pays for all the 12 personnel, supplies, etc. This is an increase from last year,
about almost $300,000. Believe it or not, we get money for fire from the county of about $604,000 this year. What that does is we have unincorporated
areas within the city. We cover fire for the for those areas. So the county gives us a percentage of what areas unincorporated. I think that number right now is
about 9.4% that they pay us what that also does. So anything that we have in our budget that we buy, I'll use the new fire station as an example. That's a $6.2 million project. The county
is going to give us close to $600,000 for that towards that station, because it's part of the coverage. So anything that we by Ron submits, then we get about 9%, a little over 9% for
certain items. They also give us money for our fire boat maintenance that we get. We have we get about $10,000 a year for that. We have another marine unit that gives us $5,000 for maintenance on that. And our
dive team, we get $15,000 a year for equipment and replacement training, etcetera. Again, there's only three dive teams in the fire departments in the county Saint Pete, Clearwater
and us. So pretty privileged to have that going for us. So. Safer grant to the new members might not know the Safer grant
is through FEMA. We got that a year ago, two years ago now. And it was for three firefighters FEMA. We were able to get it them to pay 100% salary and
benefits for three years. We are one year left on that. 2026 will be the last year that it's funded. After that, the city will take over the whole cost of that. But it's an easy way for the city to kind of forecast and
budget in to bring new employees on. This is our second safer grant. We've got we've got one first time for firefighters. This one was three firefighters last year. I was able to go with that rescue. I was able to get
the county to fund three firefighters full time now for the rest of the time now. So we've put on about ten firefighters the last seven years. So there's been no interruption to the female.
There was a there was a there was a little bit of a halt, okay. Which kind of had us in a little bit of a panic mode. Yeah. More so Ron. Okay. But sounds like it seems like it was
just a brief few weeks, but it seems like it's still rolling. PJ, our grant person, keeps an eye on that to make sure what's going on with that. So they just as a matter of fact, they just
sent out the notice for anybody wanting the new Safer grants. So if to me, if they're advertising it, maybe they aren't looking at really stopping it. So we've been really lucky with safer grants, a lot of departments for
safer grants. They never get them. So we may look at another one possibly, but we'll have to see how it goes. We still have one more year to pay on this one
that will be funded for this one. So. So personnel, services, expenditures. As you can see, 2024 was 5.8. This year is at
6.3 2025. We're projected at about $6.1 million a year. Our operating expenses you can see in 20 41. Almost 1.3 this year, it's at 1.4. We're on track
right now to be about 1.3 for this year. Still fluctuating at all. Depends how overtime is calculated to this and how we do with spending and costs. We're
seeing a lot of increase in supplies and stuff like that that we are buying. So it's just the never ending. So this is we
also handle emergency management in our department. We have one person in emergency management, Megan personnel services for her budgets 124. Operating expenses
are about 90,000 for a total of about $213,000 a year. So this is how it kind of breaks down. So we get funding from the county, about $3.7 million. The city funding for our department
is about $4 million. And that's how we come up with our $7.7 million budget. So as you know, station 70 out there on Gulf Road is has started. If you go
out there, I think tomorrow they'll get ready to pour the footers for the building, and we're expecting it to be done somewhere June, July of next year hopefully earlier, but
we'll see. Exciting. And that's it. I'll answer any questions you might have. Questions.
Comments? No questions. Great. Thank you Scott. You're welcome.
Procurement's next. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Janina Lewis, procurement Services Director. Thank you for
being here. Basically, my budget is almost the same as last year. You'll see maybe one change where we have under our repairs and maintenance. There's an
additional fee that we've added on and that is for our solicitation software. We used to have a free software, but that software wasn't free to the suppliers. So we've opted to go
to a different software where it now, even though we pay a little more, we get not only contract management, but it's free for suppliers to do as many downloads as they like. And with
that, I will turn it over for any questions. Down. Downloads or just so with our old solicitation software, it was under Demand Star, which is a
good software. And solicitation software is where you say, I want something, you send it out. It's where we put the competition for the bids. It would be better if I say bids. So we put stuff out for bids.
That's probably what everyone's used to hearing us solicitation because a bid is different from an RFP and an okay. So you get the point. So with Demand Star with the bids we would put it on
there. But then it's like a fee one to be registered to receive more than just our city's bids. Okay. For the vendors and then per document, if they're not
registered then they had to pay like a $5 fee. And with a lot of the grants we're talking, you could have up to, you know, 20 attachments and that's a fee for them to pay each time they have
to download every document. Yeah, that's with the addendums as well. So with this new software we get a lot more services. They charge you by
document. Yes. The vendors. Yes. Vendors. Yeah. So I felt that maybe that was prohibiting some of our competition because we did go out and ask, why don't you download the documents or why didn't you bid on this when
we would get only one bid or no bids? And they would say they just didn't want to pay to download it. Okay. So you. So this will probably help get better. I think it has so far
we've had a lot more responses. You know, depending on what the item is. Yes. That's great. Tell me something. We've got real time feedback that this is
working. Yeah. Yeah absolutely. Any other questions or comments? I have one question but I don't like I asked last week how are
you able to tell it all like the supplies that the city uses or the things that you're procuring this the supply chain or sourcing, is that information
available to you or is it not? As far as you mean like our. Okay, so also under my department is our typical like water stores area, which is our
supply warehouse basically materials management okay. So we have two contractors that are our typical standardized contractors. We use only like
Neptune meters, let's say for meter readers. In that aspect, we do stay in constant contact because the supply chain issues such as brass, okay, we get a
lot of back orders. And if that's what you're referring to, that's really where we see the holdup on that side. And construction. Yeah, it's not so
much now, but after Covid there was a long lag for lumber, long leg for steel. Yeah. So long lead items. These are long lead
items that let me get in more of a better term. So we kind of do watch the market and speak with the suppliers. Before we get ready to do the project. We do the kickoff meeting with the
suppliers. And if they have long lead items, we typically like to say, go ahead. What we'll do is give them permission to order supplies up front and provided they provide us with the
receipts and the material times, and then once they're set, then we give them the notice to go ahead and mobilize and start the actual project. Okay. And so far
this year, you haven't noticed any major supply chain. Not yet. And I know with the tariffs, a lot of people were hesitant about that with steel and some of the other supplies that
typically come, you know, computer parts, all those kind of things, vehicles. We have had a lot with the vehicles as well with the chips. We've had some that we've been waiting like two
years to be built. We've put those on hold and went different routes because we needed, you know, to replace vehicles now, especially the police vehicles, they get a lot of mileage or
something happens. We need to replace them. So we do tend to try try to keep on track with the bias, but it's if it's a new
build, we do tend to wait longer okay okay. Thank you. Any other questions or comments. Thank you
okay. Thank you. During your next. Thank you. I brought you
an annual report for the CRA. Thank you, thank you. Thank you.
I was. He likes large font. Oh yeah. Tiny. Tiny. Did you enjoy the meeting I did, yeah, it was it was good. Yeah. I'm excited.
Karen Lemons, economic development manager and CRA manager. Happy to be here today. I start with the economic development budget. It's pretty
self-explanatory. There's really just personnel and office related operating supplies. You'll notice there's a reduction of $2,500 in that line
item. That was because last year I had a computer replacement. So I had a new computer. So Ron took that out this year, but the
rest of it is pretty pretty much the same as the as the prior
year. So. All right. And so I guess I'll jump in with questions if you're ready for that. I think we already covered
this last year. So maybe just remind me we've kind of already developed most of the commercial space. You're sort of looking to bring businesses in to like
rehab or, you know, or just remind me kind of just overview. Yeah. So we're looking at infill projects now. Most of the city is built out and what isn't is
primarily residential and going out East Tarpon Avenue there. So we're looking at infill projects. So for example, right now we're doing a CRA master
plan update. And I'll talk about that under the CRA. But we're looking at North and South Pinellas Avenue, which especially the south area is really in need. It's got older
plazas that especially the one that floods all the time. What we can do with that as a city for incentives, trying to prompt the owner to do something there,
we'd like to that's the that's the beginning of the CRA. We would like to be able to do something with that, to build it more like the special area plan calls for. So and there's a lot
of underdeveloped and underutilized properties all along that corridor. And then when you go north after Tarpon, well, after Orange Street, really there's another area
there that could use some love. Some love. Yeah, yeah. And we've been working on our public works, has been working for probably a year or more on some landscaping and some, some
things that we can do right away for beautification. And the issue there has always been that the right of way is very small. There isn't a lot to do. So what we're what we're going to be doing, and we've got the
consultant that's helping us with our CRA plan that's still on. The CRA is reaching out to fDOT to see, you know, what, what kinds of plans and things can we use that are green most
of the year and are acceptable to them in terms of traffic and weather? We're also going to be looking at? Well, speaking of, I
just came out of three hours of hurricane training today. We had training for the EOC and then training for preliminary damage assessments. So that's kind of
in my head. But, you know, this past year, our our businesses, especially the sponge docks, they were hit the hardest, really were pretty resilient. They all bounced back. There's
only, I think, a handful of businesses that shut down because of the storm. So, you know, we're working with them on
some marketing initiatives again, some beautification, some things that we can do to help attract tourists to the area. We still get some calls from people that think the sponge docks
aren't open yet, but that's that's from visitors. But, you know, we have a huge amount of out of state and out of country visitors that come here. So there's been a push for that.
We're looking at some resiliency, things that we can put into our code for the southern end of 19 to help those
businesses there, whether it's incentives for flood proofing or things like that. So that's another area that we're going to
be focusing on. What's happening with Manatee Plaza. The firm bought it years ago. Right. And rehabbed it. But there's no new occupants. Yeah. It was it was
sold to a company out of Jacksonville that owns several shopping centers. And we were very hopeful they were here to our board of commissioners a few
years ago. And, you know, they showed us the renderings and they pretty much did what they said they were going to do. But now it sits there. The city manager and I had a talk with
their CEO. I don't know, he's been here eight months. So it's probably been maybe four months ago. And they indicated that they were waiting on they were
trying to attract a for anchor tenant. And then when you get your anchor tenant then they have other businesses that go with that and they would fill
up. So it's like okay, we suggested some things that, you know, that we could help with in terms of that. So I work with the broker from Colliers. They're back to the Colliers broker now. They had gone with a
local person. They initially had Colliers and they went to a local person and they went back to Colliers. And she's really good. So I've been I've been working with her on things that
we can that we can do. But outside of that, from what I talked to some businesses that have have talked about, you know, have inquired about
renting some space and some of the businesses across the street because we had said, you know, once the flood hit, right, you're high and dry over there. But apparently their rental rates that they're asking are
quite high, high enough that some of those businesses across the street decided to renovate. Yeah. So we just keep in touch
with them. Yeah, not much we can do. Right, I it's always baffling when somebody has something that size, you would think that they would want to get it something better than no
income. Right. Well quest moved back in. Yes. And the nail salon is still there. And. But across the street I feel really bad for
them because the discount store and the Dollar General got. I missed the Dollar General and the discount store really struggled. So yeah I know and
they I know the discount store had inquired about moving across the way, but it was almost double what they were paying. And I understand Dollar General
is not probably going to reopen. I like those dollar stores. It's really flourishing though up north where the flea market is,
the marketplace, whatever it is, that whole section is used to be vacant, is now filled with stores, so it'll come
eventually. It just takes time. So I have a question. And I'll, I'll be a little bit selfish since I'm looking at the email that that you're copied on from
some lady that is trying to set up a stakeholder interview. Her. Inspire placemaking.com. So
where does that fit in our budget line? What are we trying to do with that? Okay, so yes Mike you are one of the community, one of the business and property owners that we thought would be good to talk,
to inspire. So inspire. And this is part of the CRA inspire placemaking is the contractor that or the consultant that's under contract with us to do the
update to the CRA master plan. That contract is not is came out of the planning budget. Once it's finished, part of it will
be paid for under the CRA budget. I think it was 66,000. So that will be that would be coming out of the CRA budget. But that what that is, is that's an update to our CRA master plan
that was written in 2001, when the CRA was first created. Hasn't been updated since. Since then, there's a lot has happened throughout the CRA. And, you
know, it's time that we do an update to it. So those initial stakeholder public engagement sessions are to talk to business and property owners and residents inside the CRA before
the plan gets too far. We just started it to talk to you about getting your ideas on what's good, what's bad, what would you like to see along the corridor? What would you like to see
downtown? What's affecting your area? Types of incentives that could be offered. You know, if you could, what would you what kind of business mix would you
like to see in, in, in your area or throughout the CRA? So it's you've been there a while. So to get perspective on how the area has changed and how you would like to see it grow, because
this will be a plan that will look at the CRA from now, you know, probably for the next 20 years or so. Okay. Thank you.
Any other questions? Thank you Karen. Thank you. Then we have
the CRA budget. So I think of the changes in here a couple things. We added some additional
training funds. We thought it would be a good idea. This is the Florida Redevelopment Association conference that's held yearly. It's for the for Cras throughout the state. It's probably the best conference
because it's all the communities that have Cras and it's sharing information, and they have a lot of sessions on basic information about Cras. We thought it would be good to add training. I go to
it every year. I know our city manager is a member of the board of directors. We thought it would be good to offer to the mayor and Board of Commissioners an opportunity to go to if they
would like to, to get a little bit more information or involved in the CRA. So that's what that additional money is in the training budget. We have an
additional lease agreement for parking lot. This was with Truist Bank. We entered into an agreement with them last October to lease their parking lot. It's
for after bank hours and then on the weekends. There's almost a million in there for the Orange Street reconstruction. That's a
project that would reconstruct Orange Street from. I believe it's 19 to Tarpon Avenue. It's a bumpy road that you're aware of.
I several months ago, sometime last year, there was a survey that was done for residents. They had three options. There was a best option to do the
reconstruction and do a lot of landscaping, sidewalks. And there was a middle and then there was a lower, you know, lower cost that would just reconstruct the street. So I think they're going to be
bringing that. That's part of the, the, the new budget. And since it's in the CRA and that's a capital project, those are the type of projects we like to see
within the CRA. So that's being charged to the CRA. And then the 1.9 is the additional funds that are in the CRA that can be spent
throughout the year. We have it labeled as CRA master plan because we are updating that. But that's not what it's going to cost. But projects to be done will be coming out of that plan,
the current plan and the new one. So things that come up throughout the year. We have a good amount of money to be able
to fund those. A couple things. We have a branding initiative that is going to the BOC and CRA
board on Tuesday. That is to hire a firm. The team selected 365 degree marketing to do a complete branding and marketing
initiative for the city. So it's pretty exciting. It's going they're going to put together a new logo, color palettes, fonts specifically for the downtown,
but then eventually it will be citywide. So we're trying to get a look for Tarpon Springs, and we have all these different. We've got the seal, we've got the sustainability, has a has a logo. We use the diver helmet,
we have the birds, we have all these different kinds of logos. So what we'd like to do is unite that and just have a one nice look so that when you see something you say, oh, that must
be from Tarpon and eventually have our like our first Friday could, could adopt that some of our events. So and then we've got our Forbes property that's
that vacant lot on Tarpon Avenue. So that is out right now for an invitation to negotiate, which is we're asking for proposals from developers to see what they would propose to build
on that piece. We've gone through several of these in my time here, but we'll see if this one works. The deadline for that is June 18th, and then we'll
we'll see what what we can get from there. We have offered some incentives for that. So if it does come to fruition and we negotiate a project, any those
incentives would come from the CRA. Any further questions for Karen on the building grant? We've not done any this year. I
see there's nothing year to date actuals, no building grants this year. We haven't reimbursed any. This year we had some. But then the hurricane came. So we they haven't finished their projects.
So we have a couple there and we have two new ones that we're working on now. So yeah, last year was a little different.
Yeah. Anything else. Thank you Karen. Thank you. Building
development group. Hello. Hello. Hi I'm David Wilson, building development director. You know, obviously we'll ask any questions or answer any
questions you have, I. My stuff is pretty straightforward with the exception of labor and associated things that we have no control over. As I recall,
the budget was less this fiscal year than the previous year, and it's less this year. Excuse me, the 2026 than it is this year.
So we're we're getting more and more efficient and bringing the budget line items down with the
exception of labor. Any questions? No, it's pretty straightforward. Why do you feel the labor is going up. Well
that's just you know, we get a you know colas every year. It's just you know, the labor market in general, the city gives the entire staff a Cola generally
between 3 and 5%. Worker's comp is what it is, you know, unemployment, health insurance. Health insurance is bronze is
unhappy about health insurance 10%. Yeah. So you know we have no we in the department have no direct control over that.
Treebank tree bank. Shannon's been in meetings all day. I was kind of trying to get her to the tree bank. It's kind of isolated money. It's been for a very few
things. It's not really. Money comes in from people cutting trees down or paying in lieu of. So that's where that money comes. And it only goes back out
to replant trees. Sometimes to cut trees down. There's a couple things in there. We're isolating some money for some grants. But one one of the grants fell through. Right. But we still
have some other grants that we've set aside some money. We have matching grants sometimes from the feds, sometimes from the state. One of the one of the federal grants fell through, I think, because of the Doge deal.
Just so you know, we have a tree, a separate tree bag reserve about somebody that's used for this budget. Okay. So that's not part of the regular general fund. It's a separate
fund of money. Okay. Yeah. There's very, very few things can be taken for very specific reasons to be taken out of it. There's a resolution that says, what are the allowable expenses
within history? That okay, the fund has about 400,000. Anything else for David? Thank you. Good
afternoon. Okay, Ron, I guess you're up. Best for last. Yeah. Well, when I go to the finance department budget, it's gone
down, but we got the health insurance increase. We had operating went down, but that's because we had a couple computers last year. As we mentioned, we took all the computers out of all the
departments because we had the computers. We had to buy special ones for police. There were using all those 50 computers at other departments, so we won't see too many computers in these
departments budgets. We've got seven. Seven full, you know, people, full time positions. We have eight, as I was trying to say, but we're still down one
position. Our financial analyst position. We're keeping busy. As you know, we presented the audit last week. And with the budget this seems like it doesn't stop. But we're having we're doing a revenue sufficiency study which
involves our department. We're doing revenue sufficiency study for water and sewer and other revenue sufficiency study for stormwater. Because stormwater doesn't have approved rates for
next year, and water and sewer has some rate increase of 2.75%. But we wanted to revisit that and see if that rate needs to be adjusted. We're also working on
an impact fee study. Currently, there's a payroll study going on looking at our payroll system and the efficiencies of it, and even whether should we go from
weekly payroll to biweekly payroll. And thanks to Sherry and Shane, they're a lot of the brunt of work has fallen on them for a lot of this stuff, but we're trying to get them
familiar with it. But FEMA is causing us a lot of work every week, meetings with our FEMA consultant, meetings with FEMA reps for the hurricanes. You
know, Helene and Milton, about $8 million worth of debris removal. So what we wanted to try to do is make sure we get them everything they can so we can get our reimbursement as
soon as possible. You know, our debris removal is looking at we paid 5 million so far. We don't have all the invoices. I've heard estimates might be 7 or 8
million. We eventually got to pay for debris removal. It's supposed to be 100% reimbursable, but we still have maybe a $1 million of overtime.
People that work at the EOC and other maybe million dollars of supplies when needed. So we're aggressively just trying to keep pushing the consultants and FEMA meeting with them weekly to just
say, you know, make sure they get everything so we can try to get all our money back. So I appreciate being the Sherry and Shane for all the work trying
to. Get everything, get a FEMA, everything they need. Sounds like a sounds like a total pain. So we've been busy, it seems like. So that's our finance
department budget. And then if I go to the water and sewer, I'm over the water and sewer department. We've got a utility billing department and the meter
reader department. Takes a lot of times I got to be familiar with meter reader meters these days, the different types of utility billing department. It's
gone down. But they had a couple computers last year. They so that's why that went down as operating supplies. The one increase with the health
insurance a 10%. Department. The meter reader department. It went up just a little bit for like I said, mostly because of the health insurance. But it also
went down a little bit because of we had a computer last year, so not too much exciting in those departments and utility billing. There's the four ladies that work there. Very fortunate.
I have a nobody's knock on wood. We've kept a full staff for a couple, 2 or 3 years now, and we've got the three meter techs and knock on wood, I have some
good, good employees down there and I hope I don't lose them anytime. So that's a finance department with the finance department and our utility portion. If I have a question
about overtime in this utility billing. Yeah. So I mean it is it carried over from the hurricane. Yes. That's why it's
that's why you'll see a lot of apartments okay. Just so I understand it better. Thank you. No problem. Anything else for
Ron? Yeah. Thank you. I think that was the last one. You're the last one for today. We have. We have another set for next week. Yes. Okay. That concludes
new business for today. Any public comments, board and staff comments anybody. Thank you for welcoming me. You're quite you're quite welcome. Glad to
have you. You're very happy to have you here. Both of our new members, rather than future agenda items. Let's talk about future meetings. I know you said
after next week you weren't sure we're going to have to meet again until July. That being a problem, because the week we would meet in July, I'm going to be at a conference. Okay. So if
we do meet, that will fall to you. Yeah. I'll be I'll be out of town the whole month of July, so okay. So July is going to
look iffy. I think they're relying on North Florida Avenue. That's right. North Florida crew is in the house. They got a little stroke around here.
What's that? Are you going to stop eating until I. Well, you indicated by then you would have something back in terms of the final, the final numbers from
the county and all that kind of stuff that the estimate in a couple weeks. So should we have the regular June meeting then, rather than a July meeting? Have you could have a June on the
19th? Yeah. We could probably give you an update on where the budget is. I'm not sure if we'll have the pay study ready to implement in there. It's kind of
something else. Oh, and by then they'll probably they'll be doing the. Public budget public hearing on June 17th. That's where they send out the survey.
And we're working on it now with a couple questions. I send it out to all the residents to try to get their feelings on what they want to see in the budget. After the survey is completed, the board will meet on June 17th
and go over the survey, and it's time for public to come to the meeting too, and give their input. So. So if you wanted that, we could try to just update you on June 19th of where we're at. Okay, let's do the
regular June meeting. And because some of us have begun in July, we'll skip the July meeting then. We'll meet on June 19th. I believe that's the date.
And skip the July meeting. Oh, it's a holiday. Oh. That is Juneteenth. Yeah. You know this
holiday. Sorry. So we you have the option. You can either meet the only you can't meet the 12th
because code enforcement. Or you can meet the week of the 19th either Monday Tuesday, Wednesday. That works for
anybody. Or move it to the 26 of June, which is the following Thursday. I'm good with the 26th or the week of the 19th. Any any of those? I'll be gone 26. What
about Wednesday, the week of the 18th? The 18th? What about that? Let me just double check. That works. Okay. I can do June 18th.
Let's do Wednesday, June 18th, 2:00 2:00. Okay. Talked about the meeting. Now any the last
item on here is any future agenda items that we want to see covered. Other than any updates Ron can give us on the budget
process. I could try to give you a financial update on the current year. If you want, something brief, you don't need
to go into great detail 1 or 2 page slides. No. Okay. I'm hurt. Seeing nothing else. We'll
adjourn this meeting at 332. Okay. Thank you all. Thank you.
Mr.