 I'd like to call the 22nd meeting of the 2018-2019 Common Council to order. Would the clerk please read the quote for the day? Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try. Thank you very much. Would the clerk please call the roll? There are nine present. And all the person, Rosemary Trester, is excused. Please stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. 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. Next, we'll move on to the approval of minutes from our last council meeting. All the person, Wolf. Thank you, Mayor. I make a motion to approve. Thank you for that motion and support. Is there any discussion on the minutes? Seeing none. All those in favor, please signify by seeing aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes. Item 4.1 is resignation. I'll turn it over to city attorney Adams. Thank you, Mayor. The first resignation is from Amanda Salazar. She is resigning from the Mead Public Library Board, effective February 13, 2019. Thank you very much. All the person, Wolf. Thank you, Mayor. I make a motion to accept and file. Thank you for that motion and support. All those in favor of the motion, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes. The second resignation, 1.5, is from Adam Cain from the Historic Preservation Commission, effective February 14, 2019. All the person, Wolf. Thank you, Mayor. I make a motion to accept and file. Thank you for that motion and support. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes. Next, we'll move on to item 1.6. A presentation on dark store loophole property tax shift by Kurt Wotinski, the Deputy Executive Director of the League of Municipalities. Kurt, please come forward. Thank you, Mayor. Good evening, everyone. My name is Kurt Wotinski. I'm Deputy Director of the League of Wisconsin Municipalities. I understand the city of Sheboygan has plans to have a referendum on the ballot in April, asking voters whether they approve, asking the legislature to close the dark store and Walgreens loopholes. I'm here to give a little explanation and a little background about the dark store and Walgreens property tax loopholes and answer any questions the council may have or the mayor may have. And so to start out with, though, what I'd like to do is we have at our association, and just by the way, so I'm here from the League of Wisconsin Municipalities, we're an association of all the cities in the state, including the city of Sheboygan, and all the villages also. So there are 190 cities and about 413 villages. And also by way of background, last fall, last November, 17 counties and about six municipalities conducted referendum on the same issue, and they all passed overwhelmingly, most close to 90%, some between 70% and 90%, asking the legislature to close the dark store and the Walgreens loopholes. Now, let's talk a little bit about what those loopholes are, and I'd like to start out with this video that our association has prepared basically to educate the public about this tax issue. If there are big box or other chain retailers in your community, your property taxes may be going up. That's because certain commercial properties have been able to obtain special tax reductions. Perhaps you've heard of these tax breaks. They're known as the dark store and Walgreens loopholes. Unless the state legislature closes these loopholes, other property owners, including homeowners, will pay an average of 8% more in property taxes, even more in some communities. Communities like the town of Grand Chute, Ashwabanan, Sheboygan, West Bend, Franklin, Pleasant Prairie, Sun Prairie, La Crosse, and Rice Lake. You see the total amount of property taxes a local government may collect is strictly limited by state law. The size of the property tax pie stays pretty much the same from one year to the next. What can and does change is how the pie gets divided. When one kind of property like big box stores pays less, other kinds like residential and mom and pop businesses pay more. Let's take a closer look at the dark store loophole. Attorneys for big box chains claim that a brand new store in a busy area has the same value for tax purposes as a vacant boarded up dark property located in an unpopular location. Here's an actual example. A low store in Wauwatosa is assessed for taxes at 13.6 million. Lowes claims it's only worth 7.1 million, yet Lowes spent in excess of 16 million to acquire the land and build the structure. Lowes argues that even the land was devalued from 9 million to 3 million dollars once the big box store was constructed. And Lowes insists its store can only be compared to vacant dark stores for property tax purposes. Ironically, as big box stores fight for a smaller share of property taxes, they use more municipal services. Big box stores demand more police, fire and ambulance service than other commercial properties and way more than residential properties. Every day municipal police, fire and ambulance respond to calls from big box stores. Meanwhile, the cost of paying for these services gets shifted to homeowners, the class of property using these services the least. The other loophole is called Walgreens after a 2008 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision. That ruling allows national pharmacies and other businesses who lease their store to claim the value of their properties for tax purposes is less than half of the actual sale price. Here's another real example. Walgreens challenged the city of Oshkosh's assessment of its store. The court of appeals, relying on the 2008 decision, decided that the value of the Walgreens property was 2.2 million, much less than the 4.3 million actual 2009 sale price of the property. Other taxpayers, mainly homeowners, now have to cover Walgreens former share of the taxes. Plus, Oshkosh taxpayers had to pay the corporation a tax refund of $69,500. Nearly 300 pharmacies in Wisconsin can take advantage of this loophole, including stores in Ashland, on Alaska, Dodgeville, Beaver Dam, Weston, Appleton and Sturgeon Bay, and in your neighborhood. Other commercial and manufacturing businesses that lease their space are also beginning to use this same loophole. Only the Wisconsin State Legislature can stop this unfair tax shift. Tell your state legislators to restore fairness and common sense to the property tax system by closing the dark store and Walgreens loopholes. Call your state legislator through the legislative hotline at 1-800-362-9472 or visit darkstoreloopholes.org. All right, that's a fairly good 30,000 foot explanation of a fairly complex topic. What we're talking about is how do assessors for cities, villages and towns, because they're the ones who are responsible, determine the fair market value of certain commercial properties. And we have some fundamental differences of opinion between property owners like big box stores and their tax attorneys and municipal assessors around the state and municipalities. And that fundamental difference of opinion is over the tax strategy that are being employed by these property owners, commercial property owners, for the most part, is resulting in tax shift over to other property tax payers. So just let me give you a perfect example that everyone can understand. If you and your neighbor are sharing the cost, and I'm gonna bring this down really fundamental level. We're not even gonna talk about property taxes, we're just gonna talk about other things. If you and your neighbor are sharing the cost of a pizza and you say, I will pick up two thirds of that cost, I'll pay for this tonight, say it's a $20 pizza, I'll pay $15. And your neighbor says, initially says okay, but then looks at his wallet and says, you know what, I only have $3. I can't contribute the full of $5. So what happens? It's still $20 pizza and it still has to be paid for, so you have to pick up it. So more the cost shifts over to you. That's what's happening with some, as a result of these tax strategies that big box stores and stores, and medium box stores like Walgreens and CVS that use two different tax strategies that I'll explain in a little more detail. The person who's picking up more of the cost of the pizza in Wisconsin for property tax purposes are homeowners, because already homeowners in Wisconsin pay 68 to 70% of the total property tax levy. So the rest of the property taxes, 30%, are paid by agriculture, manufacturing, and commercial. So whenever anyone on the agriculture, commercial, and manufacturing side of property tax payers figures out a way to pay less than other tax payers have to pick it up. And really the only group that's left for the most part are the 70% of homeowners who are paying property taxes. So that's what we're talking about here, is trying to avoid more of the property tax burden from shifting from one class of property, commercial over to another class of property, homeowners. The other thing we're talking about here, especially on the Walgreens side, and I just wanna kinda give a 30,000 foot level look at this tax evasion effort, is right now as a result of this 2008 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision that Walgreens won against the city of Madison in 2008 that was referenced in that video. We have a situation where property like CVS stores and Walgreens are selling. So the real estate is selling for between 4 million and 8 million in Wisconsin. That's the going fair market value right now. Mainly investors are buying those properties. Pools of investors will buy them. But they have to be assessed as a result of that Wisconsin Supreme Court decision in 2008 at roughly half of that amount. So they're assessed at between 2.1 and 3 million and they're selling on the market for between 4 million and 8 million. So if your home, maybe your home is assessed at 250 to 300 million and you think you could sell it, this is, I'm sorry, I'm used to Madison prices, sorry, sorry. Your home, not million, 250 to 300,000 and your neighbor sells for 300,000 and you just bought your home for 305,000 but you argue to your assessor, well it really should be half of that. My assessed value for property tax purposes should be more like 150,000. You'd be left out the door. But that's exactly what's happening as a result of that 2008 decision for commercial leased properties. Which are, that's how Walgreens and CVS own 80% of those properties are leased, they're not owned and they're relying on an argument that they're leased, the amount that they actually pay to the owner is above market and shouldn't be calculated or considered as part of the determination that an assessor takes in, the information an assessor takes in to determine the value of the property. So would you mind showing that, so here's what I was, some examples from around the state, Walgreens and CVS assess versus sale values and you can see the sale values range from 4.2 million to 8.7 million but the assessed values are 2.4, well really just hover around 2.4 to 3.4 million. So we have two pieces of legislation. Our association worked with legislators last session to introduce in the legislature. And the first piece of legislation would close the dark store loophole which is a loophole that mainly big box stores are using and their tax attorneys argue before the assessor that their assessed values are too high because you shouldn't look at us as an open thriving store in a good location. You should value us as if we were a closed vacant store that's no longer in a popular location. And that argument is winning in other states around the country. It is not the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court have not totally bought in in Wisconsin and we wanna make sure that that doesn't happen. So we've introduced legislation to just make it crystal clear to courts and to the assessor and to property owners that it's not appropriate to use dark or vacant stores and the sale prices of those stores to determine the fair market value of a thriving open store. And so our bill basically just says exactly that. It says that the appropriate comparable for a store or any property has to be of similar age, similar size, maybe a similar retail but also if it's dark and vacant that's not an appropriate comparable for something that's open. Okay, so that's one piece of legislation. Got introduced last session. Our other piece of legislation would reverse this 2008 Walgreens decision by basically telling assessors that it's appropriate. It's okay to look at the actual rent that a commercial lease property is paying and also it's okay to use recent sale prices of that property when trying to determine the value that property for property tax purposes that you don't throw out that information or pretend it doesn't exist. So those are our two bills. Last session they were introduced, as I said, we had overwhelming support among legislators including legislators from the Sheboygan area like Senator Lamehu and Representative Kotsma. So we had 84 co-sponsors on our dark store bill and there's only 132 legislators in the state legislature in both houses. And then we had 62 legislators sign on to our Walgreens reversal bill. So you're probably wondering, well, why didn't those bills pass if they had overwhelming support? Well, that's a good question because they also had very strong opposition. And the opposition, as you might imagine, are businesses who are currently taking advantage of the kind of current state of the law and naturally do not match those loopholes or those tax strategies closed. So we were not able to get over that opposition and leadership in both houses were not convinced that it was necessary to schedule these bills for a vote. So we did not get a vote in either the Senate or the Assembly. It came out of a Senate committee unanimously and I also want to emphasize that these were bills that were supported, had huge bipartisan support. So we had strong Republican authors and Republican supporters as well as many Democrats on the bill. It's probably one of the only policy issues in the state capital in the last year and probably this year that cross over partisan lines and we have support from both Republican and Democrats on a significant substantive policy issue. So this session flash forward to this session. What's the status? So the same authors that we had last session with us and are introducing a bill and they're actually going to circulate their bill for co-sponsors asking other legislatures to sign on to that bill in the next week or so. And instead of two bills this session we decided to go with one bill and address both issues in one bill. It's less confusing and we just think it makes more sense. And so we anticipate we'll have all of similar strong bipartisan support, but you never know. And so referendum questions on the ballot where citizens can communicate to their legislators by voting yes on whether they want the legislature to address these issues by passing legislation are critical and lend support and political pressure on addressing this issue. Also another thing that's changed from last session is that Governor Evers new governor has publicly told us and also said it in a number of other forums that he will include in his budget both these bills the language out of both of these bills in his budget which he's going to introduce next week on February 28th. So we anticipate we'll have two ways for the legislature to pass Darkstore and Walgreens legislation either by separate piece of legislation that'll be introduced probably the next three weeks or a budget bill language will be in the budget that'll be introduced in a week and a half. And so we're very hopeful that this session we'll be able to pass legislation that creates a fair tax system and addresses the inequities between which classes of property are paying property taxes and which are avoiding paying some and shifting some of their bills on to other taxpayers. So happy to answer any questions that you might have or dive into some other details of this issue that I didn't touch on. Well, the person Wolf. Thank you, Mayor. Just a real quick question. I guess when I sit here and when I read about it heard about it and after your presentation what are your concerns to me this is like a snowball that's gonna roll downhill and get bigger and bigger. Right now we're hearing Walgreens, CVS. Those are kind of the big big gorillas on the pharmaceutical arena portion. We've heard Walmart, there's gonna be, we're getting the brick and mortar stores are having some struggles. So there's going to be more big box stores that are gonna become open. And my fear is that you've got the big guys that are pushing this through right now. They've got obviously a lot more money in their pockets to be able to push it. But do you see that it could actually roll out to all of the other stores that are out there? Because if you, I mean, if you look at it and like you said before, a lot of the big stores they don't necessarily own the buildings. They lease it from another second, third party group. Right, right. So these are, all of a sudden you're gonna have all of these buildings, all of these properties and businesses that are gonna say, hey, if it worked for them it works for me. Exactly, yeah. You've hit it right correctly. There's a successful tax strategy will be copied by everyone else. And the same business model leasing commercial space, if it results in a less property tax bill than ownership, that business model will be followed. And we're seeing it. So lodging industry, banks, they're copying and trying to use the same technique, same strategy. And we're very concerned about that. All the person down here. First of all, I just want to thank you for drawing me from that side. Well, thanks for having me, happy to be here. I saw that. Yes. I've looked at the building. Yes, thank you. I'm looking. It is. So I am concerned and I wonder, yes, I'm involved with the owners here. Frankly, there's some responsibility to get out to their constituents and explain them what this referendum is. But I, what's happening? And why can't, with those astonishing numbers, why, I think I have a sense of why it hasn't happened but what's going to change that will bring about a better result? Well, we're hoping that political pressure of from referendums like you're having in your city and the referendums that happened in the fall and the fact that we now have a governor who's supportive will convince some leaders in both houses of the legislature that there is some political risk in not passing this legislation. They weren't convinced. Leadership was not convinced in both houses last session that there was more pain from, they thought there'd be less pain by just not passing the legislation of maintaining status quo, appeasing some of their allies in the business community. And we want to show them that that's really not the best policy decision to make. Don't make a political decision. This is a serious policy decision that needs to be addressed. And I'll note that Mayor Van der Steen did send out to council members a spreadsheet indicating just how much the city of Sheboygan has paid out in back taxes and the interest which can be formidable. Yes. So this is, I mean, we're right here in Sheboygan. Our taxpayers have suffered as a result of this. So keep up the good work. Well, thank you. Our fingers are crossed. Well, the person boring. Thank you, Mayor. Kurt, couple questions. What was the thinking on going to one bill rather than two? I can see possibly, you know, if the dark store has a really overwhelming support and the Walgreens a little less support, is there a little bit of a fear that the Walgreens ones might not vote for the, you know, the bill in totality? I think that was, but you still think it's a better way to go with one. Yeah, so originally when we proposed this legislation three or four years ago, we were working with legislators and it was just, it was drafted as one bill. Then a couple legislators thought, now let's separate it on a more comfortable with the dark store or a more comfortable Walgreens. And so we made it into two bills. But as the session progressed last session, it was very difficult to explain both kind of complex ideas separately. And there was also some legislators who were playing off one over the other and dark store, there was more comfort with that. But really the Walgreens decision from 2008 has way more ramifications in the long term for causing a tax shift over to residential homeowners. So we don't want the Walgreens to be set aside and legislators declare victory if they just passed one of these instead of both. And then also you said the governor is probably gonna have this in his budget. That might be an easier way to pass it because then the budget passes and it's in there. Now, what are the pitfalls of who could remove it from the budget? Could that be leadership again? That might possibly take it out of there and then say, well, we're just gonna do the bill rather than having it in the budget? Yes, that's a definite possibility. Yep, and leadership has already said that when the governor introduces his budget, they're gonna go over it very closely and probably remove most of the policy items that the governor's included in his budget. So what we're hoping and our strategy is and we're completely open about this, so I'll tell the whole world what strategy is. So we're trying to at least have the dark store and the Walgreens issues part of the discussion when there's trading going on over what's in the budget, what's out, probably won't happen until next fall when they get to that point, but that's what we're trying to ensure. Thank you. I'll hold a person's sorenson. Thank you, Mayor. Curt, thanks for coming up to Shabuigan tonight. Always appreciate it. Thank you. I'm gonna shoot off a few questions here. Jim and Mary Lynn answered some of mine already so I can take those off my list. I can't even read my handwriting. So I think my first question is here. As you know, we have a referendum coming in April. I've been getting a lot of questions from constituents. This stuff can get kind of wonky. There's a lot of big technical terms that us from the municipal level might understand, but folks who aren't so plugged into these issues might understand, do you have any helpful tips or techniques that we could use as local elected officials to sort of be the advocates for our communities to share a lot of this information? So we do have talking points on our website, Walgreens talking points, and Darkstore talking points. And we have the video obviously, but ultimately at the 30,000 foot level, it comes down to avoiding having one class of property taxpayers pick up the slack and pay part of the responsibility of another class of taxpayers. That's what we wanna avoid. And we're already at a point in our state where homeowners, residential property owners are paying roughly 70% of the property tax levy, which is unusual for, if you look at other states, it's not, most of the burden does not lie entirely or mostly on residential homeowners. It's spread more equally between all the different classes of property. For instance, in Minnesota, residential property owners pick up 50% roughly of their property tax levy. Colorado, similar. Iowa, some of these states have constitutional language saying that that has to be the case. We don't, we have a uniformity clause, but we have most of the property tax burden already being paid by homeowners. We wanna avoid having more of their responsibility shifted to homeowners. That's the big way to talk about it that I think has the most understanding. And then just tax fairness. Sure. Some other questions that I had too. It seemed like in the last legislative session there was leadership was sort of dragging their feet as you sort of alluded to. Have you've heard anything? Are there any more discussions is leadership more willing to bring this to a vote on the floor? This session, this time around. And I guess just kind of another note while I'm at it too and kind of talking and referring to my last question. I don't know if you know this, but the WMC, they're bringing in a speaker I believe next Friday for the first Friday forms at the Chamber of Commerce. So the other side is sort of, they were taken aback by some of the strong support from the other communities and they're looking to sort of essentially throw a wet towel on it here. So I guess definitely anything that we can do, I guess this is me sort of preaching to the choir, but anything that we can do as local electives to sort of be advocates for this referendum, educate our community. I think that's definitely key. But yeah, again, going back to the previous question. So WMC is very advocating very aggressively in the state capital and around the state against these legislation. They're not alone. There's other business groups as well. And then there's retail. The retail stores have formed their own set of lobbyists and hired their own set of lobbyists. Leadership, I would say is about where they were at last session. So we have assembly leadership is Speaker Robin Boss. He's not enthusiastic about this legislation. He's skeptical. He sides more WMC on it philosophically and for political reasons. And I'm not saying anything he wouldn't tell you because he told us that straight up. Last session, he took the position that his house would not take up these bills until the Senate did. So we concentrated on the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Fitzgerald is not as, he kind of keeps his opinion close to the vest. But he does his position was we will not take these bills up until we have sufficient Republican votes to pass it. Just Republicans alone. So they have the majority party. So we needed 17 Republican senators to say, yes, we're always one or two or three short depending on what week we were counting to be able to convince Senate Majority Leader Fitzgerald to schedule it for a floor vote. Came out of committee, like I said with a unanimous vote, but that's as far as it got. And then last question, Mr. Mayor, I promise. In your conversations, I'm assuming that you kind of mentioned and bring up the impact that municipalities have with legal fees, with having to hire outside counsel with litigating a lot of this stuff. I know it's definitely impacting Sheboygan. Yeah, I heard an amazing statistic from City of Wauwatosa which has right now seven pending, seven to 10 pending cases going on where they are facing appeals from big box stores for the most part, appealing their assessments and City is determined to defend each of these because they think they have a winning case and they're gonna defend their assessors in the assessment and they spent $600,000 last year on legal fees to accomplish that. Thanks, Kurt. Okay, seeing no lights, Kurt, I wanna thank you very much for attending our meeting tonight. I appreciate you driving up from Madison and have safe travels home. Thank you, Mayor. Anybody here for public forum this evening? Not tonight, Mr. Mayor. Okay, next we'll go on to Mayor's announcements. First, I wanna give you a little update on the latest snow emergency, our second one that's called during this snow season. It was declared starting at 10 o'clock on Monday, February 11th and the snow emergency was in effect until three o'clock on Wednesday, February 13th. Altogether, 13 inches of snow fell during this period. We had 34 employees that worked 483 hours, probably about 150 hours less than the first snow storm we had and DPW employees drove 13 plow and four salt trucks and front end loaders, 3,348 miles, about 1,000 miles less than the first snow fall and used 165 tons of salt. Michigan Police Department issued 181 tickets for cars parked illegally and had 86 cars towed during the second snow emergency. And I just wanna thank everybody at DPW, the plows crew, the streets and sanitation department, the police, fire, transit and parking and water utility staff for working through the storm and also recognize all city departments whose employees kept their locations open during the difficult weather. On your desk tonight, you have an issue of the new Sheboygan visitor guide. Now this is a little different than what's happened in the past. Previously, the visitor guide was put together by the Chamber of Commerce, but now our new visit Sheboygan entity is putting out their own magazine and different from the other issues that came out in the past, it doesn't have any ads in it. It's just a great piece to sell the city of Sheboygan. And we also have an opportunity to view these online. If you want to, you can go to visitsheboygan.com, scroll to the bottom left of their front page and look for a word called guide and just click on that and it'll open up the viewer for you. This morning I received an email from Rosemarie Trester that she was resigning from the city council due to medical reasons. I wish Rosemarie the best as she recovers from recent medical procedure and I also want to extend my thanks to her for her three years of service to the city of Sheboygan and the residents of district number four. Her resignation will be under other matters. It came in just today so we're not able to accept that tonight. That'll be delayed until our next meeting on March 4th. However, I asked the residents of district four to consider running to replace Rosemarie as an older person for the remainder of her one year term on the city council and we're gonna be scheduling an election by the common council on March 18th. So that'll be coming up. I also want to remind people that the police academy applications are due by February 22nd, just a day or two here. The 11 week program runs each Tuesday from March 12th through May 21st and there's only 105 days left until we move back into city hall for our council meeting on June 3rd. Thank you. Okay, next we'll move on to the consent agenda that'll include items two point through to 2.7. All the person will. Thank you, mayor. I make a motion to accept and file all our O's except and adopt all our C's and pass all resolutions and ordinances. Thank you for that motion and support. Those items are before us. Is there any discussion on those items? Seeing none, will the clerk please call the roll. Nine ayes. Motion passes. Section three is reports of officers. Items 3.1 and through 3.3 will be referred to various committees. Under resolutions items 4.1 and 4.2 will again be referred to various committees. Under reports of committees item 5.1 is RC number 254 of 1819 by the finance and personnel committee. To whom was referred direct referral resolution number 174 of 1819 by all the person's reinflash. Born authorizing the appropriate city officials to enter into contracts with the UW Badger Band and the Stephanie H. Weill Center for the Performing Arts with regard to the performance of the UW Badger Band at the Weill Center as a fundraiser for the mayor's international committee on April 1st and recommends approving the resolution with updated contracts. All the person reinflash. Thank you for that motion and support. Is there any discussion? Seeing none, will the clerk please call the roll for passage? Nine aye. Motion passes. Item 5.2 is RC number 255 of 1819 by the licensing hearings and public safety committee. To whom was referred direct referral general ordinance number 41 of 1819 by all the person's Donahue and Sorensen amending section 130 to 31 of the municipal code relating to commercial quadricycle hours of operations recommends approving the ordinance. All the person Donahue. Thank you for that motion and support. Is there any discussion on the motion? Seeing none, will the clerk please call the roll? Nine aye. Motion passes. Under general ordinances, items 6.1 through 6.4 will be referred to various committees. Other matters received after the agenda was published. I'll turn it over to city attorney Adams. 7.1 is her resignation. All the person Rosemary Trester submitting her resignation from the city of Sheboygan common council, district 4. That lays over. 7.2 is an RO by the city clerk submitting various license applications for the period ending June 30, 2019, December 31, 2019, and June 30, 2020. That will be referred to the licensing hearings and public safety committee. 7.3 is a general ordinance by all the person's board inflation boron, amending section 82-33 of the Sheboygan municipal code so as to modify the department of finance table of organization. That will be referred to the finance personnel committee. Next is a contemplated closed session. Alderperson Wolfe. Thank you, mayor, I make a motion to convene in closed session under the exemption contained in section 19.85 sub-1 sub-e. Wisconsin stats were competitive and bargaining reasons require a closed session related to the development. Opportunity for the former boat doctors, 1329 Agra Avenue. Thank you for that motion in support. Would the clerk please call the roll? Nine ayes. Motion passes. For our viewers at home, this land art transmission tonight on WSCS will be journeying in closed session. So this will end that session. We'll take a short three minute adjournment and then return.