 I just hit record and transcribe. You did? Okay. Yeah. I'm trying to see though, okay. Recording has started. Okay. Just making sure I was like looking. I'm like waiting for the pop up. As long as somebody is doing it. Great. Yes. Yes. Okay. Everyone disclaimer, you're being recorded. Thank you all for joining us today. The purpose of this meeting is to really follow up from our February stakeholder meeting that we had at the end of February. That was our annual stakeholder meeting and at that time, we had talked to y'all about several high priority needs that we were looking at and funding possibilities that we were looking at with one of those possibilities being a potential fee increase in fiscal year 24. Since we had that meeting with y'all in February, we've been continuing to discuss that internally. We also met with our Mobility and Infrastructure Transportation Committee, which is made up of several of our council members in March of this year. We talked to them about some of our needs really focusing on big-scale flood mitigation needs. We got some feedback from them as well as city management. Really what we want to do today is recap a little bit of what our needs are and what our thoughts are on how to fund those and to get your feedback. Our stakeholder group of course represents our rate payers. We really want to hear your feedback on the thoughts on how we would spend the funding and then to the thoughts from just impacts to the rate payers and what y'all think in terms of what we're looking at doing. Again, I didn't introduce myself, but I think most of y'all know me, Jennifer Dyke, the Assistant Director for the Strong Water Management Program. With us today, we've got Lauren Prayer. You'll see her on camera, so she is our Transportation and Public Works Director, and we've got Linda Stern here. Linda will be helping facilitate Q&A as our communication specialist. Then talking today with me in terms of presenting the slide, we've got Stephen Nichols, our Stormwater Program Manager, and Juan Cadena, who is our Stormwater Field Operations Senior CPO. You can say later what your title is, and I know exactly Juan does everything. With that, let's go ahead and move forward. Stephen, you've got control. Basically, we're just going to do a little recap of where we're at on our current five-year revenue bond program. We're going to talk about our needs and funding options, then what we would like to do in terms of funding for capital projects and maintenance projects, and then go back to the funding needs, and recap that based off what we present, and get your feedback. Definitely, if you've got feedback as we go throughout, or questions, raise your hand or message, and Linda will be watching the chat, and we can stop and answer questions along the way. It's meant to be informal. You don't have to hold your questions to the end. Ask them when the call event is, so. Next slide. Okay. Bond accomplishments. As you all probably remember in 2019, Council approved a fee increase of 6.5 percent. The big benefit of that was it gave us the ability to issue a lot of debt over a five-year time frame. We issued the first 53 million in fiscal year 21. We're making great progress encumbering that funding. The pie chart here on the left shows that we've encumbered over $38 million, and we've got great plans to encumber the rest pretty soon, and we're working on getting ready to issue that next amount, which will be 43 million. Total of around $96 million of debt focused on high-priority stormwater projects. Next slide. This slide shows the column right next to the green column shows in 2019, when we went forward with the fee increase, we initially thought we were going to be able to issue around $70 million of debt that was based off of the initial interest rate projections and so forth. The exciting part was now that number is up at 96, but then the downside is that projects cost a lot more. As we all know, we're dealing with inflation, we're dealing with supplies, shortages, and material, and labor. Just like everyone else in the country, we're dealing with that here at the city of Fort Worth. That has impacted our five-year bond and pay-go capital delivery goals, as well as we've reallocated some of that money. We always meant to spend it on one big phase of a flood mitigation project, and because of the continued large-scale flood mitigation needs across the city, we're going to be taking some of that funding to start fleshing out phases. Doing some initial project development for large-scale flood mitigation projects. The big reason is that to try to go after funding, so different grant funding sources or federal funding sources, you've got to have a pretty well-fleshed out project. Right now, we can't even try to go after that money until we flesh projects out. We're trying to put some money to fleshing those projects out, so we can put us in a position to go after and be competitive to get grant funding, which is one of the sources that we really think that we need to help make this possible. Also, I'll note at the very bottom, we got Fort Worth Central City on there. Just a reminder is that that is all being reimbursed by the Tarrant Regional Water District. While we're fronting that money, we're actually going to be putting commercial paper to it. We will be reimbursed by the Water District for that, and so it's not going to have any impact per se on our capital project delivery timeframes or anything like that, so I wanted to make sure everyone was aware of that. Next slide. This just shows a few highlights of our 2020 bond program and what was possible with the six-and-a-half fee increase. Just a reminder, it helped us do an additional phase of a big flood mitigation project. West Cliff is one of those projects that's continuing to move forward. We've got hazardous road mitigation overtopping, so protecting life safety at these hazardous crossings, channel rehabilitation. We're about to start a big project on West Creek and storm drain rehab, so being proactive going out there and restoring our infrastructure before it fails, which protects life safety and it's also a whole lot cheaper than waiting until after it fails. Next slide. Okay, so stormwater needs. While we're getting a lot of work done, we still got a lot of needs, and that's actually reflected the city manager puts together a work plan every year and the work plan for this year actually has a section in it that says evaluate regional solutions to flooding and stormwater problems and recommend strategies. With that city manager's work plan in mind, we have been working to try to figure out, what are our top priorities? Knowing that everybody needs funding, but where can we start to take a stab at our next priority? This just shows some of the flooding problems and infrastructure problems across the city that we have right now. Next slide. I think we all know, y'all are all familiar with our mission statement to protect people and property from harmful stormwater runoff. That mission statement directly leads us to working towards council strategic priorities on the next slide. Council has come up with three strategic vision priorities that are all focused on quality of life. Our stormwater projects and maintenance efforts that we would like to move forward with are all helping to really keep our community safer. That's our number one priority. We want to keep our community safer. We want to invest in our infrastructure. We want to create quality of life. We want areas to be able to develop and grow and not be hindered by continued flooding. Flood mitigation is not an easy thing. Since our program started in 2006, we've done a lot of those easy projects. What we have left are the big challenging projects. But even though they're big and challenging, that's not a reason to not address them. But we need to start working towards addressing these projects because they are impacting our quality of life. To me, they're not where we want the city to be. We want our city vision to be the most livable community. When we have continued flooding, that of course impacts livability. It impacts both the city and both residents. Because the city and residents are constantly having to prepare and then clean up after flood events. That's what we want to work on reducing. Next slide. Fort Worth has organizational values shown on the slide as well. Just trying to show that what we're really working towards moving forward is, we want to provide exceptional customer service. We get calls all the time about our infrastructure needing maintenance and about people flooding. That's what we're working to mitigate. We want to be held accountable and spending our resources very wisely, and continuing to improve our infrastructure out there. Next slide. This table we showed back at our February meeting. I just wanted to highlight in here the yellow is where we're looking at focusing moving forward. The big thing that this table shows is our main assets, which again are the culverts under roadways at channels and creeks, our storm drain pipes, and our main assets. A lot of them aren't in great condition, especially in older parts of town. They're older and we've got a lot of needs that are greater than our resources just like everybody else at the city. That's why we work towards prioritizing where we spend our resources really focused on risk. Of course, again, trying to keep our community safe. I'm not going to go into detail on these, but I wanted to flag that this yellow is what you're about to hear about where we're going to focus some more spending. We're proposing to focus. Next slide. This slide too was from the February 23rd meeting. It's not updated and we actually have new numbers that Juan's going to be talking about shortly. But just wanted to mention again that basically, we took these programs that we mentioned to you in February, the culverts and storm drain inspection and channel maintenance, and we've continued to flush them out and talk about them and prioritize to figure out what is the best way for us to move forward with trying to tackle these continued needs. Next slide. This is another one that you saw in February as well, and it identifies our top priorities for large-scale flood mitigation needs. As you can see here, this is a huge number, around $250 million that we're estimating, and this is just in four parts of town. But again, we feel like that because of the continued flooding and the impact on our community and our residents, not just the people who live in these areas, but the people who commute through these areas, who work in these areas, that we really do need to start tackling these. The longer we put them off, the more expensive they get. We need to start now. Next slide. Basically, what's it going to take to make our community safer from flooding and to effectively maintain our infrastructure? We really think it's a combination of funding sources. One is just continued stormwater utility fee increases. Again, our last increase was approved by council in the fall of 2019, and took effect January 2020. We've got a plan all associated with that, as mentioned earlier, but continuing to increase the fee so we can properly maintain our system. Well, that maintain our system more effectively than we are today, I won't say properly, because I think that that's always going to be a challenge for cities across the country in terms of stormwater. Tax increment finance districts. That is a big discussion that we've been having with our economic development department, and we're looking at those four areas that I just mentioned in terms of needing big scale flood mitigation improvements. Could we form a tip in those areas, or the area that does have a tip? Could we use tip funding to help to put towards those flood mitigation improvements? That's another funding source. Then lastly, as I mentioned earlier, grants is a big one, so grants, federal funding sources. To be able to apply for those, we've got to flesh out and develop our projects enough so we can be competitive and try to bring that money in to leverage our resources. Next slide. What we've been doing since we last met with y'all is we have looked at a variety of potential fee increase options shown in this table here. What we're leaning at right now is we like the 15 percent one-time increase in fiscal year 24, knowing that that does not get us all the way where we think that we need to go, but we feel like it's a good step in the right direction. We're continuing to have those discussions with council, with city management, and with y'all today. Definitely this number is totally subject to change, and that's why we're here because we want your feedback. But we're going to talk about this a little bit more. This just shows what that 15 percent increase would get us in terms of in fiscal year 24. When we pass fee increases at the beginning of fiscal year in October, they don't take effect until January. That first year, you've got less revenue coming in. That would give us about 5.9 in fiscal year 24, and about 7.9 million in fiscal year 25, as additional new revenue that we could put towards both capital projects and towards maintenance projects. Right now, we're looking at splitting that. What we've done right now with our program is we have around a 50-50 split where we put around 50 percent to capital, around 50 percent to maintenance, depending on what our maintenance needs are. If we've got money left over from that 50-50 split, they go to capital. We want to try to put as much into capital as possible while trying to maintain our resources and assets to the best of our ability. As we move forward, just keep this number in mind is that we're looking at splitting right now 50-50 are proposed fee increase revenue between the big-scale capital flood mitigation projects and between maintenance. Next slide. Steven, our stormwater program manager is going to talk a little bit more detail about our capital projects. Starting to look at those capital projects. In August of 2022, we had some enormous flood events. I think there are a couple of five-year storms back-to-back. I want to highlight here on the left on the map that this is the map of all the reported flooding incidents from that storm. We're looking at over 50 flooded homes or structures, 22 high-water rescues, hundreds of flooded vehicles, and 58 overtopped road locations. A few photos here. This is the West 7th or Crockett Street, so the mixed-use entertainment district down there. Here's a photograph from the Linnwood Templeton Drive area. See that's flooding inside their house that had a cut at the drywall. We've got Western Nalinton Heights, Lakes of River Trails, which is a more recently discovered concern, as well as the Lobo area. So Jeff mentioned the upper Lobo of Linnwood projects. She had a first slide showing about $250 million worth of projects there. We've selected these. The need there was highlighted by the August 2022 storm. We also have detailed engineering studies for those areas. So we already have a good idea or an understanding of what it will take to mitigate that flood hazard. So funding for large-scale flood projects. Let me start with a little bit of history though. So this is the map of Lobo on the right, and the stormwater program has been working there for the last 22 years, spending a total of over $24 million on several projects. We had four, I'm sorry, five Hazards Road over Topping mitigation projects as well as other improvements. So this could just come an example of how the business's usual approach where that's taken us in terms of delivering flood mitigation projects. Thinking about those large four projects, Linnwood, Gary McCart, Upper Lobo, and Lakes of River Trails, we asked our consultant to put together a schedule roughly of, if we could deliver this as quickly as practical, how quick could that be done? They sent us a schedule about seven years. The challenge with a very quick delivery is it also produces a very high peak in cost which may not be sustainable. So starting around FY26, a large number of phases would be kicked off all at once, but that's a lot all at once. So we also looked at what happens if we have a less aggressive schedule, and we elongate that out over the course of say 12 or 13 years. Taking a more sustainable approach means we have down here the bottom smaller but periodic debt sales that may be a more sustainable approach. The downside of that is if we allow for some inflation over time or increase in construction costs, we may have a higher cost at the end of that. So still thinking in terms of that $250 million cost in 2023 dollars, we explored several fee increase scenarios such as the 5 percent for 10 years, or year of a year for 10 years, 6.5 year of a year for 10 years, 25 percent one-time increase, and the graph here tells us about the potential for debt sale, those fee increases we deliver. So it's really only 25 percent one time that got us close to that $250 million target. We also looked at 12 percent one-time increase. We looked at 10 percent increase in FY24, 26, and 28, and the 12 percent followed by 20 percent increase in FY25. So these last two get close in terms of debt sale capacity. Where we went though was we can't necessarily take all of our fee increase revenue and put it just to capital just to debt sale. Because maintaining up storm drain systems is a lot like maintaining a car engine. It's a lot cheaper to do an oil change every 5,000 miles than is to rebuild an engine every 25,000 miles. So although the 15 percent increase that we're recommending doesn't get us to the $250 million mark, it does give us funding to kick off design and perhaps initial phases of these large projects. The important part about kicking off design there is getting enough information that we can actually go and apply for grant funding. It also gives us a little bit of time for those tips to build up additional funding. I'm going to hand off to Juan and he's going to cover a little bit about the maintenance focus. All right, good afternoon everyone. So my name is Juan Cadena. I'm the operations officer, senior capital projects officer, whichever title fits better I guess at the time, for street operations and stormwater operations. So I'm going to talk to you a little bit about our maintenance program and how this fee increase would impact our operations. You've seen these slides before. I left them in just to recap our program. Stormwater operations has five core programs, four of which we've had from the very beginning and then we have the one new one. So I want to briefly touch on these for you. The first program, the inlet cleaning program, is managed by Vicente Elias. He has about 30,000 inlets across the city footwork. Our goal is to cycle through them in five years, as well as be able to respond reactively to additional calls. You can see the pick on the on the top right of one of our vectors at work. That's one of our key pieces of equipment in the inlet cleaning program. Within that group is also an inspection team. And it primarily inspects the inlets, but it currently pulls double duty also inspecting our underground drainage system, feeding work over to our closed circuit television program, which I'll talk about more in a bit. Then we have the concrete program that is also managed by Vicente Elias. This section maintains concrete structures, like the one you see right there in that center picture, concrete channels, as well as manholes, inlets, and underground drainage system as well. We have approximately about a thousand miles of underground pipe within our city network. This group also assists with cave-ins across the city. Next is our channel program, which is managed by Tiana Thompson. This channel section, their primary function is general maintenance of a channel. And we do approximately six miles a year, which is, and in maintenance, basically it's removing sediment and blockage from the channels. And they do about one mile of channel restoration, which is rebuilding failed channels. They also do bar ditch maintenance as well, and that's reactive. They do about four and a half miles a year in that area. And Tiana Thompson also has the vegetation program. They're the ones that make our channels look good. They mow approximately 85 miles a year, three times a year, and that pick on the right at the bottom is one of our channels, and our mowers get in that location. Next slide, please. And then we have our CCTV program, which supports the Field Engineering Stormdrain Rehab Program. This has been a key focus for us recently. This program has the potential to identify issues, like what you see on this picture on the left. That was a sinkhole that developed on 7th Street and Carroll. And other cave-ins and underground issues that can come up, really catastrophic type issues. As we mentioned last time, we now have the ability to send cameras, like what you see there in the pictures. We have the ability to send cameras inside our underground pipe system, review and assess any size pipe that we have. Operations does partner with Field Engineering to determine the best way to do this, and we can either systematically go and do condition assessments for areas at a time, or we can go reactive with cave-ins and things like that. This program really does provide a great benefit for operations. Having our own camera gives us the ability to respond quickly to situations. Next slide, please. So now as we look forward to the upcoming years and the potential of that 15% fee increase, we've been evaluating our program and trying to determine the best use of these additional funds. Listed here are the proposed improvement packages that we've been looking at, and we have five programs over the next five years. And I'll talk more about those in the coming slides. But just as we look at these, we have two proposed packages in FY24, the covert inspection team, pipe inspection team, an FY25, a channel maintenance team, CCTV crew, an FY27, and an additional concrete crew in FY28. Something I do want to point out is notice the inspection teams. We learned some time ago that the most efficient and effective way for us to perform work in certain activities is to have an inspection team. They go in front of the construction crews, so we have the big trucks, the multiple equipment. It's just really inefficient for them to go out, but we have inspection teams that go out in front, so we're not having to mobilize and demobilize our heavy construction crews. Next slide, please. So in FY24, we're proposing a covert inspection team and a cleaning team. This is an area that definitely needs help. If you'll notice the pictures here, the Dick Price Road location, it's 95% blocked. You can see that one picture in the center. That covert is, there's really nothing there, very little there for water to flow. And the second example is Harmon Road. That's a five-foot box covert. That's pretty much 80% blocked, nowhere near where it needs to be. Our current problem right now in this area is sediment accumulation across culverts, across the city. Keep in mind, we have about a 90% unknown risk. If you'll notice, we look at about 400 of our 4,000 culverts. There's a lot of unknown. There are gold here. It's to have an inspection team going city-wide and inspecting all our culverts. Right now, we don't allow certain sizes of box culverts. A 4x5 and a 5x5 are a couple of examples because we just can't maintain them. They're too small for our big equipment, and they're too big for our jetters and vectors. So we have a gap there that we really can't reach. This decision package will bring in an inspection team that will evaluate our assets across the city, which will then be followed by a cleaning crew with a new remote control piece of equipment that will give us access to the currently unmaintainable assets, and it allows us to start that systematic review and cleaning of our culverts across the city. The startup cost on this one is 965,000, and annual reoccurring cost is 670,000. I do want to mention that in all the startup costs that I'm going to mention that does include labor equipment and material, and equipment generally being the biggest chunk of that startup, the startup costs. And why is this one important to implement? It benefits the city with drainage issues across many locations, across the city, protecting property from flood and damage, of course. And if you'll recall, I mentioned our unmaintainable covert boxes. This also allows developers to go back and start using that as an option going forward. Next slide, please. So also in FY24, we're proposing a dedicated pipe inspection and cleaning team. Our problem here is we have, our goal is to CC about 40 miles of pipe per year, but we only have the resources to inspect about 25 miles a year. If we put cameras into these two pictures that you see on the right, it just doesn't work. You can see that top picture. There's chunks of concrete in there, our cameras can't get through that. The bottom picture, there's just, it's a half full of mud, our cameras can't get through that either, either. And that's where the inefficiencies come in. This decision package will provide a dedicated inspection team for that pipe system and additional pipeline and team that would follow behind. So the startup on this decision package, again, labor equipment and materials is $2 million. And the annual reoccurring cost would be 740, 41,000. From the bullet point, you can see the impacts of no inspection and cleaning that this causes us. So you'll notice we have an 83,000 cost per mile of cleaning a section of pipe without, I'm sorry, of CCTV without cleaning. And then below that, the same section of pipe would be about 46,000. So there's an 80% cost benefit in this CCTV inspection and cleaning program. And the benefit isn't just cost efficiency, inspection, mobilization, demobilization, timing cost, but there's also a public safety aspect here. We're minimizing potential catastrophes across the city, reducing flood risk. This allows us to prioritize these types of issues that we can find and minimize those ticking time bombs that we potentially have under our roads that we don't know about right now. And next slide, please. So in FY25, we're proposing another channel maintenance crew. Good maintenance practices is to keep good condition assets in good condition and not let them go to a fair or poor condition. And that's the idea here. We maintain the channels and operations. And the goal is to keep them from going to a capital program under a restoration program. Our problem in channels is that we have 66 miles assessed and it's created about an 11-year backlog for us. And we have channels currently in the maintenance condition that if we don't get to them soon enough, they're going to go to restoration mode, a considerably higher cost. So the proposal here is adding an additional maintenance crew. This one is more expensive mainly because of the equipment that we need to, the heavy equipment to do this work. So we have four and a half million dollar startup cost with an annual $940,000 reoccurring cost. Proper channel maintenance. Why do this? Proper channel maintenance minimizes risk life and property in so many ways. Plus, if you'll notice the difference, we maintain one mile of channel maintenance, sediment removal. We can maintain one mile of channel to 106,000. If we do 5.8 miles a year, that's roughly 600,000 a year and 5.8 miles in maintenance. But if we don't get to it in time, it will roll over to a capital program and that could potentially cost us up to 14.5 million on the capital program. Huge difference there. Next slide please. So in FY 27, we're proposing another CCTV crew or camera crew. This one is dependent on the FY 24 package, the pipe inspection and cleaning team. That inspection and cleaning team is going to feed work to this CCTV package crew because we know that backlog is going to increase and we're not going to be able to keep up with that, the growth in the backlog. Currently 75% of our work, 75% of our work is performed by a contractor at a higher price. So the proposal here is to add another CCTV camera crew, 889,000 startup and about a 439,000 annual reoccurring cost. So when we look at the bullet points, our current cost is about 998,000 for both in-house and contract and this package will reduce that cost by about 29%. Another really good benefit to this package is really does allow us to be more fluid, turn and pivot on the dime as needed based on the situations that we have. Next slide please. This is the last decision package that we have in our program for FY 28. We're proposing another concrete crew that's focused on the pipe rehab. We anticipate our improved CCTV program teamed up with the pipe cleaning program was going to identify a lot more unknown issues and we currently have, we need the ability to respond to those in appropriate manner and timeframe. This package provides that for us. So the proposal is another concrete crew at a $2 million startup cost, 931,000 reoccurring cost. When looking at this benefit with our limited resources in-house crews won't be able to keep up with the need which would require us to fall back on contractors to help us with those repairs of course at a higher cost. And that's all I have. I guess next in line. Any questions? No one said anything so I'm guessing we're good. So that's a good pause. So before Stephen kind of talks some more about, you know, in terms of our current fee and fee increase in a little more detail, are there any questions so far on what one presented and what Stephen presented? I know Stephen's presentation since in February, we went into detail on those four locations. We didn't recycle those slides again. I figure y'all didn't want us to sit through that again. But just in case there's any questions, I definitely want to pause right now. Okay, let's keep going and then I'm sure there'll be questions and we definitely want your feedback near the end of this. All right. So looking at the fee increase history, you know, the utility kicked off I think in 2004-2006. We had an initial fee of or an EAU, an equivalent residential unit, about 2600 square feet of impervious cover. And over a series of years, the fee ramped up to help deliver the infrastructure and maintenance that we needed. Of course, our needs are still obviously in excess of what we're able to do. Our last fee increase was January 2020 at 6.5%. And you can sort of see here on the right is our residential tiers. So a very small home, for example, might be a tier one. You're the median tier. So most people are a tier two at one EAU, which is sort of how the equivalent residential unit was set up, being the median house size or residential square footage. And one of the reasons I want to mention this is we have seen sort of 10 and 17, 26% fee increases in the past. We evaluated at least seven different scenarios in terms of potential fee increases prior to developing recommendation. We looked at both what could be delivered in terms of capital and maintenance, but also considered what it might mean for the median household, but also the commercial ratepayers. Each of these scenarios that we considered, we placed in a table here of highlighted in the red rectangle, our recommendation. So the 15% ends up being an EIU of 661, which is compared to today less than a dollar a month increase for the median homeowner. Of course, for businesses who are paying for thousands or tens of thousands of EIUs, the 15% increase does that up. The city of Fort Worth actually being the highest ratepayer within the city. We also looked at how these fee increases would compare to other cities within Texas. Today, we're roughly around the average at 575, and we started evaluating each of the different fee increases. So for example, the 5% per year, year over year for 10 years, that adds up to quite a bit over that 10-year course, but it also doesn't deliver the top of debt service we need to deliver large-scale flood projects. So the proposed 15% fee increase in FY24 puts us here a bit over the average, and it does deliver on the maintenance needs, and it helps to deliver or gets kicked off in large-scale flood mitigation projects. Are there any questions about that so far? Do I need to jump back to maybe the previous slide to look at a particular business like an ISD or American Airlines? Nope, okay. So our sort of draft or initial recommendation is that 15% increase. Again, the median homeowner would see a less than $1 per month increase on their swimming utility fee. Our plan is to split the revenue 50-50 between capital and flood mitigation projects and operation maintenance. So the new revenue would help to fund the design construction initially, as well as provide for more efficient and productive maintenance, as you heard from one. Over the long term, the four projects we've listed out, Linwood, Barry McCart, Apollo Bow and Lakeview Retrails, it mitigates flood risk for hundreds of homes and residents, as well as the traveling public in general, reduces the roadway flooding, improves public safety, economic fatality, reduces the cost to residents and the cost to city to respond to those flooding events. It also on the maintenance side, it provides for improved asset management and extends the life cycle of assets. So with that, Jeremy, did you want to talk on next steps or I'll help that? Yeah, so basically, we want to hear from y'all today. And then we want to take y'all's feedback and then take it and share it with our city manager's office. With council members, we really want to hear what y'all have to say and to communicate that to share that with our leadership to help us as we continue to move forward with our decision making. So then next steps after that is in August, the city manager will present his recommended budget to council. And we are also planning to present our recommendations regarding stormwater fee increases to council as well in August. And then all of that goes to council to vote on budget adoption in September and then our new fiscal year would begin in October. And as I said earlier, if we move forward with a fee increase that council does pass, that would actually start in January. So we do that to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to find out, to let us communicate to everyone about the upcoming fee increase. And so really, kind of we want to hear your feedback today. And as we move forward with continued discussions, then we'll be circling back with y'all. We might run more scenarios depending on what we hear today and what we hear from council and city management as we do that. And so as we continue to work on different scenarios and so forth, we want to continue to circle back with y'all. So we will probably have some additional meetings. I feel like after we met with y'all in February in person, it seemed like the virtual meeting worked pretty well versus the in-person meeting. And so if that still seems like it works well, we'll probably do that just because I know it's a lot easier and quicker versus people having to drive downtown. So with that, please chime in and let us know thoughts and questions. Gay Reed here. You mentioned at one point that you met with some council members. Was that the similar presentation to what we saw today or was that similar to the February meeting? Right. So the presentation in, yes, to our mobility and infrastructure transportation committee. So that was more focused on the big scale flood mitigation project. So it gave them an update on where we were at with our capital program and then really focused on that $250 million need. So we did not go into all of the maintenance citywide needs, but we focused kind of on that big one because that's really the big source of how do we tackle these big scale projects? How do we leverage our resources? So that was the focus. Any general comments from them? So it was really good discussion. I feel like that they were very supportive in understanding the need and that we had to figure out how to tackle it and they wanted us to come back and to talk to the full council group. And so that's what we've been kind of based off of that interest in, yes, we need to do something. Basically, they agreed that even though these big scale flood mitigation projects that we've identified are kind of for these, you know, for certain parts of town that it had a big impact on Fort Worth livability. And that's not the city that we want to be or the vision of our community. And so they felt like that we should continue having that discussion with the whole larger council so they could consider it as a part of the overall citywide budget for fiscal year 24. Thanks. And Gay, what we can do is when we send out the link for this stakeholder meeting afterwards, we can also include a link to that discussion. So if you want to go back and you want to hear exactly what was presented to them and to hear that discussion or just jump to the end is always the interesting part to hear the discussion. We'll send that link out as well. Thank you. Questions, comments, concerns. I mean, y'all represent our right payers. And that's why y'all are here today. It looks like unfortunately several of our stakeholders who thought they were going to be able to participate weren't able to at the last minute. And so one of the things we will be doing is following up with them to get their feedback and see if they've got any questions or concerns to answer. But for y'all on the call, we really appreciate y'all joining us today. And we want to make sure that we hear what y'all have to say. Well, Jennifer Rick cubes had a last minute conflict. He was planning to attend. He did send an email to wanted to express this. He says, I have a last minute conflict, but I am in favor of these necessary increases. And fortunately, it looks like we will be getting some property tax relief. Please let me know if I can help further. So sort of being in the meeting that was his feedback. Okay. Thank you, Linda for sharing that. I drove by their store yesterday. And you didn't stop and spend money? No. Well, my money right now is going to TCU because my daughter's in the TCU soccer camp. So yeah, spending money in the area. So this is not specific to what we've discussed today, but you know, there was the area in Arlington Heights that the proposal was to take down those houses. I believe they've been purchased all and it was either take down the houses, create a green space. At one point there was thought that they would be possibly could be sold to somebody who was willing to mitigate the, you know, bring it up to a level. I've heard recently that that's off the table. Is that what's going on there? Right, right. So we actually had a public meeting with the Arlington Heights community a couple of weeks ago. I think it was May 25th. So what we're doing is we have purchased 11 properties. So two of them we purchased with FEMA grant funding. We got some good funding for that. And so those have to remain green space in perpetuity based off of the grant requirements. And we can't sell them. They've got to be city-owned. So but the other nine, based off of the continued coordination with the community, we are going to issue a notice of sale to sell those properties for redevelopment with very clear guidelines that the future homes have to be elevated at least two feet above the base flood elevation, which is our requirement city-wide in flood prone areas. So we want to make sure that they're elevated as well as that when they're developed that developer is considering the impact on the adjacent properties and doesn't aggravate that existing flooding condition. Okay, thank you. And so Gay, you also mentioned Arlington Heights. So as y'all saw, Arlington Heights isn't on the list of these big four projects. And that is a known big city-wide flooding problem in Arlington Heights. And the reason it's not on that list is because we felt like that we have already invested a lot of funding in the Arlington Heights area. We put in a stormwater detention basin at Hulind Bryce, as well as under street detention. Of course, all of that is just like one little piece of the puzzle, but it has had significant benefits on those residents out there. They will say that they do flood less frequently in that area. They see the basin fill up quite frequently, as well as we bought out those 11 properties that were the most frequently flooded, reported flooding. And so that's why we really want to take the next round of funding and try to target other areas of the community that haven't had those flood mitigation projects. And Upper LaBeau, we've done a lot of projects on Lower LaBeau, but that Upper LaBeau community continues to flood. And it's a socially vulnerable community. And we really want to get out there and help them because they have continued flooding. I agree. Thank you. Any other questions or feedback? And if you don't want to talk today in front of everybody, that's totally okay. Please feel free to reach out to me or Stephen or Linda or Juan after the meeting. So if you want to go and talk to your friends and neighbors and get them excited, we definitely want your feedback. That's why we're meeting with y'all today. So I don't want to spend a whole bunch of time. I know y'all are all busy people and I really appreciate your hour. So any other questions, feedback? Can we go back to the slide that Stephen had with the stakeholders and increases? Yes. There we go. Okay. So this is this is what y'all are targeting the 15% fiscal year for 24, correct? That's what we're looking at right now. That's the ultimate goal. Okay. Definitely. So I'll say, you know, the period is subject to change, but that's kind of what we're recommending right now in our discussions. So we were trying to look at something that could take a good, very measurable, beneficial step forward. Again, it doesn't solve all of the problems, but trying to balance taking a good step forward as well as the impact on our ratepayers who are having to fund this. Of course. And of course, we want to save money with our company. So I understand y'all's need, but we don't want any increases at all. But I just want to look ahead just in case that does get approved. So definitely, I can understand that. And we'll send out the the PDF of this presentation as well, Carrie. So you could pull the numbers off this easier. Thank you. Any other questions or discussion right now? I would like to say as a resident, though, I am all for it. On behalf of American Airlines, no, but resident for it. Now, thank you, Carrie. And I understand, you know, this is going to have a big impact on our top ratepayers that have all of that impervious surface out there. I will say, though, you know, the city of Fort Worth is the number one right payer. I know Fort Worth ISD and American Airlines are just a little bit behind, but I want to be clear, you know, that we're not asking other big right payers to pay something that we're not paying into ourselves. So understandable. Thank you. Yeah, our last meeting, Carrie was telling me she went through a pretty harrowing experience, I believe, with some flood issues in her area. So that's why she's personally all for it. Do you live in Fort Worth, too? Bonds Ranch and Wagley Roberts. So you'll know that area very well. Yes, yes. So in terms of that location, just so you know, is that we, there's a Wagley Robertson and Bonds Ranch bond project, that there's 2022 bond funding, but the stormwater program is actually putting $5 million towards some improvements on Wagley Robertson at there's a creek just a little bit south of Bonds Ranch that over tops pretty frequently. And so we're using part of that past fee increase and bond funding to combine that with the 2022 general funded bond program to start to work on mitigating the flooding out there. And Bonds Ranch will have, those improvements will have significant road flooding improvements as well. So that's what we're really trying to do is where we can partner with other other city departments, other partners getting that grant funding to try to leverage our resources as much as possible. Nice. Yeah, that whole area is growing. We're going to get the bridge over the train tracks by 2026 and the Kroger. So it'll be nice. Yeah. Yeah, it will be just you gotta hang in a few more years. Okay. Any other discussions, questions, comments? All right. No, it's four o'clock. So I want to thank you all again for joining us today. And we'll be following up probably within the next couple of days with the recording. I'm not sure how long it'll take to get it. So it's in a format that I would assume by maybe Monday at least that we can get a link that we can send out with a PDF as well. So then again, if you have any questions, please go free to reach out. Thank you all. We really appreciate it. Bye, everyone. Thank you. Bye. Bye.