 All the work's being in order, it's 5.30. I'll do a quick roll call. So, I'll put the deckers here, I'll put the item in here. All the person's raining. Here. All the person's roughed. Here. All the person's cells are. Here. Okay, we'll start out with 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. All right, yeah. We got quite a full house here. Got some other people here, so I guess we'll do a quick introduction. Made of hours of staff. I'm the Deckard Chair of the Indian Public Works Committee. I'm all the person from District 6. Joe Heidemann, District 10, Alderman. Amanda Selser, District 3. Zach Russ, District 8, Alderman, and Vice-Chair. And I'm Angela Ramey, District 5. Britton, PPW and motor vehicle. Brian Seismund, Department of Public Works. Mike Holmes, Department of Public Works. Jordan Stiff, Wastewater, Superintendent. Joe Rowland, Department of Public Works, PPW. DPW Street, Department of Public Works. Great, Erin, Management, and Honours. Keaton Kreeter, Finance Director. Jessica Haas, Deputy Finance Director. Heather Burke, DPW Administration. Rachel Messier, DPW Administration. David Peeble, Director of Public Works. We have guests here. We have guests here. Do you want to introduce yourselves? Since you're doing well. My name is Tom Van Heveren. I'm a wife of John Adburn. Okay, great. Alrighty, we'll go to start out with number five, approval of minutes from September 13th and September 27th. I move. Second. Motion's made in second. Any discussion on those minutes? All in favour? Aye. Any opposed? Chair will decide to be approved. Number six, Report of Officer by City Attorney's Office Requesting Committee, approved transfer of Wellwood Cemetery Burial Plot located at section 16A, grade 341 from Lowers Van Heveren. Cook and I, to Deborah B. Faber. Yes, Mr. Chairman. Okay. Van Heveren's are here. Okay. For this request. And as the Report of Officer from the City Attorney's Office indicates, there's quite a process to go through the chain of ownership and through the Attorney's Office, they were able to find the next in line and that person has no objections to the family taking ownership of this Burial Plot and it's the recommendation to allow this to occur. It has to come through this committee. It's by ordinance. That's why with the cemetery normally, sometimes, most of the cemetery operations are handled internally but because of this change in the ordinance, we need to bring it to this committee. We don't have any objections. We think this is a great thing. So we're just looking for the committee's approval. Okay. You want to committee, have any questions? Approval, aye. Aye, moved to approve. Second. Seconded. Any other discussion? All in favor? Aye. We opposed. Chair will try. That is approved then. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman. Yes. I have a different email, I'm going to give it to this one. We are DEV, but her name should be DEV-event-e-ver-favor. So that may be. Very good. I know. We'll make sure it gets, we will. And we'll make sure it gets recorded properly. Okay. Okay, thank you. Thank you, sir. Thank you so much. Thank you. You're welcome. All right. All right, we'll move on to number seven then. Resolution number 67-2223, September 19th, 2022. Resolution authorizing the appropriate city officials to accept the temporary easement for the city to conduct maintenance activities by the drainage soil adjacent to 4812 Ferngale Cork. Brian? Yes, I got it. We're the red dot here is on the map. That's 4812 Ferngale Cork. Okay, that's the residents that we're looking for an access easement floor. Back in this area here, it's not nearly as green as time of the year. There's a drainage soil. Drain, just water goes underneath South Business Drive and it goes through here and it goes through a retention pond down in the corner down here. And there's a lot of overgrowth in here and it really doesn't flow that well through there. So we need to go in there and clean some of it out. We'll get a landscaping company in there or a contractor. But in order to get back there, the only way to do it is to go to someone's yard. And the best access point is through this Ferngale Cork right here. So that's why that's where we're getting an easement. Just gives the city permission to hire a contractor to go in there. And they're like to get the easement now because the time to do this work is like in January or February when the ground is nice and froze, oh, you're not gonna get a big mess. So that's this easement is all about. Once work is done, the easement goes away. Okay, there's nothing permanent. Has discussion been or any, you know, busy people that got that? Oh yeah, these are the ones that we're requesting it. That's why I'm talking to them. We're gonna use it or hold it for our accesses. So, is that questions? So most of them? I move. Most of them made in second, then. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. I'm opposed. Chair will decide that it's approved. Okay, number eight. Location number one dash 2223, October 3rd, 2022. Location from James Slickman, Senior Vice President, Associate General Counsel for Advocate Aurora Health, regarding Aurora Cheboyga Medical Center, a lot line adjustment for the property, commonly known as 2507 North 7th Street, Cheboyga, Wisconsin. All right, Mr. Chairman, this request that basically the reason it's coming before you this evening is, city currently has an agreement with Aurora for this eventual demolition and redevelopment of this parcel of the old hospital. As part of that, what has happened is, this neighbor has been talking with Aurora and is looking, as you can see, the parking is real close to this property and their garage is in this area. So they're looking to get an additional 10 feet. And Aurora has no problem with that. We don't have any problem with that, but we'd have to amend basically our agreement to allow it. And that's why we have this communication in front of you this evening and wanting committee's permission to go forward with that change. So that's the recommendation. It's good for the neighbor and it just helps the overall development of this once this becomes, I'm going the wrong direction, redeveloped into residential at some point in the future. Makes sense. That was the time to do it. Right. That was the time to do it. Yeah. Any discussion? Okay, motion. I move. Next slide. I'll second. Okay. Motion made and seconded. Any other discussion? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Here votes aye. That is approved. All right. Number nine. 2023 budget presentation discussion on it. In your budget or in your agenda packet, there's several documents regarding the public works, 2023 annual operation operating budget. In overall, again, pretty consistent from the last, I would say three to four years here, we've been remaining fairly flat within the budget, especially for public works operations. So we're right around a little over 12 and a half million dollars operations. And all of that, 6.8 is roughly personnel. And that includes salaries, overtime, benefits, health and medical, for instance, and so forth. So in the non-personnel services budget, roughly almost, you know, 5.7 or 5.8, roughly almost 6 million you could say. So between the two, again, 12 and a half, 12.7 million dollars total. Personnel services is slightly up, about 3.87% increase for overall, all of our personnel. We are adding a halftime equivalent position to already a halftime that would be now making it full-time. It's a halftime janitorial position. And now with the oncoming uptown social at the senior center, the idea is that this halftime person that was primarily helping at city hall, we've had trouble filling a halftime janitorial position. So it was really just vacant for this whole past year. By having this person alternate between city hall and the uptown social with that requirement, now we make it full-time, there's full-time work between the two. So they're gonna alternate between the two facilities. That's the plan at this point so that that's reflected in with the budget. You know, overall, there is a decrease from 2022 to the 2023 proposed budget, just a very, very slight decrease. And if you see that, that's we're looking at roughly from, you know, 5.8 million back in 2022 to about 5.7. So a little, almost about a percent and a half. The decrease, these decreases, but they also, we're also absorbing some increases. Natural gas, for instance, utilities and inflation, some of those factors that are also included, they're built into the budget. So overall, we're very proud of the fact that there's some automatic increases that we had to build in given the utilities, as well as there's, we have several contracts that have automatic escalators for consumer price enders. One large one would be our garbage and sanitation. So with that, every year it's a five-year contract that we enter into for handling and disposing of our waste at the landfill that automatically has whatever the consumer price index, but it's capped. So it's maxed at 5%. So one thing is, you know, looking at some of the consumer price indexes I've seen anywhere from 7% to 8%, we're not going to realize that in these contracts. They're going to be held at a max of 5%. So what's included in just the public works? Well, yeah, that would include the administration. The engineering division, streets and sanitation, parks are also included. The buildings and facilities and traffic are all within this combined first memo page here budget. So there's a lot of new, once they knew activities, but consolidation with the accounts that we've worked on and through finance department and Caitlyn's effort, we've reduced, we've gone from my career, I think we had 45 different cost centers for the department that we had to manage. And I think we're getting down to less, I think we're down less than a dozen now. So we're making great progress. We're finally using the technology at our disposal to manage properly, which is a good thing. So the only thing is from an old guy like me that had all that past history and all these, the nine, I kind of got to figure it all out again. So that's all right. You're a quick learner. I try, I try. But as I said, overall, we're in a good position. We're holding the line. We know as we've had the presentations from the city administrator and Caitlyn, as well as our consultant, Ehlers about the strategic fiscal plan that, the city's going to have challenges moving forward. And we recognize that as an apartment. And so part of our jobs are to see how we can continue to operate and keeping things moving forward, but keeping them at flat level is a challenge. So just being honest, so although the budget remains flat and we're holding the line, it may mean a little less opportunity to do work because of our purchasing power. We're not maybe going to be able to buy as much concrete. If the concrete budget stays the same from year to year and prices are increases, it basically means we have less to purchase. So then that's less opportunity to do repairs and work. Overall, we've been able to do some things through efficiencies and gain some more flows. So we're still doing making progress on those improvements and we're confident that we're going to continue making those improvements in terms of our overall quality of life in our infrastructure. So we're confident in that respect. It's a balancing act. General, if we don't invest in the operations and we keep it flat, well then maybe then we need to look at our capital improvements and maybe use some debt financing for larger improvements that make a larger difference. So we'll work with finance. We talk about this. This is not uncommon. Any questions about the operations of the main, what I would say the main public works? Yes. Kind of quick. Like things like all the things that go from year to year like last year, you didn't have quite as bad a year for self to be able to carry some of that over or how is that, are we able to carry some of that money's over? Because this next year we have this bad year or something? We didn't carry over the money. The money goes back to the general fund and fund balance. But because about 10 years ago we invested in a larger salt storage, we're able, we're full. So we used, the difficult thing with salt is is the winter season, it spans two fiscal years. Winter starts now in 2022. So we still have 2022's budget for salt, but then it goes into 2023 after January. So it's a little goofy, but we're able to, like last winter, it wasn't too bad. We're able to take our full, we're approximately, I'd say about 2,200 tons that we have in our salt storage and it's pretty maxed out. So that helps us that maybe in 2023 we won't have to purchase all of, we have the difficulty with the salt is because we buy it through the state contract, we have to guarantee the state a minimum amount that we borrow, that we purchase, excuse me, from the state. Then what happens is, if you have, let's say a late year, you're still obligated to buy the minimum amount. So it's a real fine line because if you do have a bad winter and you don't order enough, then you pay a premium if you try to buy more after your basic minimal allotment, then the price goes up because they try to purchase bulk for the entire year. So it's, we try to keep it as flat as possible. The best thing is with the salt storage facility, now we have a capacity to buffer those swings. Long answer for, but it's a little, it's complicated in terms of the contract itself. Okay, same thing with fuels, the different things we don't have fuel, but fuels are the big thing that I think we just talked about in the, again, we're licensed to the hearing, but the police fire department itself. Yeah, and we purchase fuel on a monthly basis. We looked at, do we lock it in for a full year? But we, since we have a, the distribution in the fuel doc is fairly close in Milwaukee, we get pretty good competitive purchasing on a monthly basis versus bulk purchase for the entire year, for diesel and gasoline. Thank you, thank you, Chair. I also had a mark by sand and salt. I remember previous years, one we used to buy it and then we either used it or we didn't have. Is there another alternative method that you're using besides this, that's not in here? Well, it's included in there in the fact that we're going to more liquid. So it's part of that budget and what we've been doing is trying to reduce the amount of tonnage year by year by year and use less salt and more of a liquid application. And the liquid application is far superior to the salt. Let's put it this way, it's more effective in terms of preventing the bonding early on. Now during an operation, it starts to get heavier. You're always going to have to use some rock salt. But the liquid is much more effective in earlier prevention as well as it buys us time. If we pre-wet and pre-apply the liquid, that gives us time to respond. It doesn't get a slippery right away. And it also saves on the amount that we have to treat after the event starts as well. And it's also better for our streets. It's better for streets and the environment. I mean, the DNR is also, because all of this ends up in our waterways somewhere. Right, so again, just because I had been around so long, I remember when we first started using that and there was a big question on whether it worked, it didn't work, all those assets, I'm glad to see you. But your, your, the amount of gasoline or the cost of gasoline is not in your estimate. Where is that? It's in our motor vehicle budget. That's coming up. Gotcha. Yeah, that's another, that's it. That's the internal service fund that we have. That's not, this, the general fund budget is mainly financed through the general fund and our tax let. We do get transportation aids. There's other revenue sources that come into this at all. But this, this is the main general fund budget. Any other questions about moving on? Let's go to the next one. Our percent of marina, again, it's a separate portion of our budget. It's what we call as a special revenue fund that in and of itself, it should be self-sufficient. Basically, in other words, the revenues earned at the marina should pay for the marina. For the most part, for operations, that's true. But if you go down to the bottom of the page, we still have debt. And that's the big, the big concern with the marina long-term. And marina is now 25 years old and we're still paying off debt from the original construction. It never really was built to the very beginning model that said, you know, if we build all these slips and we fill all these slips, we're gonna have all this revenue and we'll be able to pay off the debt in addition to the operations. It wasn't built, that way is what you're saying. Correct, okay. Because the challenge was it was even difficult to fill, even at the capacity that it was built. So there was really never a demand to justify adding more capital costs to expand the marina because you can't even pay off the existing debt. But aren't we putting like a bunch of energy and money to exist in the next few years? We are studying that and that's gonna be looked at. And I would say that's gonna be a subject of debate and discussion that will be brought before you. I think there's some opportunities to, with the study that we're looking at is reconfiguring things, making it more robust but also potentially smaller and less costly. So I think there's gonna be some scenarios for leadership in the comma council to make a decision long term. What is that future look like? It's not just, what we have today is gonna be fixed and we're just gonna continue along the same path. It's gotta be a different path because we know the last 25 years on this current path, it's not sustainable. So you ever seen the budget as F2, what do you think F2, F3, there we go. Did they report to you? Yes, they're a contractor. What we call they're kind of like a fee-based operator. So they're hired to manage the marina on behalf of the city. Right. So they're under contract. Next year's the last year of their five-year contract and it's up for renewal at the end of next year. And that goes through public works. You sign that, you oversee it. Yes. Okay, it's interesting. So then that will be something that will also be discussed next year. Not only the capital improvements that are needed at the marina, but also what are we gonna do about the future management? And there's some options there as well. What is the current debt left on you? What's that current debt on you? I don't know if I can read this. It looks like it says... Oh, you know what? All right, I haven't done that other document. Okay. Caitlin, do you want me to grab it or can you just pull it up real quick? Just a quick curiosity offset. I wanted to say it was like two million. Two million still after 25 years. Yeah, there's an interesting... How much did we pay? Well, and there's interesting agreements that were out there. We owe the county, I think a million dollars, but it was contingent on the marina making money. So it's kind of just hanging out there because it never really has. I'm getting into it. But then we also owe the SEEDC. And that's $250, is that right? Yeah, I want to see $250 or $300. So does everybody want in to help with the beginning development of it? Correct. Is the same organization that runs Canoesian, the other marina, is that the same group that we have? F3, I believe, runs SEEDC. SEEDC, okay. Not Canoesian. Okay, I just, pretty close. They are, yeah. So F3 does run several along, I think short, Skipper Buds is in the area. They used to run a marina prior to this. And there's others. Some, you know, in like Fort Washington and others run a minutes with their municipal staff. So I think there's opportunities to be explored next year when all that information comes up. Yeah, the marina is currently at a $2.02 million deficit. That's pretty close. I forgot the O2. Can I ask a question? Plus the possible extra million. That would be included. Well, that's included. Yes, because we have to report that that debt is outstanding. Maybe we could, as part of this new, reconfiguration of, give it a deal with the county that they need. Maybe just write that off there. Yeah, so that's it. Well, after 25 years, they got it. That's what I was thinking. Let's just figure it out. And how much was it to start with? Oh, that I don't know. That would be a little. Yeah, I want to say. I don't need that right now, but I will eventually. I'm putting that together. We're going to be doing a presentation of kind of the history of how it was built over the costs, how it was structured, where we've been, all of the improvement, all of the costs that we've had over the years to where we are today, and then now with the new study where we're going. So kind of the past, present, future. That's my question about this, because my takeaway from the study conversation that we had, however, long ago, was that the reason why we lost money on the marina was because we lost those large slips. And so we're doing this study to how to maybe replace those in order to get more revenue on that. But now I just hear, I heard you say that maybe it's potential of making the marina smaller because, so I'm just gonna use that. Smaller in terms of overall number of slips, but maybe larger slips that generate more revenue. So they have different size slips. The larger the boats, the larger the slips, the more money that's brought in. You're right, that's what we're lost this past season with the damage to them, they won't be able to replace. So we've lost some of the larger vessels. So with that lost, the larger revenue went away as well. So that's some of the stuff in terms of the model and how it could be structured is that instead of having, let's say, 200 slips that we currently have, maybe it's 150, but there are much larger slips and that 150 now generates even more revenue than the 200. But it takes less staffing, less maintenance, less infrastructure because it's smaller. And that should be the result of this. Well, that's what we're studying. That's what we're looking. Okay, so we can stop bleeding that. That's gonna be the decision. Outside of the slips itself, what they do reviewing the amenities that are like the building itself, the way it's placed down, how it's being rented, the operations of that will come through that study as well. There's, you know, part of the whole model and the infrastructure is not just slips, it's the amenities. I mean, there's a whole pool. There's bathrooms or showers. They just remodeled. Like there's a lot of money that's gonna put into that. There has to be. For 150 people to use. Just wanna say that out loud. Noted. All right. Can we move on? I think we're going to have questions or not. Okay. For now. For now. Yes. That'll be a whole, that'll probably be coming back, like I said, as a whole. I'll be, probably just the agenda item one evening. We'll have more data to present. Okay. Next would be the motor vehicle fund. And I kind of mentioned this earlier. That it's an enterprise fund. Internal service fund. So what does that mean? What it means is in our operations budget that we discussed earlier, there's a line item for different activities in different areas. I call them cost centers, but again, called consolidating, such as the parks, streets, departments, no plowing, those activities. There's actually a line item called motor vehicles and equipment. And it's an internal charge that we charge our departments. That money then goes to the motor vehicle fund where Rick is in charge of. And his operation is to acquire equipment, make sure the equipment is operating, it's fueled and ready to go. So the money that we charge to those departments comes to the motor vehicle fund, uses it to fix, maintain, and so forth, as well as acquire new equipment. All with the ideas that we don't compete with the capital improvements fund. So we wanna have this as a self-sustaining fund where we're earning revenues and enough cash coming in from those other operations that comes to this department. We can cover our operations internally with our mechanics and our fuel and our maintenance and equipment. And then as well as have enough cash to over the years systematically replace capital equipment. So if you recall, some of you that have been on the council for a long time, this fund was really flush. You got it. And we were able to do it with no problems whatsoever. Well, there was some decisions much in between that weren't part of this leadership at all that decided to use that money for other purposes. Since then, sometimes we've been competing with capital improvements over the years to acquire. Lately, we've been pulling that out of capital improvements and trying to keep our capital purchases for equipment at a lower level. One thing has helped, if you recall, we just leased a large portion of our fleet are basically our pickup trucks and light duty pieces of equipment. So that is now being leased. So that is actually a charge in this budget where in fact, in the past, that would have been again, a capital acquisition. So real quickly, if you go under gasoline, you know, we're up probably about $55,000. We're looking at next year. It's not too bad again, because we're able to get, you know, we don't pay at the pump, you pay at the pump. So we're able to buy at competitive rates, wholesale, and then we charge wholesale. We also, some of our equipment doesn't pay the motor vehicle fuel tax because it's off-road. So like our mowers and some of our heavier equipment, that doesn't necessarily drive over the road. So we don't pay the fuel tax that goes to fund the road system and other parts of the equipment. And again, my question to be there, there's not going to be any type of a reduce in services, lease pickup, all these other things that we do that consume the fuel that we might not go out that one day because we're... I'm hoping we have a mild wind, because then we don't, exactly, that will burn fuel. A problem in operation, did you see, just watch, watch. My other question is being back when that fund was had a lot of money and people were asking how did that fund get all that money? And because we never spent it. That's true. And everybody said, yeah, when we're using that, we're doing it. But is this model the same model that we had before and it's used by other communities to be green and diverse themselves? Because I think we were, the last time we talked about, again, years ago, Green Bay had this. Yes. Okay, so... Man, this is a pretty good standard model. The one thing that I would say would be slightly changed is instead of going to hourly charges and tracking it for every piece of equipment, we went to a monthly charge, here we are. And because, quite frankly, we had someone just entering and checking the time vehicle and entry. That's all they were doing is reconciling all these cards to make sure that our vehicle times were matching up with the employee times. Now it's just a flat rate. But it is, it's still the same model. And? I think, correct me if I'm wrong, Caitlin, we've, the last couple of years, we've actually added to the net fund balance. So it's going in the right direction, even with cap. So we're not taking out more money from the fund than we're replacing. It's actually starting to grow again. Yeah. Thank you. I think that's what I saw. I thought I read the line. That's why I asked. I think you read it already. Bye. Bye. All right. Let's go with recycling fund. Again, this is a newer fund. And again, it's kind of like an internal service finder, special revenue fund. So this is now when we went to the automated garbage and recycling car system to help pay for it and get it. We decided that we're going to impose a recycling fee on top of the garbage fee. It was one of the few fees that was left that the city could implement without negative effecting than the general fund by having to take that out of the general fund. So we purchased two trucks, specifically before recycling out of this fund. And we have about two and a half, roughly three full-time equivalents that are charged out of this. Cool. Cool. So is that a use full-time equivalent if you prefer? For just the recycling. So staff, yep. So we have, every day we'll have four garbage and then we'll have two recycling. And again, when we started this fund, it had, we had a grant of around over 200, some thousand dollars, $260,000 to help pay for the carts initially. There's some lease payments because when we acquire the carts, very expensive. I think the overall, both the garbage and recycling carts totally was around $2 million just to buy carts. And again, it's 36,000 carts we had to distribute throughout the community. There's a lease on that. Is that a 10-year lease? I believe so. That's what I thought. So that's reflected in here. The recycling's portion of that. Garbage's, operations. Again, you'll see a light on them in here. Motor vehicle charges. We charge this account for the motor vehicle that goes back then directs account and so forth as part of that internal service. Again, overall, it's remaining flat. Little increase in the cost but the revenues, we didn't adjust the recycling fee. It's still at $4. And I think we'll be able to go stay at $4. I think the projection is maybe for another two years. And then in two years, when that's up, I think in 2025, I wanna say we may have to take a consideration to see if it needs to be adjusted at that point. Just because of cost escalating and so forth. Good question. The carts now, are those the least old? So are those gonna be ours then after 10 years? After 10 years, yes. Yes, that's what I thought. Yep. And you know, surprisingly, and that's partly why when we went with this vendor, they have a very good track record and there's communities in some cases, they've gotten 15, even 20 years. Yeah, you get some of their cracked or broke here and there and you have to replace periodic here and there but so far, so good. Can you briefly speak to what happened between 2020, 2021 and now with the contracted services going from like $11,000 to $60,000? I'm just curious what that is. The main portion of the contracted service is is when we went to the fee, the $4 per month goes on the, that goes on the water bill. So then the water utility now charges us to put that on their bill. So that's why it jumped. We didn't have the fee in really 2020, they started in 2021 and it was phased in because we are rolling it out in 2021 and then it fully hit in 2022. Remember last meeting we talked to the water bill is that really the water bill and solve the other things. Okay, thank you. Any other questions on recycling? If not, I'm going to storm water utility. This is a very, very small portion of the budget. We did have at one time a storm water utility that actually collected a fee throughout the community but that was suspended, but the fund itself remains. So it is again a special revenue fund and mainly the only fee we're collecting is erosion control and some storm water fees through engineering. When there's developments, we charge a fee for inspection and review of the plants. Yeah, I got a question for you. If we went back to the original fee, I remember when we took it out. Yes. What was the amount of income that we were getting from that? We were roughly almost, just about 1.1 million was what I'm going to say overall. The fee was $3 a month per household or if you had a single family house, it was $3 a month that went on your water bill as well. So it was $9 a quarter. And however, if you were a commercial unit or a nonprofit or a business, if you weren't zoned or classified as residential or a two family, then what happened is there was a fee based on your actual, what we call impervious area. In other words, we actually measured every property's rooftop and parking lot, our surface, and there was a square foot charge. The square foot charge was basically a residential unit. It was right around, I want to say, 2300 square feet of impervious area. That was kind of the standard. So for every, if you had a business and you had 23,000 square feet of parking lot and rooftop, you'd pay 10 times that amount. That was the theory. So they were paying $30 a month or $90 a quarter because the theory is the more parking lot and the rooftop that you have, when it rains, it runs off faster. You need larger storm sewers. It sends pollutants to the system back much faster. So that's how it was calculated. And many, very common throughout the state of Wisconsin, I think, Ryan, correct me wrong, there's got to be 60 communities now that have storm water utilities. Yeah, I think definitely every city's got it. Yeah. I think we're like the only city in the state now that is our size that doesn't have a storm water fee. So then like, now we're doing the work on that water. Over 29th Street, the one that wants paying for that, where are we getting that money from? The pond, David. The pond. Yeah. We're going to take you around a capital improvements. So that's where this should come up. That's something that, again, is going to be, we're going to have to have a debate at some point or not a debate, but an idea or a discussion of how do we want to structure this? Now in hindsight, look, if we would have kept it, we would have been able to build up funds to fund a capital improvement without the need to go to borrowing. Okay. And that's the concept behind it because we have a lot of infrastructure that needs to be maintained. And right now we're doing it all through the general fund, which we know is very difficult to do anything out of because of net new construction and expenditure restraints and so forth at the state level. So that's the kind of stuff, you know, the difficulty now is if we would implement it, it would result in probably about a million, two million, five, roughly, let's say that would come out of the general fund. But if we do that, the state now says, you have to cut your general fund by that amount. So there's really no benefit to do it. So that's the dilemma. Now, unless we're able to have some legislators saying, you know, Shabugin, you had one back in 04 and 05, we recognize that, you know, that was before all this changed. We can write legislation that we would not penalize the city and let you do it. That's the only way I think it would be beneficial for the city to pursue it because right now it actually is, I think Caitlin would agree maybe, you know, I think that's the biggest dilemma that we're facing is, we take it out and we create a fee, then how do we, there's no benefit. It doesn't allow us to use those old, that general fund to expand other services that we all, you know, we know as a community, we could use elsewhere, you know, more street improvement, more police and fire, more library, all those good things you hear about all the time. That fee, that brought in all non-profit churches, that was, and I remember being there and kind of on the fence, it's just probably one of the only fees that was more equitable for the entire city to get. The trouble was, was the management of some of those funds at that time. Yeah, it was questionable and that's why. Yeah, the one thing is that when you, when we did the analysis of non-taxable property in the city, Shiboy, when you look at a map and you start color coding, all the property that doesn't pay taxes, property taxes in other words, it's a lot. Churches and non-profit, now, there's a lot of good that they provide to the community. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing, but it also then those provides a disproportionate burden on the taxpayer, the fund, the rest of the services, then we're all paying for it. So if there could be a better balance and that's what the store water utility provided was. It was a nice balance and it was fair and equitable to those properties that are adding to the burden, the costs and others. But that was also an expense that went away from those people that they didn't have to pay any longer. So if you bring that expense back, you're going to say, hey, what are you doing? Right. We haven't paid us for eight, 10 years. It's just interest, though. Oh, why was it paid out? The main reason it was a political and it was a campaign promise. I think there was some things that, again, there was early on in some of the administrations that was in place at the time, was looking at the fund and then using it in ways probably that could have been more, could have been more. Talk to you later about it. Okay. Yeah. Can you record it? Is that it for me too? Yeah. I know, I can start your own little podcast. Well, I think- I think there's a history of coming to town, so yeah. Part of it is it really never had a chance to fully get established. That was part of the thing. So a lot of it went all to operations with the premise that it's going to go, a lot of it was going to go to capital. Well, it never got to the point where it built up enough revenue and equity to actually get to the capital side. It lasted two and a half years, two years, I think. So did. Yeah. Okay. All right, moving on. Last but not least, one of the most important aspects of our department is clean water. Our wastewater treatment plan. Very large portion of our budget. Again, special revenue fund that comprises, basically this is all financed through the wastewater rates. And over the years, there's been a real concerted effort to smooth the rates because I would say prior to the last five years we've had a lot of peaks and valleys where rates went up 10% one year but then the next year they were 1%. Then they're up again another 9%. What we're trying to do with the budget is have an even anywhere from two to three to 4% increase with wastewater. And that provides us enough capacity, covers all of our operations, but it gives us also the ability to raise enough revenue to finance capital improvements without the need to go to capital borrowing or general fund, excuse me, general obligation borrowing or long-term borrowing, such as the clean water fund. Couldn't get great rates and there's some principle forgiveness with the clean water fund but the terms are 20 years and sometimes even longer. And that's not always the best thing to lock into such long terms for your capital. So Jordan, our newest wastewater treatment plant superintendent worked on this as well and he's doing a great job coming into the department taking on from Steve in the past. And some of the goals, we wanna continue to maintain our environmental compliance below regulatory requirements. We wanna do it in an operated in a fiscally sound manner. We're constantly continuing to recruit and develop and adjust our personnel. And I think we're experiencing that right now. As a matter of fact, we had our recent retirement, we had our recent new operator being onboarded and it's not only at the wastewater treatment, but I think all of our staff here from Mike's area and buildings and facilities and traffic to Joel in parts and forestry to Joel coming on board recently as our new superintendent of streets and sanitation. We have about four and a half, and a four and a half, four positions right now vacant just in streets that we're trying to recruit from the outside. So it's an apartment-wide issue that we're facing. One of the things we have is the wastewater treatment plant also serves not just the city of Shabong, but our outlying area. It's a regional plant. We own and operate it, but we serve the outlying areas via contracts. So the village of collars, sewage comes to us, Shabong and Falls, town of Shabong and town of Wilson. And they have contracts that we take from them to take their sewage and treat it for them. As well as, so the other thing is one of the differences that's also included in now this consolidated budget is Joel's area or streets and sanitation. Public works is responsible for the collection system. So all the pipes and the manholes and all that system, that's an operation of the public works department and the crews here. So that's not necessarily at the plant. But it's part of the wastewater rates and that activity and that cost is included in here. As well as every year we develop a five-year plan. So overall, again, increased with our personnel with the wages and benefits for next year. Looking at that, you know, it's using pretty much the same staffing. We are looking to do some, to partner a table of organizational changes at the plant for some succession. We have some retirements coming up. So we want to get the physicians in place so that we're able to absorb those retirements and have staff that are trained and ready to take on their next role in that capacity. I'm looking for other highlights. The big thing is the water utility. Again, this is how we fund the wastewater rates is that the rates get put on the water bill. It's a huge part of the budget because the rationale is we use their water meters to calculate the sewer rates. So they're able to charge us 50% of all their costs for the water meters themselves as well as the personnel to read the meters and so forth. I'm going to just look at Jordan. I want to say it's like 650,000 or is it over 700,000 now? It's more than that now, yeah. Yeah. So it's about 60,000 a month and then they're going to raise that by about 9% for next year. So it's a huge number. I'll leave it at that. I'm just making a move to talk about it. Water. But overall, again, the operations of the plant is really flat maybe. The big thing that we show is we have a big capital expenditure coming up. We have that Lakeshore Air Sector that we've talked about that is going to be protected and eventually rehabbed. So that's about anywhere from a 10 million to 11 million dollar project that we're showing but we are also anticipating some grants coming in to offset that. So questions about wastewater. Chemical charges are probably in another area that is fluctuating quite a bit with the economy and supply chain issues. So that's another area that I know Jordan and his staff have been trying to tackle and look for alternatives but it's a fairly specialized area in terms of suppliers, in terms of its limited, in terms of what we can get out there in the market for some of that stuff. That's not something the state interested in, is it? No. Because the state doesn't have wastewater treatment plants. They have high waste. But maybe we can start selling them some now. That's the public works budget in a brief. I appreciate everyone's attention and great questions and always here to answer any questions or if you want further details, give us a call. We're happy to work with you and sit down with you and go over stuff. And again, it's solely for discussion only. So you don't even have to make a motion except through a journey. Don't forget that motion. If you have any questions on the budget. All right, then we'll look at our motion to adjourn. I move to adjourn. Second. I'll second it. All in favor. Aye. I move to adjourn. Next meeting is October 25th. Thank you everyone.