May 28, 2024 — Meeting Transcript

Good evening, everybody. Welcome to our last board meeting in May. Good to see you all here. We'll get started right away with our roll call.

Alderwoman McAndrew? Here. Alderwoman Buse? Here. Alderman Patel? Here. Aldermen Gary Feder?

Alderwoman McAndrew? Here. Alderwoman Buse? Here. Alderman Patel? Here. Aldermen Fader?

Here.

Aldeman Rick Hummell?

Aldeman Hummel?

Here.

Aldemann Yorg?

Here.

Mayor Harris, City Manager David Gipson, City Attorney O'Keefe. Thank you.

Mayor Harris, City Manager Gibson, City Attorney O'Keefe. Thank you.

Now is the time on our agenda for public requests and petitions. So anyone online or in our audience that wishes to address us on something that is not on our agenda tonight, now's your chance. Come up and tell us your name. Okay, I don't see anybody. No one's online. Okay. All right, moving on then. We will now have a presentation by the Sustainability Advisory Committee done by Deb Grossman. And just in case you're wondering, we do not separate gals from guys. But it's an order of seniority the way this works out and just so happened. We've got all of the amazing people over here and oh, I'm sorry, all the girls over here and all the guys over

there. Okay. Yeah. Wow.

Yeah. It should be green. Yes.

So push the button. Green? I am now. All right. Well, first of all, thank you very much for giving us a little bit of time. We have done a lot of work over the course of the past year since I saw you last. And it's more than the 10 or 15 minutes I'm going to take of your time. So if you will just bear with me, I will race through some of these things. And if you could hold your questions till the end, that will make sure I stay a little bit closer to time rather than carrying over. I'd like to just first really acknowledge all of the staff that has been so super supportive in the efforts that we've put in place in the past year. We could not do any of this work without them. But in addition to the staff, which I would just say Matt for sure and Anna and Tony and Gabby and David, of course, you've been to just I think every meeting practically that we've had. Those of you who have served, the awesome ladies right here to my left, who have served as our liaisons with this group. And then I'd also want to just give a shout out to our committee members and to our interns. We have had such a terrific group of Clayton High School interns and WashU interns. We've had five so far since I started working with this group, and they've really made a difference in terms of how we get set up. Okay, I don't have a clicker, so somebody going to click for me? Let's just, let's rock through this. So one of the things we have done is put together a little bit of a dashboard to help us keep track of the work that we have ongoing and what we've been asked to do. I still plan to shorten this up and make it even tighter so we could maybe get like a one or two page scorecard But I'm not there yet. So hopefully next time when I come back, like in a year from now or perhaps sooner, we'll have something tight. But in terms of the key for what you're going to see, think of it as a stop sign. But we added an extra color. So you've got green. That means we're either complete with something or it's in works ongoing. You can figure this out. Green, yellow, orange, red. Okay, on to the next one. As many of you know, we had a meeting in February of 2023 shortly after I became involved with the committee to kind of just figure out where we were and what our priorities are. I'm very, very reluctant to call it a strategic plan because that's what was going on for the comprehensive plan and the livable communities plan and we are going to fold in and work with what's coming out of that but we needed some direction from that point in time until when those plans were really ready so we sat down as a group on a Saturday morning and sorted some things out our focus areas are those eight that you see up there and I'm going to give you a two kind of two highlights from each one in the next couple of minutes can you flip the slide Um, the first and most important thing for us, for the committee is looking at our carbon footprint because that's where we think we can make the biggest difference. For our region as a whole energy use 64% of it takes place in what they call stationary or buildings. And not all of you, but most of you have heard from Emily Andrews on the green building council. She also came to our group, made a presentation. And to that end, um, you can kind of see some dates in that first block. Adopting energy benchmarking policies and practices for Clayton-owned buildings is something that we're looking at as our first step. And we had an approval by our committee, and then we presented it to all of you or most of you plus a few more back last year. There's been some staff training that's gone on. There's some user group training that's gone. And we are putting our information into the energy manager, and we have begun that tracking process. So we're going to get through that over the course of the year and then we're going to stand back, take a look and see if it still makes sense and whether we're going to roll that forward and how we'll roll it forward. If everything goes according to plan, we'll then begin to look at having other buildings that are not owned by Clayton City get involved with this too. And there's some real upside for them because most of the changes that people have said they didn't. need to make are low cost or no cost, and they save them money in the end. So there's something for all of us in the air we breathe, but there's also something for the people who own the properties. So that's what we're hoping you can see in the orange block, some of the steps that are just easy, very high level, what we would need to do. Let's flip out to the next page, please. This one, again, this is on new buildings. The previous slide was on existing buildings. And we're looking at I'm just going to mention one thing here that we do need to rehab the municipal garage and looking at how we go about that. That's something we will take a closer look. Next slide. The next one is on renewable energies. We spent a lot of time working on this last year. One of the things we wanted to do was increase our knowledge of what's best practices for communities of our size for solar energy. I want to give, again, a huge shout out to Matt and Anna who made a lot of this happen. But we worked with the SolSmart organization. They're part of the Department of Energy. They're funded through them. They gave us free advice, no-cost technical assistance to get through the process, which involved us making changes to permitting and inspections and zoning and some of our corporate—not our corporate, our government operations— And so we were able to achieve in last August the bronze recognition level. That's the first level you can get. And then we got silver in April. We're super excited about that. We have a plaque someplace downstairs, that's okay, that we received for that. We are the first one on this side of the state. There are 10 other communities over around Kansas City that are soul smart communities, but we're the first ones. And there's some other of our contemporaries, if you will, who are now striving for the same recognition. So it's a real nice thing for us to have participated in. To take it to the next level, gold or platinum, we're going to have to work with the county. And that's going to be a bit more of a challenge because they're the ones who do some of the permitting and inspections on our behalf. And we would have to make sure their people get trained. The other thing I wanted to mention is the last panel on that page, and that's that Clayton joined the Climate Mayors Network. Thank you very much, Mayor. What that enabled us to do was get free access, free is one of my favorite words, access to the crosswalk emissions data so we will be able to track what's going on with emissions within Clayton's boundaries. They're having a glitch right now and sort of getting their data all up to date, but it should be within the next month or so we'll be able to get that real time. So a real nice perk for us. Again, thank you very much. Can we flip the slide? The next one is a switch out of buildings and over to carbon footprint on transportation and just looking at what our fleet and infrastructure improvements would be the two things I want to mention on this one is that we currently are doing a comprehensive vehicle. electrification assessment. Ameren is working with us, Ken Kressiman from Ameren, as well as consultants that they have. They're evaluating our fleet needs and taking a look at what the efficiency, feasibility, and cost could be for us to electrify more of our fleet and when we do that. It's a one-off. Again, it's a free consult from Ameren. We love that. The last thing I wanted to mention on this slide is raising awareness of the no idling ordinance. And this is a project that our Clayton High School interns decided to tackle. I really want anybody that's serving on our committee, especially if you're an intern, to actually have some productive work because I think it trains them to be good committee members when they're out of college and forever after. So they took this project on, they created a lot of posters. Those posters went up at the Clayton Center. If you work out there, you may see them on the boards that change or in the hard copy. They also wrote articles about it. We used them when we did some of our tabling events at Clayton Center and at, oh gosh, the Yeah, we used it also at Open Streets, but there were two at Clayton Center. One was corporate days, one was family days and transport. Next slide. Um, on the alternative modes of transportation, I'm just going to really mention one. And this is just that we're looking to get a lot more information coming out of the livable communities master plan. And that will guide us in what we might want to do in terms of bikes and pedestrians and the rest. We can invent some things, but now that we've heard from the whole community, we're going to use that as our guideposts. We will probably be working in that over the summer. Next slide, please. Clayton Green Spaces, gosh, there's so much here. First thing is just a recognition that this is work that's been going on for such a long time. We are now 31 years that we've been recognized as Tree City. That's incredible. And the last 11 years, we've gotten a growth award because we go above and beyond on how we take care of our trees. So again, a shout out to staff for that one. Lights Out Heartland, we continue to support that. I think that's the first presentation I ever made to this. body. A couple of years back this year, we took the extra step of sending out letters to other Clayton building owners. Didn't get much of a response, but we got to start. So we got a couple of other people that are going to participate and we will recognize them in our print materials or our email materials. uh the last thing i wanted to mention is this the penultimate panel the missouri american water we just received a grant of five thousand five hundred dollars to put a new water filling station in oak knoll park one of our washoe interns worked that up last summer erica ajou and we just finally heard back in may that we did indeed get that so hats off again to our um to our students. Next slide. On purchasing, this is something that we had a wonderful purchasing policy in the past. Unfortunately, it was multiple pages long and not something that was really easy to implement for anybody on staff. Depending on which department you were in, it required a lot of reading and a lot of, we just need to simplify it. And so David's really headed that up and we've made a few runs through that made some additional changes that were approved by the committee last week. And I'm sure we'll hear more about that. We've also taken a look just in sort of general purchasing or what I'd call general assessments, other things that just are brought to us from time to time. So it might be roofing changes at the Oak Knoll Park structures, or it might be the overlay district between Wash U and Clayton. And so we look at that committee will provide input. Next slide, please. On purchasing, one of the other big, big areas is waste. And I've learned a lot about waste in my time sitting in this committee, stuff I didn't even know I needed to know. But apparently, landfills are the third largest source of methane gas. They're equivalent to about 23 million cars. And it's more potent than carbon dioxide. So it's something we need to pay attention to. So we're starting to get a little more excited about waste. We have an opportunity to... apply for a couple of different grants. We did one last year, another one of our students wrote it up for a grant application with the St. Louis and Jefferson Metropolitan District. And we didn't get that one, but we're gonna file again. We're gonna get that. We also have been invited to consider applying for the county grant as well. If we end up putting in an application of a sizable number, you will be hearing from me again on that one. We've started an investigation on Green Dining Alliance and where we might want to put that in place because that's one organization that reduces food waste and encourages composting. We think we might be able to get a dining district if they'll let us do one just on demand, because we've already got a couple restaurants, coffee shops called these and clementines are already part of it we think seeds is not a hard push. So we're going to see. We'll see if we can manage that. That's more work to come. We also promoted specialty recycling. That's the last panel there. We came up with a list of alternative places where you could reuse or recycle equipment. We posted that on the website. I encourage you to look at it. I'm not going to go into detail. Our e-cycling event, which is recurring, collected almost five tons of e-waste. And we're going to do it again in the fall. Next slide. on water we're just hardly getting started here so i'm just going to own that uh we have begun to record our water bills and energy manager as part of that building process that i talked to you about before but we have more work to do there um we're utilizing a lot of msd and missouri waters outreach programs in terms of rain gardens and the rest. So when we did the tabling events that I mentioned a bit ago, we used their information together with some from Republic and Ameren rebates, et cetera. Next slide. Strategic partnerships. We're going to get a whole bunch more done if we do it with everybody else that's around here and that cares, works, plays, lives in Clayton. So we have started doing some of that. Many of the players I've already mentioned. We've had a presentation by the school district, but I think we have more opportunity to work with them. We have more opportunity to class dedicated to Clayton and what we might do in Clayton, which was some of our early template for how we rolled forward. So that was really great. We've had interns from WashU, which again, we do not pay for. That's something we work hard to train them up and give them a really good experience. We've had five so far and we are moving to a full-time intern this summer. So we'll see how that goes. Next one. Uh, communications that, can I just say that it's just ongoing? Almost all this effort is education. Everybody wants to do the right thing. I think I like to believe it. Don't tell me that's not true. Um, everybody really wants to do the some good information getting out there gabby has helped us with the clayton communicate clayton connections um in we started doing this in march of 23 and we try to get in one per week in 2023 we had 58 articles over 43 weeks and in 2024 in the first 20 weeks we have had 30 articles God forbid we ever miss an article because people call me or they email me and they say, Deb, there was not an article. So then we've got to fix that up. So Gabby's done just a really super job. She's also made sure we had presence in the city views. City views is where we will reference the other people that participated with us in Lights Out. We had two in the spring, two in the summer, one in the fall and three in the winter in terms of articles for 23. And so far in 24, we had three in spring and three in the summer. So we're doing pretty good there. that's like communications, you can never stop trying to get really good people. A couple things that we've adopted just two things for this slide is the onboarding and training. So we actually have a formal sit down with all the folks that are new and run them through everything that we have on our deck and try and make sure they're they're up to date. And we standardize those materials second quarter of this year. So now it's a lot simpler. We've got it all online. So It's a little more precise. And then building a strong subcommittee structure with a chair succession is really important to me because, yeah, I want somebody to care about this when I'm done. And that's really what I have. Again, just to tell you the three big focus areas we have are all about reducing emissions and trying to do that through buildings, through transportation and waste. Next up for us is looking at those long range plans and seeing how we fit and what kind of a difference we can make involved with that or making things happen. And that's what I've got. Any questions? Okay, perfect. There's a whole lot more in there. And I know I promised to share it with you. Thank you for taking it out to the awards.

Well, don't go away yet. I'm sure there are some questions and certainly some comments. I just want to compliment you, first of all, on your leadership, which has been- astounding really it's been great um and i also just wanted to say you know thank you for recognizing the long history of sustainability efforts that the city has made you know before i appeared on this board or whatever things were going on tree city obviously and other things and we you know we have the the solar array on the police station uh parking lot i don't know if Anybody else had, at the time it was the biggest public, you know, governmental solar array that ever existed in Missouri. And, you know, the idea of, I'm glad you're still checking into urban dark skies for one of our parks. We

are, and that's work that'll probably happen with our summer intern. And Amy's going to pick that up and work that one. Amy Jennings, who's new on our committee.

And I love your priority setting the big buildings in Clayton are really the name of the game for emissions and so i'm glad that you're working on that, I think that is similar. to the city of St. Louis program that we talked about when you first became chair. Okay, yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. And we have, I don't believe in inventing anything new. If there's something I can already just go out there and grab. So yes. And I will say that when I first stepped into this role and started asking people for data and information, there were lots of folks who stepped forward, including former mayor Linda Goldstein, who was like, here, let me give you this much paper on things that have been done. I mean, Clayton is long, long recognized as a leader, but it's like everything else. You can't rest on your laurels. You know, if you got gold place last year at the senior Olympics and you didn't do your work, you're not going to get gold this year.

all good. So just appreciate recognizing it all. Anybody else want to comment or ask any questions?

I mean, I was just gonna I mean, I feel like I could ask you a question or would love more information on everything you talked about. But we can have

coffee.

Yeah, there we go. But speaking of that, though, I wanted to especially thank you for coming to our ward coffee. a couple months ago it was great to have you and I really appreciated just hearing I mean I could listen to you talk about sustainability for a long long time so thank you so much for coming it was great to educate our community about you know more things than just I don't know complaining about things downtown.

Well we are we are trying to get that out and so I know I'm going to be out of town for a wedding and Susan's going to do ward two coming up and so she's going to get all this stuff in hard copy and we can slice and dice. And I know we were going to do one in Ward 1, but we had a conflict on scheduling with the sculpture issue. We tried to get out with more tabling events. And it's just telling people. And it's amazing. You think everybody knows what you know, but they really don't. I mean, it's

Well, and I just applaud you for the collaboration with, you know, the students and watching you. I mean, it's just great. So, I mean, I just, yeah, I just applaud you all that you're doing. We really are very grateful that you took this on.

Well, it's not me. I know. When you see me standing up here, there's a whole bunch of people standing here too. They're just not here right in this minute, but nobody could do this amount of work. It's a ton and it's the staff that's done it, it's the interns, it's the committee members. Like Jeff Leonard sat in as our committee representative on the comprehensive plan. Tina Murtha did for the livable communities plan. I mean, everybody has sort of taken something. Suzanne has helped us a lot with some idling information. Even some community members, I had one person call me up one time and say, well, you're not doing anything. And I said, let's have coffee. And I laid out, you know, kind of some of the things and they said, well, what can I do to help? And I'm like, I could use somebody to write the articles. I just don't have enough time to do all the things that need to be done. And they shot me back a list of here's, here's articles you can use. And then we had an intern fact check them. So we knew they were right. And we shortened them up a little bit. And that fed Gabby for, I don't know, probably 20 weeks. It was great. I mean, so we're, we're happy to have community help. We're Is there anybody else that's missing or wanting to do this work? I am now way over my allotted time. Thank you very much, unless there's anything else.

I'm just going to go around and make sure nobody else has anything.

Okay. Over your allotted time, I just have to say the presentation today was phenomenal. she talks just as fast at every meeting and covers just, I mean, and that's, you actually were kind of slow in that, you didn't cover very much in that

time. Because it's like, do you need like three meetings a month to do all this? I don't know how you're accomplishing it. Go,

go, go. And what

you do is you're right.

You talk fast. Yeah. And, and you, and something that's so, so whenever I say, oh my God, Deb, you've done so much. All you say is, but there's so urgency. We haven't done enough. And a lot of urgency. Yeah. And I think that's what's really remarkable about is that people feel that. And the way that the woman wrote the article for you after calling you and everyone on the committee, the high school kids or college interns, the people on the committee, it's like, whoa, if I put this time in, it's really going to make a difference. And

everybody has made a difference. And I can't think of anybody around that table that has not contributed. It has been talking to, I'm talking fast. So

I try to respect people's time. It's really inspiring. It's really good. And it's so important. So yeah, thanks. Good, good.

Thank you. Quiet on this side of the

room. I want to share my appreciation for your leadership as well as just the breadth of activities that you have. And my question is, is there anything that's a significant impediment or challenge that's in the way, either it's us or some other thing that we could maybe help you with?

Right now, I can't think of anything because people have been so responsive. Wouldn't it be great if you want me to dream big? Boy, I can do that. And I would say it would be great to have a staff person who did this full-time. But that's not likely unless we can get a grant for that. I wish I had somebody who could full-time write grants. We've looked at a lot of different things that are available through the IRA money coming out of the federal government. Most of those are going to Justice 40 communities. They're not going to go to Clayton. But I do think there's some things that we probably could get, but again, it's the time. I'd love more time, both at a high level and a day-to-day level.

I would just add, you know, Debbie does a great job promoting what we do in the city. But then whenever I see a presentation like yours, I realize it really goes to the point that 98% of the population has no idea what we're doing. And I think this is a fabulous PowerPoint presentation, so much information. And it's the kind of thing that really would be wonderful to be able to share with people to know what you're dealing with because you've done a great job and

Well, Gary, if you know of any opportunities for us to do that, you let us know and we'll go out and do it. And if it's, you know, I'll do it, but I'm sure that if I can't do it, somebody else will because we got a lot of very talented

people. I mean, just to piggyback on what Bridget said, when you came to our Ward 3 coffee, I'm sure most of the people there would be very happy to have you come to all of our meetings and present. So, I mean, I think people really were taken with what you were working on and really interested in it. And so- we just need to keep looking for those opportunities and be proactive about getting the word out there

ideally this committee should be presenting once or twice a year to every ward and if there are individual neighborhood districts that are covering different people they could do that too so thank you

thank you i just got one if i was if somebody came to me and said What is the committee going to do in the rest of this year? Like what are two or three big points to say we're going to accomplish X in the next six months?

Yeah, so I think the primary focuses for us in that foci for the next little bit are going to be looking at the plans that have just come out and trying to see where the overlays are for sustainability issues and making sure we've got that in our plans and that we're doing those. We're going to continue working on the building benchmarking for the city-owned properties, and so that's ongoing. The purchasing agreement will fine-tune that up, so that's something you might hear about, green dining you might hear about. And the other one was the waste. So again, we want to stay super focused on those high level things that are going on in terms of emissions. But while we wait for those to play out, we don't want to just sit around and wait. At least I don't. So we've got some wheels in motion for the big things that need to happen. And then we're filling in with these other things as we have opportunities and as we wait through it. And also as I see who's interested in what. So if you were on the committee and you said, hey, what I'm really care about is native plantings. I'm going to find, okay, we got something over here that you can do. So that's kind of how we've approached it. Does that answer your question, Jeffrey? Okay, good. Thank you.

Thank you very, very much. All right.

Thank you. Thanks for letting me go first.

Oh, yeah.

All right.

Next on our agenda would be a public hearing and CUP for 118 South Hanley Road, the marijuana dispensary. I will open the public hearing and request proof of publication.

Yes, Mayor. This is a public hearing to consider an application for a conditional use permit to allow for the operation of a 3,611 square foot marijuana dispensary at 118 Hanley Road. The existing building will be renovated to support the proposed use. Good Day Farm will be open from 9 a.m. until 10 p.m., Monday through Saturday, and 9 a.m.-8 p.m. on Sunday. The dispensary will be designed in compliance with Missouri requirements to include a waiting room, separated sales floor, private employee spaces, and restroom facilities. The subject property includes on-site parking with 23 spaces for visitors and staff. Deliveries, trash, and recycling services will be provided using Colorado Avenue. The applicant has stated that any marijuana products to be discarded will first be rendered unusable. The operations manual and security plan have been reviewed by staff, including the police department, and found to be aligned with local and state requirements as well as best practices. The Plan Commission considered this request at its meeting on May 20th, 2024, and voted unanimously to recommend approval as requested. Staff recommends that the Board of Aldermen approve a conditional use permit for the operation of Good Day Farm, located at 118 South Hanley Road, per the conditions outlined in the resolution.

Thank you. Okay, I'll open the discussion. Anyone online or in the audience that would like to ask us a question or make a comment about this? And I think the applicant is here.

Good Day Farm. And you

did come up and sail that into the microphone. Sorry.

And my colleague Reese Williams from Armstrong Teasdale is also here, and the compliance director Paul Rockers from Good Day Farms here to answer any questions that you or the citizens would

have. Now, we've considered this before and had a pretty thorough discussion about it, but are there any other questions now, comments? I'll just start with Bridget and go and seniority.

No, I mean, the presentation was complete at the plan commission. There were certainly questions about security. There's going to be somebody who works there who's not going to necessarily provide security, but will be reviewing all the you know people's licenses as they come in and you have guys have the highest technology to detect you know the false you know false IDs and stuff so and I just want to also reiterate I know that signage will come to staff to be reviewed but I've been assured that the signage will be very tasteful and not very grandiose like some of the um some of the marijuana um dispensary uh shops that they're all lit up but they've assured me that it will be very tasteful and subdued so

it will be very tasty very almost boring great awesome

that was my question today yeah

so thank you

okay the only thing i have is really on the heels of the presentation that you had the benefit of listening to, and I'm hoping that in the operations of the business that sustainability is a factor. I know it's a natural product to some degree, but with the packaging and everything else, certainly avoiding styrofoam would be obvious and being conscious of all that. Is that in the business plan as you're approaching it, or what are your positions on that?

Yes. Oops, sorry. Paul Rockers, I'm Director of Compliance. Yeah, all of the products that we purchase are prepackaged by other facilities. And so there is very stringent rule requirements on what packaging can be made of. It has to be child resistant. And so we really, we do everything that we can on our end on the dispensary side, but all of the products are coming from other vendors throughout the state. But whenever we are looking at our packaging as far as what the products go into when it leaves the facility, those are the areas that we're going to focus that attention on, the areas that we have that control over.

That'd be great. Just that awareness of sustainability and all the business operations would be very good for the city and everybody. Thanks.

Becky?

No, I would just note that this is an allowable use and the site is an appropriate site and you have met all the requirements and it will bring revenue to a site that has not brought revenue to the city for some time. And I think even before that probably didn't really bring sales tax because it was like a service business. So thank you.

Very good. Going around. Mr. Gary Feder?

Very good. Going around. Mr. Fader?

Um, In the April 30th letter that was sent to the city, there's a reference to question about exterior changes. And the response was that, yes, please see proposed exterior alterations attached. But I don't think we got any. It's not terribly germane to the use, but I'm just curious. what exterior changes are being made in reference to

what we submitted was a rendering. Those plans have not finalized. Like I said, they'll be in front of the architecture review board to make sure that they're consistent. I might have a hard copy that I can look at.

I was mostly just concerned. I went a little bit to the signage issue. Just is there anything that's going to building going to look significantly different than what's there now?

No, and I can't imagine it would be approved if we tried to get two cookies.

And my other one is the prior CUP that was approved for a similar use, then it never happened. I'm not asking you to comment on it, but I think there was some issue with the state in terms of that prior user being able to operate. I'm just curious, is there any reason to believe that are there any more hurdles that you all have once you get past this approval in order to operate?

No, we have to submit all of our documentation to the state. As long as this license stays within the congressional district that it was approved for, there's not going to be any pushback from the state. We've provided them with all of the information as far as what we're wanting to do, the address that we're wanting to have the facility at. So the state has been, we've been in communication with the state through this whole process. And so, yeah. Great.

Thank you. I was wondering if you could comment on a little bit about the company itself, the applicant. Are there other locations in the Missouri area? How long have they been operating? Just a general overview on the company, please.

Yeah, the company, Good Day Farm, Good 7, their home base is in Arkansas. But we have... We do a lot of management to aid and guide other facilities. And so 2020 is when the company originated in Missouri. We help manage multiple stores throughout the state. We have 22 Good Day Farm stores throughout the state that we manage. for and through Good Day Farm. They are also in other states, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

Thank you. So this store would be the same as the other 22 in terms of its structure?

Not as far as the structure. There's several of them. A lot of the facilities that we have were facilities such as this, and we built them. We've got some that were on empty lots, and so we built a different type of structure. So it's really been based upon the property that we have in each particular. And then obviously the ordinances as far as what and how.

I mean, that makes sense. I guess what I'm trying to wrap my head around to Alderman Rick Hummell's point is, is this going to be operated the same as the other ones, or are we looking at a whole different structure? I'm trying to get a gauge.

I mean, that makes sense. I guess what I'm trying to wrap my head around to Alderman Hummel's point is, is this going to be operated the same as the other ones, or are we looking at a whole different structure? I'm trying to get a gauge.

As far as the operating procedures, everything is going to be done the same way, yes.

Okay. One question I had was related to hours. Can you kind of walk me through, because it seems like nine to 10, I guess, during the week and then nine to eight on Sunday, it seems like a large amount of time. Can you kind walk me through kind of how you came up with those times? Is that standard in the industry? Like kind of how you guys got to that?

Yeah, very good question. What we're doing is looking at throughout the state, the hours of operation when we have the most traffic. And, you know, we base it on the foot traffic. And so we were constantly reviewing and looking at what's happening throughout the state of Missouri, not just at our facility, but at other facilities. trying to make sure that we are selecting the most appropriate timeframes to be open, obviously following the guidelines your ordinances as far as what hours of operation we can have as well but it's really just looking at the foot traffic that we have throughout the state and determining if those hours are still the best and most appropriate hours for the facility and we have we have made some changes to our hours of operation at other locations throughout the state simply because the foot traffic would die down at seven o'clock in the evening so we're always keeping an eye on looking on at that information to determine if we still have the best hours of operation for that location, for each individual location.

I don't expect you to have the data with you, but just as general, like I assume you have enough foot track between 9 and 10 at night to warrant staying open at Auburn? that late

obviously we would have to evaluate that you know once we get opened up here but many of our other locations yes the foot traffic does warrant that we stay open later in the evenings probably the biggest hours of operation are going to be between four and seven and then around eight nine and ten a lot of times once families get to bed people come back out so i mean on what happens here in the city, and we will evaluate it based upon that traffic. Okay.

Thank

you. Very good. Thanks. All right. If there's no other discussion, I will close the public hearing. Alderman McAndrew.

I will move to approve resolution number 2024-07, granting a conditional use permit for 118 South Hanley Road, a marijuana dispensary doing business as Good Day Farm. Second.

Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye.

Any

opposed? All right. Very good. Congratulations. We'll watch for the opening. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. all right on our agenda next is the consent agenda the things in there are the minutes and the uh the um liquor license for 200 south central does it see at cj mugs yes i was i was thinking that was right but i didn't check so yes the old cj mugs so um Any comments or questions about any of that stuff you want to discuss it?

I'm just curious what necessitated a need for a liquor license for the CJ mugs location. Change of ownership. Are they still going to operate as CJ mugs

or not? Everything's operated the exact same. We transferred the conditional use permit administratively and the board needs to approve the liquor license transfer.

Good. It would have been a tragedy if they didn't operate it just the same for us anyway. Okay. All right. So, Any other discussion about anything in the consent agenda? All right.

I will move to approve the consent agenda. Second.

Alderman McAndrew? Aye. Alderman Buse? Aye. Alderwoman Patel? Aye. Aldermen Gary Feder? Aye. Aldeman Rick Hummell? Aye. Aldemann Jeffery Yorg? Aye. Mayor Harris? Aye. Thank you.

Alderman McAndrew? Aye. Alderman Buse? Aye. Alderwoman Patel? Aye. Aldermen Fader? Aye. Aldeman Hummel? Aye. Aldemann York? Aye. Mayor Harris? Aye. Thank you.

Okay, city manager report is basically the capital improvement plan. And so you want to go ahead or come up?

So I just finished passing out that larger sheet that I had sent out late last week. And I know it's overwhelming if you just take a quick look at it. We're not really going to be working off of that, but it is here in case you have any questions related to what had been sent out or we need to reference it for anything. So what we have on the agenda tonight is a resolution that would adopt a five-year capital improvement plan. And it's really important to note that while we adopt this resolution, it's not binding by any means. You're not locked into these projects that have to happen at that sequence, that amount, locking in the revenues and everything else. This really establishes a... more or less a formal approval by the board that allows staff to then go work on the operating budget and finalizing the capital budget that we'll present to the board later this summer. So we're in the midst of that right now. We've got a lot of meetings scheduled over the next couple of weeks to go through the operating budget and having that guidance from the board as far as the capital priorities and expenditures are concerned is obviously important to us. The capital improvement plan that was sent out today, just the five-year version, you kind of got a 10-year outlook previously. Didn't really change since the retreat that we had with the Board of Aldermen a couple of weeks ago. I would note that in fiscal year 25, if you're looking at The sheets, the smaller ones that you received this evening. There are 11 projects slated for fiscal year 25, totaling $4.8 million. All of those are really maintenance type projects, with the exception of the fire training facility that we would be building with Brentwood, Richmond Heights and Maplewood, which are our training partners in our fire department. There's also offsetting revenue of about $2.2 million for those projects. So we're spending 4.8. We have offsetting revenue of 2.2 million. A lot of that will come through a federal grant for the continuation of the central business district resurfacing project. So the second phase will come in 2025. So there's a big offset there. There's also a revenue offset in there from municipal park grants. So we utilize that for Remembrance Park, also the Shaw Park fields. There's grant revenue associated with it. And then finally for the fire training facility, the city of Clayton is putting out the money to build the facility and will be reimbursed by those other three cities along the way as that goes. So there's offsetting revenue at 75% for the fire training facilities. So again, $4.8 million worth of projects $2.2 million worth of associated revenue to offset that. The only change that was really made, well, there were two of them since the retreat. The first one is the council chamber security project that was in there closer to 400 or $500,000 previously. That included the establishment of a conference room that would be behind the wall here. After that conversation, we decided to strike that. We feel like that's probably not the best location for a conference room and it's currently being used as auxiliary offices at the moment. So we've reduced that project cost down to $100,000, which would help us harden this room, the security in this room. So it still allows us to take care of that priority, but we have cut out the conference room aspect. We've also capped the transfer to the general fund at $500,000, which again was something that we talked about at the retreat for fiscal year 25. If we didn't cap it, that amount would be a little over $700,000 and it increases every year. So when we started to look five, 10 years out, you know, at the 10-year mark, you're close to a million dollars in general fund transfers. So our preference would be to cap that at $500,000 and hold some of that money back within the capital fund so we have a little more flexibility going forward. And then finally on the municipal garage, we envision using special obligation bonds that would be repaid through funds in the capital improvement fund so the debt service for that that issuance which is about $15 million comes out to just over a million dollars a year for that project. And you can see that on the expense line, it's highlighted in this sheet here and a kind of a orangish color. And what I sent out last week highlights it in yellow. But our preference would be to move forward with the special obligation bonds. I know we've had some some other conversations about potentially looking at general obligation. But that's how we've set up the CIP for now. So what we're asking tonight, and if you want to go through any of these projects again or have questions about any of the revenue or expenditures, we can talk about it some more. But what we're looking for this evening is adoption of a resolution with a five-year capital improvement plan so that we can focus on preparing the budget that the board will see later this summer for adoption in September. So with that, I'll open it up for any questions you may have.

um so just so i'm i don't have any question about any of the projects that are listed, but just so i'm clear in terms of talking about. The general fund transfer CAP and also how we would. specifically pay for the garage? Is that a later discussion? This is more just to provide guidance to staff to do the budget.

Our recommendation is to cap it at $500,000. If the board still wants to talk about that or change that amount, we can have that discussion. If we don't cap it and we just eliminate it altogether, that would put some significant strain on the general fund very shortly without some action taken. So in the larger sheets that I sent out late last week, you can see that I showed the general fund impact if you were to either cap the general fund or eliminate it altogether. And if you go towards a total elimination of that transfer, you can see that there's a significant impact on the general fund and you would need to have some other revenue source to really offset that. So one of the examples I gave was the fire sales tax. So you can see it with and without that. So these two things work as a system, capital and general fund. And so we wanted to show what the impact is to both of these funds as you move pieces around. But tonight, what's in front of you, the proposed CIP has a $500,000 general fund transfer cap. As far as the municipal garage is concerned, we can continue to talk about whether or not we do general obligation or special obligation. We still have not spent money that's reimbursable. So that really doesn't start until we start the design process. We're probably a couple months away from that happening. We had envisioned going out and borrowing the money or getting the bonds sometime in the fall of this year. So if we decide to go forward with special obligation, that would still be the timeline. If we decided to go a different direction and look at a general obligation, your options really are do that in November of this year, which means we would have to move pretty quickly to educate the public and go through that process. I will say that Historically, November ballots are not the best if there's a presidential election for tax increases, especially property tax increases. You have a lot of voters that end up showing up at the polls. A lot of them don't vote often. They don't pay attention to a lot of things, but there's a presidential elections. So they're showing up for that. And then underneath it, as they're going through stuff, they see a tax increase. And a lot of times tax increases struggle on that type of of ballots. So we can talk about whether or not we would want to go for that November ballot, but we could push it to next year for a general obligation. But in the meantime, we're going to be incurring expenses that we're going to have to pay at some point. And we're going to pay ourselves back for those when we do issue debt. So, you know, you could wait until April and if a general obligation failed, go out for a special obligation at that point and then reimburse ourselves then. But our recommendation again is to stick with the special obligation and kept the general fund transfer at $500,000. I think

just to kind of add to that, we talked this morning, and I know that various of you thought about different alternatives on that, but also at the retreat, we talked about, and I know I brought up, you know, the idea that I would like to, it would be great to see all of the possible revenue sources that Our options for us going forward, whether it's tomorrow or five years from now, you know and talk about. How those might be utilized strategically or not, you know how some might be bundled together or not what what we might want to you know use a general obligation bond for. There are other bigger projects coming down the pike so I've asked David and he's agreed to put together sort of an overview of all that stuff for an upcoming Friday session. And we'll have a chance to not only hear what he the information but brainstorm a little bit and see strategically what what's going to make sense for our city, you know, going forward with the next few years, so I think that'll be real important and tonight. Really, this is about improving these projects as part of the plan. That's the

most important piece is the projects and what to expect from a transfer standpoint. So as we're working on the operating budget, we know what kind of revenue is going to be hitting the general fund from the capital fund. As the mayor mentioned, and I should have mentioned that as well, June 25th will be the date where we talk about some of those financial options. We'll continue to talk through those things. So if that changed from a special obligation to a general obligation, it doesn't have a significant impact on the 2025 projects. So as long as we're adopting that, that project list and that transfer capped at 500,000, or we can leave it the way it is, or if you want to eliminate it, that's fine. As long as we know that if we know those inputs to the budget, we're still on schedule and we can sort the garage out later.

Yeah. I mean, I just kind of wanted to be clear on what you wanted our comment. Hopefully that helps. Yeah, that is. Yeah. So, I mean, I probably saving our discussion for the fire sales tax and special versus general obligation can be saved for another day.

And we'll have a lot of information to supplement our discussion.

And it all works as a system again. So, you know, while you have these in front of you tonight, we're probably not going to go through this in detail. It's good to hold on to because when we have that discussion, you can really see in these sheets how those decisions will impact both of these funds. So we're going to be working off a lot of documents that look like this. If there was a way to blow it up better, I would, or if we need to invest in magnifying glasses for everybody, we can do that too. But unfortunately there's not a really clean way to show this amount of information, but these sheets really show you the impact of both funds as you play with those decisions.

And I, I'm sorry, I had one last question. The Hanley house is the CCF working on that at all? Or is that mainly just a project that the city alone has it's

just us for now um plugged into the the cip that way but i think that's a discussion we need to have and at the retreat we had talked about uh going back and having a discussion with ccf about our various roles because it does hit some of their key pillars that they talk about as it relates to history and other things so

Well, they've raised a lot of money for Hanley House over the years, and that's been one of their key things. So whether they're, you know, can still, I think, I'm sure there's still game to talk about it. Thanks.

I'll just start on the Hanley House. I hope we're also looking at how other communities deal with their historical sites. Is there often some national historical society or somebody else, whatever it might be, that entity that runs it may not be directly the city's, the city's entity. And that comprehensive, what we all just talked about was very helpful in what we're actually trying to decide tonight because my concerns really are, we just came off the comprehensive planning and livable community planning is coming up and is being finalized. And there's a lot of great suggestions in there. And I worry about the cushion and the transfer from the capital fund is capping it as a good idea How long we should continue to have it is a problem because if we want to improve intersections for safety, do anything with sustainability or any other things in those projects, many of them are capital expenses. And as we keep using that fund to go into our general fund, we can't. Our hands are tied. So I look forward to the conversation on other funding sources and general versus special obligation bonds and things like that. The fire sales tax, the sooner the better it sounds like to me. I understand or I certainly hear the concerns with the November election and that makes sense to me, but that one we should address. We should have addressed it a few years ago as I think everyone in this room agrees. Yeah, so that's it. As it is now, that's good, but I hope we can find a way to have the capacity to actually follow through on everything we've just learned from our community.

Go ahead, Becky. Thanks. So I want to ask about the project list. I remember from my service on the Parks and Rec Commission a significant presentation about the capital projects point system. And I believe, I'm guessing that that's what the numbers on the left-hand side of the project list are. Is that accurate? Yeah. Um, so can you talk a little bit about like many projects don't have points? Like, are we still doing using that system? And can you just talk a little bit. So, um,

actually most of the projects do the active projects are already in process. So it's just denoted as, as active there. Uh, the rest of them are all scored with points that are on the left side. So you can see, uh, after the words active, you get down into, uh, and then it drops a little bit, and then the numbers bump back up to 66. We've got numbers on most of these. The ones that don't, which is like the SPAC flooring replacement, Shell Park Aquatic Center, the fire training facility came in later, so that wasn't ranked. The diesel exhaust system project is actually already complete. So that could have been moved up. Window replacement was the other one that we added this year. So it wasn't in that previous CIP discussion. We approved that a couple of meetings ago to replace the windows on the south side of the building. When you get down below,

I'm surprised in particular, I'll just say, because I think these projects have been around for a while, the SPAC flooring replacement and Hanley House repairs. I mean, I'm genuinely curious. Are we not using that capital point scoring process

anymore? Going forward, we're going to try to phase that out. Really, we're at a point where the projects that you're seeing being funded here are more or less critical maintenance needs. So the flooring at Shaw Park is a great example. The Hanley House exterior repairs that need to be done. If you walked around that building, you can see that there's significant work that needs to happen. And if you look at the projects down below that, you get into all your typical... road alley uh reconstruction sort of projects totally if we started to populate this with with newer type projects i think we would be more reliant on that system but in this maintenance mode um these are all high priority items so it's once we can get those funded then we go ahead and plug them in to the cip and the way this should work is that first year should be projects that you've looked at for multiple years. These new projects should be added when we can to that fiscal year 29 in this example, and then next year they all move up a year, and the next year they all moved up a year. You see these things for four years before we actually pull the trigger and move those into the budget for appropriations. You know we're trying to figure out how long can we go with a lot without a lot of maintenance on these particular things if it needs to be moved up we're doing that because we're basically at the point of failure on them. But we're in a pure maintenance mode, so the scoring is not as important as it once was and we're really looking at project priority versus what we can fund so hopefully that helps but.

Yeah. I mean, so it does. I agree that we seem to be at a place where we are primarily investing in things that need to be done or feel like deferred maintenance and stuff like that. And I am concerned about the idea that we had a point system, um, that like I was educated about and we were using. And that we may or may not use that going forward. And this is the first I've heard about it. So I would just like to offer that feedback. I'd appreciate staff. I'm not saying you have to continue it. Right. But I would actually like to receive that as like a recommendation or information about the process you went through to make that decision. Um, Because that feels like a little bit of a big deal, even though I'm sure it's not something we pass by ordinance. We're

still using it, but I would say it's not as critical as it was. So if you look at some of the 29 projects and 28 projects, you'll see they still have scores. So we're still going through that. If you look up at municipal garage renovation construction below that, you get into 811 at bottom, fire suppression, microsurfacing, clavarac. You can see that. So those are all generally scored, but

it's not going to keep me from approving this. I

guess. Yeah.

I

understand.

I mean, even if what you do is you like modify the point system to say like, this has to be done because it's maintenance I mean the point system accounted for that kind of stuff, maybe it didn't do it well enough, and maybe it needs to be revised like I don't know, or maybe you say, I'm a city manager exempting this from the points process because I say it's important. If you want to do that, that's fine. But I don't want like half point system and F not like, that's all my, that's my preference that I'm sharing with you for future feedback.

I appreciate that. Yeah.

You may have more comments on the plan, but I just want to jump in there because it's a really good question and something that I can completely blew by me. I've just been taking that point system for granted for a while now. But I think there is, we should talk about this at more length, but there ought to be probably some differentiation between just basic maintenance and other projects. And the reason this You probably all know the reason this point system came into being was back in the day, we were doing all kinds of park projects and CCF couldn't really figure out what to prioritize. And we were all like, well, I want this one and I want that one. And so, you know, we had to figure out a way to prioritize it. And Craig came up with this system. One of the big, big factors in the ranking is do you have the money? So while... For example, the ice rink always ranked high. We never had the money, so it never got a good number. So I think it is a good system. With the outcome of our just planning process that we've just had, we are going to have a lot of projects bubble up. Funding will be a factor, and we need a way to prioritize those projects. So I think this system could be amended but i don't know that it's completely broken right yeah and

i would note that a lot of those projects that that get down lower here uh into fiscal 29 and beyond you'll see a lot don't actually fall anywhere on here so parking lot repaving on that project list all the way down and onto the next page those are all projects that come somewhere in the next 10 years so those haven't even been scored yet because they're not coming up but It's something we need to revamp and take a look at, but yeah, those are critical need items that aren't scored that have moved up.

Yeah.

Yes.

It's a

good

question. So the only other feedback I have is that I am in favor of us capping the general fund transfer and working to get to no planned capital, no planned transfer from the capital to the general fund. I would like us to be able to build a budget that intends for that not to happen and only does it in case of some exception or something. Um, and, um, I support the staff recommendation, um, and to proceed with a special obligation bond subject to further discussion. I could have my mind changed shortly. Um, but that I think that works and, um, I think it's really important for us to work on getting this to a place where we are actually investing capital in projects that have the potential to be transformative for the city. So whether it's some cool idea that comes out of our master planning or whether it's sustainability or other like projects things that will help us accomplish the goals in our planning we need to figure out how to create space for that um and so that's what i look forward to doing good alderman Gary Feder

question. So the only other feedback I have is that I am in favor of us capping the general fund transfer and working to get to no planned capital, no planned transfer from the capital to the general fund. I would like us to be able to build a budget that intends for that not to happen and only does it in case of some exception or something. Um, and, um, I support the staff recommendation, um, and to proceed with a special obligation bond subject to further discussion. I could have my mind changed shortly. Um, but that I think that works and, um, I think it's really important for us to work on getting this to a place where we are actually investing capital in projects that have the potential to be transformative for the city. So whether it's some cool idea that comes out of our master planning or whether it's sustainability or other like projects things that will help us accomplish the goals in our planning we need to figure out how to create space for that um and so that's what i look forward to doing good alderman fader

comments questions

so as i understand the real the only real issues tonight are uh adopting the project list and agreeing to the transfer on the cap i'm fine with both of those yeah thank you

okay very good

David and I had talked about this earlier, and so similar to Alderman Gary Feder's comments, it seems to me that this is largely to help the city staff prepare the budget and help us move forward. So The real discussion, I think, mirrors the one that you talked about before in terms of what other revenue sources or how we're going to generate that. And that is where we can really be strategic. So I'm fine with this as well, although I do have a question. It's just not clear to me why you gave us all these pieces of paper. And I can read the differences, but I just wonder why you decided it was important for us to see this so is there something that you want to draw our attention to and

David and I had talked about this earlier, and so similar to Alderman Fader's comments, it seems to me that this is largely to help the city staff prepare the budget and help us move forward. So The real discussion, I think, mirrors the one that you talked about before in terms of what other revenue sources or how we're going to generate that. And that is where we can really be strategic. So I'm fine with this as well, although I do have a question. It's just not clear to me why you gave us all these pieces of paper. And I can read the differences, but I just wonder why you decided it was important for us to see this so is there something that you want to draw our attention to and

the reason you got all of these pieces of paper, the smaller eight and a half by 11 is this is the five year capital plan. These are the

Oh, the big

ones. I understand what it says. I don't know why we needed to look at it. I'm sorry. I thought you had the smaller one. On the big one, the reason I gave this to you was I'd heard from some that it was unwieldy to try to look at it on a computer screen. It's not much better on this, but at least you can lay these out and kind of see the differences.

But you were wondering, next to each other.

Yeah, I guess maybe let me ask it a different way, which is why were these scenarios considered important enough to go through? And so in other words, is there some kind of financial impact of all of this other than the obvious of putting more money and putting less money in and using a different bond? I get that. But I just wondered, it seemed like it was clear this was the best one. So why did we consider

these?

It was a request from Alderman Jeffery Yorg that had asked for the information some different ways or coming up with a way to present the material where you could see the various options. So at the retreat, what I was doing was if you remember, I was changing numbers and you could kind of see what the impact was but this gives you kind of the end result of each of those things in one place because I know we're probably coming back to the discussion of special obligation versus general And I wanted you to be able to see the impact of those things. Also, as far as the general fund transfer, I think it's important to realize what happens if you were to eliminate that altogether. So that's all it is. It's just showing you your options as we move forward through those discussions. Then I will

It was a request from Alderman York that had asked for the information some different ways or coming up with a way to present the material where you could see the various options. So at the retreat, what I was doing was if you remember, I was changing numbers and you could kind of see what the impact was but this gives you kind of the end result of each of those things in one place because I know we're probably coming back to the discussion of special obligation versus general And I wanted you to be able to see the impact of those things. Also, as far as the general fund transfer, I think it's important to realize what happens if you were to eliminate that altogether. So that's all it is. It's just showing you your options as we move forward through those discussions. Then I will

yield to Alderman

Jeffery Yorg.

York.

I love that Rick said it seemed obvious that the staff recommendation was the

best one. So Alderman Holm can be mad at me when he's got extra paper. But so first off, David, thank you for pulling this together because, you know. Thank you. The short part of why I was asking it, and we'll obviously get to more later, is I felt like we were, as we were moving a bunch of stuff on the Excel spreadsheets during the meeting, I think we could all track it generally, but I wanted to be able to actually see... My first quest was just get the spreadsheets myself and mess around with them. And then I figured maybe it was better if I just had David figure out how he wanted to present it. But I wanted us to be able to at least see for future discussions... like David was saying, if we move the transfer, what does that do? If we add a different sales tax, what does that to, if we move from special law of the general obligation, what does that due to the bottom line? Cause we're all, cause if you remember that day and then David reiterated it, we're basically at a critical maintenance capital mode. So I was like, okay, I want to see the numbers in front of us and I want to be able to talk to as a group when we have this meeting with the numbers in front what it actually looks like if we decide to do different things, which kind of piggybacks in on what the mayor had talked about by looking at all the revenue streams. So that was kind of the thinking behind asking for them. Just a couple of things and a couple of questions. I meant to email you all and I just didn't get around to it, but I talked to David, found out some additional information of how the city of Crestwood deals with their version of the Hanley House that I think has some interesting, potentially interesting avenues that could mix with us and ccf so i know david kind of took that away and they're going to kind of at least connect with crestwood and see if um see if we can learn anything from that maybe do some of that um i'm good with the cap on the transfer not as good on the special obligation but i'm okay with the idea that we're going to replace the municipal garage not the public works facility i don't need tony coming back to get me um but i'm good with with moving forward with that one question with that though David, you mentioned that if we decided to do the bond in March, whether either one, or if we had went to the voters in March and did it, we'd have to incur some costs now. What kind of numbers are we talking about from a cost standpoint? And do we have enough money in the capital fund to actually float that without causing us too much of a problem?

There's plenty of money in the capital fun to, to float the cost. We're just looking at design costs, which shouldn't be significant. You're looking at, um, I can't remember what we had in there, probably about a million dollars or so. Okay,

um on the fire protection facility. We're paying for that out of cash, not any sort of other bonding right? It looks like it's just two line items of a 1,000,000 plus. You guys may have covered this before I got on the board, but

Yes, I can explain the project. So what we have is design that would happen some this year a little bit, but design into 2025 and then construction in 25 and 26. And so that's why that project is split over the two years. That's 1.7 million. It's 1.7 billion. We're closer to 2 million all in. Again, we're going to have some design costs that's incurred this year. We then on the revenue side of things, if you look at revenue, That was going to be my next question. If you look at that breakdown project related revenues, other grants and donations, that's 689 and 641. That's revenue coming from our partner cities. So basically Maplewood, Richmond Heights, Clayton, and Brentwood, we train together. We have a training commission that we've set up. We've also set up a commission for the fire training center project. And so right now we try to lease space at fire training facilities in the area. There aren't many, we can't get much time to train. We found an area in Shrewsbury, our property that we have a lease on now where we could actually build our own facility. And so the plan is to split that four ways. But one of the entities, one of the four has to actually Put the cash to build the facility and that's us. So we'll get reimbursements along the way from our partners in that project. And then, again, we're just paying it for it out of the capital fund no bonding or anything. There is a grant application that's currently pending that could pay up to 50%, and we should get word on whether or not we'll receive that grant within the next month or so.

And I assume just from a legal standpoint, they can't get out of it. I know it sounded like one of the cities was kind of in some cold feet, but I don't know if that's really the case. They

could get out of the construction part at this point. And the other three cities would have to decide if we want to move forward or not. Okay. And so if we get to that point, then we'll have that discussion. But we don't intend to incur any major expenses on the design side or anything until we know for sure that everybody's going in the way we had set out to do it. If something changes with that, then we'll have further discussion on it. But I think we're all somewhat confident that it's going to move forward.

The only last question that I saw, and it's an unfunded project, but I saw you got an unfunded $500,000 line item for the Livable Communities Master Plan recommendation. Was that just, I mean, it's unfunded, but is that- That was something that we had

temporarily funded in there, and we decided to just go ahead and pull it down to unfunded for now for fiscal year 25. We'll make adjustments later if we need to, but we didn't know if we should put some placeholder amount in, assuming that we would do something. in fiscal 25, but we have no idea what that would be or what it might cost. So we're just going to scrap that for now. And then when we have some more clarity on where we're going with the plan, then we'll act accordingly. Okay. Thanks. Thank you.

Very good. Any other discussion? Okay. Alderman McAndrew.

I will move to approve resolution number 2024-08 approving the fiscal year 2025-2029 capital improvement plan. Second.

Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay. Done. Alright, that concludes our business agenda. We can do a roundtable. We can start over here with our new Mayor Pro Tem, Bridget.

We had a plan Commission meeting and the dispensary was brought up and we talked a lot about the comprehensive plan Catherine came in and presented it was great and various members of the architectural review thank Mission asked various questions and it was a good great presentation so

yeah moments there from them from the ARB

No, I think generally everybody was very pleased with the plan that there was just, it was so comprehensive. It was, you know, it's breath, you know, I mean, it was hard to get through it, but hard just because it was so lengthy, but everybody seemed very complimentary. You know, again, I'm not an expert in the field and the people that were, you know, Steve was very complimentary and Helen was everybody who kind of has seen these plans before. I thought it was very well done. So

it

was great. Yep.

Well, the meeting that I had in the last two weeks was sustainability. And I think you all heard a great presentation on that already. And I meant that when I said that she inspires everybody to actually put in the work because it's heard. And I know Matt puts a ton of work too, which is great and makes it so effective. We have... one carol klein is meeting with neighbors who have rain gardens and natural plantings or native plantings with one of the high school interns to do articles about about that so it goes from that all the way up to what she was talking with benchmarking in the buildings and people and one of the powerful things about the committee as well as as the committee members do say what they're interested in whether it be the emissions whether it be the native planning things like that and follow up on it So it was, and it did tie in well with when the Mayor's Youth Advisory Council and somebody was talking about supporting, I think it was Rain Gardens or something else with incentives or something else by the city. So we just have to keep her leadership

with

us.

I was glad she talked about being back here in a year. Yeah, that was a good time. I made note of that. So all

the women in this hell, your turn.

Yeah, just a few things. I attended the Municipal League installation dinner at which our own Mayor Michelle Harris was the outgoing president. So she presided over the evening and did a phenomenal job. It was a really great run of show for those of you who've been at prior dinners. It was really just a great evening. It was a very nice tone and pace and everything. And the speaker that I believe you were instrumental in bringing in, Dr. Jodi Sowell from the Missouri Historical Society, gave an amazing, dynamic, captivating, inspiring presentation on St. Louis. The headline is like, Hi, I'm St. Louis. I don't believe we've met. And like things you might not know about St. Louis that we can be proud of or inspired by or interested in. And so it was awesome. I would like go see that again in a second. I would love everyone to be able to see it. I've like looked online. I couldn't find a recorded version online yet. So hopefully we can figure that out. So it was really great. Thank you for your service, both your service to the league in the last year and in prior years and just the evening itself. I met with a newly elected official from Webster Groves, Jamie Hasselmeyer, who has a particular passion for sustainability and is working to build like a collaborative coalition of local elected officials modeled after an organization called Climate Action KC. So, I tried to connect her to Susan also and I've been trying to introduce her to some other folks I know in other communities. So I think that's exciting it feels like they, she was there with Mayor Laura Arnold. And another woman from the council and Webster groves at the dinner too so it was just great to kind of feel some energy and collaboration on all variety of topics. And then other than that, I've spent. many of my hours the last couple weeks at meetings that WashU and Concordia jointly hosted with our neighborhoods to talk about their plans for the project. So I think We have a little more work to do to help people understand the benefits of going to the overlay district and what the actual like processes will be and I know on a and David have have plans related to that. I think it's interesting. that like when we were hosting the meetings, it felt like so many of the questions were for WashU and when WashU was hosting the meetings, It felt like so many other questions for us. And that might just be perception, you know, like you notice that, but Overall, I thought it was an improvement. I heard a number. I felt like I heard a number of things from Wash U that I had not heard them actually say out loud before necessarily. And so I made a note of all of those in the movie. I think they're just kind of generally important in terms of, you know, how like the number of people that they'll have, they figured out, like even if they maxed out everything, they could potentially move there. It'd be 1200 people. And so, you know, I think that gives us a lot of room to really tighten the restrictions and in favor of like our residential neighborhoods that surround the site. So yeah, Looking forward to continuing to move forward on that. And thank you for your continued work. I know you were at all the meetings, too, Anna.

Alderman Gary Feder.

Alderman Fader.

Well, I was sorry to miss the municipal dinner, but I did go to my granddaughter's high school graduation. And David Sun was also one of the awardees there. And it was a great evening, a tad long. It's 240 students crossing the stage. But it was a really neat event at Chaffetz. And so that was great. And the other thing I would mention, which was kind of neat, was I went to the Chamber of Commerce program. They have them periodically at the Clarendale Center. and the new general manager of the Muny was the speaker. He's great, and it really reminded me what an incredible asset the Muny is, because he talked about the fact that people in theater all across the country are dying actually to come to the Muny and perform, because at 11,000 seats, biggest theater in Broadway is 1,400. So the opportunity to perform in front of 11,000 people is really something. So anyway, that was a need. And the final comment about the weekend was the only four hours where it didn't rain on Sunday was when we had a party for my daughter, my granddaughter in our backyard. So the gods were with us on Sunday. So that worked out very well. Thanks.

So Gary and I also attended, after our strategic planning session, the board meeting of the Clayton Community Foundation. And so there were a couple of themes that ran through that. One was financial. They've changed their appeal to a spring appeal. And so they're The timing of their fundraising is different, and they're unsure how that's going to play out. Teamed with that, Centene asked for their $2 million back, and that was delivered back to them. The positive side of that is that the organization was able to earn interest on that money, and Centene did not ask for that back, nor did the agreement provide for that. So that was round numbers, another $40,000, $50,000 of additional money for the organization this year. then the other aspect of the meeting was largely lots of presentations. And so Jake Reby got up on the public art advisory and educated all of us about the wonderful sculpture that we have and the value and how it's increasing in value. And it was just occurred to me how unaware I was of who the various sculptors are and how much we have and who's in there. And there's a website apparently for this. So I need to figure that out. There is an app for that. I just don't know about it. And then Tony and Ana gave their presentations. And so if we didn't hear enough about it at our strategic planning, we got to hear even more about it. So the organization is well aware of all of our planning efforts. I wanted to also just talk a little bit about what Becky had already referenced in terms of the neighborhood meetings. So what I found, so again, this is Wash U and Concordia putting on rather than the city. And so sort of the evolution of this is the discernment between primary uses versus accessory uses. And at least in my observation, I think we as a city tried to provide a great deal of flexibility for the users of this site, as well as for the city to be able to enforce this. But some of these accessory uses I think cause the neighbors unnecessary consternation and may not be as important to WashU to begin with. So there's at least an opportunity to narrow. And so going through this iterative process, while it can be very lengthy, there's new people that turn out sometimes and you get new input. And so that's all very valuable and so that's helpful. So just in terms of future discussions, there have been a few people that are rather pointed about asking WashU about pilots and what's the public benefit of going through all of this. And WashU is incredibly skilled at never saying no, but saying yes to what they do do. And so the whole aspect of the public benefit in terms of pedestrian ways and other things will be interesting when we get to that point. And then I'm not sure how to resolve this from our point of view or WashU's, but there are many residents that truly value the ability to traverse through this site, the pathways that get there and WashU is very willing to put dedicated paths in. And then the residents become very reluctant that it might create noise and crime and become a adverse consequence rather than a benefit. And so it's really hard to figure out how you solve, you know, on one hand, it's one thing. On the other hand, it's another. So I'm not sure where that's going to go. And then finally, I would just echo Becky's comments regarding the there's a small vocal minority that really feels like they're losing some public engagement in the process. And David and I've talked about this a little bit again today. While there may be very strictly a little bit of a change, I don't know that there's like a loss in this. And I don't think we've communicated that as clearly as we can to try to address that. So I know we're going to work on that as we go forward. And I think that'll be very helpful. So that's what I've got.

Okay. Okay,

Jeff. I will ditto the St. Louis Municipal League that Becky already phrased. I went to the dinner as well. I will, for the sake of time, I will say ditto to that comment. Talked to a couple of neighbors and just catching up neighbors in the Southmore community that they really love their traffic light discussion about this whole overlay. Yeah. I think, although the medium may not have expressed this, I get the sense from talking to multiple neighbors in that place, there may be a way forward in terms of the way they may get comfortable with a certain stoplight. Less so at Oak Knoll and more on the south entrance of Southmoor. But, which I don't actually know how practical that is. I know the north side of north entrance of Southmoore is not possible. But something for us to circle up with David maybe more on later. talked to a couple of the school board members just kind of catching up for dinner or um And they brought up a couple different ideas about diversity of housing stock and how the city can help with that, some other topics they want to do. And one of the things that I'm proposed to them, but I won't take credit for it because I think I stole it from one of you all, is this idea of getting together a couple times a year with the district and the city elected officials, not just to catch up for breakfast, but actually with like a subject in mind, like whether that be a diversity of resident discussion or finance discussion or... basically have some topic aligned so we can all kind of get together and talk through it to both continue the relationship, but be more than just let's catch up and talk about each other's kids and lives and like just breakfast. So they seem, some of the ones I talked to seem to be mental to it. I'll throw it out to how we want to do that to talk about a later date, but just as an idea.

Well, a couple of good topics will be what we learned from our comprehensive planning and what they're going to learn from their facilities planning. Yeah.

Yeah, to me it was like anything that we both as two different elected groups are going to need to work on. I'd rather have the discussion even if it's an hour and we realize it hasn't been solved. At least it's a conversation. But yes, those are some of the obvious ones. I have my first park and rec meeting next week. So I will have more for that when I go to that meeting. uh and i think that's basically it my thoughts

very good thank you all i really don't i really don't have anything um uh the i will say that just the landscape task force is moving ahead with various things um we're going to be working on the osage project tomorrow at a work session so we'll see how that can move forward i was doing a lot of reading about it this afternoon um And luckily, we have some amazing volunteers in that group that are historians in their own right and that can help us with this. And I will be going to the East-West Gateway Council of Governments meeting tomorrow morning. It's downtown. It's all of the counties in the region. And I've mentioned this before, but as part of my Municipal League responsibilities, I go to those board meetings. We will be talking about a bunch of stuff that I have no idea what it is. It's all transportation related. I think I've been doing this for a year and I still don't understand some of those projects. They're just kind of ongoing and You know other people have the idea, but we will be talking about the crime reduction plan and that's always the most important thing that we discuss and so hopefully. we'll have more progress on that moving forward, they need to hire a sort of a director to manage the plant, the execution of the plan. Now, and that'll be our topic so it's moving forward, I just want everyone to know because it's critical to our success as a community, you know at large yeah. And also, I want to know what awards were one at the high school graduation and tell me you guys did did Henry win an award.

No, just

graduation.

I was being very generous that they were awarded their degree.

That's huge in and of itself.

There were some people who had asterisks by their name. My granddaughter and David's son were not among

them. I just took that to mean maybe there was something else. I was

being generous, I think.

okay I don't think they give awards I mean I think everybody there's a big awards dinner or there's a big award thing like a month ago so yes separate yep

I didn't get an invite for that one.

I

didn't know about it. It would have been even longer. All right, if there's nothing further.

It just occurred to me, I have a question. And that is the Missouri legislature wrapped up their session. And I don't recall seeing anything that was particularly adverse to us. But my general question is, if there was something that impacts us, can we make sure we include that on an upcoming session?

Yeah, we started getting the updates. This is what had happened at the end. There were a few things that were tacked on the way they typically are. So I think I know our lobbyist is just about done sorting through it. The Municipal League sent out some preliminary information on it as well. So we'll get something sent out to the board so you can see it.

And I think I'm not sure about this, but I think that you all are probably on the mailing list for the Municipal League. So you do get their newsletter and every newsletter has a legislative report in it. if you want to look at it that way. But David's been sending his out. I didn't feel the need to send another one, so you'll get it. But the main thing is they're, well, maybe it's not positive for everyone, but they did not succeed in passing reformed referendum legislation. So to amend the- Yeah, the initiative petition

remains a democratic process.

That remains a tool for for citizens to use thus far. So anyway, all right. With no further ado, we can be adjourned. Motion to adjourn? Second. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay, very good. Thank you all.