March 25, 2025 — Meeting Transcript

All right. Well, welcome to our March 25th Board of Aldermen meeting. I'd like to call the meeting to order and we have a discussion session up front starting out with a report from our Architectural Review and Plan Commission activities for the past year.

Sure. Okay, so as you guys heard from our discussion about boards and commissions last week, we have the Planning Commission Architecture Review Board, which are two separate entities technically, but are made up by the same members. So last year, the Planning Commission Architecture View Board, there was a summary of the annual report that was included within your packets. I'm just going to really briefly touch on a few points there. The overall number of applications that went before the plan commission ARB during the calendar year did drop pretty significantly from the prior calendar year. We've addressed most of that drop is due to the number of planned unit development projects that went before the board during the calendar year of 23. And as it says in the report, development projects require multiple application types. So that really brings the volume up when you have a bunch of those applications. That go through the process this calendar year we did not have that same number of planning and development so that dropped, we also made some changes. To our administrative process which allowed more application types to go through administrative approval when they're actually getting a construction permit such as solar panels. some signage, retaining walls, some of the common elements that you see improvements within our single family areas within the front yards. So all of that was then changed to just going straight through the permit review process for construction. And so that added up to that significant decrease for overall application types. The projects that we see the most of have been pretty consistent across the years. Architecture Review Board makes up a high volume of the overall applications. Single family residential architectural review is what you see most of. And then the major initiatives, the plan commission ARB. So the plan commission is the body, as you might recall, that adopts the comprehensive plan, Clayton Tomorrow 2040. So big major initiative from the last calendar year was actually wrapping that process up, going through the reviews of the recommendations and adopting it. So that included some steering committee meetings and general plan commission meetings that members attended. And then we also had the overlay district process for the Wash U and Concordia project. So those were the major initiatives that they went through. And then setting up the priorities, which we're in the process of right now for actually implementing our comprehensive plan. So many of those priorities are actually going to continue through the calendar year 25 and so on. So that's a really brief summary of what the plan commission ARB was up to last year. If anyone has any questions.

Do you have anything to add?

No, I don't. But I'll just say that, I mean, not surprisingly, Anan, Ryan and Hobie do an excellent job of presenting to us. And so I thank her for that. And it is a great group of people who really, you know, spend a lot of time really studying the plans. And I think it's really overall just a great group. And obviously Steve does a really nice job of chairing the meetings.

Yeah, this is probably one of the most intensive committees to be on from a resident standpoint since they meet twice a month and there's pretty hefty kind of review and input that they have to go through before it. So we're lucky that we have a group of people that actually spend the time to familiarize themselves with the materials before each meeting and spend time reviewing things. So that helps a lot from a staff perspective of being able to accomplish the goals.

Absolutely. Yeah. Any other questions or comments from anybody? Yeah, Rick. I was just gonna ask a

question. Is it is it true that text amendments are typically like were initiating them as the city? Is that the right way to think about that? The majority of them

are city-initiated. You can, as a property owner or resident, initiate them as well, but the majority of the time we sponsor those, even if it was a conversation that started maybe from a development standpoint, the city really has historically been the one behind most of that. The rezoning element that's often combined with a text amendment, those are... I would say in the last five years, a lot of that has come from property owner driven requests. So either they're going to a plan unit development or they're wanting to rezone their property to allow different style of uses in different commercial districts. But so that's kind of combined with the rezoning and the text amendment being the amending the zoning map.

Yeah. So like is the rezoning from last year actually the hotel demand PUD or is Like, that's what that is, right? We didn't rezone anything else. No. And

so the hard part is some of the numbers are going to be the timing of applications is unique. So we have a lot of applications that will start the review process and they'll actually apply in one calendar year. And then they'll stretch into the following calendar year for approval. So Hotel DuMont is one of those where we started a lot of the work on it in calendar 23, but it went through and actually got approved in 24.

Thanks. I don't have any other questions or comments. Great. Let's go around, Gary.

Just a comment I've made before, Ana. I've noted that when I attend commission meetings, just as a member of the audience, I still find it, I think, frustrating for the audience that sometimes the commission members have all the detailed plans in front of them, and when a discussion is pursued... there's obviously an intelligent discussion by the members, but the people in the audience frequently have no idea what's being talked about. And my suggestion was, if architectural plans, maybe six or seven pages, I'm not suggesting that those be distributed to people in the audience. But a lot of times there is nothing up on the screen And it seems to me we ought to do a better job of finding at least on every project, some kind of graphic so that an audience member, even though they can't get into the minutiae, at least would have some sense of what's going on. So I don't know if that.

It has happened. Yeah. So Ryan, pretty much for all of, I would say the last calendar year, he's been, yeah, he pulls up some element of a plan, whether it's a site plan or rendering something like that. He's even started using elements of the site plan. He'll kind of color and annotate them. and show that as he's going through his staff report. So I think he heard your recommendation when you made it previously, and I think he's done a good job of trying to bring the audience into the-

I really wasn't fishing for a compliment. I obviously haven't been there in the last few months. But anyway, I'm glad that happened. One other just procedural thing, and I think you and I know, and Bridget and I have dealt with properties, at least in our ward, where something comes up for approval, but it's got some history before the approval is like- you know, someone clearly didn't comply with building permits or there's a history of not being very attentive once the plan is approved to actually implement it. And I think this sort of procedural issue that's come up in the past is that that's not clearly imposing requirements or added scrutiny by the building department or by your office is really not part of P&Z and ARB. And I just wanted to just address that again, because I think that's frustrating for people. Plans get approved. There's really no basis not to approve them, but there's history there that suggests once approved, based on past history, things are not going to move very well. And so I think you have informally said, hey, we'll keep an eye on this project. Is that something you think procedurally we could do a better job on or is it we just have to live with that process?

Really, I think that our inspectors have been doing a great job of trying to keep an eye on certain properties that we know of history. A lot of that's going to come more through the enforcement and monitoring under the construction permit side though, as opposed to through the architecture review board or plan commission side. So a lot of times if there aren't any at that point in time, any active violations pending, we don't really have the grounds to not proceed through the zoning or architecture review process. But the construction permit process is where we can try and address that a little bit better. Okay. Well,

I think you all do a great job. It's an excellent commission and board and you do a terrific job. So thank you.

Great, great.

Great. Just a couple of quick questions. You mentioned the change and used the example of the solar panels for an administrator versus a committee type of action. Has that change or similar changes improved turnaround time from a resident point of view?

Yes, so really the big goal is for the smaller projects that are really straightforward and meet our kind of minimum guideline requirements to just go straight to the construction process and that permitting process. And so it does cut down on their time because they don't have to come to a meeting. And it only happens twice a month. So that could impact the schedule depending on when they actually submitted previously. Whereas now that review, the administrative architecture review is just baked into the overall permit review timeline. So it could have a pretty substantial impact on the turnaround time from a resident's perspective.

Are there any other initiatives or is there anything that you're concerned about from a turnaround time that we should take a look at over the next year?

Well, I think that would have I would have to look a little. So for this, I really focused the prep on the plan commission side of things as opposed to overall permit review process with the timelines for the plan commission architecture board since they meet twice a month. And we already allow people to submit plans and things just two weeks prior to that meeting. I don't know that there's really a way to streamline that anymore. But from we're always looking to improve the resident experience. So it's something that we can kind of keep an eye out as we move forward.

Okay. In terms of the activity here, I'm wondering, you explained the reasons for it, and I know a lot of it's the ARB aspect of things, but I'm wondering, is there anything that we should draw from this as a predictor of the future regarding development or permits and fees? Is this a concerning item, or can we not conclude anything from this?

I don't think we can really conclude much because even as you look at the overall chart that goes back to 2006, there's always been kind of an ebb and flow every few years. So I wouldn't say that we should all have a lot of fear from that drop from 23 to 24. It's definitely reflective of different trends that have become popular for how people manage their own houses during COVID. And after COVID, we saw a really significant increase in people doing projects within their yard space. So a lot more pools, additions of patios and decks and sunrooms and that sort of thing really went up and just overall kind of investment in some of their sites. And so that I think drove that couple years that you saw peaked last calendar year and dropped back down.

Okay. And the last one is just a question. You identified your 2025, at least from our master plan initiatives. Just wondering any concerns about addressing those over the course of this year, just from a time standpoint?

No, I think this year it's worked so far in our fiscal year. So it's a little bit hard because we do this annual report on the calendar year, but then we've been setting our implementation goals on the fiscal year. So, so far this fiscal year, I think it's worked really well establishing the right number of priorities with you all during the annual kind of meeting that we had and then breaking those out. So far, we haven't had any significant issues kind of keeping up with that workload. So I would see it kind of continuing in the same path into the next fiscal year.

Great, thank you. Just kind of keeping with obviously the conversation last week and then some of the stuff this week is anything that we as a board could do in terms of adjustments to ARB or the planning commission or things that we should be thinking about for the next year that could provide help to streamline the process, make the process more difficult, like whatever that is.

really the key to keeping that board operational is having people that are invested and actually spending the time required to show up to those meetings, which we don't have any issues with right now. So we haven't had, you know, issues for meetings that delay things for applicants or anything like that, which has been great. A lot of what we're doing right now with the comp plan, I think is going to help us kind of in a, formalized manner, tackle some of the larger issues. I know, as Becky mentioned before, kind of what is the architecture review board focusing on within reviews? Right now we just kicked off the neighborhood standard review process, which was another one of our priorities. that will help us reevaluate our current architectural guidelines document. So that will be a big one that will drive kind of how the ARB moves forward in the next few years and what they really focus on from architecture standpoint. So really, I think from you all filling the board, there's not really anything I can ask you to do differently.

And question for you, maybe a question for David too, like capacity-wise, do you guys feel like you're good to be able to serve the needs of the city from an ARB and a planning commission standpoint?

Yep.

That's all I got. Thank you, Mayor.

Okay. I don't really have anything other than just to say thank you. And I know that our commission works really hard and we really appreciate that and hope you'll pass that on when you meet with them next. And we appreciate their expertise also and also your leadership in helping them get through all this sort of complicated stuff. So thank you. Okay, if we don't have anything further on that we can move on to our discussion of downtown short term rentals and we have some guests here who are interested in that so. We may ask you to come up and address some questions but we'll take it will go through this first and we've got a lot of information that our director of planning has. collected to share with us about what different cities do, et cetera, so that we can craft maybe our own kinds of regulations. Cause this is kind of a really new thing for, um, we won't be voting on anything tonight. We'll be, if we need an ordinance, which I'm sure we will change, uh, we'll do that at a, at a regular meeting like that starts at seven in the in the future, but not too long in the future, hopefully. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

All right. Um, so I'm just going to really quickly go through the staff or the staff memo that was included just to highlight a few pieces and then we'll open it up for discussion. So after the last discussion session where we introduced the concept of short-term rentals, there was a lot of positive outlook on it. And there were also some concerns, which is, uh, very common across the country when you think about short-term rental and how people respond to that. So just to frame it right now, we have very clear wording within our code that prohibits short-term rental, and that's really based on the 30 days or less for renting that unit. But when we wanted to look at potential ways to address some of the concerns while allowing some of the flexibility that this use might offer for some of our building owners throughout downtown, there are really seven categories that I think we should focus on to potentially regulate the use, starting with the definition where it might be allowed or prohibited, how we permit it or some registration process, the occupancy of this use within the units, parking, looking at operations, and then some penalties. So I'll just really quickly cover what we had within the table that was included in your packet to get this information. We looked through different ways that the use of short-term rentals is regulated across the country. We looked at some kind of lessons learned, best practice documents. And then pulled some information from communities that share similarities with us. A lot of short-term rental uses are regulated in larger cities or cities that have a really high tourism draw. And so with us within downtown, it's a little bit of a different context, but I tried to pull some similar communities that would have people visiting the city for similar reasons. So they might be close to a university or a college location. They have some sort of entertainment venue, not a huge population if we could approach that. So some of the best practices when we think about the definition, the first thing that we really need to do is set what type of the use we're looking at with short-term rental. A common way, slightly different names depending on what code you look at it. But essentially there are three categories of short-term rental hosted where there's the primary resident who lives in this dwelling unit. So it could be a house or a condo, apartment, etc., But they stay within that unit, and then they host a guest who's either renting a room or maybe a garage or something of that nature at the same time as the primary resident remains on site. The unhosted would be where the primary resident, that's where they would normally live, but they're going to vacate for a period of time and turn over their primary residence to a guest. And then dedicated, where there is no primary resident of that unit, the unit is always leased through a short-term rental. And then another best practice is to really set our minimum and maximum duration. So a preliminary recommendation from staff would be to look at a minimum of 24 hours, a maximum of 30 days, and then to really focus in on the dedicated type of short-term rental. I think that would fit best within the properties that we're considering within downtown and also would allow us to tailor the rest of the regulations to follow differently from how we might regulate a primary resident that's temporarily leasing. So when we think about the location, a lot of communities will limit to specific zoning districts or maybe an overlay area or some other target. The goal here is to find compatible uses and really development characteristics or other physical features that limit the impacts of this use on the character of the area. So for our recommendation, it would be to look at our downtown core area. So this map to try and kind of bring into context what that means, it highlights the age of the building on the property. So the darker the blue color of the parcel, the newer the building was constructed. So something that we've been kind of talking about within the comprehensive plan is areas, how can we kind of help spur reuse or kind of reactivize or reactivating some of our older office buildings without losing them just straight to redevelopment. The orange dots, this doesn't cover everything. This is just a preliminary look on where there's currently office space. in some of the older office buildings that is actively being advertised for lease. So you can see there are somewhat some concentrations of the orange dots there. So looking again at our location best practices, something that we also recommend is adding in some sort of buffer requirements or density limits if we're worried about that co-location. It was a common feature that we saw in a lot of the communities that we reviewed, so it would kind of limit. There's a lot of uses that have similar things like gas station where you separate them so that the impacts are not felt as harshly within one given area. So we saw anything from a 500 foot buffer to 1,000 feet, to just the overall quantity of permits within a given area being capped. So that's another one that we would

recommend. I know you're saying this, but it really helps me to see the recommendation, which is blocked by the bar on the Zoom. Does anybody have the ability to hide that? Is your mouse working? Yeah. There we go. Thank you so much. It just really helps me to buffer between properties. Like what does that actually mean?

So that would mean, so if we chose one of the, let me see if I can get the mouse work because that'd be easier on the map. There we go. Okay, so if this orange dot were the location of a short term rental and we had a buffer requirement, for example, of 1000 feet or I think I put in the staff report looking at blocks. So one on a block. If this orange If this orange dot were the location of an existing short-term rental, then we wouldn't allow another short-term rental to be permitted within that buffer zone. So if it was a block, then we couldn't have any other across the street here because they wouldn't, or 1,000 feet across would have to be for the next orange one. So that would just essentially prohibit what you have down in this area where you get properties kind of all adjacent to each other that would all have short-term rentals. So that's what the buffer would do. It would create that separation. If you had the overall cap with the number of permits within downtown, we might say we're only going to grant six permits to short-term rentals within downtown, but they could be located anywhere. So in that case, you could get all six of your orange dots lined up in one block on Bonham. but then there wouldn't be anywhere else within downtown. So they're kind of approaching it from two different angles. And then one way that we're also recommending, especially because we have a mixture in terms of the actual square footage of buildings within downtown, we have some condos, some apartments, some smaller office buildings, some large office buildings. We were recommending looking at some sort of cap for what building would qualify for So a building in this example would be if they could only have four units in that building. So Clayton-on-the-Park under this example wouldn't qualify to even ask for a short-term rental license because they have more than four units in their building. You could conversely say, as some communities in the examples I showed you, they say for a multifamily building that there's a cap on 12% of those units could be short-term rental and the rest would have to be typical occupancy. So there's a lot of ways to approach that. But based on the conversation at the last meeting, we felt that the goal seemed to be headed in the direction of how can we help some of the smaller office buildings that Are looking to be repurposed convert into this use, and so that lent itself more instead of a percentage of units more towards just a cap on the number of units. Okay, so for permits and registration. The purpose of this process is really to complete your initial review and then also have some element of kind of management and tracking and compliance. It's not the actual enforcement but it's really tracking what those conditions are. So the best practices are the initial review, which is often a conditional use permit, which is a process that we already have established, which is nice. And that allows you to do that initial review of the business plan for a specific location and then have some sort of license or permit. Some people use a business license, other use an occupancy permit. For the annual inspections and compliance checks. So that's where we could require that they provide information to us. And so we would recommend using both of those procedures. The example on your screen is actually a document that New Orleans requires is posted. And so this kind of leans back to that annual inspections. We can make sure that some of those operational requirements that we'll talk about in a minute are being maintained on the property throughout the life of that use.

And real quick on those duties. Do you think we would need extra staff to do those inspections? Or is it really – I mean, my assumption is it depends on the number we have. But at this point, given what your guys are thinking, could we do that with the folks we have?

Yes. So we would be able to, especially given the – likelihood of a smaller number. I think if we got into a discussion of not capping the number within the downtown to start, that would be a different conversation. But I think we'll probably head with a cap at the beginning that will allow us to evaluate it. And especially if we're talking about buildings with four units or less, that's something that we would know is an annual requirement coming. We'd be able to work with the management company to pre-schedule those. So I don't think it would be a significant issue. Mm-hmm. So for occupancy, this is where we start to address the density of the actual people, the humans, the guests that are coming into the city. And so this looks at overcrowding, safety elements, et cetera. Really, it starts with understanding our occupancy codes that we already have. So the occupancy for us is driven through our property maintenance code, which attaches a number of maximum occupants for a dwelling unit based on the square footage of bedrooms. That's a standard way that occupancy is set throughout the code. The square footage tells you what it is. What we found in a lot of other communities is instead of just relying on the square footage of bedrooms to determine the number of occupants, they actually put a cap just based on the number of bedrooms. If the unit has three bedrooms, this is the number of occupant total regardless of how big each bedroom is. So that allows the city to really understand going into the process a little bit more about the maximum number of occupants that would be potentially allowed within each unit that's being rented. For parking, this one's pretty straightforward and similar to how we address parking anywhere. Obviously the goal is to mitigate the impacts of more cars using on-street parking. The majority of the issues related to parking come when short-term rental uses are allowed within residential districts, especially residential districts that already rely on street parking. So if we're looking at focusing our short-term rentals within the downtown area, it's a very different parking concern. So we don't have that same issue. The on-street parking is kind of what it is. We would have public parking. So I would recommend a slightly lower parking requirement than we have for dwelling units, which is two per dwelling unit. So I'd recommend lowering that a little bit and then establishing some thresholds within the conditional use permit process that would allow us to on a case-by-case basis even waive that more. So really, we can look at a deeper dive of where these are located and the impacts of those parking might have. But again, we don't have the same concern within our downtown area that short-term guests would be taking parking from long-term residents.

So in this case, you're saying one parking space, does that include street parking that's available? Well,

that's what we would have to explore. So if we got into the process, then we would kind of be able to look more deeply in the parking that's available within downtown. I'd recommend lowering it from what we have right now. A lot of other communities match it. So if they allow short-term rentals within a multifamily district, the short-term rental needs to provide off-street parking the same rate that the multifamily property would next door. That's something I don't think we need to apply in this case in downtown. So I would lower it. And we could look at things like allowing the street parking to qualify because, again, the street parking function with the low density of units that we're looking at, those occupants using a street parking overnight shouldn't really negatively impact our street parking situation.

Yeah, it only becomes an issue during the day if they're time limited. Right.

Yep.

have to

could decide like you know for instance if there's a unit that cannot provide like dedicated parking that's not on the street i mean obviously they would market that dwelling appropriately and say if you need longer term parking you need to explore one of the garages nearby or right a surface lot or whatever the case may be right and then they would ask for that under the cup they'd say we don't have parking available can we go down to zero yes

okay

So the operations and reviews, this is the area where we found the most tailoring of different communities. So it was very clear in certain communities what issues they've had for short-term rentals that they've been dealing with and then addressing them in requirements for the operation. I would say the takeaway from looking at these categories is really just the goal of increasing the lines of communication and the awareness between whoever's managing or marketing those properties, the guests who actually use them and the city. So a lot of the best practices were focused things like the posting from New Orleans that would be visible from the street. So if there were some reason that a police officer was responding to this property for an issue, they wouldn't then have to go and try and track down from somebody who had the license, whoever it is, there would be a contact posting for them on that property visible from the public. Similarly, guests using the units, there would be requirements for what's posted inside of the unit or provided to them as part of the package when they lease. So as part of what they would get from the property manager before they actually lease would be things like how to evacuate or where parking, you know, it would be available. those types of emergency numbers, et cetera. So that's really kind of the communication side of operations. And then additionally, some of the more zoning related aspects of it. So how are we going to manage our garbage recycling? What does the signage look like? Prohibition of really specific activities. So this is something that I I think somebody mentioned in our previous discussion, so there were issues that cities experienced with people actually renting the short-term rental unit for the purpose of having a really large party or a wedding or something like that. So we could really narrow down the aspects and the operation of the use through some of these more specific

requirements. Our family's done Airbnbs or VRBOs a million times, so I mean, when we go into a place, oftentimes it will say all these things like in the book, you know, it'll say, or upon booking, it tells you no parties, you're in a family environment. I mean, all the things. So I always thought that came from the owner. So that would... That would

potentially come from the municipality. Yeah, we found a lot of more,

not all of them, but the majority of the different municipalities that we've actually read their code requirements had some form. Some were really prescriptive of there's going to be a card inside of each door that says this, this, this and this. And others just said you generally need to provide these kind of operational guidelines to your renters. So by us adopting them into the code, it will help our enforcement procedures later. So that's something we'll get into, but like the process of revoking a permit or fines or other features, if we're requiring that they're providing that information and they're not providing it, it just gives us another level of, well, this is where kind of that communication has failed.

Yeah. In the housing area, I know that our fine system going through the court doesn't really seem to do a lot of good. The only thing that does seem to work is a stop work order. And I'm just wondering, is there any parallel here? Because no matter how many you tell people what they can't do, you're probably going to have some violations. And then the question is going to be, What do you do then? And if the fines aren't significant, then violations will reoccur. So maybe that's more of a municipal judge question, but I'm just wondering how we enforce it.

Yeah, so a big part is creating an actual permit, like a process to revoke a permit. So right now within our code, we do have that for a conditional use permit. So we would... make sure that that process is sufficient, work with Kevin to make sure that any sort of fine escalations are included for this use specifically and not just generally relying on that process. But the biggest difference from some of the other problems that you're referring to is that this use would only be granted through this permit or license process. So if they continue to violate that and we went through the process, so we've outlined to actually revoke that permit, then they wouldn't be able to continue using the property in that way. So it's a little bit different from property maintenance standpoint of they're not cutting their grass and every year we have the same people not cutting their grass.

There's more teeth.

There's a lot more teeth when you talk about actually removing their ability to continue to operate.

Thank you.

Anna, but here it says specific penalties for violations related to guests and owners or managers. I mean, it seems like it would make much more sense to go down that process for the owner or the manager. It really would. I mean, if the guest throws the party, the owner or manager is going to fine them. Right. Which, you know, every time you book, you have a big like they hold a chunk of your money. Yeah.

So the big piece that we'll want to look through is is make sure that we are using whatever is available to us and allowed through our state regulation. So a lot of the penalties are varied based on the different jurisdictions and what different areas we're allowed to do. But the biggest piece is, and in the operational side too, we want to make sure that we're holding the appropriate people accountable or at least the ability to. So if there's something like a huge party that escalates into criminal violations, well, we want to find that person do whatever and process that side but then from the like the more zoning type of the use operation making sure that we have the ability to use fines and or permits all of that procedure appropriately i think will be the best way instead of just relying on our general penalty procedure that we have right now in our code

and then just related to the penalty too if would you envision that one time breaking the party rule or something? Would you imagine having a number of specific

violations before we start the process? Most communities, I mean, this is

an area that Kevin, I'm sure will be able to help us with. Most communities used more general just violation link. First violation is X could potentially be this dollar amount in a fine. But then within the process that would rise to the level of the revoking an actual license or a permit is where there were some more specific call outs. I think we would need to kind of figure out what falls where. I also saw a procedure where in some communities, the city manager can revoke a permit or a license right away. Our conditional use permit process, the board of aldermen is the one who revokes that CUP. So there's a little bit we would have to work out in terms of who can do what and what we call it specifically and what we just leave more general because we don't want to get into the game where we're trying to predict everything that could go wrong and then we miss something. All right. So really, it's just the next steps are for you all to kind of talk about this, ask any additional questions. And then if you were to want to proceed with allowing this within the downtown, we would go through the process of actually drafting the parameters, the requirements that would go into the text amendment.

Yeah. Did you? I think I agree. Like, I'm in favor of moving forward. I believe that all of the recommendations that you made Made sense to me and sounded like the direction that I would support going with one exception, the one that I asked questions about that was related to like limiting or regulating like how many and how close that. I am still confused about that a little bit in terms of really understanding it and I'm also interested in actually like feedback potentially from some of our like condo and apartment owners. I wonder what it would look like for us to ask the CCBA what they think about this. I'm assuming that even if we allowed it, allowed short-term rentals, a condo association could disallow them. And I'd just be curious about what they think about that. I'm not saying that I would support doing what they want, but I would be interested in their thoughts um and so the the thing about four the four units in one property like when we were looking at that block for example and talking about that in combination with a buffer Like, does that mean like if I have a building and I get a short term rental unit in it, then nobody within a thousand feet of me can have a short term rental, but I can have up to four? Correct. Yeah. I don't know about that. Like, I don't know. Maybe that's good. Maybe it's not. Like, I'm curious about like that recommendation. And is part of it because you think specific buildings will be like targeted for development in this way that are well suited to that size? Like, can you say more about...

Yeah. So the way that we were starting to approach this analysis, the... A big part of why staff is supportive of the concept is really to add kind of another option for some of the buildings that are older that have historically been office to go another route with the use other than residential. And so this kind of gives some of those older properties another path that the larger redevelopments don't have. so that they don't just continue to fall into disrepair and then ultimately result in the conglomeration of another half block that's all torn down and turned into a redevelopment. So that's where we were trying to target some of those properties that have maybe a couple of offices that are vacant now, up to four units, but not allow it for some of our larger units. residential because they have residential use that they've found to be successful. So that was the goal behind it. And then in terms of limiting the overall number to start with, that was more just in response to some of the concerns that we heard here and the ability for the city to address how it would impact us from a staffing perspective and enforcement perspective. under knowing that there's a cap and then moving forward we can change from there so we would want to make sure that the cap was appropriate given the types of properties that we want to target for this opportunity so that's something we're starting to look at a little bit deeper into this map would be helpful to formalize what that buffer or overall number might be but the the four units really stem from what types of properties do we think we should target for the opportunity

Okay, that's helpful. And so I just have one more question and then I'll be done. So when we went through the comprehensive planning process and talked about the idea of repurposing office or commercial buildings into residential, there were like real concerns about the practicality of that as it relates to like how they're built and like basic infrastructure, primarily like water and waste and things like that. And so- What I'm starting to guess is that you're thinking about smaller office or commercial buildings that wouldn't face that issue like a big development.

Right. I mean, we want it to be better suited. Yeah. So we want to target ones that are feasible. It's never going to be perfect because we don't know the ins and outs of every... I'm not going to sit down with the building official and inspect the ins and outs But the smaller ones are going to have different requirements when they transition from that use. So in some ways, the potential immediate return on that investment might be better reached through the short term process and just in terms of. what they'll make back in revenue than going to those longer term rentals, just given the ability to compete of a small building with no amenities trying to compete with a brand new apartment building with all the amenities in downtown and the parking and everything else. So that's where we're looking at that that will help potentially help some of those conversions within the smaller buildings, but there's going to be buildings that have the orange dots here that have open office for lease that aren't going to qualify for this program for one reason or other, they might be a larger building, they might really not feasibly be able to do the construction required for the change of use from office to residential because of those other triggers and everything else but it gives you an idea of what might be possible

thank you on it i'm sorry real quick so all

the dots on this building are just smaller office buildings

i mean none of

them i mean not all of them are smaller so really the orange dots some are some are higher but i mean they're all office buildings they are them

are currently like residential, I guess is my point. Yes, the

orange shots are all currently office that have some level of vacancy. So some have higher percentage of office vacancy than others. Some are high rise office, some are just a couple of stories. But when we only use the some of the main services to look up vacancies so that there's likely vacancy in other offices within downtown i didn't even put the orange dots on the most new buildings that also probably have some vacancy because i don't foresee senti and changing floors of their office into a short-term rental so

okay yeah all right over here questions comments

Well, I would certainly encourage staff to go ahead and draft something. I think this is an important issue. And I think you've given us a lot of ways that we can come up with something that works. Once we have a draft, I think that the idea of running it by some other constituent groups would make sense. I wouldn't do it now because it's too hard to address until you actually have a draft ordinance. But I think when we have a draft it would be worth CCBA might be interesting. I don't know what... I don't think our current hotels, they may not be crazy about our adding this use, but I don't think it creates enough rooms that it's serious competition for hotels. And even if it is, I think we've got maybe this... issue to deal with anyway. I guess one thing I was wondering about is I think when Bridget and I toured one of the Schlafly buildings, as I recall, there's at least three stories. And I think the issue that they were pointing out to us particularly was the second and third story were really troublesome to figure out what to do anything with. First floor, maybe you could figure something out. But second and third were generally, even though it was nice space, it was just very hard to figure out what to do with it. In great part because there's no parking. But I'm just wondering, is there a way to encourage second, third story use of this kind and still somehow preserve the opportunity to have a first floor retail since that's obviously still something we're looking for? We know it's tough. But I'm just sort of picturing the entire smaller building suddenly becoming residential and then the first floor we kind of lose as an opportunity. So I'm wondering if there isn't some way to address that.

Yeah, you could address it a few different ways. You could just say that these units aren't allowed on the first floor of a building. You could require them to be located in a mixed-use building that had some other use component, similar to what we have right now with our requirements for residential in general. So you could line it up that way. I think we would want to, again, as we dive into what the regulations might actually look like, evaluate the pros and cons to doing something like that in the buildings that we're looking at and just... just to make sure that we aren't creating unnecessary hurdles for a handful of properties within the downtown, because it's very different from the residential use, which is allowed widespread and maintaining some retail on very specific corridors potentially.

I agree. I'd much rather at the end of the day have it all be residential than come back to the perennial problem that we have other uses and the first floor has just got a sign in the window saying, to rent it and we can't rent it. So that doesn't necessarily help us either, but maybe in certain locations it would make sense. Right.

Thanks.

Okay. Moving on.

Great. I don't thank you for this presentation. It was very helpful to go through all of this and see the comparables. So I appreciate that. My interest in this going forward would be primarily fulfilling the goal that you identified, or at least a goal you identified of activating older buildings. So if there is a way to continue to craft this in a way and we can enforce it to narrow it to that, that would be helpful. And I would prefer it not to be involved. I would prefer to exclude all multifamily buildings at this time as well. Again, I don't know if we can do that, but if we can, that would be my preference. And then just by way of feedback, I would say I like your ideas of putting limits on location, occupancy load, especially the prohibition of activities. I think that's important. And then the penalties in enforcement parking, I am concerned. kind of, I would like to learn more about that just because it may depend where it is and what the impact is. So I'm still kind of unsure about that. And then when you come back to us the next time, if you can maybe give us some more specifics regarding these other communities experience with enforcement and compliance, just to see what's actually happens when they have to do that.

Thank you.

Great. Great.

Jeff. Two things. Yeah. Again, I'm not sure if it's you or if it's David, but how are these things taxed? I know we don't have the ability to tax hotels, which burns me for a variety of reasons. But how do we tax these sorts of deals?

You can't tax hotels because we are not big enough as a city. Cities under $30,000, I think it is. Yeah,

there's home rule restrictions. State law is tailored to allow certain communities to have hotel taxes and not others. However, you can collect sales tax on hotel stays.

They've nicely carved it out so that we can't charge hotel tax. I was just curious if these type of rentals qualify as hotel motel under the tax or can we tax them? Is there a different tax we can hit them with?

I would have to look into that a

little bit more.

Yeah,

I'd just be curious to know. I mean, again, it's probably not a ton of money, but it would be interesting to know whether it does provide a revenue stream for us outside of just sales tax.

Every little bit

helps.

If I may, the hospitality tax, the transient guest tax, as defined under state law, applies to hospitality uses where the stay is 30 days or less. So anybody renting for the kinds of times we're talking about under these regulations would be required to collect the state's hotel taxes.

Okay.

But that goes

to the state,

not

us.

So we wouldn't make any extra tax money. I mean, obviously the sales tax money, but there isn't a way around this hotel-motel prohibition. My understanding is no. Okay.

We had a proposition on the ballot and lost it.

But we do not get a portion of that transient

tax. But we do get sales tax on the same amount, on those dollars. The dollars paid for hospitality use are subject to sales tax.

Yes. Even though, okay, I'm confused now,

but okay.

So we're going to get $100 a night to rent a room.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a sales tax on $100.

Okay, but it just doesn't have the additional hotel or motel. It's

not an additional hotel.

They'd be treated like every other hotel room in the city. Got it. I think I agree with others. I think generally the way you've kind of crafted it and some of the recommendations make sense to me, and I think I'm not opposed to them for the most part. I go back and forth, Becky, to your point of like I like the idea of limiting, but I also kind of don't like the idea that if I'm the first one to the door and I can stand up my four-unit place, it's not necessarily fair for everybody else. So I think we'd have to just think about – I like the concept. I'm just not sure – you know i want to be fair to everybody um the only other thing i would like to do and i know he's not here tonight but i probably want to get some input from the chief on just how he would envision enforcing these and

we have to do it here

oh

we haven't had too many of these at uh where we have used one chip in this whole thing can operate

okay um is that all jeff yeah okay so i said a few things i i do totally support uh trying this um i mean if it doesn't work out well we can we can always change it right we can amend it we can we can change it to make it work better um I'm interested, which was mentioned to what are the condo property owners think about this, etc. I like the idea of limited not to multifamily buildings and also that kind of fits with the small, small building small older building concept, but I would like to maybe explore just get some input from some of our corporations here. that do tend to put people up sometimes for a while to bring them in for training. I mean, Centene, Enterprise, all these guys do this commerce. So maybe we could just talk to them and see if there's any advantage for them if we do this and what they would think of it. Do we have minimum standards for amenities within a unit? You know, do they have to provide the same thing as an apartment unit would? I understand we don't have to, apartments don't have to provide air conditioning. But they have to provide heat. Or, you know, what is, do we have that and would that apply here

as

well? So,

yeah, we have the minimum standards to make them a dwelling unit.

I like the idea of really targeting this. And so the more we can tighten it to, I think, to small buildings, buildings that we want to be repurposed. I too fear what would happen if we have these things available on ground floor, because again, we're trying to activate our streets, not shut them down. So I do like the idea of really exploring the requirement of having it in a mixed use building so that some amenity is on the first floor that's for the public restaurant, coffee or any other service, whatever. And then I just want to let you know too that I love the idea of streamlining this so that the city manager or you can, as soon as there's a violation, we can crack down. We can revoke the use permit right then if we need to. We don't have to wait two weeks for a Board of Aldermen meeting or something like that. I like that and I like being aggressive on enforcement with fines. No warning, first time out, 500 bucks. I mean, let's make sure we don't have a mess. Last is, we've had people rent our facilities for events and then have invited half of creation over Facebook. And so is there a way that we would be monitoring that sort of thing just as a disaster preventer?

It's something we'll have to look into more. A lot of the communities that had more prescriptive operational requirements were even added in the ability for the city manager to revoke the license. Those are added more recently, like years, you know, within the last couple of years. So some of those communities have you can look at the city and you can see published information probably as to why they added those isn't as readily available as to how that's helped them more proactively address issues. So we'll reach out to some of the communities and see kind of as Rick was into how stuff they've changed within the last year has helped them to make sure that we can address it but really limiting to knowing where the locations are so if we only had five of these properties within downtown that's something that we could also work with between inspectors and and our police to you know monitor a little bit more closely

i know you guys monitor social media al so that you know would be helpful i guess um the other thing when you do come back to us i think it would be really helpful to actually show us the buildings That we're looking at. I mean, we know one and we know that building well, but what are these other buildings? Can you just show us a photograph of the building? Yeah,

absolutely. The next step to this analysis would be layering in what the actual potential requirements or qualifiers would be. And then we would be able to highlight under this draft ordinance. a total of this many properties today would be eligible and what it would look like. So we can go into a little bit more and that will help you guys visualize the potential regulations you're thinking about adopting. Cool.

Yeah. Question. We can probably get there this way, but I'm just curious, not advocating, but curious if we wanted to just identify six buildings for the sake of number and say, these six are eligible and nobody else in downtown is, can we do that? Or does it need to be more of a, Taylor in the ordinance to say no building taller than this, but this wide and all that stuff.

Yeah. I wouldn't recommend doing anything that said within our zoning ordinance properties with these addresses can qualify. But I mean, given the context of what we're looking at, I will essentially be doing

that. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm just trying to try it.

You know,

it's a good question.

Okay. Thanks.

Yep. I think if that's it, we can move on from discussion to our actual meeting that starts at seven. So we will take this up in a more formal way with the draft ordinance, and you'll find out about that. I'm sure you're being notified, and any other property owners paying attention will know too. But we'll carry this forward, and we're working on it as quickly as we can. Yeah, so thanks for being here.

Thank you.

need a minute okay all

right

Okay. All right. Well, we're ready to start our seven o'clock business meeting and welcome to any visitors. I see a few out here. So welcome. Thank you for being here. We'll open the meeting and start with a roll call.

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

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

Here.

Aldeman Rick Hummell.

Aldeman Hummel.

Here.

Aldermen Jeffery Yorg.

Aldermen York.

Here.

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

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

All right. And then now's the time on our agenda for public requests and petitions. If there's anyone here that wants to talk about something other than what's on our agenda tonight or anyone online, now's your chance. So either raise your hand online or wave at us. Yeah. I see none. Before we start the public hearing, I just want to take time out to wish our amazing city clerk a very happy birthday. Oh, hey. It was yesterday, but it's close enough. Yeah. All right. So we can open a public hearing for Resolution 2025-05-430 Southmore. So I've opened the public hearing and I request proof of publication.

Yes, this is a public hearing and subsequent resolution to consider granting a conditional use permit to Marilyn Sue Edison, owner of 30 Southmore Drive, to allow for the construction of a 1,579 square foot accessory structure containing a 1,065 square foot accessory dwelling unit or ADU. The property has a zoning designation of R1, Large Lot Single Family Dwelling District. The plan commission and architectural review board considered the applications and associated architectural plans for the project on March 3rd, 2025, and recommended approval of the CUP and approve the architectural plans. An ADU is a type of accessory structure, either attached or detached, which provides complete independent living facilities for one more people on the same site as a principal residence. The plan commission unanimously recommended approval of the CUP with two conditions and staff recommends that the Board of Aldermen conduct a public hearing and consider approving the resolution granting a conditional use permit for a 1579 square foot detached structure containing a 1065 square foot adu for 30 southmore drive and we do have the applicant here this evening as well as Anna Krane our director of planning and development services if you have questions

Yes, this is a public hearing and subsequent resolution to consider granting a conditional use permit to Marilyn Sue Edison, owner of 30 Southmore Drive, to allow for the construction of a 1,579 square foot accessory structure containing a 1,065 square foot accessory dwelling unit or ADU. The property has a zoning designation of R1, Large Lot Single Family Dwelling District. The plan commission and architectural review board considered the applications and associated architectural plans for the project on March 3rd, 2025, and recommended approval of the CUP and approve the architectural plans. An ADU is a type of accessory structure, either attached or detached, which provides complete independent living facilities for one more people on the same site as a principal residence. The plan commission unanimously recommended approval of the CUP with two conditions and staff recommends that the Board of Aldermen conduct a public hearing and consider approving the resolution granting a conditional use permit for a 1579 square foot detached structure containing a 1065 square foot adu for 30 southmore drive and we do have the applicant here this evening as well as anna crane our director of planning and development services if you have questions

thank you i'll open the discussion um I guess, I will just ask this is Edison or. Would you like to address the board in any way don't need to but just give you the chance okay. So i'll go around in order of security with any comments or questions no comments or questions hey becky anything.

I was just trying to remember, I believe that this might be a property that we've heard you have concerns about. access, because I think your only access to your property by car is through Big Bend. Is that correct? Yeah. And it looks like that's staying the same. You're not seeing an option to change that. Thanks. Alderman Gary Feder.

I was just trying to remember, I believe that this might be a property that we've heard you have concerns about. access, because I think your only access to your property by car is through Big Bend. Is that correct? Yeah. And it looks like that's staying the same. You're not seeing an option to change that. Thanks. Alderman Fader.

I don't have any questions. Looks like it complies.

I appreciate that the Planning Commission and ARB approved it, and I'm not aware of any neighbor issues at all, so I'm fully supportive.

Jeff, anything? I mean, Becky asked the same question I was going to ask. I just was thinking through kind of the traffic piece, but... Sounds like everybody's ready to go.

Okay, very good. Yeah, I'm happy that this is working out. I think it'll be a great addition to your property. Yeah. So I will close the public hearing and Alderman McCandlin.

I move to approve resolution number 2025, granting a conditional use permit for 30 Southmore Drive to allow for an accessory dwelling.

Second. Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that passes and you get your dwelling unit. Yes, and now's your chance to escape. Okay, thanks for being here. Yeah, thanks for being there. All right, then the next on our agenda is our consent agenda. Does anybody have anything they would like to discuss with regard to that? It's minutes and disposal of records. Okay, very good. So we'll take a motion on that. I move to approve the consent agenda.

Second.

Any discussion?

Okay, we'll call the roll. Alderman McAndrew? Aye. Alderman Battelle? Aye. Aldermen Gary Feder?

Okay, we'll call the roll. Alderman McAndrew? Aye. Alderman Battelle? Aye. Aldermen Fader?

Aye.

Aldeman Rick Hummell? Aye. Aldemann Yorg?

Aldeman Hummel? Aye. Aldemann Yorg?

Aye.

Mayor Harris? Aye. Thank you.

Okay, time for the city manager's report.

All right, first item is the special obligation bonds, which we sold this morning. The proposed ordinance provides for issuing bonds to finance the cost of certain public improvements, including the acquisition, construction, reconstruction, improvement, furnishing, and equipping of a municipal garage and maintenance facility. The total amount of bonds to be issued is $13,785,000. The estimated maturity date on the bonds is currently March of 2044, which is our fiscal year 2045. The city's current bond rating for special obligation bonds has been reconfirmed at AA+, which is AAA when issuing general obligation debt. This credit rating allows the lowest interest cost for the lifetime of the bonds. The attached ordinance authorizes and directs the issuance, sale, and delivery of the $13,785,000 in special obligation bonds. In accordance with the notice of bond sale, the sale of bonds occurred at 10 a.m. on March 25th, 2025. Eight firms submitted bids for the bonds, which is actually pretty remarkable from our conversations with our financial advisor and our bond counsel. Very unusual to see that many bidders. uh in today's market so i'm very happy to see that and after premiums robert w baird and company incorporated was the best bidder with a true interest cost of 3.918 staff recommends that the board of aldermen hold both readings to approve the ordinance authorizing the sale issuance and delivery of special obligation bonds and the amount of 13 million 785 000 and in front of you this evening are revised documents as we have stated in the packet you would receive after the sale And if you have any questions this evening, we do have Mark Grimm, our bond counsel here this evening.

Very good. Thank you. All right. I'll go around in order. Any questions or comments about this?

No questions or comments. Just glad to hear that the bond sale went really well.

Yep. Good news.

Alderman Gary Feder, anything?

Alderman Fader, anything?

No questions or comment. Just a bigger picture timeline on receipt of proceeds and then when do we anticipate using the proceeds meaning when does construction start.

So the, um, project itself, as far as construction starting, we're going to have an update to the board of Alderman, uh, coming up in April. So they're going to come back in our, our construction manager along with our design team, uh, and go over there. They're at about 80% on the designs at this point. Uh, so the board has an opportunity to review all that as well as the latest cost estimates on the project. Uh, and then, uh, We'll proceed after that point to finish the construction drawings, and then we'll put the project out to bid. So we're probably looking, I would think early part of the summer to do that. And as far as the closing date, everything was flying around today. April 8th, there we go. All right, I was just pulling up April 8th. Thank

you. So then where do the funds go while they're, where will you hold the funds?

We're going to hold those in a, we have an account set up for that particular project. So those bond funds will go there. We set up project funds for our individual

funds. I understand, but I know that there's limits on, you know, whether if it's in a bank, whether it's secured deposits or if it's going to be invested in some form of treasuries. I just wondered, have we contemplated what the investment would be? I

would defer to Karen for the actual vehicle on these.

It would be great if we could collect some interest on this.

Generally speaking, they will be deposited into our general checking account because that's really the only bank account we have. We do have the overnight sweep, so we'll earn interest on that. Any excess money that we have laying around, we invest. I don't know that we can do that with the bond funds in the meantime. I don't legally if we can do that. Mark would be able to tell me if we could. But we do have the sweep where they take the money that's in there and invest it overnight and give us a quick

investment. What I'm really getting at, if it's a relatively short time, that makes the most sense. If it's a long time, then we should look at some alternative. And then just making sure that the bank is aware of a significant sum, that they are ready to pledge securities or whatever fund that they have, that that's all contemplating that.

Because we'll have some reimbursements right away, some costs that have already been incurred for design and other things that we need to pay back. Thank you.

But, you know, it's a great question that I had as well. I mean, I know that we have, I know from previous projects, we have a schedule of disbursement that usually takes place over several years. And so depending if there's a significant amount that's out there after a year and a half or something, if this is going to remain, I really do wish we would look into how to maximize any revenue for stream from that you know uh interest yeah

so we're limited in the type of investments that we can do but any type of excess cash we regularly do um you know um cash cash statement to see what we need cash flow needs and then we invest the rest either or max of three years so we do that regularly

yeah so i would say let us know how that goes for this big huge amount of money yeah okay thank you Any other questions, Jeff?

Just a couple. It doesn't look like there's a debt service reserve fund. Is that correct? Okay. And I guess for the record, we're not pledging anything from an asset or anything else. We're just basically saying, hey, we're going to pay. Revenues to the city are going to pay. Okay. And there's no limitation on us being able to issue additional debt with this. I didn't think there was. Okay. That was all I had. I just want to kind of confirm all that. Thank you.

All right. Thanks.

Uh, okay. Now let me, let me just ask Jeff, you bring that additional debt. I thought that this was the, this was it, that we would be maxed out on issuing debt after this. Why did I think that? No, no.

So I think the discussion

was 10 million if we want capacity to

issue additional debt. We have, yes, we have plenty of capacity.

I think the discussion was, Mayor, about how much revenue we have to actually service the debt.

Well, okay.

Which I think is slightly different than

whether we legally can issue the

debt.

I actually had thought, I remembered that we wouldn't want to issue any additional debt. I'm not saying we would, but it's nice to know that we could.

Yeah, it's more an issue of what we could comfortably pay as Alderman Jeffery Yorg.

Yeah, it's more an issue of what we could comfortably pay as Alderman York.

Okay, very good. Thank you. All right, Alderman McAndrew.

I'll introduce bill number 7064, approving the sale of special obligation bonds series 2025 to be read for the first time by title only.

Second. Any discussion? The city attorney.

Bill number 7064, first reading. An ordinance authorizing and directing the issuance, sale, and delivery of special obligation bonds, series 2025, of the city of Clayton, Missouri, and approving certain documents and authorizing certain other actions in connection therewith.

Okay. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed?

No.

Alderman McAndrew.

I'll introduce bill number 7064, approving the sale of special obligation bonds series 2025 to be read for the second time by title only.

Second. Second. All those in favor?

Aye.

Aye. Any opposed? Will we be supposed to

have a motion for unanimous consent?

Yes. Isn't that what you just read?

No, that was second reading.

Oh, I thought you... move to board give unanimous no i'm sorry i didn't pay attention to it at all i was so i was getting ready to say i apologize like the board is giving us yes okay so let's roll back and do that one

sorry i'll move that the board give unanimous consent to consideration for adoption of bill number 7064 on the day of its introduction

okay okay all those in favor of that any opposed okay let the minister now reflect the board has given unanimous consent

I'll introduce bill number 7064, approving the sale of special obligation bonds series 2025 to be read for the second time by title only.

Second. Any discussion? Okay, Mr. City Attorney.

Bill number 7064, second reading and consideration for adoption. An ordinance authorizing and directing the issue of sale and delivery of special obligation bonds, series 2025, of the city of Clayton, Missouri, and authorize approving certain documents and authorizing certain other actions in connection therewith.

Alderwoman McAndrew? Aye. Alderwoman Patel? Aye. Alderman Gary Feder? Aye. Aye. Alderman Rick Hummell? Aye. Alderman Jeffery Yorg? No. Mayor Harris? Aye. Thank you. Okay.

Alderwoman McAndrew? Aye. Alderwoman Patel? Aye. Alderman Fader? Aye. Aye. Alderman Hummel? Aye. Alderman York? No. Mayor Harris? Aye. Thank you. Okay.

Bill number 7065 for Taste St. Louis.

Yes, the city of Clayton desires to host the Taste of St. Louis, a food and music festival promoting regional cuisine and local businesses. Taste at Productions LLC or TIP is an experienced event producer with a proven track record of organizing successful festivals. The proposed agreement outlines the terms for TIP to produce the Taste of St Louis event in Clayton. Key provisions include that the event would be held on the third weekend in August or other mutually agreed upon dates, but August for this year. mutually agreed upon with the city of Clayton on the location, which is currently downtown. One year initial term with two mutually agreed upon five-year extension options. TIP is responsible for the event logistics, permits, licenses, insurance, and site cleanup. The city may cancel the event due to inclement weather or public safety concerns, and TIP will hold the city harmless for many and all claims arising out of or relating to the event. The city will waive certain fees for the event, including the right-of-way fee, temporary merchant fee, liquor license fee, and tent fee. TIP will reimburse the city for the cost of any public safety and public works personnel, and all vendors at the event will be required to collect sales tax. Staff recommends that the Board of Aldermen approve the ordinance authorizing the city to enter into an agreement with Taste It Productions LLC for the production of the Taste of St. Louis event. And I know that we have... the Taste It Productions representatives here this evening.

Good. Okay. I will open the discussion, and I don't think we have any online folks that want to ask questions. So we may have some questions for you, in which case then you can come on up, but we'll start going around by order of seniority. So comments or questions, Bridget?

David, I was just going to ask, I know we're waiving some fees. What is the amount approximately that we're waiving?

I don't have the total amount here handy. I can run that really quick. I mean,

I'm just kind of curious. They're

flat rates, so none of these are huge amounts. They're usually within the $100 range, a few hundred dollars apiece. A right-of-way permit's going to cost a little bit more, but we're not talking about a substantial amount here.

Okay. Caterer's liquor license is $10 a day.

A pretty small amount. It's

nominal, yeah.

Um, I was also just glad to hear or glad to see too, um, that it looks like, um, taste of St. Louis or that there won't be styrofoam and, you know, I was happy to see that the vendor restrictions were in there. So thank you very much for that. Um, And I think those were the only big questions I had and I just think it's again you know exciting that you guys will be here, and it was just you know great to hear that you guys have been so involved in the art fair in the past, which obviously goes very well every year so.

Go ahead, Becky.

Great. Looking forward to it. Happy to see the vendor restrictions related to sustainability. And one question, David, when it comes to the extension options for mutual agree upon additional terms, does that mutual agreement, does that come back to the board or is that a city administrative decision?

would consult the board of alderman on that

okay thanks

alderman Gary Feder

alderman fader

uh just a question i think i ran it by david earlier but just to repeat i think our conversation which was i think there we wanted to make sure that before we approved it we were satisfied that as far as our own city staffing just given other events that we felt comfortable that this would not be overly burdensome. So I think, David, you indicated you were satisfied that was the case, but just wanted to confirm that. We

envision a few extra officers for this. They will have private security on the site, but we will have our officers present. And as far as public works, there's going to be a third party that's going to come in and do all the traffic control and regular things that our staff would do. So it shouldn't have an unreasonable burden on them. Absolutely.

Thank you. I'm certainly excited about the event. Look forward to it.

Just a couple of questions. Back on the term of the agreement, I don't have any issue with the one-year term. I'm just kind of curious about the five-year additional terms, though, just from a practical matter. I certainly understand the benefit from the agreement uh, from taste point of view to know that they would have access. But if economic changes occur, I don't know that we're really obligating them to have this event. And so I'm wondering, is it really necessary for us to have five years? And I, I'm just want to make sure that this is a mutually good thing. And I know it says it's mutual to move forward, but I'm just wondering what's the impact of mutually moving forward for a five-year period.

Uh, we didn't want to have to go through this, this process more frequently than that. We've had, you know, obviously the yard fair and we've had festivals that have gone on for a number of years. So we thought five years would be a good term for this. Now there is a termination clause in there where we can terminate the agreement with three months notice. And I would, you know, if something were to happen and they didn't want to do the event, I don't see why it We wouldn't terminate it at that point.

All right, that's fine. And then the other questions I had were really, did we... When we discussed this before, I was hopeful that we would seek out feedback from the Central Business District, from residents, businesses, and others, just to make sure that we would get some feedback on the impact that this may or may not have on them. Gary sent out...

I don't even... Gary, do you remember how many emails? Sorry, about 50. And I think we had five or six responses, all favorable. There was one that talked a little bit about vendors and just making sure that or wanting us to make sure that there were local vendors that were included rather than just food truck sort of vendors. Other than that, all the feedback was completely positive and people are excited about it.

Okay, good. And then my last question is on parking. So were we able to contact owners of parking lots and garages and get any specific feedback regarding signage to make it easier for participants to access parking?

Nothing at this point. We're going to reach out as the event gets closer than the other events this year. We want to have actually a more holistic approach to it rather than talking about just this event specifically. We want to come up with some sort of package or some sort of signage that we would use for all of these events. So we will do that going into this event season, but haven't done it yet.

Okay. I think a holistic approach does make a lot of sense. I just think it's a very important priority that we address it sooner than later.

Okay,

Jeff. Yeah, so just confirming, David, I think you said what I read this to be, which is it's basically a five-year term, so you don't have to necessarily come back and re-approve it every five years, but in reality, it's an annual thing because we can terminate it within 90 days, I think it says. That's correct,

and that's why we did the initial for just one year. If we wanted to shut it down at that point, we could. If we had some sort of issue, we don't foresee that happening, so we could roll into those five-year options and The way this is written, as you said, we could terminate with three months notice.

So the nice thing is there's some certainty there. You don't have to go through all the process with us every year. But if at some point we wanted to cancel it in year two, we can do that. Okay. Absolutely. The insurance coverage numbers in here, how did we get to those? I think it's like because it's a very specific 3.448710 insurance. Those are the current sovereign immunity limits. Okay. that would explain why I can't go higher. And then I would, okay. Um, I think that General Oaks, I have a couple typo nits. I can just circle up with you after the fact and we can clean this up. That was all I got. Sounds good. Thank you.

Okay, good. Um, all right. Well, I, um, I have a and just introduce yourselves to us and

justice director

famous okay yeah nice to meet you guys um i think we're all super excited about this for clayton um as you may have heard it really fits with our strategic plan of making our downtown more vibrant and we do have a lot of good experience with events from the art fair So I think we're good at this, and I know you guys are good at this, so it should be great. I do have a question about what are the numbers that you're expecting to attend in Clayton? I don't know, would it be different from downtown or the same? I

would suspect... Well, just by the amount of attention that we have received in the last 30 days, it's been pretty overwhelming. I mean, we have cell phone data from Ballpark Village showing almost 50,000 over the course of the weekend.

Yeah.

And I would expect that here we'd probably be hitting the higher end of that, so maybe more in the 80,000 range.

Wow. Okay. Yeah. And what's our usual... Gary, what's our usual attendance at Art Fair over the weekend?

Art Fair says it's about 150,000. Yeah,

yeah. I thought so, but I didn't want to be the one to... Okay. And I know that you've got third-party traffic, but do we know this third-party traffic company and do we know that they've... Have they done this for you downtown? Do we have experience with them that we know we're confident that they'll be able to really do this? Because we're pretty tight.

Yeah, we would we would lean on there's probably two primarily two contractors in town either warning lights or traffic control would be the one of the two vendors that we would contact and utilize. I have a good relationship with um, the folks in your public works department, just because of my relationship with St. Louis art fair. So, so I mean, working with Mike and those folks over there to say, Hey, you know, what do we, let's make sure we're doing it right. I think what you're expecting, what you're expecting is St. Louis art fare, but a food flare. Yeah. And that's us. I think that's really what we get is I think, um, you'll be pleasantly surprised, um, that that's the goal we're heading, is St. Louis Art Fair. Again, I think that's what you're going to expect. Sarah Umloff and myself are buddies. So it's good to, you know, even today I'm comparing notes with her on some things. So I feel very confident that we can fit the needs of your expectations for this event. Want

to say something,

Gary? Pride of the Way permit will cover the traffic control and public...

Okay. All right. And then the last thing is, and Gary, you may have to stay close, but I did get some feedback just anecdotally from one restaurant owner who's very excited and who has participated before, but I think the gist of the comment he made to me was we need to make sure that the delivery of the food is top drawer, not, you know, I don't know what his word was, but he felt like there were some sort of substandard execution of food delivery previous years. And so I don't know, I want to make sure that you all have had this conversation with him or whoever, with Gary at least, and you have this worked out.

Yeah, it sounds like Amir from Oceano Beach. Yes, it

does. You outed him, okay.

No, so I'm very aware of, he brought up some good points. And I'll just say, I mean, we've been in survival mode since 2020. I mean, really just trying to keep this thing out of the ditch and just trying to really continue to produce an event that made sense. ballpark village at the time made sense just because it was it didn't cost us anything and so um but to to go to the next level well and backing up sponsors weren't interested in in helping taste of st louis in any way because their their names are all over the building already so why would they give us any you know help and so we couldn't sell beverages so that's another place to earn some money. And, you know, so we, we, again, I feel like we've been in survival mode, just trying to keep the thing going. Yeah. People love the event, but it has been, it's been a struggle and, you know, there's news out today about another major festival in St. Louis struggling big time and asking the public to pay, you know, and I think that's gonna, that that's a trend that's everyone's headed that direction, I think. And you all have been kind enough to even consider this. Because, I mean, if it wasn't for the generosity of you all, I think we would be in the same boat. So I understand that concern. Again, the expectation is St. Louis Art Fair, but with food. And I think we can fill that.

Okay. Okay, good. Thank you. My last question is probably something I missed in the document, but I know we talked about how the trash and recycling have to be handled adequately, but are we requiring recycling?

I mean,

I read it. I didn't spend hours studying that little paragraph, but I know it's very explicit on we have to handle it all properly, but do we require recycling? I'm being Susan Buse for tonight. That's what she would want to know.

We'll let her know.

My interpretation. Oh, so that's the other. Yeah, she was I totally get her she, you know, she, she was in, we were tracking on that. Yeah, okay. So, um, I don't believe it was, it was forced on us to recycle. I think what we did agree upon in the agreement as I understand it was more compostables. And things that you know no styrofoam no single use plastic bottles. We have already. Yeah, we've already prepped our restaurants that will be using compostable utensils. So, so that's another thing that if they do end up in landfill it's something that is, or, you know, it's organic materials or recycling programs pretty expensive, but what we plan to do is switch beverage to all aluminum. And the, the, the aluminum collection benefit make a wish, who is our charity partner so that's why I think that appealing to the public to say listen, don't throw that aluminum bottle away, put it in this bag and it's going to make a wish. So, that helps. You know, I mean, I think that's kind of the thing like you get people to help you out in a charitable way and it's an easy way for people to help. So that's kind of where we're headed is something like that. A recycling program would be fantastic if we could get someone to help pay for it. So that's what we're thinking.

But you do, so it does say though that you'll provide containers throughout the event site and arrange and pay for the collection and removal of waste recycling and composting materials. And it sounds like you have a plan specifically for aluminum recycling, which is a great... highly recyclable product and composting. You have a plan for that also, or you just are asking for compostable materials based on the idea that they won't last as long in a lane. That's correct. Yeah. So

again, I, There's sponsorships have, there's a lot of companies who we have not heard from for years, all of a sudden interested in Taste of St. Louis. So I think we'll even find someone that'll say, hey, that's a thing for us. We want to be a part of that. We just don't today. I don't have it. But worst case scenario, compostables end up in the landfill. But that's, again, that's a better case scenario than styrofoam or plastics and things like that. If that makes

sense. I guess we're not requiring you to...

3.2E states that they'll provide trash containers throughout the event site and arrange for and paying for the collection and removal of waste, recycling, and composting materials.

That covers it.

That's

how we understand it. Aluminum is the easiest thing. Obviously, there's a... monetary value to that and to benefit the charity. Again, I think changing the public's behavior would be easy to do when we do it that way. When we

talk about site logistics, we'll make sure that we've got the recycling covered.

There you go. And

I

think in practice, if all of it's compostable plus aluminum, there isn't really a whole lot more to recycle other than the aluminum cans anyway, just in practice. Well, you

just don't want the compostables to go to the landfill. You want them to go to the compost. Yeah, etc. Okay, great. Sorry to belabor that but it wasn't clear to me. Okay, I think that's any other questions.

Chuck, I just want to make sure I guess I was just assuming that the map or layout that you showed us last time. Is that still the case? I mean, I, I thought that was great. The way where the stages were just because they're a little bit away from like, you know, our buffer residential areas so if so people don't have to feel like they're at a concert if they're not actually at Taste of St. Louis so Is that still the plan, I guess?

Yeah, we don't have any... Our event, I guess he's our producer. Colin O'Brien is someone who has a lot of... Patrick's Parade, Shakespeare. He's the guy in St. Louis who handles a lot of event production, and that's who we really lean on. He's even questioning me. He's like, do we have too much space? That we can land 40 restaurants in there, stages, and a lot of marketplace vendors right up and down Forsyth. So we feel good at this point that we have enough space um would it be inappropriate to come back at a future date if it looked like more activations wanted to maybe move up foresight would that be inappropriate or should we just stay within i

mean the way this works is we're going to handle all those site logistics and through your right-of-way permit and through those approvals from the public works department so we're going to be a part of laying this out over time that's why we didn't want to include a very specific okay map in this particular agreement in case things were to change we

think we're good but we're gonna i mean

just we'll be a part of that yeah i mean

for the art fair we had a stage one um year at the corner of brentwood and maryland and it makes it hard for the people that live in that kind of building right there so it's just asking that the stages are more inside the city um where that you're just in the middle of office towers rather you know that's that's all And at least the map that you showed us last time had those stages more internal to the city rather than on the outskirts.

All right. Very good. Thank you so much. All right. You can, I think, be seated. All right. If there are no further discussion, Alderman McAndrew.

I'll introduce bill number 7065 in agreement with Tasted Productions LLC for the Taste of St. Louis event to be read for the first time by title only.

Second. Second. Any discussion? Mr. City Attorney.

Bill number 7065, first reading, an ordinance authorizing an agreement with Tasted Productions LLC for production of the Taste of St. Louis event in the city of Clayton.

All those in favor?

Aye.

Opposed?

I'll move that the board give unanimous consent to consideration for adoption of bill number 7065 on the day of its introduction. Second.

Second. All those, oh, let the minutes reflect the board has given unanimous consent. No, not that we vote. All those in favor. Sorry, I'm fast forwarding. All those in favour.

Aye.

Any opposed? Let the minutes reflect the Board has given unanimous

Consent. I'll introduce Bill number 7065 in agreement with Tasted Productions LLC for the Taste of St. Louis event to be read for the second time by title only.

Second. Any discussion? The attorney.

Bill number 7065, second reading and consideration for adoption. An ordinance authorizing an agreement with Tasted Productions LLC for production of the Taste of St. Louis event in the city of St. Louis, the city of Clayton. Pardon me.

Alderman McAndrew. Aye. Alderman Patel. Aye. Aldeman Gary Feder. Aye. Alderman Rick Hummell. Aye. Aldermen Jeffery Yorg. Yes. Mayor Harris. Aye. Thank you.

Alderman McAndrew. Aye. Alderman Patel. Aye. Aldeman Fader. Aye. Alderman Hummel. Aye. Aldermen York. Yes. Mayor Harris. Aye. Thank you.

All right. You guys again, thank you so much. We're excited. This is your chance to escape. Okay. All right. Now we're just going to do some budget stuff. So I'd leave if I were. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Uh, all right. The first quarter budget amendment, Mr. City manager.

Karen Dilber, our director of finance here this evening. Uh, we're going to do the first quarter budget amendment for fiscal year 25 and also the first quarter financial report, um, Karen did a really nice job in this RFPA or request for board action, summarizing what the changes are associated with the budget amendment here. We do have some revenue increases. A lot of that has to do with the building permit fee increases the board recently approved. On the expenditure side, a lot of the changes have to do with carry overs. So projects that didn't get completed in 24 that are gonna be taken up in fiscal year 25. Moving down from the general fund and the equipment replacement fund, those are all carryover items that increase that amount. Same with the capital improvement fund. And we do show a revenue increase that's pretty substantial within the capital improvement fund, and that all has to do with municipal park grants and other grants that the city will receive. Those projects were completed in fiscal year 24 and will be completed in 25 and will actually receive the payment on those. And then the bond construction fund, the big change there, that's a carry forward of items from fiscal year 24 as well. The majority of that being the central business district phase one project and then some street lighting projects we have as well. So there were a number of changes in there, but in the end, we recommend approval of the ordinance that would amend the fiscal year 25 budget, the net effect. is a decrease of $6,263,214. Okay,

thank you. We can go around with any discussion. I'll go around just in

order. No questions, just that it's just interesting how all the deferred projects make a big difference now. So that's it. Becky, anything

from you?

Yeah. I would just want to make sure I understand correctly. So I understand that projects get deferred and so expenses get incurred in a later year than originally budgeted. Right. Um, what I'm trying to understand is like our fund balance though, like, um, How does it, like if we have $7 million in additional projects this year, that means we had $7 million less in prior years, right?

If you looked at the fiscal year 24, that final budget amendment we did at the last meeting, it showed a huge surplus. Right. And so a lot of those projects carried over to fiscal year 25 in here.

So I'm really focused on the ending fund balance. And I might, well, I think so. Yeah, on the first page, all funds, ending fund balance. So in... September, when we passed this, we expected an ending fund balance at the end of FY25 of $50 million. And that would have been factoring in that we spent that $7 million in 2024. Now we're spending it in 25. So like, it doesn't seem to me like the ending fund balance should change. I don't, I would love to be corrected.

But fiscal year fund balance that you see there, it says amended budget, but that's actually the adopted budget, correct? No,

that's actually what I assumed it was. That's what was

adopted on October

1st. I expected that, or that's what I believed to be the case. That's how I was reading it. So that

fund balance ended up being higher than what you see there.

I think maybe what Becky, you're getting at is something that I was wondering about too. So I'll just add on to it. You know, the idea is, you know, most of what's happening here as a result of timing one way or another, mostly delays. And so I get it that we have a lot more expense this year than we were predicting because we had a lot less last year, as Becky said, but net net, I was kind of expecting no change in the, in the fund balance. I mean, but what, but, but what's happened is we have you know, if you, if you took it across 24 and 25, you know, what would be the outcome of that? Yeah.

At the end of 25, we expected to have $50 million across all funds. And now we're spending some of that money in 25 instead of 24 and But we should still have $50 million at the end of 25. So

we're netting over all of that. We still have higher expenditures than we originally thought beyond just delays. Is that what it is?

Yes, but no. So if you look at Exhibit 1.1 in your first quarter budget amendment packet, where it's kind of like a chart and it lays out the different funds, And that beginning fund balance, that is taken from our fiscal year 24 ending fund balance. Yeah, we need

help

navigating. I'm sorry, I'm not on the

website. On page 282.

Sorry. Wait, we're there now.

Okay, so 282 is the chart of numbers.

So it's exhibit 1-1. And if you look in, let's see, the one, two, third column where it says type, For each fund, there's a row that says beginning fund balance. That beginning fund balance includes our fiscal year 24 ending activity. So that surplus that we saw at the end of fiscal 24 is included in that beginning fund balance amount. The revenues and expenditures are what we passed, what you all passed as the original budget. So All that math, the beginning fund balance at the bottom, adds up all of those fund balances across all the funds, which, like I said, includes the fiscal year 24 ending surplus, the total budgeted revenues, the total budget expenditures to come up with the anticipated ending fund balance of $50,563,000. And I think that's an 862. I can't really see that small. So that includes the surplus that we had at the end of fiscal 24. If we had spent that money in fiscal 24, those beginning fund balance numbers would be less. So now with the decrease, what that is essentially doing is taking that money that we put in there at the end of 24 and now we're taking it out. So it's almost neutral, not quite, but almost.

So it's artificially high?

The beginning fund balances are artificially high, but they reflect where we were at September 30th of 2024.

Is there some way going forward that we could get a little more, like in this case, FY24 data or something where we can see that?

Yeah, I just don't understand how if we knew in September of 24 that these projects were deferred, how we approved a budget that said we expect to end FY25 with $50 million across all funds, and nothing has actually changed from what we expected in September of 24. We are going to spend now the money that in September of 24 we expected to.

Except we didn't know that in September of 24. We only knew that because at the end of a fiscal year, we give a 60-day window for expenditures and revenues that we can allocate to the previous fiscal year to come in, and then we do adjusting entries to apply those to that fiscal year. And sometimes they don't come in until January, but then we do all of that, and then we have other investment-related entries and all all types of different end of the fiscal year adjustment entries. So we don't have these beginning fund balance numbers. We just got them last week.

And there are probably a few larger ones in there that, that we knew weren't going to hit it. Um, when we put the budget together in June, that probably wasn't as clear as it is when we actually go to top the budget in September. So we can make a few of those adjustments on bigger items in future fiscal years. But as Karen said, a lot of this falls under that 60-day window. So I know we had, for instance, the resurfacing project that was going on in the Central Business District. Those bills hadn't hit yet and they all hit within that 60-day Payment for that project is going to hit actually in fiscal year 25 on that particular project they bring that one up as an example because it's just a huge dollar amount. To do that resurfacing project, but there were some things like street lighting and some others. That we knew in September obviously wasn't going to get up and going and done within a couple of weeks before the new fiscal year would start. But we didn't go in and adjust everything that we had in the budget that we'd put together back in June.

Yeah, but this is $7.4 million. So I'm really confused. So if other members of the board have an understanding of this and want to try to say it to me differently. Feel free to interrupt. But like when I do my budget and I don't know exactly, like for my department at work, and I don't exactly if all my invoices are going to come in or get paid before the end of the month, I make, I don't just ignore them. I either put them in this month or I put them in the future. And it feels like we ignored some batch of money to a really large extent.

It's really- Like

it's not insignificant. It's seven million dollars.

It's really IRF, capital improvement, and bond construction. Those add up to that $6 million.

So question on the budget, to Becky's point. I just don't remember. I feel like at some point... there needs to be, to put it in accounting or auditing terms, some like reserve, like reserved line so that we can look at that 50 million and be like, okay, that 50 million is in the budget, but there's reserved for carry forward or something that would say... that would say like six million so at least we could look at and be like oh we got 50 million because we didn't spend six million this year but it's sort of artificially high because we know this money's rolling out the door

i mean that's the way you would do it because the ending fund balance isn't going to change i mean we didn't do those projects so that money's still there and we have to reflect that it's it's still there uh we could note yeah but they should

have been listed as expenses well

no because they weren't spent yet that was the challenge but that's what i'm asking is

like budget and It was a budget of what we expected to spend.

So where that would show up is, so what you do see in the budget is we have the adopted amount for, let's go back to fiscal year

24,

the adopted amount for fiscal year 24. Then you have the amended amount for fiscal 24, which is all the budget amendments up to the time that you approve the annual budget. So it doesn't actually go through year end. So you have your adopted, you have your amended, and that's all the things that had come up to date. And then you have an estimated column. And in that estimated column, that's where we estimate whether or not we think things will get done and what we'll end up spending throughout the year. That number, I bet if we went back and looked at the estimated number for fiscal year 24, it's going to be probably closer to where we ended up with that fund balance at the end of the year. So the number you're seeing there, that 50 million number, I mean, that's what was actually realized at the end of year. So whatever we put in the budget, I don't know that that changes anything. We, like I said, could add a column and say that some of this was rolled forward. But when we do our budgeting and that estimated-

Yeah, I don't want us to have said-

But it's just an

estimate. We have different money than we had. It feels like the expenses got lost, I guess, is what I'm trying

to

understand. So-

Here would be my suggestion. So you're referencing a number that we don't have in front of us. You probably got it from a prior document from one of our last few.

I'm reading them from here.

No, I'm saying the prior 50 million.

It's the ending fund balance that we approved in our FY25 original budget, the bottom of Exhibit 1-1.

Yeah, I'm sorry, then be specific about where you think. So it's on

page one of the staff report, the very first page ending fund balance.

Right.

The first column is FY 2025 amended budget. It should say adopted.

Is that adopted or is that amended with your and then you're in numbers?

Well, well, on the next on exhibit one, one on page 282, this big chart page. the very bottom first column of numbers, that's the original budget. That's the budget we approved in September of 24. And we said at that time that, we were going to, at the end of 25, have $50.5 million as an ending fund balance because our revenue, because we were at 52.9, we were gonna bring in 45.4 and spend 47.8. Now I understand that these numbers move throughout the year, right? I mean, we've already had a $1.1 million add to revenue. But what I'm very surprised at is a $7 million add to expenditures. I'm confused about how those expenditures did not get accounted for in the 25 budget.

So Becky, when you approved the 2025 budget, the estimated expenditures for fiscal year 24 were $46,906.

So I think this is- Well, that doesn't match

any of

these. No, so I understand that. And so I think what you're looking at there is the actual ending fund balance. Is that-

No, it's an expenditures

line. I'm looking at the fiscal year 25 budget right now and I'm looking at 2024 estimate, year end estimate that we had provided the board with. And our estimated total expenditures was $46,906. 46,000 million? Yes, 46,906,876. I

don't understand what you're trying to tell me. What

I'm telling you is that when you said that in September you didn't have that 50 million, you didn't. You had a 46.9 number. The 50 million number that's in front of you, that's what actually occurred at the end of Is this correct, Karen? That's what we actually had the final number at the end of the fiscal year 24 budget amendment.

Was

that 50 million or?

So, no.

Okay.

Probably not because we didn't have final fund balance numbers including everything until last week when we got a draft from our auditors. This is what you're going to see in our financial restatement and we want to tie this out to our financial statement so everything you know matches otherwise we get bigger questions

so i would assume though in the audit if it's going to say 50 million there's going to be some reservation or some restriction or designation of some sort in the fund balance number for carryover in the audit

there will be Yes.

Because if the 50 million is total and we knew we were going to spend 7.4, there's going to be some commitment or some designation somehow in that fund balance number to reflect that it's being carried

over. So yeah, you'll see the GASB 54 breakdown of what's assigned, what's restricted. You'll see that in the financial report.

So another example, like if we just look at the 2014 bond construction fund, which is where the largest portion of the unbudgeted expenses are popping up. OK, we we approved a budget with two point nine million dollars beginning fund balance, no revenues and no expenditures. But we now either believe we're going to or already did expend two point seven million dollars. What is that? Like, precisely what happened there? Because it's not that we actually had 2.9 plus 2.7 and now we're spending the 2.7 like because we're not modifying what we started with. We're not saying we were wrong about our beginning fund balance. We're saying we're spending money that we didn't plan to spend.

So page 287 has the answer to that question.

Yeah,

287. So 287 on the bottom is the GO fund. And so what it's saying is when we looked at the prior plan in the fiscal 24 budget, the streetscapes, roads, and lot resurfacing were contemplated to be spent at that time. And then when we went through the budget amendment last time, These things got moved to the next fiscal year. And so that $2.7 million is intended now to be spent in fiscal year 25 instead of fiscal year 24. The bond fund still had the $2.9 million in it. It didn't go anywhere. It's still there. It just didn't get spent last year.

But let me... I hear you, Rick, but let me ask... I think, Becky, I know where you're going with it. Maybe this is actually a good example. So when we approve the budget for 2025, what was the expected bond construction fund Indian fund balance? Because I think if we were presented with... the bond construction fund balance to be a couple hundred thousand dollars, then that's one thing. But I think Becky's question is if we were presented that it was going to be 2.9 million and now it's not 2.9 million, that's where the hangup is. But if we only, if we saw it and it said $200,000 and then you're telling us that because things got delayed, it it finished at 2.9, I can get that because then in effect, it's just a shoving of money from this year to last

year. Yeah. Like I'm not disappointed in the spending of the money and the appropriateness of the projects, but that's exactly the point.

So if I could make one comment. Yeah. So it seems like to me, and I'm no accountant, but I feel like this is an accounting practice that is getting us all confused. So if I have in one year, I expected to spend $3 million and I didn't spend it, I would show it as a credit, which would be in parentheses. I took accounting. So I would show that as a credit and that would offset the next year when I'm showing it as an expense. And this doesn't show that. So in other words, so I regard our bond, I mean, our ending fund balance is something that's cumulative over time. So if we anticipated it to be whatever the number, just the change in two years of almost $7 million, well, $6 million should be It doesn't seem to jive. In other words, we should have shown in this prior adopted budget that, or at least by this point, that we were expecting to spend the $6 million, but we didn't. credit now we're spending it so expense so the net net difference it shouldn't be very it should be very close and that's kind of where my logic goes so i don't understand i think but i think this isn't a practice of the way we report that's making this sort of confusing for i mean it

is except it also means like i approved a budget that with the $6 million difference. And that's a big deal. And I didn't understand that. Like I, and I'm, and I'm actually getting more concerned that it feels like there wasn't a good way for me to understand that. Like, I'm confident there is like, I'm confident this is a solvable problem, but I'm not happy with it. I don't like it. And I think like, why did we like, did we really think we were going to end 2025 with 2.9 million in the bond construction fund?

so looking at uh the budget here uh we estimated in 2024 that we would spend uh 948 000 and that would have gone towards the uh street lighting project which didn't start with the second half of that being in fiscal year 25. um so we had that one split like equally split between the two years is the way i see it here

except that in this FY25 original budget column, it just says zero and zero for revenues and expenditures. Like it says we budgeted zero expenditures in 25. So

I mean,

I didn't go back and look at my old budget documents. I only looked at this and it might be typos.

And I'm trying to pull this up on the fly. You know what? That's what was going towards debt service because the rest was going to be paid I got to go to the cap.

All the conversations that we had. So if you think about it, the budget process starts in March. So we're only halfway through the fiscal year when we start, not even halfway through the fiscal years when we start our budget process. And we do our revenues and expenditures and every department does their own because they manage their own projects and whatever. And so they put together what they estimate that they're going to spend. And we, the finance department, city manager, we follow up with them as we get close to see if any of those numbers need to be updated and we receive assurances or whatever. So we move forward with the information that we're given. And then again, through the audit process and the close of the fiscal year process, that's where we found out that these things were going to have to be deferred or moved or whatever. So The follow up is there. And to kind of talk to like the budget being like, yes, the budget as we pass it is a firm document. But because we make these amendments because of changes throughout the year, it's actually kind of a breathing, living document. It's not like, like. Yeah, I totally get that. Okay.

My concern is the, what feel to me like significant misses in expenses. Like if I know I didn't have a $2 million expense hit my budget last year, then I budgeted as an expense in the next year, unless I know what I've actually decided is not to do it.

So

I would just really appreciate you looking into this

and getting

back to us about how-

I just found that particular item. So that's the biggest one that we have. And yeah, that one, I'm not sure why, if that was just a miss or what, but that did show the full amount being spent in 2024 with nothing proposed in 25. And so that's one of those projects that wasn't underway and we probably should have adjusted that in there. So on the estimate for the year.

I mean,

it was going to be spent in 25. We knew the expenditure was coming. But I think you're right. It doesn't accurately reflect it in the adopted budget for that particular item. And that's going to be the bulk of the number you see there because the streetscape portion, which was largely street lighting, was 2.4. And then I know we had about 300,000 left and resurfacing that was rolled over to 25 where we showed the full 1.685 million being spent in 24. So I would say the large part of that amount that you're seeing or that difference is going to be attributed to that project primarily. Other things within the IRF are going to be a little bit harder to identify because a lot of those things were carried over because they just weren't ready. So like the reserve ambulance being replaced, which is a huge amount that got switch from one year to the next. We had a number of vehicles where that expense didn't hit because we weren't able to take delivery. So things like equipment replacement fund, those rack up pretty quickly and those are items we think we're going to spend by year end. But I think this GO bond fund was a definite miss.

But so if we thought we were going to spend it by year end, wouldn't we have... shown that in our beginning fund balance when in the budget that we approved right so that then actually like our amendment now let's say it's a hundred thousand dollar vehicle our amendment now would be to add a hundred thousand dollars to the beginning fund balance because we didn't spend it in 24 and we started 25 with a hundred thousand extra dollars but it doesn't mean anything because we're going to spend it that's what i expect

with

If

it was incorporated in your 24 fund balance, you would show it as an expense in 25, which would ultimately subtract from the money you

have. But I think that's Becky's point, is that if we don't think it's going to be spent in 2024, it should be shown in the fund balance in the ending fiscal 2024. It doesn't sound like this

lowers the

fund balance. And I think the confusion is that's not what, at least from the data we're seeing, that's not there. It looks like beginning fund balance of the 2025 budget is $52 million. point nine total. And maybe it was stated and we didn't hear it, but it would be nice when we did the last amendment to be like, Hey y'all, we would have finished a year at 45, but we're going to add another 7 million to this because we didn't do a bunch of projects, but don't worry. It's all going to be flushed out.

Or it should just be represented both in the pluses and the minuses. I mean, the debits and the credits. One should offset the other. Yeah, if it's moving between years, it offsets. It doesn't just go away.

But it might be just the way we are reporting budgets at certain times that creates this kind of problem. And I'm wondering if you guys take a look at that idea that if we showed a little, a couple more columns here before the 2025 original, so that we make sure that we can track, you know, we were gonna spend it here and that was gonna end up with this fund balance. But, oh, whoops, we didn't spend it. Now we're gonna put it over here. So now it will affect the fund balance. And so the fund balance shouldn't really swing

Yeah, I wonder if you could have a column.

By $6 million.

Like I wonder if you would have a column that's like FY 2024 Indian amended budget or something. I have to think of exactly what that is that would show what we were expecting the fund balance to be at the end of 2024. And then we'd be able to say, oh, we were expecting it to be $46 million. Oh, the beginning fund balance of 2025 is now $52 million. You're like, oh, there's a difference there. And then in the note, you'd say, well, look, the reason why the the 2025 budget fund balance beginning is up is because we didn't spend the stuff in 2024. I'm kind of doing this on the fly, so I'd have to kind of think through this, but I think an extra column showing where we expected to be in 2024, assuming everything was spent next to the column of 2025 that reflects that we didn't spend it. Yeah, the fund balances may be awful a bit, but I think that's Becky's point is that

being able to see what we

expected in versus what we actually started with, we then can have a footprint to explain why there's a

difference. The concept is when I do the two-finger approach, I should be able to understand if I expected to spend it here but I didn't, then I'm going to see a credit. And now I'm spending it here, so I'm going to a minus. And in the end, it should equal zero. I mean, it should all wash out or close to it, unless we have surprises, which we will. No problem. But these expenses are well planned for capital improvements, bond construction, and IRF. So

I would say that looking at this, that was the big miss in there was the street project. I'm looking through these other items. A lot of this stuff wouldn't have been known to us when we were putting the budget together. So things like delays on a lot of the IRF and other things like that. So when we look at that year-end estimate, I'm not sure that we would have caught all of those items. I think the GEO bond fund was the big miss on there. And some of the timing on the municipal garage.

I want to be clear, my understanding in looking at all of this is that when you say miss, we haven't missed anything in terms of anticipated expenditures. Our dilemma here is the presentation doesn't seem intuitive. That when we show it this way, it appears like we're worse off as opposed to this is merely a timing issue. And so the presentation doesn't accurately reflect what the reality is.

I agree. But when I say miss, I mean, as far as it's estimated, we had enough lead time where we could have gotten that. tighter and than what you see here

yeah and i'm like willing to sort of like have like faith and give the benefit of the doubt and stuff but we approved a budget believing we would end with a 50 million dollar fund balance which it feels like we should have been able to know was not right

you you approved because now you would have a 46 million dollar fund balance

where do you see the 46 million in the

adopted fiscal year 25 budget so then what is this column that's what you saw in approved on october 1st

no or not a

fund balance i'm sorry i'm i'm talking about expenditures i was looking at the expenditure page so

yeah but it's still that still doesn't match the column that is in this chart exhibit one one

yeah i have to go back and look at

I think the column should match some for us somehow. So we need to be able to connect those dots. Otherwise, we don't know if we're, you know, if we've been worse off or better off in the end. We know that everything's not absolutely predictable by year end.

And

we should be able to connect the dots.

The other thing I would say is, I mean, I think it's... It's fair to say that what we're also talking about are the funds that have the most likely that kind of have these weird things. I mean, look at the general fund balance on one one. There's not much going on there. It generally looks fine. So it's not uncommon to have capital. Capital money expenditures swinging from year to year. So I don't think we're questioning what happened, I think, to one of your point, I think we just want to make sure that it's. It's easier to be able to pick it up and be like, okay, this is what we thought we were going to end 2024. This is what we actually ended 2024. This is I actually was going to say I would actually almost have a whole other thing under here that's just general fund because there's so much noise in our capital funds that it was harder for me to figure out what I care about, which is day-to-day operations, like where are we at? Which I could find it on 1.1, but it wasn't as clear as I thought it would be.

Going through by individual funds is always preferred over looking at just the all-fund number because there's a ton of movement there. It's looking like... The summary that we had for the fiscal year 25 budget at the time of adoption showed a beginning fund balance of all funds of $39,981,000. So about $40 million was what the board saw when you approved the budget back in September.

Okay, so then, Karen, what you presented in Exhibit 1-1 doesn't match that.

Correct, because those are actual fund balance numbers based upon our annual audit and the fiscal 2024 activity. It's

not the adopted

number. Labeled as FY25 original budget. And so I can accept that there's these different numbers, but it says original budget, which when I read that, that's what I reviewed and approved.

Well, and it also says adopted or amended budget on page one. So it's just, I think you guys get the concept. But if you could

just say one more time, David, what you said, because I think it helps me feel a lot better about what we actually adopted.

Yeah, I'm looking at an all-fund summary that had a beginning fund balance for fiscal year 25 of $39,981,000.

Okay, so in September of 2024, we actually expected a beginning fund balance of around $40 million. That's

what I'm seeing here.

Okay.

a beginning that like

that's a totally different picture and then i what i so what and then what i would like is then the amendment is we're actually amending the beginning i mean i don't know you can figure out the right way to do it but

i also need to look into i just pulled up the summary real quick yeah it's reserved or unreserved we can figure out what that actual sure number was but okay it's much closer to to what you're actually closer

right it's still four million dollars different

that's why again i want to look at whether that's a

Yeah. Yes.

Well, some of that could have also just been, hey, we made some money last year that we didn't expect to make too. So I'd be curious kind of if that's reserved or unreserved. Yeah, yeah.

Exactly. I get what you're saying. So I think we need to, we can't create the chart here. We're going to get the concept out and let everybody, let these guys figure out how to better show it, which I think will be great.

But I will say on the larger things like that street project, I do think that led to a lot of the confusion that that wasn't in the estimate at the end of the year. Yeah.

okay um well we spent a lot of time on that but that's good because we had some I was confused as well um do we have any other discussion on the budget amendment or um and are we are we kind of also considering the first quarter financial report at the same time Or do we do that? Are we doing that separately?

Did you have anything additional to report on that? I have questions. We haven't gotten over here

yet. Okay, yes. That's why I said, is there anything else? All right, yes.

Quick general question. To the extent that under the general fund we talk about federal grants and state and local grants, I'm just wondering, since there seems to be a general movement, especially at the federal level, to eliminate every conceivable grant possible, do we have any concerns that what's going on either in Jeff City or in Washington will impact our revenue from grants? Not right now.

Yeah, not right now. The only one that may be at jeopardy eventually is the state's cutting a bunch of stuff. The DWI grants that we get from the state, it's a pretty small amount. I think it's 5,000 to 7,000, somewhere in there. Maybe Captain Thuett knows better. Okay. That is, from what I've heard, the only thing that we would really have at risk. The larger road projects, there's no talk at all about changing that.

So one of the things I noticed in here were that we were adding some parking on machines and that there was a fee increase. I don't want us to address that now, but I'm just wondering, have we ever addressed our overall parking strategy regarding all that and whether it still makes, it's still cost effective? Is that something that we can do in the future?

Yeah, I think we need to, from the conversations we've had, we'd like to lean more into the app-based payment and get away from the standing meters that we have. As far as the Parkeons are concerned, I think the feedback is generally positive on that versus having to put quarters into the meters. But I think we need to talk about that system overall and where we want to go with it. The other question too is whether or not we want to look at maybe having a second app on top of Passport you can actually run two systems if you want within your parking. So it would have two emblems, one for passport and one for park mobile, which is the other big one. A lot of people just have one app on their phone already. And if you have park mobile already, no matter what city you're in that has park mobile, you can punch it in and do it from anywhere. So from a convenience standpoint, that is something that we'd like to take a look at this point. I just

want to make sure we look at our strategy there and make sure it makes sense. Okay. I noticed that we had significant delays on the 10 South Brentwood. I just wondered was what was generally happening that caused the delays?

Those were generally bids that came in over. or we didn't get bidders at all for it. So for instance, the security gates is something that we wanted to take in front of the board for months. And the last time we bidded out, the only bid we got was from an electrical contractor that wanted to do the motor system and didn't even provide a bid for the gates. So we're having trouble with that. That makes sense.

Design reasons and the cost, that makes sense.

Exterior doors that are listed here as well, that came before the board a couple of months ago. So that project's

And on page 287 in that capital improvement fund section, fund 51, in there it identifies roughly $2.3 million of municipal garage construction and design. So earlier when we talked about the special obligation bond, I'm assuming that some or all of these expenses could be used from the proceeds of the bond.

That's correct. We passed a resolution recently right about a year ago, maybe maybe more that we could reimburse ourselves so we can reimburse ourselves for everything but construction management services prior to the issuance of the debt. So there's going to be some that we're on the hook for, but that's going to be a very small amount compared to those design costs you see

round numbers will have 10 million 10 and a half million to. Okay, that's all that I have on this particular section. Thanks.

I'm good. I was able to track down all my questions as we had a little bit of time to kind of go back through here. I do appreciate all the extra snow and ice control that we all bought. It's always good to have more salt. So, but no, otherwise I had a couple of small ones. I was able, I was able to find them in the back. So I'm good.

All right. So that's the budget amendment. Do we, do we want to now talk about the first quarter report? And we can go around with that. Unless, Karen, did you want to say anything first? Sorry.

There's just a few things I want to point out. There's really nothing super exciting in this one. It's the first quarter. The sales and use taxes are up. That's actually being driven by the use tax. I don't know if you look through the back of the document, but sales taxes are down. The use tax is up by 61.9%. um property tax receipts we we only received uh i think two distributions through the end of december we received more in january we'll receive another one in may or june so um it's similar to where we were last year i just want to let you know we have not received per this report the majority of our property tax receipts um utility taxes down by 0.3 percent that's really um Let's see gas and water up by 17% year over year electricity telephone and cable franchisees are down by 5% and through the numbers that nets to being down by 0.3% parking is up and that's being driven by the parking meters and parking space rentals. The major areas increase in the contractual services, which you'll note is up by 4.98%. Water, sewer, and insurance. Those are the big ones that kind of drove that up. And commodities, that's down by 14.21%, according to your report. But that looks like timing issues. We have fuels and lubricants. Those are the bigger ones. And uniforms and clothing. And we'll purchase more of those throughout the year. It's just this particular quarter ending where they were down. So those are just the big things I wanted to point out. So if you have any questions.

No, that was helpful about the view stacks. So thank you.

Thank you.

Becky, no? No, nothing else. Anything here? No? Yes? I'm sorry. I looked down. Nothing for you? Good.

So Karen, I'm still, I heard you, but I'm still confused. So on 288 at the top under all funds, you indicate that the sales tax is up 2.3%. And on 289 in the general fund, you indicate that sales tax is down 6.2%. So are you saying that the use tax is not included in the general fund to account for that or why the discrepancy?

Use tax is in the capital improvement fund.

Okay.

I'm just bumped into that all fund report under sales tax.

And I get that. I just want to make sure I understand the distinction there. Okay. Um, that's helpful. Um, and then let's see one of the things i just want to make sure i draw everybody's attention to this that on page 288 the revenue and expenditure graph we can see how those expenditures are that gap is getting really wide and so we see that our personnel expenses are growing by 5.4 percent on the next page as well And so our revenues are not keeping pace with that, is my point. And so we can see the impact of that. And with that widening, that's a significant number. So I just want to, unless you have a way to allay my concern, that's something that's very concerning to me.

And that typically happens. I'm sure you know the history. Revenues kind of plateau, expenditures keep going up, and that's why we have to try to either come up with new revenue sources or ways to cut expenditures. We're pretty lean here at the city. I know David did it Pretty decent hatchet job before I got here on the expenditures. So, you know, but this chart, I also want to point out that this chart at the bottom does not include other financing uses. We receive a transfer in from the special business district. So the expenditures include the special business district, you know, events and things like that, that that revenue goes towards. The expenditures include that item, but it doesn't include the revenue transfer in. So the other financing sources and uses are not included in that revenue number. And the transfer from the Capital Improvement Fund, that $500,000 that we capped it at, that is also not included in that revenue number. But you are correct in that there's always going to be a widening and that's something we always have to be cognizant of. You got

about a 1% gap probably. It's not quite as wide as what you see on here and that's because the property taxes and special business district taxes that come late.

That's the property taxes.

The point is I understand it's a first quarter report and it's a point in time. My point though is that when your expenses are running at an increasing rate that's higher than what your revenues are, that's going to be a problem. And so I just wanted to make sure we're drawing that attention. And then I'm just curious on you. Can I ask one question,

Rick, on that point? Yes. Sorry. Is there a reason why you don't put the other financing in that chart? Because it could theoretically kind of mislead stuff. So that's why I'm asking.

If we include all other financing uses and sources, so that's the transfers between funds, our transfers from capital improvement to the IRF, that shows up in there. There's just a whole bunch of other extra information that almost doubles our expenditures that's going to show up in there when we run this report and pull it.

Sorry. It's okay. I am curious, though, you know, the trend in sales tax. So you give us the detailed report on page 292 that has the different types of industries or groups that are paying the sales tax. And generally, it's going up. But it is concerning to me that for couple years in a row restaurants are actually going in the other direction um it's not a huge difference but it's when we see hotels of on the other hand going up in a real nice direction it seems inconsistent as to why restaurants are going the other way any insight on that

and i really have none

closures too

yeah closures in the business

it is a small amount for the restaurants it's down by 1.9 percent from fiscal 24 to 25 and that can be some of the smaller ones as opposed to the ones that are in the hotels where they may generate. I'm

hoping to see this pick up after the first quarter, being that we've had a couple things that have opened lately. You know, I know Tony's closed, but Flight Club opened up, which helps first watch. Might have had some of their receipts within this, but you'll have a full quarter of them. You've got Rooster. You've got a few others that have opened up recently.

I just know that the big picture question really is if people are going to shop in these retail type uses differently and we're going to capture it through use tax instead of sales tax, that's one thing. It's just sort of which bucket does it come in? On the other hand, if it's a measure of our economic vitality, if hotels were going the other direction or restaurants were going the other way, that would be more concerning. Hotels are going in a very positive direction. And so it's just trend data. I understand that the amounts aren't that much, but if we were having good economic vitality, then you would expect the trend to continue to go upward. And so I'm just want to make sure I understand what the data says. And so you've shared on the restaurants. So thank you. i don't have any other

like you said it's first it's a first quarter snapshot it's interesting to look over a longer time you know i've um i have asked for a lot of these breakouts on sales tax over the years and i always watch them and i think you know uh some there's seasonality there's there's blips of closings and openings and so over a whole year is a much better picture on some of these detailed sales taxes i will say and i think you hotel we'll see if it continues to go up and up because we have new hotels coming online right and left so I think that that's going to be a big factor so there's yeah

I'm sorry

no I'm done there's

also you know they sometimes they don't always report when they're supposed to and we get these reports from the state so let's say their report was due January 31st for December and they didn't file till February because they had some type of issue that's not going to show up here

I'd be really bad too, like the way liquor dropped. I mean, the wine merchant did a lot of sales. No, and we're not a big community and the wine merchant had like unbelievable bottles of wine and liquor. So I wouldn't be surprised if that-

We're missing a report in the grocery pharmacy liquor category. can't understand what would drive that otherwise i do think though that you're going to see a hit with dgx closing

yeah i'm sure oh yeah i'm

gonna show up there for sure

we're just i mean we're not big enough so like losing one restaurant or one big wine store is significant yeah

um i got one question if rick if you're done

rick are you done

yes i'm done thank you oh well well i had one question but i think we've addressed it um and that just was on the in the capital improvement fund. Let's see, we gotta figure out which page this was on. Page 300. So on page 300, we actually showed a negative number here. it to the right. Oh yeah, here it is. So in the second table on page 300, the Capital Improvement Fund, it shows grants and donations of an actual negative number in fiscal year 2025 through December of negative 725. That just strikes me as odd why we would have a negative number for grants and donations. That's

our accrual. It's a flip of our accrual from the audit. Once we get that actual money, that negative will go away.

I understand what you said, but I don't understand why we report it that way.

I'd have to look at the actual entry. I can get that to you at a different time once I can pull up the entry.

I accept that. I just don't understand it, but okay.

Go ahead,

Jim. So the only other question I've got is I completely understand the idea of the revenue and expense chart for all funds, showing it the way you show it, because you're right. There's a lot of noise rolling in all funds. For me, if we're really looking at, on the general fund side, so 289, if we're going to be thinking about the general fund to include the transfer from EDA, the economic development. And we're really going to consider the general fund with the transfer from the capital improvements fund. I feel like it would give us a better understanding of how the general fund's working if it included those transfers in there because we're banking on those as revenue, even though they're technically not revenue, they're transfers. Um, cause that would like right now the numbers they've in line, but as Rick said, they're, they're divergent. And I do think there's a lot to your point, Karen, there's a lot of noise on the all funds when you start looking at that chart because of capital and money going out. But I know for me, I would like to see one of the charts on the general fund, at least that includes those that we count as again, quote unquote revenue, um, Yeah, just because, again, because of the way we budget, we're budgeting that transfer, we're budgeting the EDAC money. I don't think it gives us as good a picture without it, given that we all bank on it as money.

Well, I think it's good to look at it without it, especially with the CIP transfer. That's fair. The special business district, we're spending that money. It's purposefully devoted to that, and that's never in question. So including that in the chart. is um i think makes so much sense but we need to know how far how far short we're falling without because we our goal is to get rid of that transfer no that's a fair

point there

well on the on an annual basis we show this same graph for the general fund but we have a dash line that shows the actual revenue without those and and i think we could just add that dash line here

uh-huh

that shows the transfer and then shows it without the transfer.

It would just be

helpful. That's fine.

Thank you. I think that would work well. That was all I had.

Okay. Karen, is there any other discussion or questions, guys? Okay. Karen, thank you so much for all the work that you put into these reports. We appreciate it. Yeah. Okay. All right. So... So we've done the budget amendment. We've actually done the quarter financial report, but we need to vote on the budget amendment. So can we go ahead and we've had discussion. I

just wanted to ask Becky though, just to see, would you rather do, would you feel more comfortable having the information that you requested or the reconciliation? So you could see it brought back before we vote on it or are you comfortable?

yeah you know i'm glad you said that rick because i think i i would suggest david that what you highlighted is that the like details of the language and numbers on that exhibit one one aren't precise and so i i like the beginning fund balance in the original budget is not 52. Yeah,

and I would need to research that to tell you whether or not it's precise.

Okay.

And if you're looking for a number that came out of the adopted budget, yeah, I would want to go back and take a look at everything.

Yeah.

So I just looked at one summary page real quick, and that was the number I saw there, but happy to do that.

So we could go ahead and approve it, or we could wait.

And ask for it to be better. I would feel comfortable with that if others would, because it seems like we found a couple discrepancies that could be cleared up. What do you guys think?

I just find it, we use the terms adopted budget, amended budget. We revise the numbers to reflect reality. These things change all the time. And so I think having a presentation that reconciles a number from the budget we approved to where we are would give everybody comfort to know substantively where we are. And I don't think we have that information in front of us.

We can take a look at that. I don't know that we have, Karen, do we have any pending expenditures that need this amendment. We can cashflow without this for the time being, correct? Okay.

Okay, very

good.

Do we need a motion to table? You could

table or you could first read and leave it at that if you'd like. And we can come back and report the rest of the information. I don't know that the numbers will actually change as far as what we need to move over to actually make these purchases and that sort of thing. Yeah,

I don't expect our end numbers to change. I expect them to be able to be like reconcilable.

There's some additional reporting on there.

I would just vote for just tabling it, the whole thing, rather than getting halfway through it and then changing everything. So a motion to table. Karen, any

concerns with the reporting format?

Right. Yeah. So what we're looking for is to be able to tie it to what actually happened or what was projected. So try to reconcile it because now it looks like we had a $6 million surprise. Yes. And we know that's not the case, but we can't connect the dots. And I know that we all are sure that this is all fine, but I think to approve it without that is... And I also, I would just say, if Joe Schmo comes and looks at the budget amendment that we approved and they say, oh, general fund balance went down by 6 million, what are these guys doing? I mean, they have no clue. So if there's no way to see the number that matches it could be problematic. So, I mean, if it doesn't cause you any cash flow problems, we can go ahead and just table it for two weeks and then take it up again. Is that going to work for you? And then if you can't, you know, I know you have systems for the way you do these, churn out these reports, but maybe you can just come up with your own, you know, Excel sheet that shows, you know, the reconciliation that we need, you know. That seems possible. Okay. Okay, so we need a motion to table. I will make a motion to table second. Do we have to have a roll call for that? Okay, all those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay, very good. Thanks, guys. That was a really good question. Okay, so the financial report wasn't informative only, so we don't have to vote on that. um we do we are going to have an executive session so i'm i might move that we i might suggest that we skip our round table for tonight is that okay with everybody i don't have

anything urgent

okay all right so um we need to read our little blurb

I move that the Board of Aldermen hold a closed meeting with a closed vote and record as authorized by Section 610.02112 and 3 of the revised statutes of Missouri related to legal issues, real estate, and or personnel negotiation of a contract pursuant to Section 610.0212 of the revised Missouri statutes and or proprietary information pursuant to section 610.0 2115 and or information related to public safety and security measures pursuant to section 610.021, 18 and 19 of the revised Missouri statutes.

Second. Okay, good. And we need a roll call.

Alderman McAndrew. Alderman Patel. Aye. Alderman Gary Feder.

Alderman McAndrew. Alderman Patel. Aye. Alderman Fader.

Aye.

Aldeman Rick Hummell.

Aldeman Hummel.

Aye.

Aldermen Jeffery Yorg.

Aldermen York.

Aye.

Mayor Harris. Aye. Thank you. Okay. All

right, so we are now in closed session.