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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2004 11-23 PreCITY OF MERIDIAN PRE -COUNCIL MEETING AGENDA Tuesday, November 23, 2004 at 6:00 p.m. City Council Chambers 1. Roll -call Attendance: X Shaun Wardle X Christine Donnell X Charlie Rountree X Keith Bird _CX Mayor Tammy de Weerd 2. Adoption of the Agenda: 3. Finance Report: Presented by Stacy Kilchenmann (*20 minutes) 4. Discussion of Storm Water Drainage Pond Landscaping: Discussed — create MOU 5. Executive Session per Idaho State Code 67-2346(1)(dxc): No Decision *Approximate allowable time set for agenda item may change depending on discussion. Please use the designated minutes as a guideline only. Meridian City Pre-Counoil Agenda — November 23, 2004 Page 1 of 1 Ali materials presented at public meetings shall become property of the City of Meridian. /n••.•.•� JnniJ n n r JMle.n fn. JL.. Ll1Yln� rinL,.J Ln Jnn..rn—L. ..n Jln. L..nJnY Meridian City Pre -Council Meetina November 23, 2004 The Meridian City Pre -Council meeting was called to order at 6:00 P.M. on Tuesday, November 23, 2004 by Mayor Tammy de Weerd. Members Present: Mayor Tammy de Weerd, Shaun Wardle, Christine Donnell and Charlie Rountree. Others Present: Brad Watson, Bill Nary, Kenny Bowers, Doug Strong, Stacy Kilchenmann, Anna Canning and Will Berg. Item 1. Roll -call Attendance: X Keith Bird X Christine Donnell X Shaun Wardle X Charlie Rountree X Mayor Tammy de Weerd Item 2. Adoption of the Agenda: Bird: I would entertain a motion, unless there are some changes. Donnell: So moved. Rountree: Second. Bird: It's been moved and seconded to approve the agenda as published. All in favor say aye. Nary: Mr. President. I was just going to ask on the Executive Session on the Pre -Council if you would add subsection "c" as well to the Executive Session among with "d". Bird: Add 'b and d" onto the subsection. Is that okay, Council? Donnell: Yes. Bird: Are you still the motion maker? Donnell: Yes. Bird: It's still all ayes, then? ALL AYES. MOTION CARRIED. Item 3. Finance Report: Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting November 23, 2004 Page 2 of 9 Kilchenmann: Okay, we are finally wrapping up FY2004. I think, hopefully, we have everything booked and the audit started this week. So, I am going to just go over some of the highlights of the past year. These are not the audited financial statements, but I don't anticipate too many changes. I want to first go to page 2. 1 am not going to go through every statement in your packet, but I did put a couple of extra different types of comparisons and graphs and so forth and one of them I did for each fund is titled FY04 to FY03 expenditure comparisons. So, those are comparisons of personal and operating cost. The difference between the actual for this year and the prior year and then there is graphs down at the bottom that shows you how much of that increase occurred in each department. So, for example on page 2 is the special services fund and it shows percentage of operating costs increased by department and in the second graph it has Building Department, 89 percent, so for the actual dollar amount of increase, 89 percent of that occurred in the Building Department. So, then it goes by the personnel increase. Then on page 3 1 have the general fund and the enterprise fund and it's the same kind of thing. It shows you what the graphing of the two of the different types of increase and then what department was responsible for it. For example, in the general fund the actual personnel increase, 56 percent of that increase was in the Fire Department, 35 percent was in the Police Department. So, those are just some different ways of looking at how expenses behaved. Then the next thing that I want to talk about just briefly are the investments, which are on page 4 and 5 and if you look at these, I am not going to go through the detail, but you can see that our investment in cash balances for all funds and for city wide have increased, which actually we have had an increase in our net assets that we will look at that when we get done with the audit and we look at the Gasby 34 statements. But, we are trying something a little different. The state has opened their bond market pool to cities for the first time. This started in July and its interest rate is outperforming all of our other investments. It's like at 4.21 and the fees for that are very low. So, the fees are just minimal. We might pay $400 a month and I think we have probably $16 million invested. So, we are trying that out and we have been really pleased with it. So far, it has boosted our interest (inaudible) and actually helped our interest to come in at budget or slightly above this year, which we weren't expecting. Then on page 8 are just kind of some — pages 8 and 9 are just some — one of them is at the enterprise fund and we have the bottom graph that shows the total number of utility customer account increase, which is almost 2,300 accounts we added in FY04 and then as you are all familiar with on page 9 graphs the building permit sales for commercial and residential. So, in FY03 we had 1,200 residential building permits; with 2004 we had 2,081 residential building permits. That is just kind of a graphic way to look at some of the increases, some of the indicators. Then on page 12 and I know that the print is really tiny, you may have to get a magnifying glass to read this, but this is the final analysis of each component of our revenue and basically our revenue came in about $600,000 higher than we expected and there is two big reasons for that. One is the state revenue sharing increased by 322,000. We budgeted that based on the estimate that AIC gives us early in the year and so that came out — that picture was much Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting November 23, 2004 Page 3 of 9 more rosy than the estimate they gave us. And then we had a $257,000 increase in our property tax between the original estimate we got when we did the budget and then the actual — once the new construction costs is (inaudible). So that is good news. Then some of the other items, some of them were slightly up, some of them were slightly down, but there really isn't too much variance in any of our other sources. Then on your — in front of you, that's not on your computer, I put a new worksheet that says City of Meridian, changes in fund balance pre -audit. Donnell: I am sorry, what page was that? Kilchenmann: There is no page. It looks like this. It has got green columns on it. It was like finished an hour ago, kind of thing. This is probably where kind of the heart of how we did over the past year is. And it's each fund, beginning balance, change in fund balance and the ending fund balance. So, the first block there are all the general fund accounts, which we have several of them. Park Impact Fees, that is kind of self-explanatory. Our net increase is $869,000. So, that's cash in minus cash out because that number doesn't include amounts budgeted that we didn't spend. Fire truck fund, the same thing. We had a net decrease because we didn't add to it in FY04. Then the big number, the general fund and reserve, we actually increased our fund balance by 1.4 million, but before you really look at that number you really have to take the overpass out — no, I have taken the overpass out. That's below. So, that is the actual increase in cash. Then the Locust Grove Overpass — that we have only spent $74,000. So, that's not going down very fast. The police construction fund; that is just that we are required by the terms of our lease to keep the last payment in reserve. So, that's what the $400,000 is. Special services fund, our Planning and Zoning and Billing Department before we transfer the capital improvement fund and see that's 1.1 million, so that is going to be a big boost into the capital improvement fund. The $836,000, the capital improvement fund, those are — we spent a little bit of it. We have some interest and then those are the transfers we have made of prior years into the fund from the special services fund. Then underneath, if we look at the — so those are like actual cash changes, then underneath our budget to actual savings without the overpass and these numbers did not include depreciation because we will only do that on the Gasby 34 Statements, but I think these numbers are what you probably are really going to be concerned with. So if we look at — take the overpass out because that really skews things because we have that huge budgeted number that we don't spend, we can see the revenue went up by $600,000, which we looked at before. That's basically property tax and revenue sharing. Then personnel and operating we were under budget by 8.8 percent and if you break that down, our personnel savings were $695,000, which is a little over 6 percent and that was largely due to vacant positions in the Police Department and then the firefighters being in training for two months at that lower pay where they were budgeted as Firefighter 1's and then there is a little bit of savings from turnover positions and so forth from each of the other general fund departments. Our OE savings is $297,000, which is almost 3 Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting November 23, 2004 Page 4 of 9 percent and that's due to a combination of things. One of the biggest savings is in police, like in (inaudible) savings because that program started at the end of the year. They had a big savings in their electricity. We had a savings in legal costs and then just various departments had other amounts and aren't material in themselves, but added together resulted in that almost 3 percent savings. So, that's kind of a quick look at the general fund. The enterprise fund; we do this a little bit differently because we have already taken the depreciation and so we do not so much a change in fund balance, but what we call a change in unrestricted assets, which the change was 5.9 million and what we do is we take their total fund balance, take out the number that we call invested in capital assets and then related debt, which are all their assets minus their accumulated depreciation and then we arrive at what we call unrestricted net assets. That increased by 5.9 million dollars. Then if we look at their budget to actual numbers, including depreciation the personnel and operating were 3 percent under budget. Operating revenue 4 percent over budget. So, considering the dollar amounts that those budgets are, those aren't terribly significant, but their assessment revenue is 80 percent over budget, so we budgeted 4.8 million dollars and ended up with 8.8 million dollars and that assessment revenue includes interest income. So, that's kind of a look at the City, a quick look at the City for FY04. Are there any questions? Bird: Any questions, Council? Mayor? If not, Stacy, another great job as usual. And another thank you to all the directors, employees for turning something like this in the tough times, I certainly appreciate it, as a Council person that has to answer to tax payers. De Weerd: Mr. President. Bird: Madame Mayor. De Weerd: I guess just to pull me in on what you just said. You know, there were a lot of cost increases that were not anticipated. In particular, with fuels and the net result on other type of consumer expenses, so we appreciate the frugal attitude of all of our staffs. This what you see here is a collective effort and I appreciate that finance is able to put it in layman's terms, by all means, but we appreciate what our whole city staff does as well. Bird: Madame Mayor, you will express this out in the newsletter to all the employees because it's been a cooperative effort. I know there is a lot of public entities and private companies that would like to have a bottom line report like this. It just goes from the hard work of not only top management, but also our directors and all of our employees as far as I am concerned. This is — since 1965 when I moved here, it's the way Meridian has been ran and I hope it continues to get ran like this. I am sure you are going to see that that does happen. Thank you. If nothing more, we will go on. Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting November 23, 2004 Page 5 of 9 Item 4. Discussion of Storm Water Drainage Pond Landscaping: Canning: I think it's the Mayor's. De Weerd: I guess we needed to bring back your decision to ACHD in response to their requests and allow some discussion so that I can bring back your decision. Bird: Okay, any discussion? If not, I will discuss it. We got the answer that we wanted. My main concern and I think it was Councilman Rountree's too is what is being done in the other areas. I for one will put out the money to keep -- to maintain the landscaping to make the drainage ponds look nice. I think, I don't want them looking like a tulle pond or something like that. I think it needs to be landscaped. That's my personal opinion. I don't know about the rest of you. Jump right in here. They came back and showed us how the other communities work with them and I don't want anything special, but I want to do the same as the other communities do and evidently, the other communities take care of the landscaping if they landscape it. De Weerd: Mr. President. Bird: Madame Mayor. De Weerd: I believe also that the list showed that this is on a case by case basis and it would not be a standard, across the board, any ponds that are built would we maintain, but these ponds are in very visible locations in our community and it would be different from what the rest of them are. Bird: Yes, you are right Mayor. Any other discussion on this? Wardle: Mr. President. Bird: Yes, Mr. Wardle. Wardle: Two concerns that I have and have expressed and one of them is that I understand the case by case basis and certainly we want these ponds not to be an eye sore for the community, so I think the money spent in other communities and the money that would be spent here would be worth having as a part of our community, but I have brought up the equity issue that we have with paying impact fees to the County Highway District and we have a couple of projects coming up and so I have voiced my concerns there and my other concern is what length of an agreement are we going to have? I don't necessarily feel comfortable doing — making an agreement in perpetuity where we agree to do this forever or there may be a time where those ponds, we might want to change the landscaping or do some of that and so what would be a reasonable amount of time whether it would be five years or ten years or twenty years, I think we Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting November 23, 2004 Page 6 of 9 need to come up with that type of an agreement that could be changed in the future. Bird: Like the Mayor said, though, Councilman Wardle is this is on a basis per basis deal. It's not something that is written in law for everything. You do it on a per basis as a go and I agree with you, I don't think we should — I think another thing we could look at and I think this is something Parks and Recreation needs to look at is on maintaining landscaping like this is hiring, outsourcing, some lawn care landscape place that has their trailer with all their equipment on it can run out there and for half the price of us loading up and heading out there do it for us. Boise has been very successful doing a lot of outsourcing in their parks, so — but it is on a case -to -case basis as the Mayor said. Wardle: Mr. President. Bird: Yes, Mr. Wardle. Wardle: One of the other things that I see and I don't know to what extent we utilize that, but as I drive Veteran's Parkway and in some of the areas listed here I see that County Inmate Services is partnering with what it looks like supervised Park's Department, so that might be an option for us as well. Rountree: Mr. President. Bird: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: I don't disagree with what's been said. The thing that concerned me, I guess is that we had some concerns about one particular instance, but apparently that pond on Overland and Meridian Road was something that's been apparently submitted to the city for consideration of landscaping and I am not sure anybody knew about it, not that I need to know about it, but I didn't get a sense from staff that they were aware that something was going on there and I guess the other comment is is that I haven't seen the final product on Locust Grove, but good job. I appreciate that effort and I think those kinds of things if we have them in the community are things that we should take pride in and show the appreciation by agreeing to maintain them to Ada County Highway District. Canning: I can fill you in a bit if that's okay, Mr. President. Bird: Sure. Canning: It's been a much longer process on the Overland Road site because they weren't complete with construction. When we first contacted them, they had done some of the initial work to the point where you see it now. They do intend to do more work, so at the first meeting we had with them, which I think was about a year ago, we talked about both the Overland Road and the Locust Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting November 23, 2004 Page 7 of 9 Grove. The Overland Road they had already kind of completed that section of the project, so they said, we will address it when we do the rest of it and they committed at that time to do the Locust Grove and make sure that got done and they did do that and then Steve Siddoway met with ACHD regarding the Overland Road and this would be the second time on this one. About three weeks ago, I think, he kind of laid out those provisions that we were talking about last week with them and they don't have a plan yet that meets those standards, so they are coming back. So, it's not an official application or anything. They have been working with Steve on that design. Bird: Thank you, Anna, very much. That answer your question, Mr. Rountree? Rountree: Sure. Bird: Any other discussion on the storm drainage? If not, we will go on to Item No. 5. De Weerd: Mr. President. Bird: Madame Mayor. De Weerd: So, do you want Mr. Nary to bring that back? Or that we will go ahead and put on the agenda next week to sign the MOU or what is the direction of the Council on this? Bird: Council what is your pleasure? Rountree: Mr. President. Bird: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: Given what I have heard, I think an MOU is appropriate; crafting the language might be a little bit tricky if we are looking at what we are agreeing to is going to be on a case by case basis, but I would certainly like to see one blanket MOU that could be amended as opposed to an MOU for every pond that comes up because just of the headache of trying to keep track of something like that for staff would be — well, it wouldn't happen well, let's put if that way and nothing against staff it's just stuff like that happens to find ways to leak out. I don't know that the one we saw originally is the right document. De Weerd: Mr. President. Bird: Madame Mayor. De Weerd: We could direct our City Attorney to take a look at it and make sure it reflects the wishes of Council and we can run it by ACHD and when we have a Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting November 23, 2004 Page 8 of 9 document that looks appropriate we will get it on the consent agenda. Does that sound feasible? Rountree: That would be great. Bird: That would be great. I am like Mr. Rountree, I hope we can get something that's generic and all we have to do is take out the dates and the place and the description, but have the same MOU so that we can understand what we are dealing with. De Weerd: Mr. President. Bird: Madame Mayor. De Weerd: Mr. Nary do you have enough information to move forward on that? Nary: Madame Mayor, members of the Council, yes I have enough to probably get that back. It would probably be two weeks because of the short week. De Weerd: Is that going to be enough time, Gary? Bird: I have got to say something. He didn't sound like that when he was sitting (inaudible) did he? Nary: I think, Mr. President, I was always willing to give more time, if needed. Bird: Okay, Council, if we are done with that then we need a motion to go into Executive Session as per Idaho State Code 67-2345(1)(c)(d). Rountree: So moved. Wardle: Second. Bird: All in favor? Oh, wait, Mr. Clerk, roll call please. Berg: Thank you, Mr. President, members of Council. Roll call vote: Rountree, aye; Wardle, aye; Donnell, aye; Bird, aye. All ayes. ALL AYES. MOTION CARRIED. Item 5. Executive Session per Idaho State Code 67-2345(1)(d)(c): Bird: Let it be known that no decisions were made in Executive Session. I think that concludes the Pre -Council meeting of November 23, 2004. 1 would entertain a motion for adjournment. Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting November 23, 2004 Page 9 of 9 Donnell: So moved. Rountree: Second. Bird: All in favor. ALL AYES. MOTION CARRIED. MEETING ADJOURNED AT 7:10 P.M. (TAPE ON FILE OF THESE PROCEEDINGS) APPROVED: WA MR - -�11 X&M ATTESTED: N71IIU_1LTA to /Z , 1,f-,04-- DATE