Good morning, good morning, good morning, and welcome, welcome, welcome. It is time now for our community connection right here on K one, the one you trust today at City Matters and we have the Vice Mayor of the City of Bartlesville, James Kurd with us. How you doing this their Good morning? All busy night last night at city Hall, some kind of heavy business last night. We lost, of course, Counselor Billy Rohan to after a short illness and we have a vacancy in her ward. Tell us
how we progress from here? What do we do? Well? It was it was certainly a tough evening because we actually had three meetings last night and Billy's been such a great part of that council for the last two year, year and a half and two years actually so and we had a beautiful bouquet roses in flowers in her seat last night, so you know, you carry on and keep doing the business of the city. That's what we needed to do. But it was a very heavy hearts last night that we had to
conduct it without billity there last night. I think we were all still kind of reading from the fact we had no idea and it was a short illness and we lost her very suddenly, so but we did carry on, we did discuss the next move forward. We've I've been on the council now for almost eight seven years now and we've had two replacements on the council. Uh. We have a process where we basically take in take applications and then divide
the applicants up between the councilors. We meet two at a time so we don't violate any open meeting laws and interview the councilors and kind of coalesce our our ideas back to the city manager and from there then conduct a meeting where we'll eventually pick a replacement for to fulfill this term through December. And I understand that the applications are being accept it as up today. They started this
morning. Elaine is there and for just getting it going this morning. If there's any questions or it does flow very smoothly, knowing Elane, it will blow very smoothly, but just call a city manager's office and she can help guide you through the process. Yes, first things first, you have to be a resident. You have to be a resident of that ward for six months, and there's some other requirements beyond that, but we can find that on the website. City Market all that on the website, and it's within
our charter also and that's posted on the website too. So any citizens out there interested in applying for that position, read up on that charter or read up on that and then certainly call it Elaine and get an application. You have any questions as a result of reading that information, just direct them towards the Cita manager and we get those answers for them. And then the budget took a center stage for a while there too. Last night we had we're
early in the budget season, which is kind of nice. We have a lot of things going in the city in May, and so they've tried to push the budget. I had a little this year, and so we're on top of a little earlier lengthy discussion of the budget and how we're going to present it and what the expectations are for revenue, expectetions are for expenses, expectations for new hires, employees, and so kind of the highlight of it is we're going to proceed with a one and a half percent reduction in sales
tax next year. I think one of the and that's a conservative nature that we always Mike and has always done the city. I think it's better to be surprised and have better income than to predict growth in sales tax. We've had two strong years of sales tax growth, and I think there's an ineffable slow down with inflation and everything else coming that might impact that. So I think it's a good choice to kind of look at things like that. And
then we also looked at some employee changes. I think one thing that concerned the council more most is that we're got seventy four police officers. We'd like to have seventy seven or seventy eight, and we're going to hold off hiring anymore base officer for the position of hiring three new dispatchers on our nine one one because our nine one one dispatchers are struggling to get the call volume down down to be able to return calls quickly, so it's a trade off.
I think the police chief decided it was a good trade off to hire these dispatches over the police, but it raised some questions in the counselor's mind last night, and we certainly need help in the dispatch with the nine one one. We have twenty four agencies that we are responsible for. I think that we answer nine to one one calls. So it's a very important position and we do need some help in there. And that's not an easy job.
I've done that, and I got to tell you it's trying. I can't imagine how difficult something something else so good there, So telecommunicators, Well, I guess that'll be posted on the city website as well. I would. Yes, it certainly will be, and so it once we approve it in the budget, and we still got another thirty days or so. Looking today, No, but I'm fairly certain we're going to be hiring some new dispatchers for the city of We certainly need them very good. There was some other
work that the city did last night because there were three meetings. You have that we had three meetings, which is unusual. We periodically have a Barbleville Municipal Authority meeting and it's a kind of a financial arm of the city council, so we can borrow money and do things. But last night was basically accepting an environmental report, several hundred page environmental report on the activities out at
our wastewater treatment plant that's been ongoing. It's under a consent degree with the EPA of eighty million dollar improvements to that plant to better handle the volume and better handle the treatment of our wastewater. So we approved that in a BMA meeting. Then we rolled right over into a special city Council meeting, a formal city council meeting to accept that report from the BMA into So it's kind of a it's just a logical way to do it so that it's all out
and transparent. So we did that basically at our other meeting, and then of course went over a couple of things, and then we rolled into our third meeting, which was a workshop meeting, which was pretty much dedicated to the budget, but we also did talk about Adam's golf course, our pro out there. Jared Benedict will be retiring and so we've got some strategic plans
in mind on how to operate the golf course in the future. So he had a contract there, and we're interested in looking at the other opportunities we have ways to want whether it be you could lease the property to somebody, you could hire a management company to run it, or you could keep it
in house and have a director at the city operate it. So I think what we came away with last night is the idea that we'll have look at two opportunities, two groups to look at number and the city could do our own review, or we might try to put out a request for proposals from consultants that could come in and look at the golf course as a third eye and just give us their view of how it has operated, how it could be better, how it is operating well, and then give those back to
the City Council, and then we could basically choose between a city review or a consultant review. And we've got a golf course operating committee that is up and running and kind of reinvigorated and wants to be involved in the process, and thankful for some speakers who came last night to kind of voice their concerns for the golf course and what we feel we can do better out there.
Well, the golf course is right day in the middle order, it gets the beginning of getting some things have redone kind of like a little bit of an overhaul. We're putting a lot of money into it. The city is for a change, and it's been you know, it's gone through the period of years where we were had low sales tax and it went through ten or twelve years where it's just was underfunded, and I think everybody agrees with that. But it's a jewel within the city. It's been a bigger jewel than
it is today in the past. So I think there's a lot of hope that we could kind of raise the standards out there. And Jerry's done a great job, Jodie's done a great job, but it's been funding and other issues. We feel like we can kind of it's a great opportunity, so I see how we can perform better out there, especially for the citizens. It's a great golf course, the layout is great. We have a city
open out there. We share that with Hillcrest. They have Men's League out there, they have tournaments all the time they've got and more importantly, they have our United Way tournament that our large corporate neighborship put on that's worth a couple of million dollars a year to our United Way. So that golf course is very important to the community. And like I said in the council meeting,
and golf is local. It's very personal to people that play golf at that golf course, and as it is at any other golf course in their community. So hearing from people last night that like the golf course and want to see it improved, it was good, very good, very good. I want to go back to the reduction in sales tax. When when would that take effect? Well, we're just proved. We got to prove it, right, Yeah, yeah, it's just it's a small decrease. We're
predicting a small decrease in sales tax next year. Okay. I thought there was going to be something where you pay less at the cash register. I wanted to get that clarify. Thank you for telling me that there's no reduction in sales tax and within our budget we're predicting that we'll have less sales tax revenue. Okay, for I want to make sure we got that clear because they're gonna be folks out there wait a minute here, Oh, they probably
if they thought it was reduction. I'm sure they would have been calling the city hall immediately today if we were reducing it. But I think we have a conservative nature of looking at our budget and predicting our revenues on a reduced scale or conservative side of something we've always done. And it's worked out, for the most part very well, because we're either coming in at that level or slightly below, or when we come in ahead, then we feel like
we've done pretty good, very good. We've got some very capable people. Mike Bailey course with our CFO for several years underhead and then our current CFO just hit there on top of every aspect of our budget. So they like numbers. They are they good with them to they are good at numbers. It's good that it's printed and in front of us because the way it comes out in a meeting is challenging to be a tenant to every minute of it
because they know it inside out. So well. Anything else you'd like to add to everything that's going on, Well, I was trying to think what else we had. I'm going to just look at my sheet here, because we did have. I talked well, we did in our We had an update on our comprehensive plan last that's right. There was something that was it and there was a very in depth review of that. We've got a consultant working on our comprehensive plan within the city. They gave us an update.
I think they said they were around seventy percent complete. Still had some ways to go, but we've talked about land use and regulations and things within our city. So this is a very in depth view. We only do it, I think legislatively we're supposed to always have one done every twenty five years, and so it's good to catch this plan up in front of the city. It will be a great framework for us to go forward. They can always change the plan as we go forward, but it's good to have a
plan in front of us. And this consultant has done a tremendous job involving the public, public meetings, involving the counselors, involving administration to come up with a comprehensive plan for the City of Barbles as we go forward. So
great update last night on that. The communication has been pretty good. You know, the city people who have an interest in this have been showing up and they have been vocall yeah, and we've got we've used We've got a lot of people that are involved that are reaching out to their circle and their friends to try to answer surveys and get more information for the comprehensive plan.
So they were pleased with the amount of people that we've had involved. And we can always do better, but it's advertised on the city web page. We do all we can to get it out to people. Not all we can, we can always do better, but we do a lot to try to get it out to people, and we've had a fairly good response at this point, I'd say so, counselor, thank you very much for being
with us. Student. You bet we could have had a thirty minute meeting going over for those three meetings, but glad we got a lot done in about twelve to fifteen minutes. All right, thank you very much. Thank you've been listening to City Matters. How did