Events coming up this week or actually this month, I want to make sure everybody was aware of so anyone who would like, we would love to have you join us this Wednesday, So Wednesday, May fourteenth, this will be the fall Fallen Officer Memorial event. This occurs between the Central Fire Station and the Police Station which is on Johnstone. We actually have a memorial there and so we will have a memorial event to honor all the fallen officers
in Washington County. And so that will be again Wednesday, May fourteenth noon to one great event, and we are we would love to have everyone who's available come down. The actual ceremony itself is only about ten to fifteen minutes, so if you're on your lunch break, feel free to come down. Afterwards, they do open up the police station. They serve snacks and people are allowed to come in and you can get a little bit of a look at what's going on in our police station.
So good.
Yeah, it is a really cool event. If you've never had an opportunity to attend, we'd encourage you to join us. And then coming up this will be on May twenty fourth, we will be opening the swimming pools and so these are the city owned swimming pools, which would be Frontier and sooner. Those are both owned by the city, but they are operated by the YMCA, and so YMCA will
be ready to open both of those on May twenty fourth. Now, the splash pads might actually open sooner than that, but that really is just depending on whether and so if the weather cooperates, we'll actually open those sooner, and.
So once that happens, we'll we'll make that announcement for sure. Did you give the test glide on the slide already? Did you give them me the approval?
You know?
I was. I was.
I was one of the first ones down, and I'm going to tell you the fast slides pretty fast good. I lost I lost contact with the slide at one point.
Wow, weez, zero gravity in the tube. It was. It smooked me just a little bit.
I'm not gonna but it was fun, right, And of course I had a bunch of people watching. So the only thing I could think of is please don't scream like a little girl.
And I didn't.
I didn't, but I did on the inside just for a minute. Okay, So but that's that's coming up, and we would love to These are all of our swimming pools are fantastic. They are and the amenities there are awesome, so it's a great thing for families. But we'll plan to have those open May twenty fourth, and we're really excited about it. Another thing that's going on, and actually we are in the very last phase of it, is the hydrant flushing, and so we are in the last phase.
In fact, it will be happening this evening, and so we will be flushing the hydrants between frank Phillips. Basically, if you live north of frank Phillips between seventy five and the Caney River, we'll be flushing those tonight, so you'll you could notice some discoloration of your water. And people are always curious why we flush the hydrance, and there's a couple of reasons.
One of them is to ensure that all the hydrants of town are working.
So this is a you go around and you you actuate them and flush them out and you make sure that they're working. But actually the main reason for it
is for maintenance of our water lines. And so by flushing those, you actually flush you increase the velocity of the water in the line and it scours the inside of the lines, and so it removes what's known as the biofilm, and so all all water has minerals and things in it, and it actually will deposit on the inside of the lines, and so we we speed up how much water flows through there, and it actually scours that out and helps to keep the lines maintained.
So those are those are the two reasons. And it does.
It can cause some can cause some discoloration of the water when we're doing that, so just be careful, especially if you're washing clothes. You might want to wait a day and not We don't want you to stain your clothes at all. So but that'll that's I believe that's the final phase of that and we will have completed hydro flushing for the year. So now back week we had a council meeting, would have been yeah, actually it
would have been last week, so one week ago. Had a fairly lengthy meeting, but we had a lot, We really had a lot on the meeting. It was one of the weightier meetings we've had in a while. And in fact, we had budgets and we had contracts with the Barbsviell Development Authority and visit Bartlesville, and we had their budgets and their stories, and we had a lot going on that night. In fact, I'm forgetting about half
of it. But one of the one of the items I know that generated a lot of public interest was the city's comprehensive Plan. And so if i'd just take a minute and kind of back up, because the city's comprehensive Plan was actually adopted in November of twenty twenty four, and so we have a comprehensive plan and it is we have been operating under that plan since November twenty
twenty four. And if you're curious exactly what a comprehensive plan is, it is the longest term plan that the city implements, and so it looks way into the future. We're talking twenty or thirty years for these. Most of our plans are relatively short in nature. We look one to three years into the future. But this is the overall framework for our community, for our government, for development, for economic development. This is the overall framework looking as
far out into the future as we can. Took about took thirteen months, I think, to develop the comprehensive Plan. It involved hundreds of citizens of Bartlesville, there was a tremendous amount of input.
We had a top.
Shelf consultant from half An Associates and this plan was again it was thirteen months in development, adopted in November by the City Council. At the same time, the City Council invited people to provide input for a thirty day period and so during that thirty day period we wanted to hear from everyone who had concerns, and I think Larry you told me we received about we received probably five different submissions, but they were all essentially the same submission,
so they had the same source. And so the Larry actually facilitated an ad hoc group to review those changes and to see if any of those that the City Council would be interested in implementing any of those and there it was quite a voluminous number of amendments, and so the ad hoc group, I think you spent about four months studying that, so about four months actually studying it, and then took the final document to the Planning Commission,
and the Planning Commission recommended that we reject all amendments. And so what they wanted was for us to keep the plan that the council had adopted in November, and that was unanimous by the Planning Commission, so that was
their recommendation of the City Council. But since the City Council is the actual deciding body and the Planning Commission is just a recommend we went ahead and took it to the City Council and Larry explained it that night exactly everything that I'm talking about now, how we arrived at this place and the council considered it and they actually split vote three to two. They rejected all the amendments, so they followed the recommendation of the Planning Commission.
So we have the same comp plan.
That we have had since last November, and we will and to be clear, I think we have a great plan and I think it was well developed, using again all of the resources that our community has. There was incredible amounts of public input and frankly, there was even more availability for anyone who wanted to participate. Not everyone did, and I get that there's thirty eight thousand people.
That live in Borlso Localholm and not all of them care to participate in a thirty year plan.
Well, I and those open meetings there sure were a ton It was standing room only.
It was actually pretty impressive, right, yeah, that we had that many people participate. So that was what went into the development of the area origional plan and the If anyone is curious why we had the ad hoc it was to consider the submissions that we received after the plan was adopted, and so they did a small group. It was actually Larry was the staff facilitator. We had
Council East on the committee. We had Vice Mayor Dorsey on the committee, and then we had two citizens, one of whom had served on the original the Planning Advisory Committee, which was Dan kelleher he brought some technical expertise as an architect. And then the final one was Sarah Burnette, who is.
I believe her.
I believe she's actually the vice vice chairman of the Washington County GOP and so that as far as I know, that's her only official role she had. She was the compiler of all of the suggested changes. So the ad hoc committee met in good faith and looked through everything. But again at the end of it, both the Planning Commission and in the City of Artlesfield rejected those amendments and so we will will go with the plan that was that was initially adopted and we're.
Quite happy with it. Oh yeah, very much.
Then I'd just like to chime in that you know, the conference ave Plan is a guiding document, is not an ordinance, right, no law. It is no law. It is adopted by resolution by city council. So it is something that the city will constantly be looking at and actually as a part of our comp plan and ordinances is that we look at it every at least once a year to see if there's any potential changes that need to be looked at, and that's always about every November.
Is that will take a take a look at that, see if there's anything that needs to be done, and then go from there. But yeah, I mean it is it is a well crafted document that you know, well over a thousand citizens participated in helping create and craft that document. Oh yeah, I mean that's that is incredible to have that much participation, both through you know, in person meetings that we had and the online information that we are surveys that we had available. So yeah, it's it's incredible.
We're grateful to everyone who partic diipated and again, this is this is something that we will but we will use as we look to Bartlesville's future, and so it helps to shape other plans. So when we look at our strategic Plan, which is a shorter frame timeframe it's generally about three years, is what we look at there. As we look to our strategic Plan, we align it
with comprehensive plan. And then every year when we do our budget, we align it with the Strategic Plan, and each department they align their.
Goals with the Strategic Plan. So it does.
It is important, but again it's just it's a it's a guiding document. It is not there is no force of law, it doesn't allocate resources. So but we're excited to have that behind us so that we can we can continue to move forward. And speaking of budgets, that was a major topic at our last council meeting. In fact, we essentially the Council adopts two separate budgets. The first budget is the operating budget, and included in that is
funding for capital projects. But the Council actually considers the capital budget separately. So they adopt the operating budget and that's funding to these capital sources. But then we have a completely separate presentation on all of the capital projects and then the council adopts those So as far as the operating budget went, the council did adopt the operating budget as presented, so all of the city staff's work was appreciated on that. And so just some quick highlights
on the operating budget. Our finance director will be back later this month and be on the radio and he can talk in greater detail.
But the biggest highlights.
We anticipated decline in both sales tax and use tax, and so we typically budget very conservatively and this year was no exception. We have budgeted for a one percent decline in sales tax, which is a significant amount of money. Sales tax is our largest tax source, and a two percent decline in use tax, and so both of those are significant revenue sources. So we're trying to hedge our bets a little bit as we go into these times of uncertainty. It's always uncertain, by the way, that's just
the reality. When you're planning a year, you don't know how it's going to go. So you described as uncertain.
Well, if you did, there would be no surprise. That's true. That's not all surprises are good. Dumb. The older we get, the more we realize that there are very few good surprises, very few.
So one of the other provisions we did provide for standard pay increases for all city employees, which is very important to us.
We want to be an employer of choice.
We want people to want to work here because eighty over eighty percent of our budget is for personnel.
Work service organizations.
So the service we provide to the citizens of Bartlesville is dependent on the quality of people we can hire, and that is directly related to what we pay. As far as additions of personnel, there really were only four additional personnel. We are looking to add four firefighters to the City of Bartlesville, and there's a lot of reasons for that, but part of it is is to help to offset some of the overtime that we were incurring.
And part of that is that we have simply grown as a city since we established the number of firefighters that we have, so adding for we believe will we'll provide a better service to our community and save money. And so it's it's not often we can do those two things at the same time, but we believe this will do both. And then there were a couple of
initiatives in there that were they're sort of interesting. One of them is as we set aside some money to explore the implementation of AI in our in our organization, it is an incredibly powerful tool, somewhat misunderstood, and we were just curious where where could we.
Go with that?
And and again, our goal is tooful, just like it was with the firefighters, is to reduce costs and increase service to citizens. So we think that AI presents that opportunity. We just need to be very careful in how we implement it.
Okay, yep, very careful.
Very yeah, we don't want to turn on sky Net Tom, No, we don't. Sorry for anybody who's under the age of thirty. That was a terminator reference. And the other thing that we set aside some money for was actually to implement the next plan. And so the Council is currently in the process of adopting our next strategic Plan and so that is has been titled Barlsville Next and so we will be looking to do that in the near future.
And so once we adopt the next plan, there are typically some priorities in there that do require funding, and so there was just some money set aside that the Council can actually use to accomplish some of the goals within the next plan.
So that was it.
It was a relatively boring budget, which is awesome. Those are my very very favorite kind. I like it when things are simple, and in this case, it was a relatively simple budget. No, not yet, but there most certainly there most certainly will be. And you're right, we have we have reserves to help deal with those surprises, and
that's why we budget the way we do. So the second budget that the council adopts is actually the cap little budget that we discussed, and that one is that that's run by our city engineer, Mike Seamers, actually our city engineering director.
You're also a city engineer. You're also a traffic engineer. Is there anything else I miss something? Manager?
Yeah, I don't know.
It's done at the water buffalo. Lie.
That's it.
There you go. See, we're all about to say it clearly. All right, So Micah, let's talk capital budget. So the first off, capital budget is generally from sources of revenue that are voter approved. So we have our sales tax, which is a half cent sales tax that's dedicated for capital. We have GEO bonds that are voter approved, so the projects for those are largely decided unless we have excess funds and then we can add projects of the same type.
So if the voters approved streets in this amount and we have some extra money, then we can do some extra streets.
It's kind of how how that shakes out.
So talk to us, and there's some other sources of capital, but those are the two biggest. So talk to us about what what the citizens can expect.
And these are projects that we expect to either.
Start design or start construction in the next year, which is why they were funded.
Correct.
Yeah, so we we each year also always carry over some projects that were already funded with the previous year, quite a few previous budget.
And it takes more than a year to get most of these capital projects.
Unfortunately, it does.
Unfortunately it does.
Yees, lengthy design and then bidding process and then right some of them then themselves could take six well, depending we've got wastewater plants, may take.
Two years to may take two years on that. In our bridge project, we'll be pushing a year when it's all complete there on Tuxedo. So yeah, so there's government doesn't always move quickly when we're opening money, which isn't necessarily always a.
Bat, but not always a bad thing, that's right. Let's be deliberate.
We don't rush into things, yeah for sure. So but yeah, so, like you said, we were working on geo bond funds from the twenty twenty geo bond. Currently we've got the twenty twenty two issues, the twenty twenty three issues of those, and so actually really the majority of those projects should be really going out to bid this year. Hopefully.
This is awesome.
We're I don't want to say we're caught up, because we're not caught up by any means, but we're finally doing better I think in our department and trying to get some of these things cranked out. So you'll see a lot of street projects happening this year and whatnot. But as far as new projects that they're new to the budget, we're, like you said, we're on year five of the five year sales tax extension and there.
Weren't a whole lot of projects in there.
Usually try to get things done earlier in that five year periods. You never know what the money is going to do.
Right, all of the ones that we promised the public we would do, we try to get done.
We're trying to get that done early, so there really weren't a whole lot of projects in there. The biggest thing really is about one point two million dollars worth of prevent the maintenance street funds. Those specific streets aren't identified yet. We'll start working on that here the next couple of months and get that before Street and Traffic Committee, but we'll use our payment condition model to help identify
those as well. But we've got funding for that, and then we've got our kind of what we call evergreen funds as far as maintenance, some equipment, things of that nature. So we've got small vall smaller things. We've got funding for general fund, vehicle replacement, for police vehicle replacement, and equipment, you know, tasers, things of that nature. It's all the things that really are kind of recurring each year. We've
got funding for that. But like you said, if we do have some savings or more money available than the product that we're planned, we do reach out with the directors for their list of needs, and so we went through that process this year as well. And so in sales tax alone, we do have a one hundred and eighty thousand dollars for new abatement storage building. That was really kind of the largest thing in sales tax sadly enough, and that's just not all that exciting.
Right, Well, that was a very exciting budget. Very exciting budget.
We've got that We've actually got the last bit of funding for our City Hall remodel project in the carpet. So we've got some funding for carpet replacement in City Hall.
That's exciting for the people who work there.
It is.
And so you know, we're getting close to bidding that project as well, and this actually works out well, we're now just got that last piece of funding so we can make that happen.
This building is over one hundred years old, so it requires a little care.
And love, it does for sure. So again that's kind of your project's there for sales tax. As far as new projects, we also have a capital Reserve fund, which is actually general fund money that again, if we have a surplus that we can put towards capital project, that's.
Right, anything that we can we try to put towards.
Capital, right, and so really the most exciting project in that is going to be nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a new fire truck.
It is definitely badly needed. We were due a replacement on the pumper anyway. But this will be special.
Right, So this will be special. So this is gonna be equipped with phone capabilities. They call it RF I believe, I forget what that even stands for. Yes, well, I'm not even gonna report, I don't remember. Long story short, it's gonna help us be covered at our airport. That's so if you have fires out there and those hangars, you've got jet fuel, you've got other things that are combustible, and so we're really not currently equipped to handle that.
There was a time when Conico Phillips ran that airport that they had the equipment on site I did.
They actually had to our vehicles on site that we don't have anymore.
And so when we took over operation of the airport out there, we've already always owned it, but we took over operation.
What was that three years ago now, it.
Seems about right, Yeah, we we haven't had that equipment. So that came up as part of this new hangar project that we're currently working on design out there, and that it would have cost about one point five million dollars just for fire suppression in that one building to
do foam suppression. And so we thought a better option would be to equip our fire department appropriately and then we can get by with normal I guess, more conventional water fire suppression in that hangar at a lesser cost, and then we can be covered on the other hangers.
With It allowed us to increase our capability of our fire department and yeah, for sure for the airport and beyond the airport.
Right, So this is I think this is I think we all feel like this is a good, good step, good thing, decision, good project per se. It's equipment, not so much a project, but so EARLYI Other than that, I mean that's the rest of us equipment and things for other departments and whatnot. It's as far as sales tax. We had about four point four to seven million dollars
available for new projects. That's after we got through our carryover projects that were already budget previous years and if we had to add additional funding to those or we never really cut the projects, but sometimes we'd have to carry over some additional funds and we haven't got the design, maybe haven't got to construction. Those who carry over the full budget for those we had about four point four
to seven million available in sales tax. We had about three point sixty seven million dollars in actual projects, and so it's got that about just almost eight hundred thousand dollars buffer.
It's always good to have, especially when we have increasing prices like we have right now.
Correct, we are really.
Uncertain, you know, It's been interesting. It's just might have been all over the board, something seem high.
Something.
I've been surprised on some street projects here they're actually coming in lower than expected. But I think as a whole, things are still high.
And I think some of.
The streets are the materials are local right, our buildings, a lot of that stuff is We're going to be bringing in steel and stuff from other areas, so that will will certainly be more susceptible there.
So this is nice.
This is I think last year we had around the same amount a little.
Bit last thing.
That's seven hundred and fifty thousand last year for unallocated It's nice because there haven't always been years. No, there have been years where we've had about one hundred dollars safety hundred thousand dollars safety debt there and.
It went fast, pretty nerve wright again it went fast.
So this allows us to do the projects that we've identified, even if some of them come in over budge correct, which which we know that that's a good chance that will happen this year, right, right, Our estimates are not are a couple of years old.
Now, so they are. Yeah, especially on the sales tax side of things. You know it's a five year extension or geo bond products were maybe a little bit better shape on this lightest one, but uh, we try to be conservative, but we we did find out pretty early on especially on some bridges I think too hurry over on that one we've adjusted and modified for a sunset portion is going to happen here the next year.
So there is there anything in there that you think that the public would be excited about that it's something something unique, sort.
Of like you said, it's kind of boring.
It's kind of kind of boring.
Kind but there's there are a lot of street projects, a lot of street projects.
Yeah, and so and really what's going to happen is is not so much with the new projects, but what you're going to see is on that last issuees of the twenty twenty g O bond Uh. There's a whole bunch of street projects in that. We've got I think four different concrete street projects that we're lumped into one project. We've got about six different asphalt projects that are lumped
into one larger project. So we've got a lot of things that you're going to see construction happening that are really carried over from previous years.
And there will be some disruption, there will be asked for everybody's patience. I would apologize, but the reality is is what we're doing is we're improving our community and making our streets spanishers nothing to apologize for.
We find ourselves apologies.
That's it, and so I and right now we're we're getting ready to go through a period of some pretty significant intermittent district eruptions and they're signage up on those streets now. So if people have noticed the little temporary reflectors on a road, it's because that road is getting ready to get and improvement.
That is and is if you drive through town, it's pretty much going to cover It's quite a.
Few major.
We've got them all and we do and that will be essentially a thin overlay and then it gets sealed with sort of a year. It's sort of a super hard sealant on it. And this is preventative maintenance. So these some of these roads you'll look at and think, man, that road was okay to begin with, Well it is, but in a couple of years it won't be right.
And so she just had that conversation with a friend over the weekend. We were talking about it and they were asking what the you know, what the signage was it was up and what's going on and the sticky tabs and and I just explained it, and actually I sent them the link. So if you guys are interested in this project, good point for starters, get on city Beat. There's a link in there for that and in the project description. We should also have that on our website.
But they really did a pretty good job of laying this project out. It's in phases. I don't if you want to go to that level of detail here on the radio this morning, I'm not sure we have time for.
Yeah, But.
Bottom line is it's going to cover a lot of the city of Barbles little but there is information out there on that link, and yeah, it's prevented maintenance.
But those streets.
They're really not in that bad a condition now now they're they're in pretty good shape, but we want to extend the life of those This will get us another ten to fifteen years. So this is where we have to do something more like Teresa's.
Painting your house rather than repair repair in your side.
And so that's really where we're painting our roads and we're going to make sure that they're in good shape come ten to fifteen years. So this is an excellent use of that money, right, all right, Michael, Well, thank you. We got Larry here too, and I don't want to cut him out completely, so he got a couple of minutes.
But Larry, so we're here really to kind of.
Talk about code enforcement because this is the time of year in which I.
Want to talk about Mark exciting, okay, so I'll okay, well I'll do very quick on that.
Well, just as a reminder, I'll tell you what you do. You nobody ever listens to me anyway, So just do your thing.
Always listening to it doesn't mean I actually act on it, but I mean I listened thirty seconds Argus, Yeah, exactly. So anyways, code enforcement coming. As you know, we've had lots of great rain, Thank the Good Lord that we did is that we needed that desperately considering the past couple of years. But what that leads to is grass growing. So what does that mean, citizens, please be out there
maintaining your your grass. Is that we need to make sure that those things keep mode because if not, we'll be knocking on your door to just get you a little reminder.
Keep it under what keep it under least twelve inches?
But if it all possible.
Shorter it is always better. Better, Shorter will be better for inches wet grass, it is hard to.
Moyah exactly exactly. So the other thing I wanted to point out is that Keith Barsol Beautiful our committee that we crayed last year as doing an excellent job, and that we have our first project that we are doing to day. We are going to be out actually planting us some new plants within the planters downtown at Keeler and Frank Phillips and so they will be out today doing that and we're really excited about that. And we'll be doing that as well. Uh, we'll be kicking off
Zony Code update soon. We are going to be going out for an RFQ request for qualifications for a consultant to come in and assist us with that update. That will be about a year year and a half long process. So the comp plan, we want to make sure everything is going to be cope a set of goodness, so
we'll be doing that as well. The last thing I want to talk about is that last year, late last year, the History Museum had requested the park Board that we do a slight neat installation over off on a pathfinder and that is where the inner Urban crosses pathfinder was to do a little little installation of actually showing that location.
So our team will be out there doing that hopefully this Friday, if all the weather holds out, that we will be actually putting that installation in, which will be a painting on a cross pathfinder showing the location of where the inner Urban For those who don't know what that was, that was our old city rail line that we had going through the city. Super cool and so we're putting it doing that as well.
So that's awesome.
So we got we got a lot of little things going on and so our as always, our community is a very unique place and this is just more demonstration of it.
Very good job. We got that all in on time. Just listened in already. Thank you for watching and listening to our City Matters program right here on K one, the one you trust. Stay tuned, we have news ahead in just a moment.