You. It more than likely will matter to the city. I'm just saying
your responsive government there correct might not be able to do anything about it,
but it will certainly matter all right at manage your familey, take it away
and more. Tom, How are you. I'm doing okay. Limping out
of the weekend and end of the week. Oh yeah, you know how
it goes. You know, you live like a madman for Saturday and Sunday
and money. You come back with what's left of you. You know,
got time change and all you gotta pay for your weekend. Oh buddy,
oh yeah, time change don't remind me. For some reason, my dogs
went the opposite way. They got them earlier, not later. Everybody's dragging
in. You know, dogs don't wear watches. They just know it.
I'm hungry, whereas it's done, wake up their so yep, that's it.
It was a w w in the bed in the morning. Well,
we we had a bit of sad news over the last couple of weeks.
We are our fire chief Chief David Topping has been with the City of Bartlesville
for thirty five years in the fire stir us and he will he'll be hanging
it up in June of this year, so just wanted to take a moment
first off and wish him well and to announce that publicly. This was this
man has been a huge part of our fire department for his entire thirty five
year career. It I actually first met him during negotiations on the other side
of the table. He was actually he was in union leadership for years and
years and years, and then eventually in leadership in the department working for administration.
And again he has he has had a huge influence on our department for
his entire career. We certainly will miss him. He's the guy that came
back from the army just to run into burning buildings. That's it. That's
our man. Served served I believe six years in as an army ranger and
then came back and got into the fire service. So he is more grateful
to him. We'll miss him, but we also are anytime something like this
happens, you you kind of look forward of the future. You know what's
next, what can we do, how can we get a little bit better.
So we'll be uh, we'll be entertaining our search for our next fire
chief. Obviously we'll be looking at internal candidates, but we're also going to
entertain some external candidates. The last time that we did this, in fact,
when we hire Chief Topping, we brought in external candidates and and he
was still the best one out there. And so I think that when we're
doing positions like this, it behooves us to look both in and out and
to select the best, the best person for the job. So looking forward
to it, but at the same time, a little bit sad. It's
a sort of a bittersweet, bittersweet moment, but we certainly wish Chief Topping.
Well, he's got he's got a couple of months left, and he's
promised me he's going to get a bunch of stuff done. Is you got
wait around till you do fire truck shows up that I'm just asking for a
friend to get a fire truck, just like a just like a three year
old. You get a fire truck on the cake, you'll make them happy.
I thought was that when mister Bank, when Cheap Banks returned, there
was a lot of cake going. There was a lot of cake there.
We decided we just gonna taste something. It was pretty good too, wasn't
it. Fire? Trust me, firefires can cook that's one thing they can
cook. So but yeah, So so that announcement was made at the city
council meeting, which of course was last Monday, had several other things.
Actually had a pretty pretty weighty meeting. Had a lot of small items that
were of interest, but we had some fairly significant items as well. So
now one of those is that we are beginning our water our wastewater reuse pilot
uh. And so for anybody who doesn't know what that means, essentially it
is sort of a it's like a pallet test. They bring them in in
a box, uh, and you you test these different processes and you measure
the outputs to ensure that what you've proposed to do on a full scale is
accomplishing what you had intended it to. And so we'll be doing that that
will run all the way through the summer. You have to run them in
different seasons with different flows and different water chemistries to ensure that the water that
we're putting out from our wastewater plant meets the standard that we need it to
before we enter into the reuse project. So this is not we have not
turned on the reuse project. I know there were some people who were confused
about that we haven't turned it on. It is Oh. They were swearing
up and down that yeah, there are some people that are convinced. I
assure you that's not the case. It is all run on site. It
discharges in the same location it always has. This is just a pilot of
a new process that's essentially tacked onto the backside of our wastewater. That's it
just creates sampling. So and this is necessary to ensure the safety for the
future. So when we do the reuse project, we know what we intend
to do, but we have to prove it to Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality
that it will it will perform as promised. So reuse water is stuff that
we used and we dump it back into the river after it's been treated.
Yes, and it's reused again. So when it enters the river, it
is cleaner than what it was when we pulled it out of the river time,
much cleaner. And don't want anybody getting nervous out And there are some
so there are some upcoming rules dealing with chemicals of emerging concern or constituents of
emerging concern, and so that's really a lot of what this focus is is
on those how do we treat for those and we don't even have it,
So we're really trying to build this to a standard that will treat to rules
that haven't even been passed yet. So I don't think that we could do
this any safer than what we are. And again, it meets a tremendous
need in our community, which is water security. The good news is that
we have water right now. So both Hewlet Lake and Hudson Lake are over
one hundred percent full. Kopan Lake is now up. I believe it was
up to sixty six percent this morning. That was after reaching a load down
in the thirty percent. I was getting kind of weird weary watching him fish
train to walk. It was, it was. It was pretty frightening for
the fish, getting little headed curve. The fish and the town of Copan,
we're both equally concerned. That was so for the city of Artlesville.
Of course, we don't get much of our water out of Copan Lake,
and what we do get comes down the river to us, so it doesn't
have as great an impact on our water security, but it has a tremendous
impact on our neighbors to the north. So we were we were certainly worried
for them, but that's fortunately seems to be turning in the right direction.
Hopefully spring will fill everything up without flooding us. But we know that mother
nature is she's a fickle beast. Mother does what mother so. But that's
so, so that's the ongoing right now. We will run that. It'll
still we're probably still a couple of years away from getting the final go ahead
on this because we also have to build, uh the rest of the improvements
to our wastewater treatment plant. So that was another item that was on the
council meeting. Actually was essentially to get the process started for a loan application
through the Oklahma Water Resources Board. And this is for essentially to completely renovate
our existing waste work treatment plan. And this is not something that we want
to do. This is something we have to do. And so this is
a consent order from the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality. We have been working
our way through these for I don't know, for decades, working through these
consent orders from ODEQ. Yeah, as long as I've been here, and
pre dates all of us. So this will be well, this will be
the final phase of our existing consent order. However, if you all have
experience with ODEQ, there is typically another there's typically another thing waiting on the
other side of any completed project. So this will be a huge project.
However, it will likely be the largest capital improvement in the City of Bartleswill's
history. Up to this point, our largest one was our water plan.
It was about forty three and a half million dollars. Last night or on
Monday night, the council approved a loan for up to eighty three point two
millions. Say. This is a huge investment, and that is just for
the wastewater treatment plant. We are not ready to begin construction on this,
so it won't construction actually won't start till twenty twenty six. The purpose of
this is to cap the rates. The uncertainty in interest rates in the future
had led us to believe that it's probably best that we get a cap this.
Once we get this approval, it will cap the rates, but we
can still actually get a lower rate, and so it was kind of a
no brainer for us. It won't go any higher, but it could go
that's it. So it was kind of a no brainer for us that we
needed to do this. The amount of interest on a sixty plus million dollar
loan is enormous, and so even a half point makes a huge differences,
more than all of us make it a year, Yes, sir by,
quite a bit, so if we will likely not draw this entire eighty three
point two million dollars, But because we're still a couple of years from construction,
we wanted to ensure that we had an approval up to an amount that
was sufficient to cover it, because you just don't know. Our latest estimates
are showing us probably in the sixty million dollar range by the time we do
this, but we have approval up to eighty three point two so we can
cover it no matter what happens, because we simply don't have a choice.
We have to build this Westbot Trend Treatment Plan improval improvement. So and one
other thing before I turn this over to these guys, This is upcoming in
April, during your regular election time, there will be a charter election for
the City of Barlsville. This is We've been talking about this for a while,
but the actual date is coming up, so we wanted to make sure
that everybody was as informed as possible about this. It will this is one
again April election date'll be charter election. There are three really main components to
the charter elections that will actually be about There's about ten questions, but if
I remember right, six of those ten were just cleanups of language that's no
longer valid when we made our last charter change back in two thousand and twenty
ten. I guess we met our last charter change in twenty ten and included
some one time language that had dates specific to that conversion and all those things.
So about six of the questions will really just be removing that old language.
But there are three really important components. One of them is the election
dates. We're proposing to move the city council elections from November to April for
the future, and the reason being is that November, as you all have
undoubtedly noticed, is very very busy election time. I figured somebody at the
radio might have noticed that there are a lot of things happening in November,
whether it is during a government a governor's election, or during a presidential election,
either of those. The amount of money spent on campaigns, even locally
is astounding, and so it's very difficult for someone who is running a local
campaign as a volunteer to compete with that and actually to be heard to get
enough recognition to be elected. So we wanted to move that back to April,
when that is when local elections are happening. That's when statutory towns and
I think all of the towns and cities around us are doing their elections in
April. It is also a time at which school boards have their elections.
They have actually have two election dates because they have a general that's it.
So that was the point of the April is to make that let's put the
focus on local elections in April so that we're not kind of getting lost in
all of the noise that happens in November. So that will be part of
it. One of the other parts is that we are looking to move council
terms. They are currently two years. This would move their terms to three
years. In the past, we'd had a four year term. It was
a little bit too long, and so during that charter election process there was
a debate between three and two years. We have found now in the last
thirteen years that two years is a little too short, so we would like
to extend that to three years. And then that also allows us to stagger
the council terms so that in any year you never have more than two council
members up for elections. It introduces some stability into our election, our local
election cycle. So we really believe that both of those are great changes,
and so we are suggesting those to the voters, But ultimately it is up
to the voters to decide whether this is how they want to be governed or
not. There is another section dealing with recall provisions, and our current recall
provisions. They are essentially untested, but as we began to review them,
there was a couple of things that cause concern. One of them we have
our city clerk sitting here. One of them is that our current charter gives
the city clerk ten days to review all of the signatures and to certify that
that petition. So you have an army I would need that, yes,
And so we could be facing over a thousand signatures and our city clerk would
have ten days to verify that they're all valid. It was a big ask.
So what we're asking is that the voters extend that to thirty days.
It doesn't change anything about it, It just gives the city clerk more time
to do his job. And then the other thing is is that there's no
the current provisions aren't time bound, so if you want to obtain signatures for
a recall petition, you can take years to do it. What we're proposing
is is that all signatures would have to be attained in one hundred and eighty
day period. And this is not intended to make recall provisions impossible. It's
not at all. If a council member needs to be recalled, me,
of all people, I want that person to be recalled, right then it
shouldn't take years to accomplish that. If someone has committed an act degree just
enough to be recalled, let's do it. Let's get on it. Within
that gives people six months to attain signatures than the amount of signatures necessary,
and then it gives the city clerk thirty days. So that was one of
the others. The final one is really just sort of an internal thing.
It deals with our purchasing procedures. Right now, if you want to purchase
a car, or if you want to purchase a building or land or a
box of pins, you use the same procedures. However, if it seems
to affect the clerk, an awful lot. It's all about the clerk here,
isn't it. It varies over there going yeah, that's good. Good,
And so that's true on all of our purchases, with the exception if
there's a contract, and so it doesn't matter whether that contracts for twenty five
dollars or for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It has to go to
council to be approved. So what we're proposing is is that the contract purchasing
would resemble or be identical to all of our other purchasing. That's it.
It will be much more consistent. We have a good set of controls already.
It's up to twenty five hundred dollars. The directors are authorized to make
purchases anything over that there are increasing levels of responsibility for them, including getting
quotes and reporting them to the clerk or the finance director both in this case
that same guy. So those are the major changes. So really looking at
change in election date, change to the council terms, some tweaks to the
recall provisions, and then some clean up within our purchasing. So when is
this election to change the election tickets? So the election to change the election
will be at your normal election in April. Whatever day that is, is
that April I don't remember it's anyway, whatever, the first, the fifth.
I think it's the first Tuesday, right, the first Tuesday in April.
So April fifth will be the day. And of course I'm pretty sure
it's the first Tuesday, and it's April fifth, and so the there will
of course be absentee ballots and in person absentee. It's very convenient for me
and for a lot of people who work downtown. If you want to cast
your vote early and don't want to wait till Tuesday, then April second,
second, April second, sorry, April second, and the in person No,
Larry says, hang on, I think Larry was looking at the that's
the that's the wrong year. I think I think it is. Oh,
there did April second? Okay, so April second, way off. So,
by the way, if you want to vote early and you go upstairs
there at City Hall, it's deceptively you're going to put on take your little
tracking device for your steps. Huh. It doesn't look like a big offers.
It's pretty good signing. Yes, you will get a nice workout,
but you'll be out of there in about to all those people if they're in
shape, I'm telling you, since building I'm not. This is that is
where I That is where I do all of my my voting. I do
it in person, absity. It doesn't matter what the election is. So
come on over to City Hall. It's up on the fourth floor and it
is not a city function. This is actually a function of your county government,
our local election board. They lease some space from us up on the
fourth floor City Hall. So come on over. Take the elevator up.
It's a smooth price. You will be You will be in and out in
about two minutes. Miss takes care of you. Well, yes, sir,
she does. So all right, what's that said? I'm not kicking
over to Jason who came He has come to reign on our parade. Okind
and give us our about our only bad sales text. It's a result for
this year bad at face value, you're not really bad. So a little
bit of mixed news. It is. It's a it's down almost nine percent,
eight point eighty six percent, which is about one hundred and sixty two
thousand. But when you dive into the numbers, and historically it would actually
be our second highest collection in March today by almost one hundred thousand dollars.
So it's less about this year and more about how last year. Last year
it was monstrous. So like, in context, this is pretty dark.
Good. Yeah, if you look at the five year average, we're over
the five year average. If you look at the twenty two number, we're
one hundred thousand dollars over the twenty two number, but we're one hundred thousand
over the twenty three under the twenty three. Yeah, behind, So last
year was just so well looking at the data, I mean, it's still
lower than our February marches, lower than our April, which usually is,
but it wasn't by much last year, and usually it's several hundred thousand dollars.
March is usually a relatively slow that's when it comes to these, it's
it's pretty small. That's because mother nature can't make up our mind. And
you're coming right off the Christmas season, the shopping season. We're all broke
broken, so so yeah, and that then by April you've made peace with
it, just accept it. So and for the year that puts us we're
pretty flat. We're about thirty three thousand dollars ahead of where we were last
year, so I would say that flat. But we budget very conservatively,
so we're still too point two percent above our budget expectation, which puts US
about three We budgeted for about a two percent degree. So even if we
finished the year even was last year, we'll be ahead of budget. Yes,
and so that's hopefully this is just a one month slump. We won't
know. Obviously, one month does not make a trend. No, I
mean looking at historically, if we go back, it was actually a really
good month. Last year was up sixteen sixteen percent, and this year's down
eight down eight percent over, so so we're really probably more in line with
what last year should have been, but we still have to compare back to
it. So it is what it is. We'll keep an eye on it
and keep looking forward. Use tax. We've got brand news tax. We
finally have. We finally got something compared to thirteenth month. Thirteenth month,
but comparing to the first year of any kind of new tax like that is
not a real apples to apples because you got what mister Dave Francis, our
go to at the Tax Mission said, this could be up to a month
and a half in your first one, we got a because you have all
these estimates people are making and paying to you see, not really certain way
that's going to fall. So this one actually failed twenty five percent below where
last year's did, but not knowing what the actual was a full month,
we don't know what it has. The true comparatives are going to come from
this point forward. Let's wait till next month. This month, you fall
in line with about how last year ended, so it seems it seems relatively
normal and stable, but you know, was stre twenty thousand dollars would be
our lowest month collected, but kind of it falls kind of the pattern of
sales tax. It's usually March sales tax's one of the lowest months collected,
right, and generally kind of reflects that it does now because it is it
is a sales tax now essentially so. And so it's however, even at
three hundred and twenty, how much did we expect to get two hundred and
eight? So we're still one hundred and twelve over the monthly anticipation. So
that's the good news is we came into this very cautiously because frankly, we
weren't sure what use tax is going to be, just shot in the dark,
and so we we anticipate did very very low numbers and we've exceeded those
literally and everything every month. So that's that's the good news. It has
performed better than we thought that would uh. And that is a good sign
because we're actually going into budget, which is when we're gonna have to start
making decisions about what the next year looks like where we think we're gonna lay
in and obviously we'll take a conservative approach at that and make sure that we're
in a good financial stable environment. And I want to I want to expect
to spend more than we think we're gonna tract. That's right. We definitely
it's better to better to be under than it is to be over when it
comes to budgets. So all right, well, thank you, Jason.
I appreciate that, and we'll look forward to hearing more on it as we
get into the actual budget season. And with that, I'm gonna kick this
over to Larry. And I guess I didn't even introduce these guys. I
expect everybody to know them just like I do. That's Jason Monager. He's
our finance director, city clerk treasure. I missed something, but that's nice.
There you go. But that covers it. And this is Larry Curtis.
Of course. Curtis is our community development director and on this instance a
project manager over something that doesn't follow community development. You were looking for something
interesting, Well here we are. No, no, no, this is
great. And you know, been here for now over a years, so
very excited and you know, feel more and more like a barsh and everything
that getting there, getting there. So the hajing work, that's good.
So some exciting stuff going on in the city, for sure, is that
the City of Barsville is looking to obtain some qualified organizations to submit to our
recent RFQ or a request for qualifications to manage our soccer fields within the city.
So those would be our robin Wood soccer fields, Daniel Soccer Fields,
and our Virginia fields that we have over on the west side. And so
this is a really exciting opportunity is that the city hasn't done this before with
our soccer fields, but we have with our baseball fields this past year,
which has gone exceptionally well. We do have a model there with the baseball
fields. We do we do and a lot of cities do this, so
you know, city like Broken Ourrow, loss of Genes, they kind of
do this as well. And so the whole opportunity here is to provide an
opportunity to open those up to experience organizations and leagues so that they can have
those that have experienced with these leagus and tournaments can help also manage these fields.
So the responsibilities of these organizations would include administrating soccer leagues, managing field
maintenance, providing concession services, and ensuring overall facility upkeep. Importantly, no
monetary compensation is going to be expected or acquired as a part of these Instead,
organizations will be expected to make improvements to the facilities using revenues obtained through
their use. So that way, I think that's a really important point,
is that we're not expecting a lease payment for someone to use these fields.
We want it to be successful, we want it to be as affordable to
our citizens as possible, but at the same time, we want to continue
to see these facilities improved. So instead of a lease fee, what we
ask them to do is to continue to make improvements to our fields exactly.
And so you know, it's kind of gets, you know, government out
of the way to let the private sector really do what the private sector does
excellently is provide excellent service. So interested parties should submit detail qualifications including organizational
information, experience, financial statements, scope of service to the city. The
deadline for those submissions will be eleven twenty am in March twentieth, twenty twenty
four. And of course if anybody has any questions, they can reach out
to me directly. They can email me at Larry R. Curtis at cityatbarswel
dot org, or they can just call our me and city number and ask
for me and be able to hopefully answer a lot of those questions. But
again, this is a really exciting opportunity to provide not only our citizens with
an excellent company to help manage those facilities. But of course our kiddos will
be really going to be the ones that'll be affected by that this is and
we've been really happy with the way this worked over our baseball fields, so
we're hoping that we will get a lot of qualified applicants at our baseball facility.
We actually received applications from trying to think of where it was, but
it was in Missouri, there is a company there that that's Springfield, Missouri.
That was what they did was they ran leagues there and ran turn us
and actually owned their own fields there. So they were they were interested and
I'll be really curious to see. We've got some great local organizations that I'm
sure will be interested in this. But the it's an interesting opportunity. The
deadline one more time is March twenty ninth through yeah, March twenty ninth,
March twenty four by eleven twenty eight, So we definitely want we want as
many of these as possible so that we can review them. We will put
a panel together, we'll review these and then ultimately we'll negotiate with the successful
proposer. And it's a this is it is. It's an interesting process to
go through. The contract that the city has I think is a very good
one and it is a model that's worked very well around the around the Tulsa
Metro in particular, And like every year, you know, we'll be analyzing
these these this organization will be required to provide you know, updates to the
city and you know, we'll be analyzing how their finances are doing and everything
on those lines to ensure that the public interest is being kept at the same
time being sure they're being successful too. We that's this is we ideally we
hope that this will be operated similar to a business, So there is uh,
there is an employee. That's one of the things that we're looking for.
We would prefer to see it rather than just being run by a group
of volunteers. That changes. We would like that group of volunteers to employ
someone that would be ideal ye. Uh And and with before F at our
baseball fields, that was what happened. It is still it is still a
nonprofit organization. However, there are employees. Uh. And again it was
I don't believe it was perfect last year, but I think it went much
better than it had the year before. And I think that it will continue
to improve. As with anything, they'll be growing some growing pans associated with
it, but it'll it'll be hopefully in the end better than and in fact,
for F expanded this year. That was the there was an opportunity.
So so part of this is that the y m c A who had been
managing our fields for us for years, my gosh, for years and had
done a great job and was a very valuable partner to us. This field
management didn't align with their strategic direction anymore, and so they had they had
given us notice and they were great to work with. They allowed us to
pick the date that they exited that worked the best for us UH, and
in this instance, it was it allowed us to they'll they'll manage it through
this final season and then our new our new contractor will manage it beginning with
the next socker. Yeas, our goal is to definitely have that handshake of
you know, from one an organization to another, so it is easy drop.
Yeah, there's going to drop the ball and hopefully someone picks it up.
That's right. One other thing if I may talk about is that if
you know, mister Greg Collins, our special projects manager, would be very
upset with me if but I did not remind the public about our comprehensive plans
going on right now. You know, our surveys continued to go on.
We had our public means last months which went exceptionally well. We got a
lot of great information from our citizens. But our organization still has the UH
survey available online. In addition that we actually also have an interactive map program
now so that people can actually click on the map and provide information, like
they know of an intersection that needs to be looked into santest or there's an
area that maybe that's they have concerns about, they can click on that and
add information to that as well. So if our citizens want to go to
the Citybarsbille dot org website, go to that website and click on the Conferhensive
Plan link. From there, they can provide the information that way. So
there is there is essentially a portal in there that is related to this UH
and there are there are a lot of different ways to provide input and we
would like as much as is humanly possible from ours. So far we have
had over seven hundred and ten respondents, it's Winster Collins told me this morning,
which is fantastic for coning our size. But as always, the more
information we get, the better our community can be. So that's what's one
yes, So but we look forward to that. This is a process that
will continue on through I believe we had slated it all the way through October.
October this year we get we are very much looking to getting that wrapped
up so that way we can move forward with the other projects. Again,
this is part of the Endeavor project. So are the projects called Endeavor?
But they were five and you know the vision that we have for the city
moving forward. So yeah, Oka