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