Good morning. We're going to get started this morning with an invocation from Pastor Jordan Roberts of the Gate Church. And that will be followed by the pledge of allegiance led by Kayn Newman, Brinley Roberts, and Scarlett Love of Girl Scouts U Troops 269 and 156. Please stand as you are able. Heavenly Father, thank you for your guidance and presence in this chamber today. Lord, on behalf of these members and on behalf of our city, I ask that you would bestow upon us the same grace that you gave to the Apostle Paul who wrote and said, "According to that grace, you have made me a wise master builder." Lord, I also ask according to your word that it's your joy that will be the strength of the leaders in this room as they seek to build and develop the future of this wonderful city. Lord, I ask thirdly for a special blessing for this city to keep us safe and to lead us into a bright, prosperous future. And Lord, I'll ask since I know that Oklahoma City is one of your favorite cities in this wonderful nation that you show special favor to the Oklahoma City Thunder and that they go all the way. In your name we pray. Amen. Amen. I pledge allegiance to the flag, United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, for liberty and justice for all. Well, thank you, Pastor Roberts, and thank you, Kayla, Brenley, and Scarlet. Well, I call this meeting of the city council to order. And uh today is always a celebratory and special day here at city hall when we uh swear in half of our council. And um in this case, welcome two new council members to what we call the horseshoe up here. And so we're going to handle that now up front. And we're going to do it in order of ward. And so we will begin with Councilman Bradley Carter. You cheated. You went up here first. If I may uh I usually have a list of who's delivering the oath. I don't have that today. Um I might uh invite Councilman Carter. Oh, I do have it. Okay. All right. Well, Councilman Carter will be delivered the oath by uh Oscar Ortiz of campus pastor Victory or he's the campus pastor of Victory Church. Is that correct, Councilman Carter? Yes, sir. I should also point out uh four years ago we were in a pandemic and this is your first right correct oath of office. This was on this was done virtually four years ago. So, we're glad you finally get this moment of a full chamber and get to do this for everybody. All right, the floor is yours. Uh, Pastor Ortiz, I, Bradley Carter, I, Bradley Carter, do solemnly swear do solemnly swear that I will support, obey, and defend the Constitution of the United States that I will support, defend, and obey the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Oklahoma and the Constitution of the State of Oklahoma and that I will not knowingly receive directly or indirectly and I will not knowingly receive directly or indirectly any money or other valuable thing any money or other valuable things for the performance or non-performance for the performance or non-performance of any act or duty pertaining to my office for any act or duty pertaining to my office other than the compensation allowed by law other than the compensation allowed by law I further swear I further swear that I will faithfully discharge my duties I will faithfully discharge charge my duties as council member of ward one of the city of Oklahoma City of council member of ward one of the city of Oklahoma City and trustee of the Oklahoma City Municipal Facilities Authority and trustee of the Oklahoma Municipal Facilities Facilities Authority and the Oklahoma City Public Property and the Oklahoma City Public Property Authority authority to the best of my ability to the best of my ability. Congratulations. Thank you very much. [Applause] Now, while he's making his way to his seat, I will uh point out that uh um most of our council members this morning have received an official oath uh prior to the meeting from uh our city clerk or others. Um there is a list of statutoily uh admissible uh people who can deliver the official uh legally operative oath, but some of our council members this morning have chosen people that are special to them in their lives to deliver a ceremonial oath. But just fear not, everything every legal box has been checked. Everybody will be officially sworn in by the end of these this ceremony. Councilman uh Carter, I didn't know if you wanted to say a few words. Um, I just wanted to say thank you uh for, you know, be given the pro, uh, good lord, the privilege and the honor to be able to represent W one again. Um, and I want to just really thank my pastor for being able to be here this time and to to deliver that oath. That means more to me than than you know, and I appreciate that. But the fact that we get to to sit up here and do what we get to do every every week or every other week, um we don't take that lightly and uh it is a very big honor, but we also respect the uh the responsibility that comes with it. So, thank you very much. Thank you. All right. Next up, we have representing Ward Three, uh Councilwoman Katrina Bedell Ever Avers all the way in the fourth row. That's the last time she'll ever have that perspective. And uh the council woman will uh receive the oath from our city clerk, Amy Simpson. Amy, you can start when you think appropriate. Okay. Can you raise your right hand? I, Katrina Bedell Avers I, Katrina Bedell Avers, do solemnly swear do solemnly swear that I will support, obey, and defend the Constitution that I will support, obey, and defend the Constitution of the United States of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Oklahoma and the Constitution of the State of Oklahoma and that I will not and that I will not knowingly receive directly or indirectly knowingly receive directly or indirect correctly. Any money or other valuable thing any money or other valuable thing for the performance or non-performance for the performance or non-performance of any act or duty pertaining to my office of any act or duty pertaining to my office other than the compensation allowed by law other than the compensation allowed by law I further swear I further swear that I will faithfully discharge my duties that I will faithfully discharge my duties as council member mber of W three as council member of W three of the city of Oklahoma City of the city of Oklahoma City and trustee and trustee of the Oklahoma City Municipal Facilities Authority of the Oklahoma City Municipal Facilities Authority and the Oklahoma City Public Property Authority and the Oklahoma City Public Property Authority to the best of my ability to the best of my ability. Congratulations. Thank you. Heat. Heat. Well, Councilwoman Avers, uh, as you get settled there, if you'd like to, uh, say a few words, uh, the floor is yours. Thank you, Todd. All I can say is thank you. I never imagined or dreamed of being on the horseshoe and I am humbled by the responsibility and when I make an oath I'm committing to giving you my very best. So, thank you for your support. Thank you for your encouragement and uh can't wait to see what Oklahoma City's bright future is over the next few years. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Well, next up we have from Ward 4, Councilman Todd Stone. Um, his oath uh will be provided by his daughters, Erica and Emily. Nope you're Eric and Emily, just begin whenever you are ready. I, Todd Stone, I, Todd Stone, do solemnly swear do solemnly swear that I will support, obey, and defend that I will support, obey, and defend the Constitution of the United States the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Oklahoma and the Constitution of the State of Oklahoma and that I will not knowingly receive and I will not knowingly receive directly or indirectly directly or indirectly any money or other valuable thing any money or other valuable thing for the performance or non-performance for the performance or non-performance of any act or duty pertaining to my off office of any act or duty pertaining to my office other than the compensation allowed by law other than the compensation allowed by law I further swear I further swear that I will faithfully discharge my duties that I will faithfully discharge my duties as council member of Ward four of the city of Oklahoma City as councilman of Ward 4 of the city of Oklahoma City and trustee of the Oklahoma City Municipal Facilities Authority as trustee as Municipal Facilities Authority in the Oklahoma City Public Property Authority and the Oklahoma City Public Property Authority to the best of my ability. To the best of my ability. So help me God. Congrat Congratulations. [Applause] That's nice. Councilman Stone, the floor is yours if you'd like to share a few thoughts. Thank you, Mayor. Um, I think as most people know, I've been here for eight years now, looking for a excited for another four years kind of sometimes. Um, I'd really like to say that I appreciate my family being here. I wouldn't be here without him and I appreciate the city staff and I appreciate the rest of council and I too am looking forward to the next four years. Very exciting. Thank [Applause] you. And finally this morning, our second um new member of the council representing W seven is Kamal Pennington. And uh Councilman Kamal Pennington's oath will be uh administered by his parents, Carl and Cheryl Pennington. Carl and Cheryl, you just begin whenever you're ready. Raise your right hand. I, Kamal Pennington, do solemnly affirm that I will support, obey, and defend the Constitution of the United States. We might have to take it a little bit slower, Mom. Okay. Let's try this again. I, Kamal Pennington, I, Kamal Pennington, do solemnly affirm do solemnly affirm that I will support, obey, and defend that I will support, obey, and defend the Constitution of the United States the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Oklahoma and the Constitution of the State of Oklahoma that I will not that I will not knowingly receive knowingly receive directly or indirect indirectly directly or indirectly. Any money or other valuable thing any money or valuable thing for the performance or non-performance of any act for the performance or non-performance of any act or duty pertaining to my office or duty pertaining to my office other than the compensation allowed by law other than the compensation allowed by law. I further swear I further swear that I will faithfully discharge my duties as council member of Ward 7 that I will faithfully discharge my duties as council member of Ward 7 of the city of Oklahoma City of the city of Oklahoma City and trustee of the Oklahoma City Municipal Facilities Authority and trustee of the Oklahoma City Municipal Facilities Authority and the Oklahoma City Public Property Authority to the best of my ability. and the Oklahoma City Public Property Authority to the best of my ability. Thank you. Oh, I got Okay. Thank you. Councilman Pennington. Uh once you get settled, the floor is yours. Thank you, Mayor Holt. Um, and thank you so much for uh for everyone for all of your support, but I especially want to say um thank you to my family and thank you to my wife who I've said over the course of this last year has been a single mother uh because of the campaign. Um, and so I know it took a lot of work to keep the family up and I love you and I appreciate you for all of your support and I appreciate my girls Olivia and Ella and uh yeah, Olivia got the shout out. Um, but I I also want to thank all of my family, my parents, my sisters are here, my mother-in-law, the best mother-in-law in the world. Um, and just all my my surrogate parents, my grandparents, my uncles, all all of you. Just thank you so much for all of your support and your love. And um I am inspired by uh by one of my pred by all of my predecessors, but one in particular, Willa Johnson, because I am actually the first uh former member of the Oklahoma City Youth Council to be sworn in as a councilman. And and I just think about how much Willa poured into to me the idea of service above self. the idea that we have to put our community first in order for us to make real progress. And so I'm grateful for that. And I also want to give a shout out to Debbie Martin. Um Debbie was always there and just an inspiration for youth council and I just I appreciate you Debbie for all of your what 54 years of service to the great city of Oklahoma City. So, I appreciate [Applause] you and I'll say to my colleagues, um, I'm just grateful to serve with you and appreciate you all. So, looking forward to it. Well, that concludes our swearing in ceremony. Um, we are going to be here for the next couple of hours, but you probably don't want to be. So, that's entirely up to you. You're certainly welcome to stay, but I thought I might pause here for a moment if uh for those who may want to exit. All right, I think we're uh going to get started. So, we actually do have one vote today. Um, today of course begins the uh consideration of the budget for the fiscal year that begins on July 1st of this calendar year. Um, and uh, as we always do, we begin by setting the schedule. There will of course be some extra meetings in between our regular bi-weekly meetings where we will hear budget presentations for many of our city departments. This is really guided obviously by the city manager in in our form of government. is the city manager's proposed budget, but absolutely it is ours to consider uh uh approve or amend along the way and uh today begins that process. There is uh as I said one vote today at the beginning of this and that is to basically call the hearings on the budget and so we'll begin there with item 4A a resolution setting public hearing dates of May 13th and May 27th and setting June 3rd as the formal city council public hearing on the proposed annual budget for fiscal year 2026. Is everybody logged in? Everybody's good to go. Okay, we have a motion and a second. Cast your votes. Passes unanimously. Now, we're done with voting for the day. You can log out if you want. Uh we're at item five, presentations and discussion of FY26 proposed budget. And really from this point forward, for the most part, Mr. City Manager, the floor is yours. Thank you, Mayor. Um, I really appreciate I want to acknowledge the work by Chris York is here, our budget director, but also all the budget staff and all the departments. We have a few of the departments here today, the department staff that have worked on the budget, but really it goes broadly into the departments and it's really by intent that the departments that are working on the front end dealing with the issues are the ones that make the proposals on the budget and prepare that. and I just appreciate all the work that they do, not only in preparing the budget to be presented, but also the work that they do in carrying out the budget and implementing the budget throughout the year. So, Chris, thank you for your leadership and to your team and all of those that are involved. Um, this year's budget's been a challenge. Um, and I think the team's done a really nice job of working through this to minimize the impact on services. It has some impact on services. Can't make reductions and not have impact. Um, Chris is going to talk about it. We are projecting growth for next year in sales tax right now and we'll talk about the fact that that that's something we've got to really monitor just with all the uncertainty in the economy. But our real challenge was in this current year the growth we projected has not been recognized. And so that really set us up in the position where when we took our same service level budget and adjusted for things that we knew we already had committed to with pay increases and things of that nature, it set it at a certain level and then the revenues where they were coming in was below that. And that's really why we have to make these adjustments in all of our assumptions. And so we we gave instructions to the departments on their uh adjustments that they needed to make. Not all of those were taken. I mean they they that's a starting point for us. Chris will walk us through the process, but again, I appreciate your support and understanding in this. Um, it's one where we'd always like to be adding because our city is still growing even when our our revenues aren't growing, but we do have to make adjustments to live within our budgets. And I just appreciate the discipline that we've had through the years to ensure that we stay within the budget resources that we have. And so, Chris, I'll turn it over to you, let you introduce, and then we have three departments that will present their uh introduce their budgets today. Yeah. Thank you, city manager. Um, I would just like to echo your comments. I really want to thank uh my team that's here with me today. I've got Lori Herd uh running the presentation in front of me. Uh, behind me I've got the rest of the budget staff in the uh back left from your view. Um, we have uh Steve Akins, uh, Jessica Looney, some of our other specialists. We have our deputy budget director, Leticia Thompson. Uh, we have our analysts, Tiara Taylor, Nicole Tower, Billy Smith, Michelle Nance, Traima Jackson, and Brandy Wolfskill. really appreciate all their work um in putting this document together for you. Um I will say there was some unintended symbolism of bringing this document to you after we complete the marathon because there are many parallels I feel like the budget process has with running 26 miles. Um we've been working on this uh since about November and so really appreciate all the work that you've done. Thank you team. I also need to acknowledge our partners and the departments. Um we have a very collaborative process to develop the budget here in the city. uh the city manager pushes down this philosophy that the people engaged in doing the work should be engaged in developing the budget as well. And so that means that you don't need to be a department head or an ACM to be in a budget meeting. Those were occurring all over the city and they have been since November of last year. Um and so really appreciate all of their work as well in putting this together. Um it's a heavy lift both figuratively and uh literally as you can see we're near 700 pages here in this document. Um and then one last acknowledgement. Um, I I have to admit we were saved by the print shop. Um, they were flooded and their machines were damaged and they still printed all of the budget books. They are unstoppable. So, just really appreciate them for saving us this morning. All right, I will jump right into it here. So, let's talk about where we're at in the process. Of course, we're receiving the introduction today. We'll receive presentations from uh public transportation and parking, parks and recck and development services. Two weeks later, we're going to have another public hearing and we'll hear from public works, utilities, and fire. We'll have another batch of presentations, the last batch of presentations on May the 27th for planning, airports, and police. Um, and then if everything goes well, we'll ask council to adopt the budget on June the 3. We'll go live with it at the start of our fiscal year on July the 1st. Now, maybe as a primer for our residents, we'll just talk about where we're at in the overall strategic planning process. We're up there in that upper left quadrant at budget development, but really that's just the last step in a continuous process that really starts every year with the resident survey. We push out that uh survey to our residents and get statistically accurate feedback from them that then informs your council priorities. The council priorities are then distilled into long-term strategic business plans by each of our departments on how they're going to respond and achieve those goals that you set for them. And then really the budget process is just an annual snapshot of how we're going to achieve the next year's part of the strategic business plan given the resources that we expect to have. And that's where we're at right now. So here are our council priorities. Uh these seven priorities cover just about all the work that we do here at the city. Um and again serve as our guide for the budget development process. I will note the icons over to your left there um are found throughout the budget book, both its volumes, the performance supplemental as well as the main book for areas and they're out there in the margins for areas that are responsive directly to your council priorities. So, be looking for those out in the margins um as well as in the uh published book online, which we'll talk about in a moment. All right, jumping right into it. This is the bird's eyee view of next year's budget. I'm going to start at the bottom there and just talk about the overall increase to the budget. So, we are at 2.054 billion for next year, which is a 2.47% increase. Now, that really doesn't tell you the whole story. We need to step through the process a little bit to to get us back to this number. So, let me just orient you a little bit more. FY25 is our current adopted budget right there in the center. Um, that's where we're at in the current year. And FY26 over on the right is the proposed budget for next year. We further have that broken up by general fund which is our city's primary operating fund and pays for most of the services and staffs that act and staff that actually deliver those services to our residents. And you'll note that that one is contracting by about half a percent shrinking from $615 million in the current year to $611 million in the next year. I might take a moment just to talk about that half percent reduction because you might be trying to reconcile that with what I told you at the budget workshop was which is with that we asked departments to take a 4 and a.5% cut for most general fund supported departments a 1 and a.5% cut for our public safety departments and neither of those numbers if you do the math will get you to a half percent cut right and that is because we start the budget with what we call same service levels so FY25 we have in the column there that is our last year's budget but then we add all of the known cost increases to the budget to provide that same level of service in the next year. A good example of that would be, for example, if our labor groups have negotiated a wage increase, we will add that to the department's budget knowing that we're going to have to pay for those costs to start the budget process. And then from there, we ask the departments to take their cuts. So, the departments did take their one and a half and four and a half% cuts, but with the ins and outs, it doesn't work out perfectly. that in the right column you can see that u mathematically when we broaden out our view to the other operating funds we start including things like the public safety sales tax, the airports fund, the utilities fund, uh the drainage utility fund and these are again other uh funds that are still paying for people and services. And you'll note that this one is actually increasing by about $15 million or 5%. Uh and there's a couple of movers there. Police sales tax is going up about a million dollars from prior year. fire sales taxes going up about three million. But the big change here is the hotel motel tax fund increase um that as you'll recall voters approved August of last year moving from 5 1.5% to 9 and a4% for that hotel tax rate. Um and that's expected to generate about $7 million more in the next year. So about half of that increase that we're showing there in other operating funds. Now other nonoperating funds, we start looking at our capital related funds. These are going to be your maps 3, maps 4, better street, safer cities, capital improvement projects funds. And this change of 3.39% increase uh is mostly driven by our maps 4 fund at $66 million of an increase. Uh other funds like the MAPS 3 uh that I mentioned, capital improvement projects fund, better street safer cities are all remaining flat or decreasing slightly. And so the net increase to our non-operating funds for next year is about $55 million. Now, I will pause there to give a just a quick self-critique on municipal budgeting. We overbudget in our non-operating funds. That is just a known thing. We do it on purpose. It is for good reason, but I want to call it out for you because as we look at this, we do that for two reasons. One, on the revenue side of the house, we want to present our residents with what we reasonably believe that we're going to receive in the next year. So we budget all of the revenue that we expect to receive, even if we don't have an associated project that we're going to spend the money on next year. And then on the expenditure side of the house, we also want to give our project managers maximum flexibility to roll out these projects as they can. They're largecale multi-year. They might need to encumber a purchase this year that they may not use for a couple of years. And we want to give them that flexibility to not have to come back to us for a budget adjustment or a budget amendment just so we can get these projects rolled out as efficiently as possible. That does have the the the byproduct though of overbudgeting, nonoperating. And I'll give you an example of that. Maps 4 in FY24, we budgeted $225 million. We spent closer to $100 million. But that nuance is particular to our non-operating funds. We are much closer in our general fund and other nonoperating our other operating funds. I just want you to be aware of it. If I might amplify what you're saying for the media or anybody watching this, it can look like on this screen that we're going to spend $2 billion in our next fiscal year. You know for a fact we're not. You just can't say you just don't know exactly how that'll turn out. But when I somewhere in here, you probably show some of our past year spending. And if you were to compare actual spending to this year's upcoming budget, it might look like we have some huge jump or something. But it's because of what you just said. we we include all our potential spending and all of our capital projects and it always looks a little bigger than it really is. I just I always like pointing that out and I know you're anticipating that probably with these comments you just made, but it's really important because it's a big differential between what we actually spend and what we budget for. Yes, sir. All right. Now, let's take a look at our overall revenue numbers for next year. This is where we start the budget with because these are the resources that we're going to have um for next year. And this is what ultimately drives the budget. The largest recurring revenue source of course is taxes. Uh and they total $897 million or 44% of the budget. When we're looking at it in this view, that tax category includes things like property taxes for our debt service fund, which is about $107 million. Um and that goes to paying towards general obligation bonds. We also include our use tax uh at $106 million um included in that category as well. Some other areas that I'd call out for you are going to be the uh fund balance number which is our second largest revenue source and that is at 34% and that's going to include MAPS 4, MAPS 3, capital improvement project funds and so on um at just under $700 million and again that is um exacerbated a little bit because of that um note that we just made earlier. Um and that's why you see fund balance in this view but as we move along I I'll note for you that it does shrink. Federal grants are down about $2.5 million from last year. Um, but still account for about $87 million next year. Um, and this just kind of continues the the decline in grants. We saw about $8 million increase this current year. Um, and that's just as we taper off CO programs like CAR's Act, ARPA, and so on. Other revenue includes things like interest and lease revenue and other miscellaneous sources. And those account for less than 4% of our revenue at $70 million. So then we'll drill down a little bit to $930.8 million in operating revenue. And so this is where we've pulled out all of those capital focused funds like MAPS 4 and better streets and safer cities. And this is really focusing on those funds that provide staff and services. Again, largest revenue source is still taxes um totaling $597 million or 64% of the total. And then you can see that fund balance becomes a much smaller portion at just 4% because we have a policy that we do not budget fund balance to pay for operating expenses. And so it almost disappears off the screen here. Fees and charges account for about 28% of the operating budget of at $259 million. And then transfers and other revenue such as interest are less than 4% or $35.8 million if you put them together. So, zooming in again to just the general fund. If we look at just the general fund, um, specifically, it's going to match in large part what our operating distribution looks like with taxes making up about 74% of the total. Sales tax accounts about 54% of that or 330 million. Use tax is the second largest piece there at about $106 million. And so if you put those two things together, you're at threearters of the budget from just sales and use tax. And so and all of that is propped up by consumer spending. Other taxes are fairly small at about 3% and include taxes that we receive from the state such as alcoholic beverage tax, gasoline tax, commercial vehicle tax, and those are collectively about $13 million. Pretty small number. Um a pretty strong supporting number though is our franchise fees which represent 8.4% 4% and that total comes from revenue we received from utilities companies for use of our rights of way and that comprises about $51 million of next year's budget. Fine and court cost total just at $8.6 million or 1% of the budget. Uh and then fees char and charges are going to be building permits, admin charges, wage adjustments from the fire and police sales tax and they make up 14% or $84 million. And then finally, miscellaneous revenue includes interest and several other smaller accounts that represent just about 3% or $17.9 million. All right, I've thrown a ton of numbers at you. Let me just pause here and talk about some of the assumptions that are baked into this revenue number. Now, as we discussed at um the budget workshop and the city manager highlighted for us as well, the real issue here is that sales and use tax in the current year are not coming in as we projected. As a reminder, we built this year FY25's budget on about a 2% growth rate. And we are expecting to end this year closer to somewhere between 0% and a half percent. So basically flat, no growth. Um, and that already puts a a significant hole in our budget. Good news is we're fine in the current year. We have strong reserves to pull from if we need those, but it means that we're growing for next year off of a smaller number. So when we look at next year, we have uh budgeted 1.86% 86% as our growth rate. And I want to put that in a little bit of perspective for you because historically we've seen about a 3% average growth rate for our sales tax. So if you just take this window that we're looking at, let's take a look at FY24 for example, we had a 1.4% growth rate. We just talked about the current year we had flat and then next year we're at 1.86%. We're pretty far apart from what we have seen historically at 3% just in this window of time that we're looking at. And that's what has caused us to have to seek out budget cuts in the last two years. Now, when we look at our supporting revenue sources, um we are expecting growth there, but they're just not enough to make up for that largest piece of the pie that we talked about, that almost three quarters um of all of our revenue coming from sales and use tax. But franchise fees um we expect to grow at about 3% over the current year. Unfortunately, we're ending the current year a little bit under about $4 million of what we budgeted. Lic licenses, fees, and permits are close to target in the current year. Um, and so we are expecting some strong growth over next year, about 10%. Some of that's based on activity. Um, but a lot of it's based on the fee study that council approved recently to implement. And those, as you recall, fee increases are going to come online over time over the next three to four years. And so we've built those into our next year's and future years projections. Um, and then while we're talking about revenue and fees in general, I do want to put you on alert that I would expect council to receive some proposals on additional fee reviews um, over the next few months. Some of that is going to be related to that fee study that we already discussed. Not all of the departments were able to go through the update process at that time. They had other initiatives competing for their time when some of the other departments went through. Um, and then also just as we've done the budget, it's an opportune time for us to look at the cost of delivering these services. And so I would expect again over the next quarter or so for you to see some proposals uh in that regard uh relating to revenue. I will give our standard disclaimer with regard to fees because sometimes it's a sensitive issue. None of us like to pay fees necessarily. Um, but I will just remind um the residents that the city is not in the money-making business. We cannot charge more than it costs us to deliver the service. And if we don't recover what it costs us to deliver the service, we are in effect pulling from other resources, those general funds like or those general revenues like sales and use tax to cover down on that fee that could otherwise be directed at your other priorities. All right, I'll move along here. So now switching to the expenditure side of the house. I'm going to move a little bit quickly through this because I think it's good uh reference material, but probably not very actionable. Um we have all of our expenditures back at the $2.05 billion number. Um, and again, capital at this level is going to make up the line share at 33.6% or $691 million, followed by personal services at 31% or $643 million. Then other services at $381 million or $18% and then the pieces of the pie get smaller from there. Now zooming in to our operating expenditures and you see personnel services again because this is where we pay for staff and services grows to 68% of the pie or 2/3 um of what you're seeing here at $634 million followed by other services at $171 million. Then transfers at $80 million, supplies at 38 and capitals here shrinks to about $6 million. All right. So, as we zoom into just the general fund itself, personal services um is still uh the lion share there at 67% or $49 million. Other services uh is at about 27% and includes things like utilities, contracts for service and our payments to KPA and that's going to be $165 million. Uh and then we start getting smaller at transfers at $27 million and supplies at just $10 million. So now if we switch to looking at the general fund by category, this gives us an overall view of kind of how we spend our money. So public safety um which is going to include police and fire of course um is going to be the largest portion at 61% or $375 million. Public services the second largest at 19% or 114 million and it's going to include public works, development services, and the planning department. And then culture and wreck is largely the parks department. Um, but it also includes operating the Paycom center, the convention center, our partnerships with Myriad Gardens, Civic Center, Scissor Tale, and so on. And it makes up about 12% of the budget or $65 million. And then finally, you have your general government category, and that's going to be at 9% or $56 million. And that's going to include finance, the city manager's office, HR, IT, general service departments, and so on. All right. Now, I put up this very small print for you. um really is a couple of talking points, but I don't want you to get bogged down on any individual number. Um if you're interested in the department's budget, there's a better way to look at that. In my opinion, I would uh direct you to section C of the budget book, and that's going to give you more detail about the individual budgets that you're seeing here. I just wanted to bring this up to uh describe what we talked about earlier for same service levels. So, as an example, if you tried to reconcile the 1.5% cuts to public safety and you went to fire or police and you read across that line, you would note that those both increased by 4 to5 million, not a 1 and a.5% cut. Right? Again, this is the same service level. And in these examples, um FOP bargained for a 3% increase to wages. IFFF bargained for 5.4%. And so after the ins and outs, I just want to illustrate that point to you is that that's how that works there. I'd also like to call out a couple of things that might have caught your eye. Parks, for example, looks like it's being decreased by $2 million, and that's a big number. Parks did make significant cuts this year, but it's not at $2 million. About 800,000 of that is behind the scenes related to chargebacks. That's where services are provided by other city departments, and we move funding around between them. Um, and again, that's about 800,000. So, the park's uh proposed cut is about $1.2 million. Still significant, but not quite the $2 million here. And then finally, you'll note non-EP departmental going down $10 million, which is a is a big move here. And non-EP departmental is our department where we store everything that doesn't fit nicely in another department. And it includes things like our salary reserve for cost of living adjustments that we expect might be negotiated for in the next year. And that is in large part what is being reduced here. Um, and the reason for that is just you can see the numbers, $10 million. Had we tried to maintain the level of reserves that we've had previously, it would have triggered even deeper cuts. And so, we needed to pull that back. Um, also, historically, we've been giving um some uh pretty competitive wage increases to staff over the last few years to maintain our competitiveness as a employer. Um, and so the the thought processes of those will start to taper off as well. All right. Uh, and now we'll run through the major budget changes by function starting with public safety. Uh, now Chief Kelly is going to be presenting to you on May the 13th for fire. So I won't steal all of his Sunday. I'll just have a couple of call outs here. So they are proposing to delete 15 vacant uniform positions by removing the second engine at station number one. Now the vacant that I have there needs a little bit of explanation. Those positions are not vacant. They are filled positions that are operating that engine. But the reason I included it there is just leave you with the uh understanding that those firefighters are not being let go. They are going to be moved to other vacant positions. So the position positions there that I'm referencing are not vacant, but no firefighters are being let go. They are being moved to other vacancies. And I just want to call that out. Um, it is also, uh, proposing to add four positions to its alternative response team program, as well as an HRBP, um, to help with its HR functions and a little bit of an increase in the public safety sales tax for capital at $1.7 million. The police department is proposing to freeze 20 vacant uniform positions. That requires a little bit of explanation as well. So, when we freeze the positions, the positions still exist. They're not cut. They are still authorized. there's just not funding there to fill the positions and so they will still be on the books but the budget will not be there to fill those. Uh to put that in a little bit of perspective though for you uh we still have about 180 uniformed u vacancies and around 80 recruits in the pipeline. So if we net that out they have about 100 positions left to fill. If we pull out this 20 that still leaves them with additional 80 positions that they could fill um uh should they need to. And Chief Bassy will brief you in further detail on May the 27th. Oh, let me go back. Municipal courts deletes five positions. Uh, many of these positions were added related to House Bill 2259, the court cost compliance program, which we expected to generate a significant amount of work. However, when we received the work, it was decided that it would be better absorbed by the probation services division due to the nature of the work and the requirements of the work. And so we expect minimal impact for these reductions um to services um related to cutting these positions and the related supervisory positions. Municipal courts isn't scheduled to present to you um during uh this series. Uh but they are located on C 105 of the book if you have any uh questions or wanted to get some follow-up on that. All right, switching to public services. Public works is deleting two vacant positions, one from traffic and one from infrastructure. and you will receive a presentation from Debbie Miller on May the 13th. Development services is also deleting two positions, one from plan review and one from permits and licensing and they are presenting later this morning to you. Public transportation and uh parking made a number of adjustment of adjustments. Uh the largest of which is insourcing the street car program maintenance and operation for a projected savings of about $1.4 million. They also have a proposed elimination of a route and a reduction of another route and Embark will be presenting to you later this morning as well. Utilities is adding two positions to their Hefner water treatment facility uh and increasing its service and supply budget by about $2.1 million and you will hear from them on May the 13th. Parks uh is proposing several uh changes to meet their target um with the deletion of three vacant positions. They also have reductions in support based on the uh partners programs from myriad uh gardens uh Scissor Tale and FAM uh just based on their projected budgets um that they that we received from them. They also have proposed contract labor line item reductions and athletic field maintenance supply reductions necessary to hit target and parks is also presenting to you today. And then finishing up with general government, uh general services is deleting two vacant positions. Likewise, finance is also deleting two vacant positions, one in risk and one in accounting services. Human resources department is deleting a vacant public information and marketing specialist in the talent acquisition program. Uh they believe that a lot of the work around branding and marketing for HR is largely completed and so they don't expect to have a significant impact from the deletion. And then finally, municipal counselor is deleting a vacant legal secretary position to make their cut. So let's look at that spread out over time. So for next year we are reducing budgeted funded positions by 27 bringing us down to 5090. But I do need to make the note for you that this again does not include the 20 police officer positions because those are just being frozen. So if we include those the effective fillable budgeted positions would be 5070 in the next year. Now, if we break that out by department, this is what it looks like to give you a sense of what impacts there might be to services um to the various service areas. And I will just say generally speaking, I think the departments did an amazing job of looking for everywhere they could to tighten the belt. Um with one and a half and four and a half% cuts, I was expecting much larger impact uh to positions. Um and I'm it's not good news, but I'm glad to see that it wasn't more significant than this. And this page can be located on page B30 of your budget book if you'd like to look into that. And again, it does not include the frozen police officer positions in the count. Okay. So, as we start coming to a close here, I would just like to call out that we as we develop the budget, we try to uh comply with financial policies and best practices. We of course adhere to the state law, which is the municipal budget act. Um, and that determines how we uh put together the book, specifically the fund summary section that's tabbed off for your book. Um, and that is actually the the document that we will ask you to adopt on June the 3. Um, we also uh participate in this program run by the government finance officers association uh for distinguished budget presentations. And I would just note that FY25 will be the 37th year that we've received recognition from the GFOA. So, uh, very proud of the work that the team has done to earn that. All right. Now, I will give you just a brief tour of the budget book. We have them tabbed out for you here. Um, but again, this year we have two volumes for you. The smaller volume is your performance supplemental, and that's going to have you uh your issues, strategies, and performance measurements by department. It'll also include uh any of those measures that are responsive to your council priorities. The larger book is going to start off with the introduction which has a letter from the city manager talking about this year's budget challenges. Um some demographic information and then it gets into the financial summaries. Financial summaries is that good highle look at the budget for next year. Then we get into the departmental individual budgets and that breaks it down by department program positions and funding sources. So very useful to dig into individual departments. Then there's the fund summary which again is the official budget that we'll ask you to adopt. There's a capital section in the back and that's just a one-year snapshot of the next year's expected capital spending. And then finally, we have the appendix which is going to have our financial policies in there for you. Okay. So, let's talk about how residents can engage with us. So, we'll s we will use the same public comment process that we used over the last couple of years. Um the budget will be available on okc.gov today. Um, and we're also starting our 20-day initial comment period. It used to be just the 20-day comment period, but um, our former council member, Nikki Nice, uh, always asked for that to be extended, and I think that's a good practice, and so we will continue to do that. So, we'll have an initial comment period through, um, uh, that we will collect, uh, feedback, and I'll give you all the ways that, uh, uh, residents can submit that and then we will provide those for you, um, at the May 27th council meeting. and then we will leave that process open and then provide you a last batch on the Friday before June the 3. So we have your schedule of department presentations and I will just also note that the May 13th uh 27th and June 3rd will all come with public hearings and so if uh residents prefer to speak on the budget here live they're able to do that. So here's how they can submit their feedback. So last year um with the help of PIM uh we stood up vision.c.gov. It's intended to be open all year long. Um, and we respond to comments out there as we receive them. There will be a specific subpage um for the budget for this year where folks can go out there and take a look and leave comments for us and we will respond to those. Um, there will also be some resources provided. I'll give you um a look at that in just a second. Um, they can also email their comments to budget comments at OKC.gov. They can even text their comments to the action center or if they want to old school, write a letter to us and mail it in. and they're able to do that uh do that as well to the city clerk's office address there. I should point out attention budget office. The city clerk does not want all of our mail. Um and then uh let's see here. I'd just like to call out this uh vision.c.gov. So, we provide resources um including videos about how we develop the budget. We'll have every presentation that you receive posted there as well, including links to the budget book. We'll have our timeline out there. So, it's just a really good one-stop shop for uh residents to engage with us and uh leave us their feedback. And with that, that concludes my presentation this morning, but I'm happy to answer any questions you might have. Uh yeah, Chris, I just appreciate all your work on this and I do appreciate pointing out what we're doing with the portal there with uh the vision.c.gov and the work that PIM's doing to help us with that, getting all that loaded in there. Um I did want to acknowledge as well the work of the departments. uh Chris had given a nod to the fact that departments work not only to try to minimize the impact on services but also trying to minimize the impact on employees that we were looking at vacant positions everywhere that we could and departments really worked hard to do that and I do appreciate that so it had a minimal impact on employees when we do affect an employee we do our best to try to find another position for them to land in uh but I really appreciate that extra effort and appreciate Chris again your leadership on this and again we'd be glad to answer questions on the overall budget. We will have the presentations on these three this week and then additional in the next few weeks. Thank you for your presentation. Thank you for your context, city manager. Um I went back to my office to grab the 2024 resident survey because there was just something you said that really stood out to me at the start of your presentation, which is that and helped me understand this process. the it sounds like the budget office and maybe the city manager's office, maybe department heads. Do you all go to the resident survey and which I heard you say, but then do you look at what the um so I just turned to page 76 and it said which three of the items listed in question one do you think should receive the most emphasis from city leaders over the next two years? So you all go there. Is that about right? that we look at we look at all you know sorry we look at all the feedback that we get so we do focus on that but we look at all the feedback that we get I only mention it because and this is just the first year it's ever like clicked for me to like dig into this I think it was because of the way you you began those comments and I just made an asterric of where in W 2 it's broken down by word in this this section so all of you could do this but it it's broken down for those top three choices and I went ahead and noted them. So it was condition of street which is more of a bond issue, right? Yes. Um and but then from there it was the number one so like conditions of streets was how much here? 74.9%. And the only thing even close to that that height is is homelessness and it's 87.2%. 2%. And so I'm going to be very curious during these presentations over the next few weeks like what how we're responding to that number because that I don't know that just seems pretty that's a very very high number. And just to give you some context everyone, the closest to streets and homelessness is 29.1% and that's flow of traffic and ease of getting around town on city streets, which is way higher. I just saw a council woman in in W 3 than it is in in W 2. Like considerably, it's 40%. So, I'm I can't wait to learn a little bit more from you about why that is in W three or at least it out to me. But um that's a huge drop from 74 and 87% to then the next thing. So in my mind that says that W 2 residents are really asking this body to address homelessness. Um and I just wanted to set that up as we head into our um our budget season. Um so I get really nervous. I'm just going to all cards on the table right now. I am very worried about a an austerity budget. Um so when the city's residents in W 2 are asking us to to address homelessness um because in my mind the more we work to stabilize the people who are experiencing homelessness and I can see it as clear as day on 23rd and pen. That's all I can see in my head right now. 23rd and pen. Um, in my mind, when we stabilize people who are in these tents or standing on the intersections of 23rd and Penn, when we stabilize them and they're in housing and they are able to buy things, that helps contribute to our our sales tax revenue. So, I see a connection there between these two things. So, I just wanted to like give a little bit of a different context for the start of this conversation. Our residents in W tier are asking us to deal with homelessness. We're facing this budget shortfall when it comes to sales tax. And I see a way out of both things by stabilizing residents who are experiencing homelessness so they can contribute more to our sales tax coffers to help us not have to delete services. And I'm worried that some of the services that we're thinking about deleting are actually not going to help us address homelessness, but possibly exacerbate it. So I'd like to learn how that is and is not the case as we go along. So thank you. And maybe this is the place because it is kind of the broadest look we'll take at this whole exercise to say I see clips from other cities. You know, I've been following civic affairs at the municipal level in this country for 20 years, and we never seem to have the cataclysmic events here in Oklahoma City that I see in other city governments where they're laying off dozens or hundreds of employees. It's just this seemingly endless roller coaster cycle. And I think that is a great testament to this team uh which has a lot of continuity. And and I mean, some of the people involved in this have been involved in it for decades. and our residents. Though a year like this year, as Councilman Cooper just said, is not ideal. Um, boy, it seems like it's a lot worse in other cities. And, uh, and it seems that we've managed to have, especially based on a volatile revenue stream, we've had a very stable, um, budget through the through the years and through the decades. And I think that's something we should never take for granted. And I just want to express gratitude for that. The conservative management of this budget and really non-political management of this budget through the years has allowed our residents to to for the most part count on these services and expect to see them year after year after year and not see the uh the the yo-yo effect that I see in so many other large cities. Thank you. So, next up we have public transportation and parking. our uh director Jesse Rush will present this budget and we'll walk through each one of these uh let them uh walk through their budget, give an overview of their budget and again have additional presentations that will come in the next few weeks. Jesse, yeah, good morning. Good morning, mayor, city manager, council. Special good morning to council person Avers and council person Pennington. Welcome aboard. Welcome to the horseshoe. Uh so my name is Jesse Rush. I'm the director for public transportation and parking. Um, do want to give a couple of shoutouts. So, um, really a huge shout out to our marketing team, Around Reyes, our finance team, uh, with Christina Hen and our planning team, Chip Nolan. But specifically, specifically got to give a huge shout out to Ty Holly here. So, everything you're going to see today, this presentation is a handy work of Tai. Really appreciate uh, your artistic view of everything that we do. It's uh, very, very exciting. Um, Mayor Hold, I would like to address similar to what you did with uh public budgets. Uh, so we do the same thing when we're looking at uh public transportation budgets across the nation, and we're seeing the same thing. We are seeing a lot of folks that are dealing with uh much more cataclysmic budgets. So, just specifically looking at LA Metro, they're looking at about a $700 million fiscal cliff that they're facing. Uh and then a little bit closer to home in Kansas City, they're currently looking at the possibility of cutting funding uh basically cutting their service in half. So it is uh it is dire out there. So we will walk through our budget today. So I'll be talking about our our vision, some of the strateg strategic initiatives that we've been working on, uh and then we'll jump into the budget. So moving along, I'll give this a shot. All right, it works. All right. So, I did want to just kind of point out uh just remind everybody who we are, right, as uh as Embark. So, we are a public transportation uh trust to the city of Oklahoma City. Uh I wanted to remind everybody really the modes that we that we operate. So, first clearly is our our bus service. So, that's our fixed route service. That's the the big white buses that you see running down the road every single day. So that really started back in 1966 when the uh central Oklahoma Transportation and Parking Authority uh Trust was established. And so that really allowed us the opportunity to manage the public transit and public parking back in 1966. Uh next up on the list here is our our BRT or our Rapid Northwest. And that uh of course was launched in 2023, December of 2023. Uh then next is our OKC street car that was launched in December of 2018. Uh mentioned parking already. And then our Oklahoma River cruises or our ferry service that we operate on the Oklahoma River that was launched in 2008 about four years after the the MAPS program established the Oklahoma River. Uh then finally our our plus program that's our ADA service complimentary to our fixed route and our transit services that was started in 1982 uh full eight years prior to the passage of the ADA program uh in 1990. So we were ahead of the curve there. Uh so next up this is our vision. So our vision is embark will be worldclass transportation that is accessible to all and all want to access it. So this is our aspirational goal right. So this is what we are striving toward and forward every single day. Uh and I wanted to point out some of the initiatives that we have started to to really get us there. So the first one being create a great place to work. We'll talk more about that coming up. Uh and then the next being enhancing the status use and understanding of our services. And then finally, preserving the confidence of the board and city. So when we reference the board, that's the the COPATA board. We reference the city that is this body, the city council, but it's also our customers that use our service every single day. All right. So our very first initiative is create a great place to work. So when I think about a create creating a great place to work for me specifically, it's exactly that. It's coming to work to a place that I love and enjoy working with the folks. And so we wanted to make sure that we did that across the board. So some of the programs that we have started um five years ago we actually kicked off our what's called our roadmap and so this is the brainchild of our uh former director and current assistant city manager Jason Farbrush and so this really really kicked off our momentum moving forward. So we've been working on this for the past five years. Uh we've got our 5-year anniversary coming up later this year uh November 16th of 2025 and it really set us on a path right it set us on a path of growth. Uh I think has been mentioned several times, public transportation and parking is one of the fastest growing departments within the city and we've seen that uh growth continue. So we're going to talk a little bit about some of those programs today. Uh the first one being our Stoke storytellers. So we love acronyms and transit. So if you think of Stoke, we think about our core values of be safe, the S be there, be open, and be kind. And so with this program, it's really our peer-to-peer recognition, right? So, we wanted to make sure that there was an avenue or an opportunity for folks to be able to recognize their peers if they're doing something that really represents our core values. And so, since the launch of that, we've had over 3,500 folks recogni recognize their peers. So, over the over the course of almost 5 years, that peer-to-peer recognition is really taking hold at. Uh the next uh little caveat there is we've had 72 72 legends of the quarter. So every quarter we gather the folks up and if you uh you were nominated we identify five. So there's five different categories and so every quarter we identify five legends uh and then you know work toward our legends of the quarter. And then finally legends of the year. This is folks that just really step up and really emphasize that c those core values. And our previous winner here is on the screen uh Mr. AJ. So, as you can see, always a smiling face and just a joy to be around and really really appreciate the opportunity to do that peer-to-peer recognition. All right, next up is our culture compass. So, this is uh really through the gauge survey process, we realized that folks needed an avenue to be able to communicate with uh leadership. Uh let's face it, sometimes frontline employees are uh nervous or apprehensive to to communicate directly with uh leadership. And so we really set up this culture compass. This is a volunteer uh opportunity for staff to come in and get together and talk about Embark as a whole. And they uh it's really that that um pathway between what's going on on the front line and leadership. So since the launch of this, we've had a lot of um great input. I'd like to point out here that we with the culture compass, we had a 200% increase in our gate survey u uh participation. That's huge for us, right? Um, a couple of things that came out of the culture compass though that I want to specifically call out. So, first is uh new safety barriers on our buses. So, with our BRT buses that rolled out, if you've ridden the the BRT bus, they have this real heavyduty uh bus barrier for our our operators, right? And this was a brand new thing that came out and through the culture compass, we heard from our operators that we really really would like to have these on our existing bus fleet, right? And so what we did was we actually piloted a a program here in Oklahoma City, first in the nation uh to retrofit our existing bus fleet with these bus barriers. So really want to give a shout out to Dennis Fry, our facility and maintenance uh manager to to really pilot that program and bring that to Oklahoma City first and then we're starting to see that come across the entire nation. So what has happened with that? We have actually started outfitting our uh newest fleet working our way all the way backwards and we are happy to report that at this time we have over 25 buses with those brand new bus barriers. Uh the next item here was added security on select routes. So we uh we partner with the city manager's office to add security on our systems and this really really hit hit home with our our staff to making sure that they felt safe when they're out there operating our our system. All right. As I mentioned earlier, we are one of the fastest growing departments in the city and that is showing uh with our facilities. So, we uh if you're familiar with our headquarters there at 2000 South Bay, we quickly outgrew that. I'll talk a little bit about that here in just a second, but we had an immediate stop gap that we had to do. So, one of the things that we did to try to maximize space for uh folks that are coming on board was we uh uh we worked at the Santa Fe Depot to do a remodel. Uh ACM Fairbrush mentioned this last year. It was right before we were about to to start that remodel and move in. It's happy to report that we have completed that remodel and we now have staff working out of the Santa Fe Depot. Uh that's relieve some of the stress there at uh 2000 South May. And so with that, we've actually been able to move forward with a remodel at 2000 South. So this is about 17,000 square feet of space that we've been operating out of since the late 90s. uh as we've grown, we've started to take over more and more of that building and now we uh occupy the entire facility, the full 17,000 square ft. Now, it has not been efficiently laid out. So, we have we've added offices that we as we've grown. Uh we've added people into offices as we've grown. Uh we currently have several offices that have three people operating out of those offices. We have offices that are 20 by 20 and we have offices that are 10 x 10. So, with this remodel, we'll be able to really maximize the space of that. This is a a little bit longer term stop gap uh with the hope of being able to look at the possibilities of building a brand new headquarters uh with the with the geo bond election coming up. But I wanted to point out some of the highlights here. So, we'll we build we will be building a brand new training room that'll be able to house uh almost 50 folks. So, we do a lot of coordinates programs. That's our all hands meeting and we'll be able to we've currently have to do that offsite with the remodel. We hope to be able to do that on site. Brand new break room for our operators and staff and then also the the top right rendering there is uh our front entryway. So very very excited about that remodel kicking off uh here in about two weeks. All right. So our next initiative is enhancing the status use and understanding of our services. So when we think about that that's a couple of things. So it is uh specifically it's maintaining our current customer base but also making sure that we're reaching out and trying to build our customer base. Then also ties back to our brand. What do people think about when they think about Embark? And so some of the things that we've been working on to address that uh the first one here is the construction of the first Americans museum landing or the FAM landing. So, we received uh some federal dollars, some ARPA funding, and then we also received a local match contribution from the OK uh Okana Resort to help build this fan landing. On the left side there is the rendering, and on the right is an aerial shot of of about two weeks ago. And so, we're anticipating this launching uh later this summer. So, looking forward to that. And when I think about expanding our reach, this is an example of that. So, I mentioned that we started our Oklahoma River cruises in 2008 and since then we continue to add additional landings and this is our latest one and we're excited to be able to again extend our reach when it comes to public transit on the Oklahoma River. Uh the next one here is our maps for BRT service. So, this is very very important to us. This is again expanding our modes, expanding our reach. Uh so specifically I'll point out that on the map here you can see uh the kind of dark purple or dark blue lines that's uh you can see that reach going into the northeast side of Oklahoma City and then again to the southwest side of Oklahoma City. And so what's important about the maps uh for BRT is that with the implementation of the BRT we're able to repurpose and reallocate our existing fleet and our existing routes. You we've seen that with the launch of Rapid Northwest along Classen. So, we were able to reallocate some of our resources that were already operating on Classen and distribute those to other routes to be able to improve our frequencies. Uh, so we're looking at launching this later uh in 2028. And again, we're partnering with Maps Ford to be able to bring this to Oklahoma City. Um, it'd be remiss of me to not also point out that with the launch of the BRT, we'll also be looking at uh bringing microtransit to these areas, right? uh specifically the northeast side of Oklahoma City being the pilot program for that microtransit program. Uh and then one other uh partnering um partnering with maps 4 I wanted to point out is that uh it was mentioned earlier about being able to get around Oklahoma City quicker and faster. And so we are in the process of working with maps for to uh bring on what's called transit signal prioritization or TSP. And so really want to give a huge shout out to Michael Scrogggins and our IT department uh is helping uh really kind of pilot that and bring it forward to Oklahoma City. So very excited about that. That'll allow our transit system to be able to flow quicker through traffic. So what that is is our our fleet will get the green light or if it's red or sorry if it's red it'll switch to green or if it's green it'll hold that green and we'll be able to uh move quicker through traffic. All right the other one here is uh very exciting for us. Uh the maps for bus shelters. So uh on the left there is an image of a recently completed shelter and you'll notice several amenities. So first clearly being a shelter uh and then next being it's a lit shelter, right? So that adds to that feeling of security. Uh we have trash cans and bike racks at all of our uh new bus shelters. And a part of that is also making sure that we have that connection. So we want to make sure that we have that ADA connection to the nearest intersection including sidewalks. So very excited to be bringing that to you. But I wanted to show you a little bit of history of shelters in Oklahoma or bus shelters in Oklahoma City. So all the way back in 2014, it really became a a strong initiative that we wanted to bring more shelters to to our system. So if you notice uh there on the left, that little gray there. So back in 2014, we had about 60 of our total of 1,357 bus stops that had shelters. So very very small percentage of our bus stops had shelters. uh we continue to make that a a growth opportunity and initiative. And so we uh we specifically were able to bring 167 additional shelters uh to our system. And then partnering with MAPS 4 in phase one, we added an additional 140 shelters. And then finally with um another program with MAPS 4, we recently received a $19 million raise grant. That's that's huge. that's going to be able to allow us to add an additional 360 shelters across our entire system. So, bringing uh our entire network of 50% of our bus stops having shelters. And that's huge when you look at the national average. Again, the national average being about 30% of transit stops having bus shelters and we're going to have uh just a little over 50% of our bus stops having shelters. So, very excited about that and excited for that partnership with the maps 4. All right. So talking about uh never stopping. So one of the things that we wanted to point out is some of the things that we do to make sure that we are providing the the best service that we possibly can. And so the first thing we wanted to point out is uh during winter weather. So this is uh when folks depend on us uh very very much. So if you think about it uh we want to make sure that we're getting folks where they need to go regardless of weather conditions. Today's a perfect example. We had flooding on roadways but we did not stop. We continue to provide that service. if we had to, we implemented detours to make sure that we were still able to get to our customers. But specifically when we talk about winter weather, so we u one of the things that we've done is we partner with the planning department and we uh partner with day shelters and night shelters. So if you think about it, anytime that it gets below 32 degrees, these day and night shelters are activated. So this gives an opportunity for folks that are unhoused an opportunity to get in out of the weather and go to these shelters. And so what happens is uh if you're unhoused and you're in a day shelter uh in the evening time, they have to shut down that day shelter to prepare for the next day and they open up the night shelters. Well, if you have to leave the day shelter to go to a night shelter, how do you get there? So we partner with the planning department and we uh basically have a a shuttle service that goes to the day shelters. We'll pick folks up and we'll transport them to the night shelters and then we do the the uh vice versa in the morning picking pe folks up from the night shelters and taking them to the day shelters making sure that they're able to get get in out of the weather out of the elements and be able to uh stay safe during the day. All right. Another thing that we uh we've partnered with so I think folks are familiar that uh the prayer surf uh area and the garage underneath that is going away. And so that is about almost a thousand parking spaces that's going away. And really want to give a shout out to Corey Hubert in the parking division uh really coming up with some ideas and plans to be able to make sure that we still maximize parking availability to folks that need it uh downtown. So one of the things that we did was we partnered with the uh the Thunder to provide these shuttle services. And so with that prairie surf arena going away and those nine almost a thousand parking spaces going away, we wanted to make sure that folks still had a place to park if they were going to a Thunder game. And so we uh opened up our Arts District garage and our Sheridan Walker garage just uh here on the corner. And so if you park in one of those garages, you're able to show your parking ticket essentially a parking ride and you're able to use our OKC street car or our shuttle service and take you straight to the front door of the arena. And so we do that two hours prior to the game and two hours uh during the game and two hours postgame. Be a be able to get folks where they need to go. So I want to talk specifically about the wrership here. So on our street car, again, this is uh essentially a loop that takes people from the Mir Gardens to the arena stop. We've seen almost 3,000 folks use that since we implemented that earlier this year. And then on our rapid uh total wrership on that being a little over 6,300. So why is this important? Why are why are we making this initiative? Well, let's point it let's make a point that usually this the these folks might be folks that have never used public transit before, right? And so we wanted to make sure that we show how easy it is to be able to use public transit to be able to hop on a bus and be able to get where you need to go. And so we're very very proud of that. Uh our total combined ridership for this program being just a hair over 9,000 folks have used it so far. And we're continuing this program into the playoffs and hopefully into the finals. All right. Another program that we implemented is our Embark Express service for the Women's College World Series. So, we kicked this off in 2022. Uh, and we basically had two buses that would pick you up at one stop and take you to the College World Series, drop you off at the front door. Again, that shuttle service. Uh, since then, we've continued to see that grow. And in 2024, we um had two buses and two stops. And so, again, you can see the growth that we've seen that. And we're anticipating doing that uh this year. We're going to continue to have those two stops. and we're going to be implementing uh three buses to do this shuttle service to be able to get folks where they need to or get folks to this women's college world series. So very excited to see that growth there. All right, so I wanted to really kind of take a pause here and really focus on this slide. So, what people are saying. So, Council Person Cooper, you mentioned the the um resident survey, and that's uh fantastic that we have folks looking at that, and I believe public transit ranks very highly on that uh resident survey. But this is our customer survey. So, this is folks that use our service every single day. So, that's why this one is so important to us. And so, I wanted to point out uh really kind of get you oriented on this slide. So, on the right there is a graph that kind of shows what we're going to be talking about today. So in blue is our fixed route uh customers what they're seeing. Uh chartreuse that's our rapid color. That's that greenish yellow color there in the middle. That's what our rapid folks are saying our customers are saying. And then in the gray there is the national average. So if you take a look at that uh safety while riding the bus route our fixed route customers are saying they 81% of them are feeling uh satisfied or very satisfied with the safety while riding the bus route. National average being 42%. And then on our rapid northwest, 89% of our folks uh say they feel safe while riding the bus route. Then just working our way across there to the right, uh safe operations of our buses. That's a huge shout out to our bus operators. So 80% of folks feel say that they feel safe while uh safe operations of the buses and then 90% on the Rapid Northwest and national average there being 73%. Safety while waiting at a bus stop. again contributing back to our uh implementation of more shelters at our bus stops. Uh 76% feel safe while waiting at a bus stop and then 86% of our Rapid Northwest feel safe while waiting at a bus stop. 35% national average exceeding the national average. So very very proud of what we've been able to do there. And then finally, safety at the transit center. Uh we are setting out about 7 75% of our folks say they feel safe while waiting in the transit center. Unfortunately, there is not a national average for that. So we uh we we want to make sure that we track that and we are going to continue to do that. All right. So continuing on that. So this is more overarching what people are saying. So uh just total customer satisfaction when looking at our system. So on the OKC fixed route we are sitting at about 77%. Uh OKC street car sitting at 96% and then the rapid northwest sitting at 92%. Then if you take a look at our entire national average sitting at 58%. So very very proud of what we're doing here in Oklahoma City and that is thanks to the support of this council and our board our COPTA board to be able to do the initiatives that we have talked about earlier and what we're going to talk about later to be able to get to these uh customer satisfaction results. I did want to point out uh Chris Tatum there with the ETC Institute. So he does these surveys across the nation and one of the things that he pointed out when he presented to our uh to our board was that I just want to read his quote here. It's clear from the results that Embark's recent transit improvements like the addition of Rapid Northwest and the update of all route schedules via OKC Moves made a positive impact on customer satisfaction. So again, this is Chris who does these surveys across the nation saying that about what we do here in Oklahoma City. So again, thank you to this council for being able to help provide the support that we need to be able to do this. All right. Uh human services. So this is our mobility management program. A huge shout out to Dr. Dylan who manages these manages these programs. So these programs help fill in those gaps, right? When you think about our fixed route, Rapid Northwest, our plus program, our mobility management program really helps fill in those gaps. So I wanted to point out a couple of them here. So first being our climb ride child welfare program. This is a nationally recognized program. We've had several other transit agencies actually reach out to Dr. Dylan about the possibilities of how we could help them implement that in their cities. And so what that is is if you think about uh folks that maybe have been separated from uh their children. Oftent times uh you have to go to a a courtup supported system to be able to go to classes to be able to reunite with uh your children. With this program, we provide transportation services to those courtappointed services to be able to help folks uh get re reunited. We've seen a huge growth with that and uh huge support. Uh the other one I wanted to point out here was our embark well program. So this is a a program that we implemented a few years back that transport uh senior citizens to uh health and wellness centers, specifically YMCA's and MAPS 3 program or MAPS 3 wellness centers. And we've seen that continue to grow and we're very excited about that. All right. So, we're going to talk writership. I'm going to move a little bit quicker here, see if we can't get get this wrapped up so we can take some questions. So, specifically wanted to look at our writership across our different modes and the growth that we've seen. So, uh you'll notice uh the icons there at the top help kind of show which ridership we're looking at. So, very first there are bus and rapid. So, this is our bus network. We combined our fixed route and our rapid wrership. Uh so with FY25 we're projecting again April, May, and June are estimated, but we're projecting to uh be just a little over or almost 3.2 million folks using our bus and Rabbit Northwest system for FY25. Uh 288,000 folks using our street car system in FY25. Uh nearly 10,000 folks using our Oklahoma River cruises. A little over 50,000 folks using our plus system. and then 142,000 folks uh across the board using our mobility management system or programs. So, just want to take a look at the the growth that we've seen across our different modes, right? So, 6.4% growth in our bus and rapid, 23% growth on our OKC street car, nearly 10% growth over previous year with our ferry. All in all, we're just continuing to see growth in all of our different modes. And if you take a look at FY25 compared to FY24, all modes considered, we're seeing about a 7% growth on all modes. and almost an 18% growth if you look at FY25 projected to FY23 wrership. So very proud of the continued growth that we're seeing there. So this here shows our uh our fixed route system total bus ridership again uh we're looking at about 2.2 million on our for FY25 on our fixed route system. Our night ridership for FY25 uh almost 100,000 folks using our system at night. uh weekend bus ridership 375,000 projected for FY25. Uh then our Rapid Northwest average daily ridership. Uh so for the weekday our average is almost 1500 folks using our Rapid Northwest system and then on the weekends almost a thousand uh per day average. All right. And then looking at monthly ridership since launch, you can see that continued growth. We did see a slight dip in February. I think most folks remember the very very cold weather that we saw in February, freezing rain. So, we did see a slight dip in February, but we're starting to see that grow out of that. So, on average, we're averaging about 38,000 folks using our Rapid Northwest system every single month, and we're seeing that uh stay pretty steady. I did want to point out our street car ridership. Uh so, for FY25, we're projecting about 262,000. did want to point out that um you know when you think about street car it comes across as a mode but it's really when you look at it it's really a a route right so it is a dedicated route with specific number of vehicles um running running that route and if you look at it that way it's actually one of our highest performing routes again we're projecting 262,000 folks using our street car in FY25 uh to talk about our uh plus program so looking at the the top left corner slide there or top left graph there. In FY20, we saw about 52,000 folks use our plus program. We of course saw that dip uh during COVID and uh like we saw a lot of things during co we saw some new creative things come out of that and one of the things is the teleaalth program and so we have seen our plus program stay steady since then and about 45,000 folks using our plus program. Then on the bottom right there is our mobility and senior services. You heard me talk about that earlier some of those programs. So for FY25, we're projecting 142,000 folks using those programs. All right, our final initiative here is preserving the confidence of the board and city. So jump right into that. So when we think about that, we want to think um you know that Embark is looking at creative ways to find funding to uh promote and expand public transit in Oklahoma City. So one of those was our partnership with the planning and u public works department for the transit oriented development. So we received almost a million dollar grant to look at uh transit oriented development along Classen. And so what that is is they're going we're going to come in and take a look at that entire corridor and look at ways that we can improve that corridor uh for businesses but also folks using transit. And so we're going to look at improvements for pedestrian access uh to the existing Rapid Northwest stops along that corridor. And then the next one there being a raise grant. I mentioned it earlier. We partner with the MAPS 4 department to get nearly a $20 million raise grant to help fund the additional 360 bus stops for our system. Um, another one is our parking. So, we talked last year, uh, ACM Fairbrush talked about how we were going to be taking on street parking enforcement. Uh, and we have started that program. And so, I wanted to point out that we have a little over 1500 parking spaces on street. uh we took over that parking enforcement. Now, why is that important for the city of Oklahoma City and businesses in Oklahoma City? So, if you think about it, one of the things that we want to do is we want to make sure that we're turning over that parking so that folks have quick access to businesses and uh things like that. So, with our parking enforcement, we are uh much more diligent uh with making sure that we're turning over that parking. So if you have parking spaces that are designated for two hours, we want to make sure that folks are using it for two hours and then moving along so other people can have act have have access to those parking spaces. So really really proud of what we've been able to do there. Uh and then I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention our off- streetet parking. So again, we have several parking garages that operate uh downtown and I mentioned earlier the removal of the Prairie Surf parking garage. Uh we have again implemented some new programs to make sure that we're driving folks to use our public parking at the Arch District garage and our Sheridan Walker garage. Uh the maps for long-range transit. So we oftent times uh if we want to preserve the confidence of the board and city council, we want to make sure that we're also looking into the future. And so that is exactly what this is. So if you think back to 2005 with a fixed guideway study, things that came out of that was the um the OK or the street car system, a BRT system, commuter rail and uh microtransit. Well, we have an OKC street car system. So we have achieved that goal. We have the rapid northwest or BRT and we achieved that goal. The RTA is taking on the uh the commuter rail and we're looking forward to bringing microransit soon. But with this Maps 4 long range transit plan, we've partnered with all of our partners including maps for ACOG, the RTA, Edmund, uh with City Link, and of course, Embark Norman. And then our government partners, of course, being city of Oklahoma City, city of Norman, and the city of Edund. So, we're looking at the future of what public transit would look like, and we're excited to bring that plan to our board and city council. And then transit center feasibility study. So, we received a grant to take a look at our current uh downtown transit center. So, I mentioned our growth, right? So, we are seeing a lot of growth in public transit. Uh we want to make sure that our transit center is able to meet that demand. And so, we are looking at that and seeing what the possibilities are or basically where that line in the sand is with our transit center where we can no longer achieve that growth at our current transit center. And with that, we'll also be looking at our Santa Fe Depot to make sure that there's connection between the two. Right? If we're going to be bringing commuter rail to Oklahoma City, we want to make sure that there is connection between the two. All right, it's time to talk budget. So, in your budget book, we are found on pages C-147 through C-156. I'd like to point out in your budget book, that is the city budget. What I'm going to be talking about today is our public transportation budget. This is our trust budget. So, you're going to see some differences, but I wanted to make sure that we focused on our entire budget. So, let's jump right into it. So, our proposed FY26 COPA budget, you can see here, it's no surprise that 73% of our budget is uh going toward our bus system, right? Uh a little little more than 1% is going toward our Oklahoma River cruises, so about $1 million there. 10% of our budget is going toward our street car at about 6.7 million. Uh parking 10% about $6.3 million. And then Norman being about $4 million. So, I'd like to point out that in Norman, uh, we we contract with the city of Norman. So, city of Norman provides the equipment and the facilities. We provide the the staff to run that, uh, in Norman. So, it is a full cost recovery. So, this is simply here to be able to show that uh, there there is that full cost recovery there. Uh, funding sources. So, specifically for our off street. So, it's important to point out that with our parking system, that is an enterprise system, right? So we we operate uh with the funding that we receive from uh folks using our system. So it's important to point out here that 46% of our uh park parking revenue comes from our monthly parkers. Those are folks that we contract with uh to have that monthly parking. And then the the remaining there again being about 24% at of our event parkers and then 26% being our daily parkers. So our off- streetet parking budget being about 6.3 million. And then for our funding sources for uh our public transportation, it's no surprise that 65% of that comes from uh the city. So with that $39 million there, uh the other coming from our federal grants. So about 8.6 million, 2.2 million of our um our budget is made up from fairs. 1.9 million is made up from ODOT, our state uh subsidy there. mentioned Norman earlier about four million there again full cost recovery and then 4.5 million made up from other funding sources total being about $60 million. So I'll move quick through this. So our total budget there for FY26 proposed being a little over 67 million. Uh kind of just jump to the bottom there. Our general fund being uh 41 million. This is a 1% reduction. Um, I did want to point out the the biggest reduction there being in our street car. We're looking at about $6.7 million there. About 6% reduction in our street car budget. All right. Major budget changes. So, this is uh the the main point here. So, about $1.4 million uh budget change there is going toward our uh changes in personnel related costs such as salaries, merit increases, things like that, health insurance, and other benefits. Uh the next three make up our 4.5% that we had talked about earlier. The biggest being assuming uh the operations and maintenance of our OKC street car. So we are proposing ending that contract with Herszog Transit who we've been a partner with since 2018. Uh it's important to point out that this is clearly at no fault of Herszog. This is simply a budget item. Uh but we look forward to continuing some form of relationship with them uh moving forward. And then the next two here, um, a budget reduction of 252,000 with the elimination of Route 19. And then 132% or $132,000 budget reduction with the reduction of Route 24. This is our commuter route between Oklahoma City and Norman. Uh, $634,000 addition to really increase our funding for our utility costs there. $162,000 increasing funding for our labor supplies and repairs. We talked about those shelters earlier. We're with the MAPS four program. We're bringing on that many more shelters. And so we want to make sure that we have the funding resources uh and staffing to be able to keep those to our world-class standard that we talked about earlier. And then finally, a 147,000 reduction in IT and finance and marketing. This is really really uh finding those budget efficiencies every possible way that we could to kind of trim those budgets down. So we're happy to report that we have met our uh our goal of 4.5%. All right, last slide. So, I I just wanted to kind of drive it home really how important public transit is, not only to me, but also the folks that use it every single day. Often compare what we do in public transit to uh what is happening in public safety. When you think about police, fire, and IMSA, unfortunately, they uh you know that fortunately they make TV shows like Chicago Fire and Chicago PD. They have yet to make a Chicago Transit. I highly recommend that they do because I believe it'd be a very very entertaining show. But um I did want to we we took an opportunity to really uh get some of our customers that use our system every single day and allow them an opportunity to really tell council how important public transit is to them. So with that, I'll uh I'll play our last slide here. I'm on the bus every day of the week because it takes me back and forth to most of my doctor's appointments. It's one of my main source of transportation. So, like I said, it's it helps a lot to be able to navigate throughout Oklahoma and go different places, like I said, with more stops that enhance. So, it makes it more convenient. I use it for everything. I'm glad you guys are here. I go visit friends and family. I go to the park. Um, I use it I use it daily as my daily transportation. when but far as the the rapid is concerned, I think that that's going to make Embark build a a better system. I'm glad y'all got the rapid. It's every 12 15 minutes and you can get back on the bus and go do what you need to do. It was very fast. It was very friendly. I didn't have to wait long on on the bus. It came very fast. I made my appointment on time. I I love the people that work here and drive. They're really really nice and kind. And I like all the Embark employees cuz they do look out for us. But I respect them because they get out here and they drive us everywhere we need to go. They don't have to do that, but they do. They take time out of their lives to do that for us. And I like that. I appreciate that. Just the people in general. Get you a pass and get out there and see what Oklahoma has to offer. Don't embark on. [Music] All right, that concludes my presentation. I'd be happy to take any questions. Thanks, Jesse. Thank you. I have a No, please go. Well, one, I want to say Jesse, um, thank you for the presentation. Appreciate it. It's great to learn how valuable this service is and the great work that we're doing. Um, and I but I do want to point out um the recommended cut to Route 19 that's going to which is in my ward far um East Oklahoma City um and express my concern about that and I one want to thank you for having a community meeting that we had one last week. I appreciate that. um you took some very tough questions and I appreciate that with grace and um we're going to be again together at the Menace Lake View um uh community center this evening hearing again from our neighbors who are affected by this. Um I think and this occurred in our conversations about this. I understand that the city is trying to make a logical decision in eliminating a route that gets the least ridership. That makes sense. I understand that. My concern with that though is that we're targeting an area that has less population density that has um low incomes in in a lot of these parts. And so we're it's almost like we're taking the people who are least prepared to deal with a significant change and then making them have to pay the pay the price for our budget cut. Um I I also understand based on the conversations and feedback we heard from the meeting that you know there was still some dissatisfaction with Route 19 as it is. So there's that concern as well. So I think what I'm asking is how can we work together to ensure that the residents in in Spencer and Dunie and that part of of W 7 still have highquality access to their services to bring them closer to Oklahoma City to take them to jobs um and medical appointments. It's really important to our community that we have highquality access to these services. And so, while I would like to hear if there are options as far as um other routes we could combine with um other services that we could utilize, we I just am afraid we're going to strand people in our own community when it doesn't suit us uh because of budget cuts that we're going to hurt the the people who can afford to be affected the least. So, yep. I'd be happy to address that. So, uh I came prepared. There are you figured I was going to ask there are additional slides. Yes. So specifically let's let's make sure we're oriented when we look at Route 19. So on this slide is uh in purple. You can see the route 19 again. That's our our far more uh northeast side of of our metro area. And then as we zoom in you can kind of see that it connects to Route Two and Route 15. Uh this is some of the same information that we shared at our our public hearing. Um so specifically talking about route 19 uh it annually it carries about 12,000 annual trips. When you look at the system as a whole our average uh routes carry about 106,000. Uh the average daily wrership for route 19 is 46 folks. Uh and then our again looking our entire system our average uh route wrership is about 439. Um the uh council person Pennington similar to like what we'd mentioned uh during the hearing um it is 46 folks while that is our lowest performing route it's still 46 folks that are impacted by the proposed removal. So what we've done is we've taken a look at are there supplemental ways that we can uh still provide service. So we took a look at our uh writership uh specifically by stop and what we've identified is that most folks are going to the Mary Mahoney Center in that area. And so what we be what we are proposing today uh to help supplement the service to this area is uh I'd mentioned earlier our embark well program. So we are going to propose to our board to uh allow us to run that embark well program in this area. Uh specifically picking folks up two times a week essentially taking them from their front door to the Mary Mahoney Center. Again that direct access from home to Mary Mahoney Center being the highest uh trip generator in that area. Um, oh, sorry. Go to that slide. So, also we're going to um be requesting from our board the ability to remove the um age requirement that is currently part of the embark well. So, right now embark well you have to be 60 years of age or older to use it. So, we're going to be requesting our board to allow us the ability to remove that age requirement. So, anyone can use that embark well program to be able to get to that Mary Mahoney Center. So again, it's kind of to your point, it's uh it's not the full service. It is a supplemental service. Uh but that is that's what we're going to be requesting from our board. And so with the um the Embark Well program, that makes a lot of sense. So what about so this would help people who are looking to go to medical appointments, but if we're talking about residents that need to go to work or you know any of those other uses, would they be they would not be able to use this service? So that's correct. So this would take them from their home to Mary Mahoney Center. It would not take them to the apartment complex that you had mentioned earlier, Dunie. Um we can we can look we can partner and see if there's possible ways that we can make that happen. You know, I'd mentioned that the microtransit I know during our uh the meeting that we had the other day that was a goal that specifically the city of Spencer would like to see. Yes. Come to that area. Um I had mentioned it earlier that we were looking at bringing that online with the maps for uh BRT system. So the reason why that's important is because during those MAPS 4 uh implementation of the BRT, we'll be reallocating really everything that happens in those areas that are affected by the BRT. And that's when we are planning on bringing microtransit uh on board specifically for the northeast side of Oklahoma City. Uh so we're not quite ready to launch that. Um but we could we could certainly chat and see if there's something that we could do to to help supplement aside from the embark well. I'd definitely love to chat about that because again, Mike, I know that and I appreciate the fact that there was surveys that were done so that we know we believe that most of the people who are utilizing route 19 are again going to medical appointments and we have an immediate solution. I'm certain that when I talk to my neighbors about this, what they're going to ask is what about the technology gap and the access to be able to um use the service and request it? Um, what about the ability for um, again for people who have needs that are non-medical that might need to access the service? So, I wonder if we can also look at I know there's Route 15 that's in the area. So, are there options for us to be able to change that, modify that in order to meet some of the the needs that are there. Um, and I wonder also if we've been working with other municipalities um to see if they would might be willing to chip in as well as the county, but I understand there's some statutory reasons that limit the county, but would love to hear about that as well. Yeah. So, you actually bring up a good point that I failed to mention. So, one of the reasons why we are looking at uh the removal of Route 19 is for the past 28 years, this is brought up during the the meeting. For the past 28 years, Oklahoma County has helped fund the Route 19. And so there was uh legislation that was passed uh I believe it was last year, Senate Bill 1931 that prevented uh Oklahoma County from specifically being able to help fund this route because they saw it as a social service. Right now what's uh interesting there is that Tulsa, we we had talked about this also. Tulsa was able to their legal opinion was able to still use that funding for specifically things like this. So, I know uh Commissioner Lowe and Deputy Commissioner Pettis are working with Senator Nikki Nice to see if we can get a a different legal opinion of of that Senate bill. And so, if that happens, you know, hopefully we could see if we could get some of that funding put back toward Route 19. Uh we would still, you know, we still have to look at what that gap is though to to be able to bring Route 19 back. But to your point, I know Oklahoma County is looking at that to see if they could get that back on the books as a possible way to help fund Route 19. But have other m municipalities as well? Have they been engaged in this? Yeah, so we've been talking with uh Midwest City, uh Rose State, uh Spencer, uh we should probably do a better job of communicating with Spencer, but we have been talking specifically with Midwest City and Rose State to see if there's any possibility. At this time, there's not. um they're they're not interested in helping fund the route at this time. Well, I appreciate that. I again I would love to um to the city manager to the mayor how we can put our resources together to figure out I don't know if that means better relationships with some of our um our our philanthropic partners because I think I fear that we are going to leave again our community members who are the most in need without services that they desperately need in order to live their lives and they are still taxpayers even though they're in far east Oklahoma City they still deserve the same quality of service and so I just ask that we come together to make sure that we don't leave anybody in in the dark and without access to this quality transportation. Absolutely. Welcome to the horseshoe. Thank God. Sometimes when I say these words, people stare at me like I am asking for utopia and I am asking for better director. I'm about I'm so excited. 10 years we're about to have known each other this summer. It dawned on me when you had the the bus stops like that timeline. I'm so I know sometimes when people hear me speak, they hear the criticisms and I just want to take a moment. I am so proud of what you all have done. Mayor, you like to talk in your speeches. Your memory goes even further back, right around like '05 and these sorts of times when when transit was just not even anyone's like consideration. It just really I if I'm correct and and you know you and I don't always agree, but there's a lot of places where we do and we support each other. Um, and one of the moments that I will leak to your defense is you are the first mayor, no shade to Cornet because he's the one who appointed me to the transit trust took a chance on me there, but you're the first one to say that public transportation was a core city service. So what you were saying, director, that alongside fire and police that these are core, your rhetoric, mayor, um, just to affirm you in that that you named it and that was critical because there are still people who believe that public transportation that that it should pay for itself. They say it to me and and they don't understand. They don't. Um, so I just wanted to give like a little bit of, you know, look, I see where we're heading. I know we're heading in the right direction. I know in 2019 with maps, the bus stops, the BRTs to the east and the southside. I'm aware of all of that. I love it. It gets me up in the morning. But what comm what counselor, former commissioner, former youth counselor Pennington is saying is true that there we should be very concerned about what $200,000. That just seems somewhere I have seen this city government move mountains to get bonds for arenas. I we have rushed in this room to get the very best percentage rate on bond. Rushed. And the challenge I think in front of us right now is twofold. one, how can we bring that level of um finance which is your role city manager as you recall as former director of that department and you sat on cop but I learned from you so I just it just why where is that challenge right now and it's in front of us now the moment that where people roll their eyes at me cuz they I will never understand I learned from COPPA. I learn from going to these conferences how public transportation investments work. Would you mind reminding us, director, is when I brought this up on our transit trust, the route on Lincoln, was that 22, right? Route 22. This body, it's for 18. Oh, I'm sorry. I do this every time, Councilwoman. I don't know why I do that. I switch 18 and 22 in my head. Uh they caught me on that one last time too. I knew I was going to get it wrong. Um when we improved its frequency um just a couple years ago, we being KPA and this body, we increased its frequency from an hour to 30 minutes. Not even the industry standard of 15 or less, which you just saw those residents be so excited about. What happened to wrership when we increased that frequency director? Yep. increased uh I believe by 80%. Yep. So in my mind what councelor Pennington is asking for is how do we and what the residents out there are asking for. It's not just how do we get them to Mary Mahoney which I'm so grateful for you and chairman Sentner for trying to figure that out. It's not just about Mary Money but as you heard the counselor said it's about the jobs. As you heard these residents say it's about the parks. It's about visiting family. It it it's not just the the survival mode. It is literally quality of life. But I would go further. I don't think it's just about stabilizing this route. I would suggest as I have suggested before and what I still see is missing in the RTA, 23rd Street is a major corridor in this state's capital city. It goes along its state capital. It has all the way out to near Spencer etc. all the way out to Lake Overberholser. The idea that we would not follow logic data and repeat what Lincoln did right by increasing the frequency on 23rd Street from 30 minutes to 15 minutes and making that a constant just regular 15minute connection reliable. What would happen is, and I'm not talking about homeless people anymore from earlier. I'm talking about just our people, the vulnerable people the counselor is talking about. If they could better walk from their neighborhoods a couple blocks to a bus that was running every 15 minutes, watch your sales tax coffers increase because they will be spending more revenue at the retail shops. the OCU students will have better access all up and down that corridor and to its connections to other parts of the city, not just up and down 23rd. But so far there is no plan. There's no vision. And I would feel more comfortable if in this moment we were trying to figure out how do we microtarget get the people out there in the Dunie Spencer area. How do we address the the the stem the bleeding right now right with paratransit etc. if there was an articulated vision of what 23rd Street really needs to be in terms of increasing its frequency which is the reason why I think you speak so uh gracefully on this and knowledgeably is because you started on the youth center or sorry youth council so you've learned the city government I did it too with Kappa and so we know the industry standard is 15 minutes or less we know that wrership will increase with that we know that the people out there if they had that sort of frequency would be better accessing this urban court. It's downtown, spending money, enjoying a night with their family and friends, God knows where. So, that's my challenge and I'm I'm curious. Can we articulate that vision? Can we agree on that vision for 23rd Street? Can we can we set that in motion? Can we begin that work as we're doing the stemming the bleeding right now? And I would even challenge us. It shouldn't even be a stemming the bleeding. We should pull the knife out. So, thanks. Yep. That was the question about the that that was a legit question about 23rd Street. That wasn't a rhetoric. I mean, can we and where would we try? Yeah, I would say that's definitely something that we can incorporate into the master plan of the future and the vision. I think first we probably have to focus on the and I think tying it in with RTA is exactly right. the idea of how we get some of these improved services getting to the rail is exactly what we need. So I think see that kind of greater vision being part of RTA of how we deal with those direct services that we can provide through like a BRT or an enhanced route there. I do think our first goal and again my hope is RTA can help us with this. Our first goal is to try to address the funding for the uh BRT with maps. We don't have a funding source for the operations for that right now. So that's like probably, you know, priority one. But I think again the idea that we especially taking some of these spines that connect the services so well, I think is going to be just an important priority priority for us going forward. It's just it's going to be a challenge of how we get there, particularly if we have to do it without having an RTA, you know, an ability to enhance services in that way. Um, I just want to echo um the comments and concerns about Route 19 and also just lift up some concerns I've heard about Route 24. I know I was able to attend a good chunk of the meeting last Thursday um to hear a little bit more about what people's concerns are. So, um, appreciate the work that you and your staff are doing to sort of be responsive to those and kind of figure out what, um, the best sort of path forward is. Um I have a sort of separate question that's really just more of my own curiosity because you know I think um sort of the going uh you know people's assumption is that when you contract things out to a private company that it's going to be more efficient, cheaper, etc. So I'm curious to hear a little bit more about bringing the street car services in house and kind of what um how it is we are like where that savings is coming from. um by bringing those things like within the embark um kind of staffed and employee structure. Yeah. No, be happy to address that. Um so you're right uh with when you contract a service like that, you're you're essentially paying for uh an expertise, right? So back in uh 2016, 2017, specifically June of 2017 when we signed the contract with Herszog Transit uh prior to actually launching the service in 2018, uh there was really no one in Oklahoma City that knew anything about street car service. I I had a general idea, but I I wasn't the person to be able to to do that. Um over the last I guess at this point six, seven years, uh we've we've become more efficient and have more expertise. uh specifically uh Carl Barnaby. He's our chief uh of bus operations. He was actually the general manager with Herszog uh and helped stand up the street car and was a general manager for Herszog for many years. So we we now have that expertise inhouse and uh and more recently Delano Fischer, he was a maintenance manager for Herszog and we have since hired him also to be our street car manager. And so we we now have that expertise to be able to run that street car system. uh but specifically to the dollars. Uh so one of the things is it's a private company and so they of course are going to have profit and overhead built into their contract and so with the elimination of that contract that amount of money automatically comes off the top. And then we've also again with Delano Fischer being our uh street car manager where we were able to eliminate several key manager positions specifically the general manager position from Herszog large cost savings there. And then also um with that contract, we had to have um a high level of insurance and with us bringing it inhouse, we're able to self-insure it and so that cost goes away also. So we we saw some significant savings through those areas. Yeah. And I would just say again, I appreciate Jesse emphasizing that this was not a slide on Herszog. They've done a great job for us. We could not have started this service without them. So they've been a great partner in this. there just there are times when it's that provides efficiency when we privatize something but in a situation like that we saw the opportunity here and I think you know the idea of the insurance like that's something that we're taking on more risk as a result so it's not that they were overcharging us or doing anything wrong in their contracting so I really appreciate you emphasizing that and I appreciate the challenges that we see here and appreciate count council's comments about concerns with this I want us to continue to look at this Jesse and I are gonna work together with Jason and see if we can figure out a a solution here that helps to provide um the services in a supplemental way or look at what we can do as an alternative. It's just it's that balance of trying to manage the resources that we have and we've really gone a long time that we've really protected transit services and haven't affected them by cuts when we've affected other departments. This year we were trying to pull transit into it as well just to see what we can do to try to produce some savings. And so I appreciate all of the effort. No one wants to cut service. That's not a desire there. But we will continue to work together on this to to look at opportunities and options. Can I ask when you say continue to work I would I mean is is the plan in terms of this you know stemming the bleeding is that are we going to have a plan before we have to vote for the city budget? That will be our goal because Yeah. I'll tell you right now go please councilman. I agree. I'm just agreeing with you. I'm aing you. Yeah. No. Oh yeah. I I just I just don't want to take up your because you're I want to make sure you have your space to I'm holding space for you. Uh no, I I have a it's going to be difficult for me to vote for a budget, right, that doesn't figure that out. Speaking of budgets, and I know we kind of talked a little bit about this at the end of Kappa on the side, I'd like to city manager, your question or your com your context earlier kind of raises for me. I know BRT is like a $4 million annual service, give or take. I I'd like to know like Yeah, I'd like I'd like an articulation of that for South and Northeast Side. Uh and then how much it would cost to increase the frequency in terms of operations uh for 23rd Street. Um so I just want to like will it into existence. I want to see those numbers so that we can be thinking ahead um and having a long-term plan to address those those needs so we can start going okay well how and then one final thing uh councilman also mentioned the private sector like I think reaching out and this b you know our city uh manager's office kind of has those relationships manager mayor does excuse me but you know are there other partnerships here that could be helping because 203 is such a major corridor that is responsible for so many connections to so many facets of our life and I wonder if we were to go to folk and articulate that that uh partnership possibility like what's possible as we get to this larger vision. So that' be my challenge city manager. Thank you. Thank you director. Thank you. I I don't want to argue with you at all, but nobody up here knows the bus system better than me because we build all the shelters for the bus system. And when you go east of I35 on 23rd Street, all your bus stops are out in the middle of nowhere with no houses within 2 miles of it. So to make that a success, you've got to make the bus stops at a better place. I mean, I'm thinking of 23rd and air depot sitting in the middle of a wet pasture with a nothing around it. So, we've got all these stops going out 23rd Street with absolutely no rooftops anywhere to be seen. So, people aren't going to walk the two miles to get to the bus stop. I'm I'm I mean, or they get dropped off. Or they get dropped off. I mean, but what I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying we need to make it more accessible. Oh, counselor, from your lips to the Lord. deers. That was something I found in the u I'm really glad you articulated that. It was something I found in the resident survey where people were saying they wanted stops closer to them. So, yes, if you run it down 10th Street, you're running through the middle of neighborhoods. If you run it down 23rd Street all the way to Chalkaw, you don't hit a neighborhood. Well, and look, I let me, as you all know, here I am, data all around me, and I know Embark loves data. Like, bring it on. Like, look out like where is and we already kind of do this when you go out further. There's moments where it jogs off of 23rd onto 10th Street where there's a density of apartments. And so, yeah, I mean, I think there are absolutely more opportunities for us to, you know, uh, be a bit more surgical and precise the way that you're talking. I completely agree. So yeah, I would be interested and I think that's again what I mean by a challenge is we can look at this and Embark's really good at that. But yeah, I think there's still some holdovers to your point, Councilman, of some places. Why did we put that stop there? You know, and I might add that W five has very few bus stops and the microtransit works really well getting people to the nearest bus stop or they're, you know, even the senior wellness center we built down there doesn't have a bus that runs to it, but seniors are accessible to it through microtransit and they use it quite frequently. So, and for what microtransit costs as opposed to a fixed route bus route, I'm sure the numbers are I mean less. So, thank you. I just also want to say that's not arguing council member. That's like engaging in a discourse and I this was talking about two weeks ago. I love that. Always feel comfortable to do that. I love it. Thank you Jesse. Thank you for your time. So our next presentation is with development services department and our director Brock Row. Um so we've got two directors giving their first presentations, right? That's correct. That's awesome. I love it. There we go. All right. Uh, good morning, mayor and city council and, uh, city manager. I appreciate the introduction. Uh, but I am Brock Rome, the director of development services, and I am pleased to present to you this morning the development services department's proposed fiscal year 26 budget. Uh, I want to recognize my staff and Lion of Business Partners um for their support during this budget process. Uh, this includes my assistant director, Christila Miles, um, Carol Reed, my administrative manager, and Tony Mitchell, my management specialist. uh my line of business managers which are our code enforcement superintendent Chad Davidson uh animal welfare superintendent Ronnie Slabs and development center manager Scott Wise and all of our employees for their dedication and commitment to provide quality service to our residents and customers. Uh if you're looking for our department, we are located on page C33 of the proposed budget book. So the mission of development services is to provide animal welfare code enforcement, construction permitting and inspections, licensing and development application review services to the development community and general public so they can receive timely development decisions and live in a clean and safe stable city. We've been rooted in long-standing traditions of service. Our department has evolved to meet the growing needs of the city while staying true to our core mission uh in enhancing the quality of life uh for our residents. As a vital part of public in public safety, we play a key role in building a clean, safe, and stable community. Through our commitment to responsible development, proactive code enforcement, and compassionate animal welfare, we serve both the development community and the general public with timely, consistent decisions that reflect our values of stewardship, accountability, and service to Oklahoma City's future. So, we have our summary of our our budgets for the last two years. Um you can see that there is an increase of uh 3 uh 28% over the total budget. So our total operating budget is 22,323,29 which is an increase like I just said of $3.54% over last fiscal year which is about $764,000. Um, our nonoperating budget for fiscal year 26 is $1,312,41 which is a decrease of 1.8% about $14,000. Uh, this includes a PDU fund for the landfill, um, the spanure programs and donations. So, our total budget is $23,635,610. Um, about 2.8% 8% over last year's budget. So, our major budget changes um first of all, our big change is um the change in personnel cost costs, which is our salaries, our merit, our retirement, our health insurance, and other benefits, which is about $564,000. Um but we do have some position reductions. Uh so, we are we are we proposed the deletion of a vacant uh code technician position from the plan review program. Uh this position was responsible for plan review uh for residential plan review. Um at this time we believe we can continue to meet our target turnaround times for residential plans. However, a workload demand naturally fluctuates and we will remain flexible with any of those needs that we have to do. Um we also recommend the elimination of a vacant lead customer service representative role. Uh both of these positions are in the development center by the way. uh we feel like that is uh with three of those positions going down to two, we will be able to manage that uh and continue to have our same level of of commitment to services. Um let's go and move the next slide. So our department is organ our department is organized into four lines of business with a total of 190 employees. Um so the development center get this moved over just a little bit. Sorry. The development center has 85 employees, uh, while the code enforcement has 40, administration has four, and animal welfare has 61. So, we're going to talk about the development center first. Um, the development center is our largest line of business. It's led by Scout Wise and consists of three key programs. Construction inspections, perman, and license, and plan review. Our focus continues to be on improving service delivery, enhancing the customer experience, and maintaining strong communication and collaboration with our partners. Um, as part of the of this commitment, we are actively engaging in process improvement initiatives grounded in lean programs and lean principles, which keeps us identifying uh inefficiencies, streamlining our workflows, and deliver more consistent and timely outcomes. These efforts reflect our long-standing dedication to continuous improvement and our responsibility to meet the evolving needs of the growing city. So, if you look at our numbers, um oh, go back one slide. Sorry. So, if you look at our numbers we've completed 136,85 inspections and we've reviewed 2,770 commercial and new construction remodel plans. We also reviewed 5,51 residential new construction plans and remodel plans and issued 62,637 permits. We've also issued 12,122 business license. And what I want to keep in mind on that is that permitting and um doing those inspections and all of those those really do eb and flow with the economy and and the building environment and the development of the city. Uh we can't really increase those. We can't decrease those. Those those just eb and flow based on need and what uh the uh community is requiring at that time. We do have some um issues issue threes in our development process support. Um the percent of construction related inspections completed in one day. Uh we currently have a target of 90% within one day. Uh but while we re realize there's still progress to made meeting these target response times, we remain committed to those goals and have in intentionally chosen not to lower our standards. Uh we're we're going to end up about 71% for fiscal year 25. But with our lean programs that we're going to be doing, it looks like that we can we can get th those numbers up and continue to strive for that 90%. So the next one is percent of construction related inspections completed in one day by trade. This is from July 1st 20124 through March 31st 2025. So one of the things that you see there as you look at that you see that building inspections, mechanical inspections, and plumbing inspections are all over 75%. Uh with mechanical leading the way at 95%. You see electrical is down at 31%. When I first started, we were many, many days out on our electrical inspections. Um, it's something that is that's kind of haunted us for a couple years. Uh, but we've taken lots of steps here recently to streamline that process. We've looked at the National Electric Code and we worked with our inspectors and our plan reviewers and we we came to a conclusion that we were had a lot of redundancies in our inspections and that we there were unnecessary inspections that we needed that we were doing that we didn't necessarily need. So, I'm happy to announce that for the last couple of months, we've actually been 0 to1 days out on our inspection, which is actually pretty phenomenal for a city our size. Uh we we talked to people all over the country who come here to develop and we mentioned that to them and they're just blown away by that because be a top 20 city and have zero to one days out on your inspections is phenomenal. And and I I just want to compliment to the staff and the team and you for the work that you've done that when Brock first came in, Brock sends me a report me and Aubrey a report once a week on this to where those are and we were at I think at with electrical we're about eight days out or something like that at one time and a team I think up to 13 at one point before I came and that just really is difficult for builders and developers like when it's that long they're waiting for an inspection we create I mean it's not unintentional but it creates problems for them and they're great partners with us working with us and the team working together with doing creative things with their staffing and getting more people in and getting people in those jobs. I think they've done a great job with getting us that port and the most recent reports I've had over the last several months has been basically effectively zero days out on any outstanding inspections at any trade and so they're doing a great job and I really appreciate the effort and the work on that. Absolutely. Thank you. I you know it's something that's going to set us apart from other cities that are in our same class that we we're able to do that and that's a that's a big sale to any development de developer wanting to come to our community to invest in in Oklahoma City that we can do that for and it's not to say that everything's resolved because we still have a few areas in plan review and some other areas that are challenged that we're focused on. We got a consultant that's taking a look at some of that. So we're very focused on trying to be better in this way. That's right. Uh let's go ahead and move on to the next uh slide. So one of the things that we've been looking at, we kind of alluded to a lot of these things is that um we one of the things we did for our operational efficiencies is we actually issued all of our inspectors smartphones. Um believe it or not, they had flip phones up until um I don't know four or five months ago. Um one of the things that they can do now is they can accept pictures for an inspection. and they can they can communicate well with the development community and the contractors and stuff like that to be able to do those follow-up inspections without physically having to go back there and just take a picture and be able to create more efficiency that way. Uh we've been doing a lean process to identify unnecessary inspections like we just talked about in the electrical inspections. Um that is something that that I'm I'm a big fan of lean processes. Um, it's unheard of really in government because it's it's more of a private sector thing, but it's something that can really transform your department and transform the city and and getting the very best efficient and effective things you can do. Um, so we we we're be really excited in that. We're going to continue to be doing that. Um, we utilize city uh print shop to produce inspection stickers, which seems kind of silly, but that's something that was costing us a lot of money to outsource that. And so we were able to pull it inhouse and we we were saving money that way. We also standardized our colors for our inspections because for some reason we had multiple colors that meant multiple things and now we have streamlined that to mean green means one thing, red means one thing, orange means one thing, yellow means something. So we we've streamlined that process and standardized those colors. Uh we've also in our our plan review plan reviewers are are wonderful and great and they they have a lot of comments sometimes on plans and so we what we've done is we've standardized those comments so that people can understand what each one's trying to to say to them so we can get that process a little bit faster. Uh we've train crossrained our permitting and licensing staff. Before we just had them kind of in silos where they worked on their own. One was working on licensing, one was working on permitting. And now they work together and they understand each other's job so that we if one's out or one's on vacation or one's sick. We have more than one by the way. Um but you know we we were able to make that process a lot better. Um and then we also leaned out the process for refunds to make that better. That was that was kind of another sore spot in our department where refunds were getting a little bit behind. So we we were able to uh lean out that process and make it better. We'll go ahead and oh there are let me let me go ahead and address this too. So our our staff remains committed to delivering inerson's customer service at the business center um offering support across a range of services including access to self-service computers, assisting with permitting licensing and guidance on plan reviews. In addition to helping customers navigate the permitting process, staff are available to answer questions, troubleshoot issues, and ensure applications are complete and accurate before submission. This hands-on support plays a vital role in improving the c the overall customer experience and helps to maintain delays, reducing errors, and keep projects moving forward. Uh Craig kind of alluded to this, but we are pleased to share that city's comprehensive development process review uh led by a consultant through the office of innovation is nearing completion. After months of cross departmental collaboration, in-depth analysis, and uh outreach to stakeholders in the community, the consultant has is finalizing a set of recommendations aimed at improving the overall development experience in Oklahoma City. While the development center within development services serves as a primary point of contact for development related activities, this review has included valuable input from several key departments including planning, fire, public works, utilities, and airports, each of which play a vital role in the process. to ensure a well-rounded perspective. We all we also engage with the stakeholders through the community including developers, builders, and industrial partner partners whose feedback help shape the direction of the review. Internally, the development process involves many teams with distinct responsibilities. However, from a customer's perspective, uh it functions as a single interaction with the city. The forthcoming recommendation recommendations are expected to offer a clear path forward for a more coordinated streamlined and customer- ccentric approach enhancing both service delivery and satisfaction at every stage. Implementation of this recommendation will occur over time. Some improvements will be rolled out immediately while others due to the complexity or the need for broader coordination will take additional time. This phased approach ensures that changes are both meaningful and sustainable, aligning with the city's long-term goals for customer service excellence. So, we can move on to code enforcement. Um, code enforcement is led by Chad Davidson and consists of two core programs. Those core programs are code inspections and nuisance abatement. Um the key services provided are addressing common issues such as junk and debris, tall grass and weeds and unsecured and dilapidated structures. Focus areas are enhancing the customer service experience through improved communication and education. Promoting safe, clean and healthy neighborhoods. Our approach is to emphasize on collaboration over punishment, partnering with uh property owners to explain city code requirements and working together to bring properties into compliance. If you look at our numbers there, uh, we've completed 80,000 inspections in this last fiscal year. Uh, we've issued 18,531 notices. We've also issued 2,97 citations including 1,592 for yard parking. We've removed 31,377 illegal signs in our city. We've removed 196 inoperable vehicles. We've abated 448 junk and debris violations. We've abated 1,613 highg grass violations. And we've raised or demoed 35 dilapidated structures. And we've secured 212 unsecured structures. So our staff is out there working really hard to uh make the city a better place, cleaner, and more vibrant. So some of the uh issues that we bring forward that that we have in our uh um lead by results is we the number of first complaintbased inspections completed within 4 days. So we've got all the way back to 2021 there. Our target goal has been 85% for this. Um we have we have had challenges this year with staffing and maintaining. We've got a a very young staff at this point uh for our inspectors because we've had a lot of turnover. Um so it's the training and trying to get them to understand what we're doing. But we project that we are going to be about 83% for the the total year. We're at 82 right now, but by the time the fiscal year is over with, we'll be at 83, which is just a little under our target goal of of 85%. The other one we bring forth is the code violation resolved voluntarily. So that would be owner abaded violations where the owner has taken care of the issue and we didn't have to do anything with it. Um our target for that is 82%. And our endy year estimate is about 81%. Our goal is to work with property owners to make them clean their properties um to so that we don't have to get involved. Uh we do realize that there are some situations that cause people to not be able to clean their yards or clean after uh abate their their uh weeds or their or their tree limbs or things like that. Finances are are part of that issue. You know, there's there's a a community that that you know just doesn't have lower income communities do not have the finances to be able to do the things they need to do sometimes. So we're working really hard to try to figure out solutions for that. Um, you know, one of the things that I I I really believe in is is the kind of this uh, you know, Malberry um, not Malberry Mayberry approach. I take that from like the the Andy Griffith show and um, hopefully that's not copyrighted to talk about that. But um, my point is though is neighbors help neighbors and if you have a neighbor in need, you know, that that needs their yard mode or something like that, getting with them to try to figure that out before we get involved is is something that we're going to be looking at how to make that happen. and and create that approach for for the community. Um so I'm very excited about that. That's something that we're going to be working toward. So operational efficiencies and code enforcement um is code inspectors were issued new computers for faster processing systems uh with with faster processing systems to uh result in less communication connectivity issues. Uh we we kept getting logged out a lot of times and when you log out you lose all your pictures, you lose all your information and you have to kind of start over. So, we've uh upgraded that. We've used those lean principles again to streamline uh reviewing and processing notices. And we've we've cross trainined the clerical staff in code enforcement as well so that they can work across the board and to help each other out. So, these are some before and after pictures of just what code enforcement does. Uh if you look at that house, that before that was a burnt out house that had um you know, it has plywood up against the door on the garage door and things like that. And so over from 2019 to 2025, uh you see that that house majorly transformed and became a a great house that was added back to our housing stock for the city, which is which is phenomenal. The next picture is a before and after. Now, this one's over a 10-year period of trying to get this house secure. We're happy to report by 2025, this house is now secure, and it's being being rented out and it's being used in our in our housing stock again. So you also see this house here um a before and after. So this was a reinvestment by either the owner or someone came in and reinvested. And this is a major transformation of this house. Um you can see that they even took off the front porch and replaced it with a new one and poured new concrete and sidewalks. But really investing in our community and bringing houses back to a a better standard and a higher higher expectation for uh living conditions. This is a junk debris removal. Um, this is this usually happens in one day where we come along and we clean up people's yards and take take the excessive junk and things that are in their yard that are deemed junk anyway for their for their properties. But it's a it's a it's a it's a long process sometimes, but more more than likely it's usually one or two days that this happens. Larger larger ones, they they do take longer. So, we're going to transition over to animal welfare. So, animal welfare is led by Superintendent Ronnie Schlabs. Um, this picture that you see here is actually of our field services team. They are um vital to picking up dangerous animals on the streets that are affecting the community. Um, so animal welfare has uh four key program areas. They have field services, the animal shelter operations, community outreach, and veterinarian services. Uh, animal welfare plays a critical role in supporting public safety and enhancing the quality of life for both residents and animals in Oklahoma City. Uh, through field services, officers respond to animal related concerns and emergencies through throughout the city. At the shelter, staff provide care for thousands of animals animals annually, focus on safety, enrichment, and opportunities for adoption, reunification. Community outreach promotes responsible pet ownership through education and resources while veterinarian services ensures that animals receive essential medical care resources while vet while uh to provide their well-being and adoptability. Um as the needs of our community evolve, uh animal welfare remains focused on compassionate care, public engagement, and sustainable solutions to reduce shelter intake and improve outcomes for every animal that enters our system. So, if you look at the numbers there, um they're actually quite phenomenal. Um what we do, um we've completed 17,234 SE service calls and we've cared for 18,746 animals. We sterilized, which is our spay and neuter program, 4,760 animals. And we've saved by getting them out of the shelter and getting them into a wonderful home, about 14,737 animals. And we've also received 7,441 volunteer hours which we couldn't survive without our volunteers. So we really do appreciate them and everything they do. So our target uh for live release rate is 90%. As you can see in fiscal year 21 we actually achieved that but we have not maintained that. It's a very difficult thing to maintain. Um currently we are at 86%. um when at the time of this slide it was 81 but we've came up since then. Um we've come a long though a long way though because I believe in fiscal year 2011 um we were at 48%. So this is true dedication to our staff and trying to bring that up. But I am pleased to share that year to date we have achieved a 20 days with the shelter capacity being under 100%. uh including a recent completed 14-day streak. This is a key strategic goal to reduce shelter capacity, creating more manageable and humane environments for both animals and staff. Animal welfare is making steady progress to implement best practice diversion strategies and refining intake processes to prioritize urgent cases and support keeping pets with their families when possible. The next one we have is our spay and neuter program. Now, I'm I'm uh a little optimistic on this slide uh more than other people about the numbers. Um you can see that in fiscal year 23, we kind of have an apex there of of 6,627. And the last couple years, we've been uh slowly decreasing. I like to be optimistic and think that's because we're making a difference in that. Um, but we do provide uh free spayneuter programs for the citizens of Oklahoma City and we our target is 7,000. Um, but we uh are very optimistic that we can increase that number. We actually have word that our new veterinarian will be starting. We have one vet, but we're going to have another veterinarian. Uh she'll be starting um at the end of this next month. So, we're excited about that. And I do want to note that 50% of the adoption fees for the Spain and new pro program uh is what funds that program. Uh so and also our um sponsors and our donations and actually patrons of OKC um they donated $10,000 yesterday for spayneuter program. So we're really excited about that. So our operational efficiencies, first of all, I want to I want to point out the picture. Um, our amazing staff, they created these Valentine's Day cards of of dogs and cats and they put them on our website where you could print them out and your kids could take them to school and hand them out. And there's a QR code there that that links to our website to be able to, you know, talk about animals and animal welfare and how to be a better pet owner and things like that. So, we were really I wanted to put that on there. I thought that was really cool that they did that and we're able to make an impact. Um, but one of the things we did is we we've lowered that intake based on best practices nationwide. We've also added some signature pads to the front counter to reduce paper waste. Um, we were doing everything by paper and you'd had to hand sign everything. So, we actually were able to get some of those signature pads and that's streamlined that process quite a bit. And then again, our new veterinarian is going to start at the end of May 2025. Uh we are proud to have the very best volunteers, foster families, and over 100 dedicated transfer partners, including the Oklahoma Humane Society, Best Friend Animals uh Society, the Bella Foundation, Patrons of Oklahoma City, Animal Welfare, and Shaunie Mills. With the support of our assistant city manager, Aubrey McDermad, and the Office of Innovation, and key stakeholders, we are working to redefine animal welfare in Oklahoma City. Our goal is to build strong a stronger private partnership and adoption adopt a more holistic model. One that gives every animal a chance at a loving home and shifts the community mindset to see the shelter as a last resort and not a first stop. And I really want to talk about that just for a second because I think that's that's the key to overpopulation. That's the key to responsible home. um not home, I'm sorry, responsible uh animal welfare and taking care of your pets is really getting out into the community and engaged in the community to understand how to do that. Starting at great grade school kids and talking to them and and explaining to them how how to be a proper owner of a pet and how it's important that it's a dedication. It's not you buy it for Christmas or for Valentine's Day. It's a it's a 15-year commitment and it's it's it's important. it's the life of that of that animal. So, we're going to we're working on that. We really want to take the focus out of out of animal welfare and really focus it into our community and how we can engage that and change that mindset. So, we're excited about that. We're kind of at the very cusp of of of getting that started and going. Um it's it's just we're going to get there and it's going to change the entire mentality of the community and how we address animals. So, we have some community resources. Uh, one of the things we do is again that free spay and neuter for all Oklahoma City residents. Uh, we provide free collars and leashes to residents in need and we distribute those regularly into the homeless community. Uh, we offer free uh residents uh a dog house if they need one. Uh we have ID tags that we make right there at the animal welfare uh building uh to uh have the license on the pets so that they can be quickly reunited with their owner. Um it's it's a great program and we provide those to anyone who wants one. So if you need one, come on out and we'll make you one. Um pet food bank, we provided free pu food to residents in need. Uh we've uh we've distributed nearly 12,000 pounds of food every year. We have a lowcost vaccine and microchip clinic with in partnership with OK Humane, Bella Foundation and Patrons of OKC. And we've held several several times a year to uh to offer affordable vaccines and microchips. You can see that little picture there. We just completed one in March 29th of this year uh to be able to do that. And then we also promote responsible pet ownership again through our pet public education. We deliver that through our shelter and field staff interactions, uh, community events and neighborhood associations, our monthly newsletter, our social media sites, and through our website. Sorry, my nose is running. Allergies, I guess. Um, anyway, um, so one last thing we want to talk about is the Oklahoma City Louisa MUN Animal Welf Welfare Center. Uh, as we look ahead to the transition into the new Oklahoma City Louisa Mchune Animal Welfare Center, we are excited about a new capacity in key areas including veterinarian services, animal care, and administration support. Staff is working to ensure we are wellprepared to operate this state-of-the-art facility at the highest level. Our goal is to ensure the new center is equipped to provide exceptional care for the animals and strong service to the community for years to come. So with that um do you have any questions? Thank you for the presentation and sharing some of the sort of just efficiencies you all have been working on. Um excited to hear how that continues to evolve. Um, I do want to just say, uh, the piece that you mentioned in code enforcement, sort of the Mayberry approach, which I appreciate, big Andy Griffith fan. Um, you know, I think I also subscribe to that approach and would prefer that we can rely on that. I think the thing that um and I I heard you sort of allude to this, but that the the concern and the sort of um uh difficulty I I experience when I talk with residents about that is like you mentioned a lot of um lower or moderate income neighborhoods. people just don't have the time or resources necessarily um to always consistently, you know, submitting something to the action center is a lot quicker and easier when you're like piling the kids into the car, you know, trying to go catch the bus or whatever you're doing to get your, you know, day. Um and and so you know when I when I think of some of the programs that the city has been able to be part of that are successful in sort of changing that um it it really comes down to resources for those neighborhoods right the strong neighborhoods initiative and being able to take the time to um support neighborhoods and organizing because it's all you know volunteer efforts on their part. Um, you know, I think about like the ability to bring those resources to bear for like junk and debris or like you said like limb tree limb removal. Um, so I just, you know, I'm I'm excited to hear you sort of framing things in that way and I think it kind of falls then to us to think creatively about how we um help support those efforts. Um because you know I I think Neighborhood Alliance does what they can in helping support neighborhoods get organized. But um you know I think it so much of it really does come down to we're really relying on people's extra time they have. And I think if you talk to anybody we none of us had extra time. Um, and so, you know, I think, you know, I was actually, this is timely because I was actually having a conversation with a resident um yesterday about concerns they have in their neighborhood and wanting to organize some kind of neighborhood event to talk about resources like through animal welfare welfare or um sort of code enforcement types of things. And um, you know, again, this is a single or a mother of a newborn. you know, she's she's sort of seeing the world in a new way because she has a child. Um, but also now she has a child, right? She has so much going on and she's just adding this to her plate. And so I think thinking about ways that we can um you know creatively better bring these services to people's neighborhoods um support neighborhood organization through through things like expanding or or what you know finding ways to expand support for things like strong neighborhood initiatives so that we can you know uh sort of amplify those efforts. Um, I think I just I guess I'm urging us uh and look forward to opportunities to work with you to do that because I think um you know it's not all partnerships are great but it still comes down to we're relying on people's extra you know free time um and and that's very difficult and I know there are people in our neighborhoods that you know maybe have uh you know could set aside extra time if they were compensated for their time if there were other sort of things that could help them do this consistently um and make sure that those connections are getting made and I think could probably even make our um services and resources that we do have to offer more efficient and um because of that consistency. That's what again what I see through a lot of W six neighborhoods is the you know someone might have the capacity for a little while or it's someone who's retired who can really take on that neighborhood organization and communication and and really show up in that way and then they move or they pass away or life you know situation changes and they can't do that. Um, and so just that inconsistency kind of leads to this cycle of of losing um that connection to neighborhoods and to residents that um could, you know, help organize a tool library to, you know, go cut the grass for the 80-year-old neighbor that can't get out and do it. Um, but I think when we're kind of relying on people's free time and not able to compensate people for their time, um, we're just going to kind of keep falling into that same cycle. So, um just kind of want to lift that up and um and and and maybe give us the charge of how we can creatively be thinking about um how to amplify and strengthen um like our neighborhood support services. So, thank you. Well, I I I do want to comment that, you know, the whole idea behind that is to help each other. Um your neighbor who who has stuff in their yard or their grass is overgrown, they're not a criminal. they they just are in a situation that any of us could be in with just one minor thing changing in our life. And so we have to show compassion and grace and that's kind of the idea behind that. But if we can find a way in our department to have more resources to even just pointing people in the right resources, we're up we're updating kind of our our um our book to see what we can do to help um with different put them point them in the right direction to the nonprofits and things like that. um and and showing grace to people and giving them consideration because there there are situations that cause all of these things. Thank you, Brock. Appreciate that. Appreciate the leadership. Next up is Melinda McMillan Miller with the Parks and Recreation Department. We've gone a little bit long here and so I promise we're going to try to move quickly. U Melinda's really good at moving this through quickly. I hate to short her in this uh but she will work hard to get you through uh quickly so we can get finished with the meeting here. Everybody stretch sitting here for a while. We are parks and recreation. We like to stretch and exercise as much as we can. Thank you so much for your attention today. Um the parks recreation budget starts on page C17 in your budget book if you want to turn there. Um I'm Melinda McMillan Miller, the parks and recreation director. We're happy to present to you today our FY26 um operations budget. So, as the uh budget shows, we have pretty much split out into five different working divisions that really encompass the full proposed operating budget you'll see in front of you today. Um, also within that is our capital budget, which is pretty much like our CIP bond programs and that sort of thing. And then also our non-operating budget, which is the other stuff, right, the things that we have and our special purpose funds and things that also help us tie up loose ends on different projects and operations. So our total department budget this year is proposed to be at $63,652,000 and about 187 positions. So to dial into the actual proposed operating budget, the one that we get to have fun playing with all the time, um that budget, as you'll see on the slide between the adopted budget we had in FY25, and then our proposed budget for 26, you'll see that um there are some decreases across the board generally. Um but the decreases that we're going to be able to mitigate fairly well with um either other opportunities for um efficiencies that we'll gain, but also in opportunities to look at additional or alternative funding to help make to bridge the gap in these opportunities. And then we'll also have an overall decrease in about three positions that are currently vacant. Um all the work that those vacant positions would have performed have been absorbed with other full-time positions. So we should not have any impact to our operations daytoday. kind of highlight the major um operational budget changes. You'll see we had the personnel related costs as we have, you know, increases in wages across the board, but then also um we eliminated those three full-time positions that are all vacant. Um we'll also decrease some of our athletic field maintenance supplies from our operating fund, but we're planning to pick some of those needs up in a different funding source. Also, and our contract labor, we're just going to work smarter, not harder on our contract labor line. um and be able to move some labor numbers from one budget line to another budget line to give us the flexibility to be more reactive and proactive um on some of our athletic field needs um and also some of our mowing needs across this uh department. So in at the end of the day when you see the reductions in our overall operating budget, there really will be no effect to our mowing schedules. There's not going to be an effect to um our really our programs that we currently offer. Uh so we shouldn't the the residents and our visitors to our city really should see very minimal impact at all to um their programs and services that they've enjoyed having. So I always like to capitalize when we have a chance to be in front of you um to really remind you of all the amazing things that we do as a city and the purpose of why we're all here. The parks and recreation is one of those departments that really touches our community in multiple different ways. From whom we actually serve and the people that we interact with, from our community events and activities just to our 174 parks, over over 9,000 plus acres of public land that we manage um annually. And of course almost 100 miles of trails. We're going to get there, right, Councilman? Um, and also our community centers and recreation centers, our swimming pools, our golf courses, our senior centers, our uh the only municipally owned fish hatchery, which I'm always very proud to brag on. Um, our event centers for people to use for having their family activities, anniversary parties, and birthday parties, and of course, our multiple sports complexes that we get to use every day. Parks and Recreation is honored to be one of your council priorities and as those priorities is to enhance those recreational opportunities and community wellness for our entire community and our residents and visitors. Part of that task of being able to perform that duty for you is being able to provide those quality recreational opportunities, healthy living opportunities for our community to have better well-being and overall convenient and well-maintained and attractive parks and facilities for our residents and public to enjoy. We accomplished that through our um working divisions. One of those is the recreation division. Uh within the recreation group, we have broken into three different groups, which is our aquatics, athletics, and then a general recreation programs. We're really happy to see our numbers are um starting to come back up after some a couple of dips and budget issues and that kind of thing. So, our participation is definitely coming up in our adult leagues as well as in our um youth leagues. Our aquatics visitations continue to increase. Our swim classes are becoming more and more popular. Um, we also are really happy to have added new programming for our adaptive community. Um, and I'll show a slide later in a little bit that go ahead and flip that slide. Actually, uh, want to point out the young child there in the bottom center who's really excited about his Easter basket. Um, he had just learned the concepts of in and out. And so, as his parents had taught him, let's put our Easter eggs in the basket, he was putting them in. And then he was ecstatic to be able to say out with all of his eggs and just tossed them in the out of his basket and was thrilled that he had accomplished and mastered in and out. But these are the type of activities that really drive home and demonstrate why our adaptive programs have become more and more popular every single year to help promote our community's well-being. Um it also is very important to remember our natural resources division which really helps concentrate on our natural areas and providing high landscaped areas across the city. So within our parks, a lot of people don't realize that the Bricktown Canal is actually a park. Um so we have our uh professional horiculture team that takes care of the Bricktown Canal, uh the Oklahoma City Boulevard, if you go up and down there and seen all the trees and the landscapes there, our First Americans Museum and other highintense landscaped areas like Bsentennial Park across the street where the festival arts occurs, City Hall Park, Kerr Park, um our more high intense landscape locations, especially down here in the central business district. I mentioned our fisheries program. I'm always very excited to talk about John Rayfield and his work there. Um he we stock lots of different fish, over 300,000 fish that are stocked in our area, ponds and lakes across the city. But then the number of children and adults that he is reaching through our programs to teach the skill of fishing to um which is of course a skill that can be used clear into as long as you can possibly cast a rod. Um that is a recreational activity that is very popular for people to do until they're well into older age. Our most popular park in our system is Martin Park Nature Center, which experienced over 200,000 visitors last year alone. Um, it keeps increasing the visitation and getting us more and more opportunities to educate our residents about the importance of preserving natural areas and repairing areas across our city. Some photo some photographs too. And again, we just finished our Easter hunt, so we've been excited to show a lot of pictures from our Easter activities. But then also just um promoting through the fisheries program and adult programs from flower arranging classes, hikes and field trips to also of course the maintenance of our our older facilities and preserving those locations like Will Rogers Gardens and Will Rogers Park. In order to help maintain those parks, it takes an army of us to go out and take care of those 174 parks and 9,000 acres. Um, we were extremely excited to be able to brag that our grounds management team led by Jacob Webb, um, has done an outstanding job of increasing and bettering the training that our staff is receiving and gaining efficiencies so that we've actually been able to um, mow our parks more frequently than just two weeks. We're actually down to mowing them every 10, actually every seven to eight business days now. That's why you'll see that 151% number kind of coming off the chart. We're really proud of that efficiency. Um, and we're gaining more ground on that every day. Our park maintenance team also of course inspects every playground in our system. It's an incredibly important safety feature for us and we're very proud of our inspectors that go out and make sure those are safe for children to use every day. Our urban forestry team continues to excel at their tree maintenance requests that they receive and then of course just keeping on top of the mowing of all of our parks and acorage. Um our maintenance teams just do an outstanding job. In this slide here, you'll see kind of a good representation of our folks doing all the great things they do from our athletic fields, laser leveling our athletic fields and the infields for our softball fields. Um, but then also just making sure we stay on top of weather response and um, forestry and mowing those beautiful areas in Edwards Park there in that large center picture. We can't do all of that without supporting them. And so I always say that our administration team, we are um, in service to our staff. We help remove roadblocks for them and just try to keep as much um out of their way so they can do their very best job they can. So in service to our staff uh the administration division we really work hard with um supporting their functions but also in the financial management, HR management and of course supporting our five commissions and trusts. Um within those trusts of course the park commission, golf commission, game and fish commission, riverfront redevelopment authority trust and the trails advisory committee. And the administration division also supports all of our community partners. So within those partnership groups, we have seen um an increase in visitation to those five primary partner organizations. Those numbers you see there are the actual participants who came in to to a structured program. So even though Scissor Tale Park looks like 224,000 visitors, there were many many more visitors into the park, but them actually participating or in a program or ticket event at Scissor Tale. That is the number there as well as myriad. Those are the number of visitors to the Crystal Bridge Conservatory. Our Golf rounds continue to increase. It's a phenomenon that we're seeing across the golf industry. Um since COVID, everyone rediscovered the game of golf. It's a sport you can play that without being in close contact with others. And so people got re-engaged in that sport. Um, our golf courses have never been busier across our system, our five courses. And in fact, our busiest course on a percentage average is actually James Stewart course, which is only a nine-hole course, but it's something that's very close to downtown. People can run out, pick up a quick nine-hole game in about an hour and get right back to work. So, um, it has seen an exponential increase in growth in business. We're also extremely ple um grateful for our volunteers that come out and help through all of our community partnerships. We could not do at all what we do without having them come out and help us. Whether they're helping at a fishing clinic or they're helping um take care of their medians and rights of ways in their neighborhood association groups. We really could not do what we do without them. So big shout out to them. Their volunteerism um really grew this year and has been growing steadily since the COVID pandemic. uh sense of civic pride and duty has definitely been showing through the city. I also want to take the opportunity to kind of highlight some things that you will see um happening across the city currently right now. These are all under construction. They're all big dirt pictures, but they make me excited because I know things are coming and they're very exciting. So, WY Post Park on the northshore of the Oklahoma River, you'll see the dirt has the land has been scraped and we're working right now on um developing some new uh um public facilities there. But that's also where the USS Oklahoma City um submarine memorial will also be. Um Hefner Golf Course Clubhouse, the second floor of the of the facility. The concrete's been poured, so it's pretty exciting to see that. I'm looking forward to standing up there uh at the golf commission meeting next Wednesday to be able to see out across the lake. It's an incredible view. Come out and see if you haven't yet. Edwards Parks football fields, they're they're ready for sod as soon as the the rain slows down a little bit for us. as soon as we can get that sawed in. Uh we really expect um football to be played at those four football fields under lights um starting here this fall. And then Dewey Park under construction. You'll see the uh large plaza there to the left and on the right hand side that concrete slab is actually for the athletic courts. That's another project that u should be completed the end of this probably this winter we're thinking. And up and cominging developments will be the Swisser Park phase one out in W three that will be starting. That preliminary report should be coming to council um I'm hoping next week for you all to approve. We're excited about that phase. Also um the early wine golf course at the turn grill will also be starting this fall under construction. That'll be about a full year construction to finish that little building, which will be really important to help serve the new covered driving range facility that has seen an amazing amount of growth and participation in that area of our city that otherwise were underserved in our golf covered golf facilities. And then of course, MAPS 4 is really ramping up this year in parks and recreation. Um the soccer facility improvements at Cameron and South Lakes parks will um start this fall um if not August, we're hoping. But then also all the maps for community and neighborhood park improvements will also begin this fall. Phase one, one A, 1 B, and 1 C will begin with that. And that image there is Washington Parks um preliminary ex, you know, exhibit there of improvements that we hope that we'll get the community's engagement input on and be able to make that park even greater. So, thank you very much for your attention. I do want to thank my staff, my team who's a lot of them are back behind me here. Uh Mike Smith who of course runs our uh central business office. Scott Fairman's our assistant director. Say hi Scott. Our assistant director that helps me run the day-to-day operations. Scott Copeland over natural resources division. Jacob Webb over our grounds division and Lisa Hubble over recreation division. But more importantly than anything, it's all the staff that work that they work for. We're very excited to be able to honor our residents with our service and our work. And I'm happy to answer any questions that you have. Thank you Melinda for the presentation. Thanks everyone for all your work. Yeah, thank you. Okay, so that concludes item V, the presentations and discussions of our fiscal year 26 proposed budget. So we'll move to citizens to be heard. I am to understand that Councilman Carter, Am I wrong? Am I doing this wrong? I don't think I'm doing this wrong. The Councilman Carter had some remarks that he has shared with councelor Hinkle who is a citizen and so um we'll hear from him and then uh we'll have one more after that and thank you for that clarification. I just wanted to say thanks to Chief Basy for putting on his first prayer breakfast this morning. And I'm sorry from council's perspective that this conflicted with that because last year's was great and I'm sure this year's this morning at 6:00 was just as good in the rain. So, thank you. Thank you, Councelor Hinkle and Councelor Carter. Um, next up we have Michael Washington has signed up to speak. If you wouldn't mind stating your uh first and last name and then your address, you'll have three minutes, please, in your remarks. Thank you. Michael Washington 100 with the P place in it. Well, now Midwest City. By the way, I hate to spoil this wonderful occasion about how this wonderful money is being spent monthly, yearly, quarterly, whatever the case may be. Wonderful. I don't have a disrespect toward it. But what I do have a major problem with is that these deaths continue to go on repetitively, non-ceasingly in the Okoma County detention center that I call the House of Horror. Now, we know that you people have loaned your citizens who are accused of crimes to that facility. What are you doing to investigate all that evil activity that's going on in there? While those people are paying judge, jury, and also attorney for the defense. This is what Michael has concerned with. That's right. Y'all know y'all yourself that the contract you have with the county detention center to hold their inmates rather than in a city tail. You don't just say here take them. You must be saying yourself as supervisors as the authoritative figures. Hold up. What are y'all doing to our people that we long to you cuz we don't have a facility of our own. That's what I'm getting at now. That's six deaths already. It seems like every year it continues to go on and on and on and on and on. It must be stopped man. You don't hear about those kind of deaths in third world countries even in the worst than this in any county jail. In the worst third world countries less known this here in the United States supposed to be a modern day uh simplistic realistic society that we living in progressive society we're living in. No one asked me to come and speak today, but I took it upon myself to deter myself from what I've gone to be doing. Wasn't coming out today. Rain, sleep, the snow wasn't going to stop me to come in and say to you, let's look into this. Let's look into this. These people are depending on you. You just can't. You know what? Every person go jail is not a criminal. Let me state fairly what everybody can hear. Just like they accused Michael of that fake ely abuse. Huh? Are you kidding me? Look at this face. Look at this face. Hey, I abuse me. I'm not in jail. Why? Because those suckers know I ain't done no stupid stuff like that two and a half years ago. Still on the same cake. They still alive moving about because they hold up a minute. 30 seconds remain. We know better than this. Your people deserve better. And if it were your loved one, friend, or soldier, whomever's in there, they have a right to be protected in life, living in pursuit of happiness, and let a judge decide whether you stay or go, not the jail to say, "Well, you die today." There are pocket of people allowing that to go on, man. What are y'all going to do about it? You need to investigate and look into it. Thank you so much. I don't want to go past my time. I will be back. My favorite time I Thank you, Mr. Washington. And I believe that is all of our residents who have signed up to speak under citizens with uh to be heard. So that will move us to item seven, adjournment. Thank you. Thank y'all so much in