2011-0906 Special City Commission Meeting

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Summary Minutes: Special City Commission Meeting September 6, 2011 First Budget Hearing Sunny Isles Beach, Florida will result in a $75,000 decrease. We are contracting with outside counsel to assist us with Police Union negotiations which is $50,000. We are anticipating fuel increases over this year's budgeted amount of $68,000 based on cost of fuel going up. We have an additional $145,000 item for a variety of small maintenance projects, which we expect to be recurring because other items will be coming up in years ahead. The $105,000 is for the in-house construction of three (3) lifeguard towers representing a $345,000 savings not including in- house labor. The installation and rental of the Public Works trailer under the Lehman Causeway is $25,000, a lot of that is for set-up and break-down, this is a significant change from the original $150,000 Capital Projects item presented to the Commission. We will also develop a plan for development of a Public Works compound in that area. We are seeing an increase in expenses of $139,000 for water, as a result of some water meters that were installed by North Miami but for some reason we were not billed in a timely manner and they have realized their mistake and we are paying the back bills now. Based on those bills this is the increase in water expenditure that we expect, and Gwen Margolis Park was the big one. City Manager Cohen said there is a $150,000 increase in insurance cost due to the addition of City assets, Heritage Park being the biggest one. He looked into the concept of self-insurance and asked our provider for a list of all the items with a value of $50,000 or less to see whether or not it was worth self-insuring those items. It was approximately 40 items and the total premium was less than $3,900, and so the big ticketed items are really parks and structures. City Manager Cohen said we will see on the positive of $120,000 due to a decrease in property taxes that the City is paying to other taxing authorities due to the conversion of City property that is currently income generating property that will revert to non-income generating City parks. Weare converting a commercial property to a park and it is coming off the tax rolls, we no longer pay taxes on it to the other jurisdictions. We are seeing a $19,000 reduction in cost for the off-year in the election cycle. We have an increase of$45,000 for the addition of a variety of special events. A lot of this is due to new programs that we are going to be running at Heritage Park, and we will have at least one large event each month. This includes our piano series which was added mid-year last year after the budget was approved. City Manager Cohen said we have an increase of $700,000 over last year's budget that moves over to the Capital Projects Fund. We have a decrease in funding of Capital Outlay Requests so these are Capital items that are funded in the budget and the $163,000 that you see means that this year's budget has $163,000 less in it for Capital items than last year's budget did. Lastly, $163,000 for a variety of savings that had been experienced to date from last year's budget to this year's budget due to the efforts of our Procurement Department. Vice Mayor Thaler asked about the FRS savings, and City Manager Cohen said when employees State-wide were required to contribute to the fund for the first time, the State also decreased the amount that all municipalities had to contribute to the fund, and so there was an offset there. We anticipate that number going up and we will probably, within 2 or 3 years, be back where we were paying this year. They projected that next year is a lower number but the following year will be a significant increase for the municipalities and their contributions. Vice Mayor Thaler asked if the additional lifeguard is a part-time position, and City Manager Cohen said yes. Vice Mayor Thaler asked where we are putting him, is it for after we get the 3