City Manager’s Progress Report: March 2024

I have just a few things I want to cover this evening. First, I want to talk a little bit about the State sales tax grocery exemption. As many of you read recently, the legislature and the Governor signed into law the grocery tax exemption on state sales tax. As part of that legislation is also included a prohibition on cities, towns and counties from holding sales tax elections until June 2025. So, for example, if a City were to hold an election during that period, the City would need to exempt local sales tax collection on groceries. If after June 30, 2025, a City wanted to collect the local grocery sales tax, they would need to hold an additional election to enable them to do so. Presently, that prohibition impacts both increases and renewals of local sales tax rates. In essence, a City would not be able to hold a sales tax renewal election during this period without exempting the local grocery sales tax portion of the sales tax. In addition, the current law states that cities, towns and counties cannot call for an election during the prohibition period as well.

The City would have to wait until July 1st, 2025, to be able to call an election. That would result in probably the earliest a city or town or county could have an election would be late 2025. So we have been working with our partners at OML and other cities, as well as our contract lobbyists to have discussions with our legislature about possible remedies for that. Some of those remedies could include enabling a city, a town or a county that simply needs to renew an existing sales tax, but not at a higher rate to hold an election during that period, or at the very least, allow us to call the election during that prohibition period.

These concerns aren’t just ours at the City of Edmond even though we are a sales tax heavy city. It impacts many cities, towns and counties across the state. For us particularly, this is important because as many people know, or if we don't know, we have a one cent and a half cent sales tax that is scheduled to sunset in 2027. So as we've been discussing over the last several months about if and when to hold an election, we hope to have a great flexibility to have that determination. So that's why this is an important issue for us. On the issue of where we stand today with Edmond sales tax and use tax, let me just give a brief update if people weren't available to watch the workshop. During last year's budget development, we projected a conservative 2% combined sales and use tax growth.

Our present year-to-date for combined sales and use tax collections are up over this time last year is 0.48%. As we are past the holidays, which is our high season for collections, we think it will be increasingly difficult to reach our projected 2% growth rate this budget year. Consequently, we will be looking through our budget process and through our current budgets to hold costs at an even level to help us get through this time. This is not a unique situation just for us. As I've talked to other cities, City Managers, and cities and towns across the state., sales and use tax generation has also slowed for them as well.

So it's something to watch for and something we'll be looking as we look to constrain our current costs as well as looking forward in the coming budget year. About a month and a half ago, we came to Council and talked about a Development Advisory Forum. We shared with Council and the public the effort to reach out to our development community and invite them to participate in an externally-facilitated set of meetings to enable them, our developers, builders, architects, engineers, to provide feedback, input and suggestions about how we can partner to improve and enhance our development process with the City.

Developers, builders, trades, architects, engineers and real estate investors were invited to participate. Our friends at Francis Tuttle facilitated the initial meeting with over 30 people from the development community participating. We're grateful for our Francis Tuttle partners, and we received a lot of feedback and suggestions. Feedback that came out of that first meeting included positives about the portal system. That has nothing to do with Star Trek, but just the portal system, the friendliness and accessibility of staff, the willingness of staff to consider development agreements among other things.

Areas to work on include a wide range of topics, generally focused on timeliness, consistency and reviews, out-of-date standards and ordinances, and reviews being more holistic in their review instead of just individual specific items. Our next session is this Thursday the 14th at 5:30 over at Francis Tuttle. Invitations have gone out to our development community partners and we hope many who participated previously will return as well. After that meeting that will dive deeper into concerns and suggestions, the Francis Tuttle team will meet with City staff to detail the feedback they received in key common areas of suggestions for improvements. From that point, the staff will begin efforts to undertake those suggested improvements, with the hope that many in our development community will continue to partner with us as we move forward.

An upcoming key date is coming forward on a key project that's been talked about for a number of years. It's called Smart Choice. The next step in our Smart Choice program, which is to upgrade our electric and water meters in both residential and commercial properties, is a new customer online portal. Our target start date is the beginning of Quarter 2 of this year. This new web portal will allow customers to access the previous day's hourly usage for their water and electric service. Additionally, historical hourly usage will be available to view and graph. Various tools will help customers track, compare, monitor usage so they can better control their utility costs.

Customers can watch for messages in their utility account email about the change, which will include the date of the switch and a link to the online page to re-register their current online account. If they have any questions, they can visit. EdmondOK.gov/SmartChoice for frequently asked questions and helpful information, or they can email CustomerService@EdmondOK.gov with specific questions or concerns. A more detailed Council briefing about Smart Choice will be provided to Council and the public at the March 25th City Council meeting. So it's a key presentation coming up. I know we've been working on this for several years on this transition and we appreciate the patience of our citizens. On an exciting note, we had our 38th Edmond class of the Youth Leadership Edmond last Wednesday for their City Government Day. Youth Leadership Edmond is a program for high school juniors through the Chamber of Commerce. Forty-one students from all three of our public high schools, as well as a few from private schools, learned about the Fire Department, Police Department, Traffic, Engineering, Dispatch and Animal Services. After a crash course, –Hopefully, they weren't crashing — but a crash course in local government, the students met with Mayor Davis at Fire Station # 5, participated in fire extinguisher training, saw our computer systems at work, competed in an Edmond Jeopardy game, met one of our adopted dogs from the Animal Shelter, and visited our 911 Center and heard from one of our detectives about cyber safety.

Staff were impressed with the engagement of the students and loved hearing all the questions and ideas from our future leaders. Just a couple of upcoming events we want to highlight to put on your calendars and the public's calendars. The first is March 22nd at 12 p.m. is the NorthCare Urgent Recovery Center Ribbon Cutting. If you remember, the City of Edmond provided $1.45 million in financial assistance to NorthCare through ARPA funds and through Community Development Block Grant funds for the renovation of a new urgent recovery center. This location will feature outpatient services and is an urgent recovery unit designed to serve adults as well as children and families. This family is a certified Community Behavior health clinic, which means it is a specifically designated clinic that provides a comprehensive range of mental health and substance abuse services and serves anyone who walks through the door, regardless of their diagnosis and/or insurance status.

So that's a big event for us. On April 3rd, 4 – 7 pm, will be our Solar Town Hall. It's a hot date that night. Hosted by Edmond Electric. This is an opportunity for the citizens of Edmond to learn about Edmond Solar 101. Staff will answer common questions and provide info about solar panels and have some hands-on activities. I think Councilmember Robins is going to be involved with that as well. On April 4th, from 2 – 4 pm, is the Edmond Vendor Initiative, in partnership with the Edmond Area Chamber. This is a meet and greet for Edmond businesses interested in being a vendor for the City of Edmond to meet with staff to learn about the types of services, supplies and purchase needs for the City. Our hope is more of our local businesses will have an opportunity to partner with the City to be a vendor for us..

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