What's good, George Boar Ross back again with another video. So I'm going to check out bad Mike's skills. Wrestling's worst talkers by wrestling, wrestling with Andy. You haven't subscribed to his channel. Go ahead and subscribe to a link to the original video will be down below. See, as a wrestler, one or two things are going to happen either or it's a it can be a combination. Either you'll be fantastic delivering promos and on the microphone. Your in ring ability may not be up to par, but it's serviceable. You can sell someone on the match or it can be a situation where your microphone skills are to be desired, but your in ring ability is superb. So a lot of times your opponent has to sell the match and you can just, you know, put in a fantastic work rate within the ring or the rare time where your microphone abilities are fantastic. And your in ring work is fantastic. And I forgot there's some fourth option.  So we're going to check out some of the individuals where their microphone skills were not up to par to everyone else at the time. Appreciate all the love and support you guys are showing on the channel, man, should be a good one. Let's do this. One of the most important skills in a wrestler's arsenal is the ability to cut a good promo, right? Hell, it's this very skill, which has helped to see the likes of rowdy Roddy Piper, macho man, Randy Savage and the rock rise to the top over the years. That said, not everyone can be as good on the mic as those performers. No, some fall on the opposite end of the spectrum, in fact, but who are the biggest offenders when it comes to bad skills? I don't know. I don't know. That's exactly what we're going to be looking at today. And if we're going to start anywhere, let's do so with one of the biggest examples of someone who should never be let anywhere near a microphone. And that's Ahmed Johnson. Yes, over the course of his three year run with WWF between 1995 and 1997, the Pearl River Powerhouse quickly developed a reputation as being someone who may have had the physical look required to be a star, but who certainly didn't have the voice. And this was because every time he was given the opportunity to cut a promo, he did so in just about the most incomprehensible way imaginable. Seriously, go back and listen to any of Ahmed's interview segments and try to figure out what he's saying. But even if his words could be parsed, it likely wouldn't have met Munch anyway, as the former Intercontinental champion wasn't exactly Shakespeare at the best of times. I don't take my pro's egg anymore. I'm not going to get off pro's egg, brother. You don't know. And this didn't exactly help him endear himself to his bosses in the long run, because as we all know, Vince McMahon's idea of sports entertainment requires someone be an all rounder who can do more than just wrestle in the ring. In fact, being a good wrestler is way down there on the list of things he needs someone to be. And like I said, there's been plenty. We've seen plenty of individuals that were fantastic. At wrestling, but their microphone skills were to be desired. One noticeable individual was Cesaro when he was in WWE. His microphone skills were definitely to be desired. He was not good at selling you a match, but his in ring ability is top notch one of the best wrestlers WWE had in the company at the time he was with WWE.  He wasn't that good at selling you on a match and building off a promo, so order to turn them into a star. But then it's not as if Ahmed Johnson was great in ring either. So with a reputation for hurting his coworkers, he couldn't exactly rely on this to give him any traction. So when you combine that with the fact that he couldn't cut a good promo either, it was only a matter of time till his run in New York came to an end. Of course, he wasn't the only one working for WWF during the tail end of the new generation era who had a habit of cutting promo. So out there, few could figure out what the hell he was trying to say. And that's because elsewhere on the card at this point, Sid was also applying his craft. That's right. He may have half the brain you do, but Sid Udy never let this hold him back because at times in 1996 and 1997, he'd somehow managed to transform himself into one of the most over baby faces Vince McMahon had on his roster. How had he done this? Well, through sheer force of charisma that in a physique which looked like it was ripped straight out of the golden era that said he needed both these things in high volumes because one skill he certainly didn't have in his arsenal was the ability to cut a promo because you are feared of me. Sure, there is an ironic quality to his rambling incoherent speeches, which has allowed people to go back and enjoy them now. Yeah, back then it wasn't as if these were doing much to increase his stock.  You only have the man that I am and I have have to bring the GD. Really, the only thing you can do, I have have to bring the GD, I would, what? Why would you say that about yourself? Who is laugh otherwise it would be too tragic to watch and that's not something any performer wants you to be saying about their work. But then sometimes promos like this can go to a level even greater where they're actually so bad, they're good and as a result help to get someone over in a whole new way as was the case with Scott Steiner. Now we're sure you're all aware of that promo. You know the one. Yeah, it's the segment from an episode of impact in 2008 were big pop a pump attempted to explain the math behind why he was going to dominate both Samoa Joe and Kurt Angle at the upcoming sacrifice pay-per-view legendary and while this created a moment so legendary it's since become a full blown meme and the thing the former WCW world champion is most known for amongst younger fans today. The fact remains, it's only scratching the surface of the wild promos he's provided us over the wild. Yes, they say all men are created equal, but when you look at Scott Steiner, whenever he has a mic in his hand, you can see that statement is not true. Nope. You see normally whenever a main event star gets time to talk, you've got a 50 50 chance of it being good, but then he's a genetic freak and not normal. So that means there's a 25% chance of best going to work out and then there was the time he went off script and told WCW fans to change the channel and watch Steve Austin on Raw instead or the time his first audible words during his return to WWE in 2002 were him screaming, give me the Mike to some poor unseen figure. Honestly, we can sit here all day listing time. Scott Steiner went buck wild during an interview and made unintentional magic in the process. Here's the thing with him. His promos were obviously not the best in a sense of creating some type of storyline or whatever the case may have been, but they were like the bad good. Like they were bad in a sense because he's just saying whatever the hell he wants and they may not even make a lick of sense, but it's good because people will remember them there. They're not promos that you just you don't remember. You know what I'm saying? You associate certain promos with him because they're so legendarily wild. So he's one of those people that delivered promos that were so wild that they were unforgettable and it worked out. Well, he could probably fill about half a dozen videos himself with all the material he's given us over the years, but in the interest of making sure we give enough space to others, we'll move on for now and instead look at someone who was just as rambling and drug fueled at their and that's the ultimate warrior. Rest in peace. Again, we likely don't need to explain to any of you how crazy Jim Hellwigs promo style was. That's not to say that he wasn't a big star back in his day though. No, he was one of the biggest ever. In fact, after all, who can say they briefly dethroned Hulk Hogan is the top baby face of WWF during the golden era. Just the warrior and Randy Savage. Yeah, that's it. That's it. But while the macho man was an all time great on the stick is Indiana Park. Sadly, couldn't say the same because whenever he was called upon to carry an interview segment, his method of doing so usually involved granting in such an indecipherable way. You would have needed a translator if you wanted to understand it and it was this way of doing things which gave us such gems as his WrestleMania six pre-match promo on Hulk Hogan, the one where he threatened to crash a plane into the ocean. Now quite how this was supposed to help him win the match remains unclear. Just as it remains unclear what he was trying to say during his never ending speech when he showed up on Nitro in 1998 and there challenged the Hulkster to the rematch of the century. But one thing we can be sure of is that it made sense to him, even if it didn't to anyone else. No, when you're dealing with Jim Hellwig, you have to accept the fact that there's not going to be a lot of logic to the proceedings and if you can do that, then there's at least a camp quality which can be taken from the thing. One person who it's very hard to see the fun in though when it comes to his abilities on the mic is our next subject and that's because well, he might have been a lethal weapon once the bell rang when asked to speak. Steve Blackman had all the charisma of a plank of wood. Hell, you could argue even a plank of wood. Yeah, he he definitely had the in ring ability to murder you. But outside of that, you ask him to build up a match, sell a match, sell his own match to the fans. You can you can hang that up. Wood had more character as hacksaw. Jim Duggan was able to get one of those over in a big way. Yeah. But when it came to the Pennsylvania native, there would be no such similarities as with his monotone voice and lack of anything interesting to say every interview segment he had felt as painful as dental surgery. Sure, you could argue he never needed to cut promos as his strengths were always in his legitimate martial art skills, skills which made him a fairly big deal on the attitude era WWF mid card. But then the fact that he had the likes of Ken Shamrock and Dan the Beast seven to work with here, two people who complimented his style perfectly certainly helped to make things easier for him in that area. The same could not be said for when he was asked to go against performers such as Owen Harder, Shane McMahon. However, as with them being excellent Mike workers, then Blackman was forced to try and go toe to toe. And when he did such incidents only exposed his staggering lack of charisma all the more this way. This thing's got in one way or not. He tried to force that he definitely tried to force that man. This this thing got in one way or another.  Seriously, sometimes we're not entirely convinced the man wasn't just a very advanced robot who had been programmed with all the skills of a dozen different Bruce Lee movies. That said, for as bad as he was he did always have those in ring skills to fall back on. And this at least meant the six time hardcore champion was able to make a nice career for himself. Even if he couldn't talk worth a damn. That's it's just a shame the same couldn't be said for the next subject then because despite him also having a legitimate history in shoot fighting not only was Jake Hager unable to translate this into a wrestling ring, but he also wasn't able to cut a promo either. But this has been something which has followed the Fargo native all the way back since his days in WWE where he wrestled under the name of Jack Swagger. Hell, so bad was he there that even when he briefly won the World Heavyweight title in 2010, you could have easily forgotten he was on screen at all at the best of time. Facts. Yeah, bro. It's it. It's cheese. Just man, just a charisma vacuum. Why was this? Well, whenever he was given a microphone, he instantly sucked all the energy out of the room with his anti-charisma. There we go. Once his time with WWE came to a close, he continued to work in the industry by signing on the dotted line with All Elite Wrestling where he currently serves as an enforcer to the trio of Daniel Garcia, cool hand Angelo Parker and everyone's favorite hard nipple man, the Canadian National Treasure that is Daddy Magic Matt Menard. And yes, you could argue that he's gotten one thing over during his time there with his I like this hat gimmick. I like this hair to other recent great AEW bits like Tony Storm morphing into a fallen Hollywood starlet. This is pretty small potatoes. Still, it could be worse because moving back to WWE for a moment. We find our next subject, someone who doesn't even have a hat to help get her over. Yeah, and here's the thing. What they did do to try to help him and it kind of did get him over in a sense was pairing him with Zeb Coulter and they're doing we the people stuff that actually kind of got him over. It did. He didn't need to talk. He's one of those guys. You don't have him talk because you're going to get you're going to send the people that paid money to watch. You're going to send them home. They're going to want to leave. So pairing him with Zeb Coulter at the time worked. He needs to be paired with other people and by himself knew. No, no, no, no, no. No, all she has is a complete nutter lack of promo skills and that's Tamina Snooka. Oh man. Now you could argue that it's unfair to include Tamina in this video as she rarely, if ever cuts promos. Yeah, but to that we'd say there's a reason she doesn't and this reason is because she's so bad at them.  You need to be quiet or you're going to start looking like Ellsworth and what makes her like whoever wrote that for her to say the same thing. Charlotte said just wild lack of charisma in this area. Stand out all the more is that Tamina has often been paired up with great talkers such as the time she served as an enforcer to AJ Lee for a while in 2013 and 2014. Then after that partnership ran its course. There was the period she spent alongside the likes of Lana Sasha Banks and Naomi three people who while they may not be the best to ever do it on the microphone are still worlds better than anything the daughter of Jimmy Snooka can deliver. But then her lack of speaking abilities haven't exactly been a death now for her career as with her basically serving as the heavy of the WWE's women's division for much of her time there. Tamina has largely been able to get by on being a silent powerhouse. It's a shame the same thing can't be said for our next entry though because with her being only five foot three in height there's little opportunity for Dana Brooke to serve in that role. So this is meant if she ever wanted to succeed in a major way then she was going to have to learn how to cut a good promo. Yeah. Unfortunately for the former fitness model however such a talent has never exactly been in her wheelhouse. No whenever she's been in a segment which is called for her to talk in fact it's usually gone down like a lead balloon.  It doesn't matter if it was her time on NXT or her subsequent spell on the main roster Brooke just never seemed to pick it up when it came to that part of her craft. And that's a shame because with her not exactly being the best wrestler in the world either it's pretty much guaranteed she'll never rise above the spot of mid card player within the halls of New York. Yeah. Sure. She's had her moments over the years such as the time she joined up with Titus O'Neill and I forgot that was even Titus world wide or the period where she became a 15 time holder of the illustrious 24 seven title but she succeeded in it's crazy because she got featured in nevered. She got featured in nevered man. I'm I'm pretty sure that parts part part and do because of her you know promo ability as well. But yeah, they they let her go. So it's just one of those things there's like to give and take type situation all at night. But yeah, it's unfortunate man. Hopefully you know wherever she ends up going she's able to hone her craft that she decides to still keep resting on her craft and and get better in all aspects of wishing nothing but the best for her. But yeah, that that sound about right. If you're not really good at talking not really the best in the ring they're probably not going to push you that much. The people that are really good in the ring and great talker sometimes they don't even push them like they should. So what does that say for the people that are not on that level at all? It's like it's a good chance at some point you're going to get featured in nevered those moments in spite of her lack of promo abilities because others were able to carry the weight for her and outside of such times she hasn't really done much of note at all mostly just build around in a death spot that is the women's tag team division and alongside a variety of partners such as Mandy Rose Rhea Ripley and Liv Morgan but for as bad as she is when it comes to getting people interested and about through her words even Dana Brooke doesn't hold the distinction of being the worst on the modern day WWE roster and that's because a certain former UFC Bantamweight champion has her beat in this area. She was bad. I don't think she's I'm not sure if she's in WWE anymore. I believe her contract may have been I believe it may have expired. I'm not sure we just she hasn't been on television in a while. Yeah, no.  That's right. It's time to talk about Ronda Rousey. Now, no one is going to doubt Ronda's skills as a fighter. Hell, there was a period where you could have made a solid argument. She was the most dominating MMA performer in the world. Yeah. And while figures such as Amanda Nunes or Valentino Shevchenko have gone on to surpass her in the long run, there's no doubt the baddest woman on the planet was the best at one time. Yeah. That said, part of the reason she was able to become so successful during her time in UFC is that she wasn't really required to cut promos in order to get her fights over. No, while she would have to do the odd pre and post match interview, it wasn't like she was being asked to monologue about the backstory between her and her opponent here. Something she would have to do once she signed the dotted line with WWE in 2018. And when she did have to start cutting promos inside the squared circle, then her lack of skills in this department suddenly became apparent for all the C and as such a little bit of the aura she developed over the years dissipated. Of course, that's not to say she didn't find success in the world of pro wrestling. No, quite the opposite in fact, as during her work a year there, Rousey showed herself to be something of a prodigy in the ring. Still though her first go round, she was she was she was she was holding it down, bro. She had some great matches or whatnot. She was holding it down. It's just her promo ability was not there.  You know, people really hyped about it or whatnot. But her promo abilities were to be desired. Then when she came back around the second time it just seemed like it got worse and then on top of that stuff she was saying on Twitter while she was gone and she was kind of you know, rubbing the fans the wrong way. It was just a multitude of things on top of her microphone ability not having improved. It was a lie, bro. Okay. Oh, whenever that microphone was handed to her and she spoke to the crowd in the most stilted and unnatural sounding of ways. It couldn't help but make things feel a little less special. And this was even more noticeable during her second run in twenty twenty two in twenty twenty three as by that point with her in-ring work also having atrophied all of her flaws only stuck out that much more. So maybe it's for the best she seems to have entered at least semi-retirement now with her last bout of what they did with her and Shayna in that backstage interview that's what they should have been doing more so that or have someone be a speaker for her but if you couldn't find that the backstage interviews that worked better because that's more in the lane of where the world she came from more so of interviews and post interviews or media scrims or whatever to you know talk about a fight talk about their opponent or talk about you know talk about her victory or loss or whatever the case may be those interviews those work better than her actually going out there to live in a promo because it just wasn't that good against her real-life friend Shayna Baszler at August of the latter year SummerSlam marking the final date of her current contract Oh look there it goes she return again in the future this remains to be seen but if another former UFC champion schedule is anything to go by we wouldn't be surprised if she does come back periodically after all there's a lot of money to be made in wwe even if you're as bad a talker as Brock Lesnar is yes we do have to preface this one by saying that during his current run in Vince McMahon's promotion the beast verbal skills have improved somewhat at least to the I know someone's going to clip this and send this dub I don't care early in his career no could have kept the microphone away from him like that he was not good at talking on a microphone but he didn't really need to be because he was out here destroying people later recently like two years ago when he actually just when they separated him and Paul and Paul's with Roman he actually seemed actually normal like it not normal in the sense of like delivering a normal promo I guess you can say in the sense of it sounded actually decent it didn't sound bad it didn't sound forced it it's not like we were just talking to Brock himself like it wasn't no character that he needed to portray that's why I said it sounded normal it sounded like how Brock would normally talk to anybody if he chose to talk to somebody you know I'm saying and it actually worked it actually worked but in early in his career no he was not that good at talking on the microphone point he no longer needs Paul Heyman as a mouthpiece that said during his initial run in the early 2000s this was not the case no back then even if he looked like the incredible Hulk and moved like the flash all the good will such towns created frittered away whenever he was given a live microphone yeah I laid it on my noggin and that's because like whatever else we've discussed today Brock's skills have never been as a talker though he's always been more about getting his point across using his fists or if not them then several well-placed German suplexes yeah so this is exactly why back when he was a rookie still working on conquering the wrestling world he was given a mouthpiece in the form of the former ECW owner with that turning out to be the best thing possible for both that involved as it created a partnership for the ages one which can still to this day stand tall amongst the likes of Bobby Heenan and Nick Buckwinkle or Paul Bearer and the Undertaker mm-hmm sadly though as the saying goes all good things must come to an end eventually and so despite the pair reuniting for a few years following Lester's return to the ring in 2012 after a period spent dominating the world of MMA come 2020 Heyman would move on to an all-new client in the tribal chief Roman Reigns yep needless to say then this left little room left in his date book for dealing with the 11-time world champion and as a result Brock was forced to learn how to carry himself in promo situations all of a sudden thankfully though he's been able to do this to at least a satisfactory degree over a month since meaning he technically shouldn't be in this video anymore if we're being honest but then given how bad he was initially maybe his spot is still one which has been earned for a lifetime and he's not the only one who has a lifetime pass onto the bad promo Hall of Fame as our next subject also fills a full-time spot there on account of his routinely terrible mic work were we talking about this time who else but the British bulldog that's right Davey Boy Smith may have been a spectacular athlete someone who could perform physical feats most other men his size wouldn't be able to dream of and he may have had charisma to burn which is exactly why to this day many British wrestling fans still consider him to be their goat hell so over was he during the transition period between the golden and new generation eras he even got to main event 1992's SummerSlam show there pinning his cousin Bret Hart to become the intercontinental champion to an absolutely catastrophic home field ovation mm-hmm sadly though even at his heights he just wasn't someone who could carry himself when it came to the other all important element of his job and this was getting things across during speaking segments no rather than be able to talk fans into watching him wrestle via his gift of the gab Davey Boy arguably turn people off if anything during his promos as they were so boring for wondering why Vince McMahon chose to push him at all and it wasn't as if he got any better at this as his career progressed either you want you a chance of me come on and take a piece of me Oh man that was ah that was tough bro you you want a chance of me what was that man ah that was a tough thing on I see that was hard to watch it didn't matter if it was his subsequent spell the peak years of the attitude era in fact one thing about the Manchester native always remained constant and this was that he couldn't cut a good promo at all ah man this was a great one bro I enjoyed this video man like I said there you you fall into a certain category you got to figure out which category you fall into you know and not everybody's gonna have the gift of gab when it comes to the microphone abilities if that was the case then everyone would be able to do promos and it wouldn't be a special I'm not saying that we want to see people messing up promos but at the same time I feel like it's an acquired skill that deserves time and dedication to be able to pull off and what y'all understand it is not easy to get a promo and sell yourself in front of thousands of people alive in front of millions watching around the country around the world it's not easy so kudos to anyone that can actually go out there and give it their best shot it may not land it may not work all the time but I got to give respect to anyone that's willing to go out there on a microphone and try to sell themselves and sell a match and sell a feud it's not easy at all so comment down below let me know who do you feel like it's the worst promo of all time in wrestling whenever they pick up a microphone you damn didn't want to change the television let me know who you feel like it's the worst promo out there worst microphone user out there man but I appreciate all of support you guys shown on channel both 250k and I'm still in the speed of youtube wrestling champion world appreciate y'all kicking me see you next one peace


Hello everyone and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I'm your host, Josepha Hayden-Champosie. Here we go. Hello, my dears, and welcome to 2024. I hope you've had a lovely break. At the top of the year, I like to look around and gather the projects that the community is interested in. We can't always commit to everything, and sometimes even the things we plan to do can't make it across the finish line. In the next few weeks, I'll be publishing kind of the big picture goals for the year, but I wanted to share a little bit about what I've collected so far. Firstly, we've got phase three. This has been called a few things over the years, collaborative editing, multiplayer, co-editing, but whatever it's been called, the biggest changes to writing and design workflows are likely to happen in this phase. A redesigned workflow can be a bit of a shock, but fortunately, we already have a prototype out there. I'll include a link to some resources in the show notes, or of course, you can always stop by make.wordpress.org slash core for some insights, but I would encourage you to at the very least get your hands on that prototype to see what it looks like is coming in phase three so that you can be aware and provide your feedback. The next thing on our list is data liberation. This is a new to us project that was introduced at State of the Word. Fortunately though, it's not a new concept overall. Data liberation is actually one of the earliest ideas that sold me on WordPress. The idea that you could set up a site for a client or yourself and that hard work wasn't lost if something went wrong was really important to me. It's been a long time since we put any effort into our importers and exporters and I think this will be a good focus for the year. The next thing that I've picked up, kind of a list of three things, but there are three mid-sized areas that I want us to pay attention to this year, plugins, old tickets and new meetups. Plugins because they really have turned a corner on where they ended 2023. A lot of work has been done to make sure that they've streamlined some efforts, gotten some better onboarding for folks as they're going in and we could really use a hand to keep that momentum going. Tickets because it's something that we hope for year after year when we're talking to people about what they want in new releases. So often part of what they say is some way to work through all of these old things that have been around forever, some with patches and why not after all. And then new meetups because I really still think that meetups are the best intro to WordPress. No matter whether you're wanting to become a developer eventually or like the community building aspect is the thing that hooks you forever, meetups are the place to encourage those and discover those. The next thing on my list is also two things. It's two things, but kind of a guess at the moment. There are two summit items that I want us to try to consider this year. So the first one is contributor recognition. Acknowledgement and recognition I think are two different things and there was an entire series of sessions at the summit where we talked about it. And so I think that it's worth us digging in on that. The other thing from the summit that I would really like us to all kind of dig in on is accessibility, how we do it, how we confirm it, what we think we should do versus what we actually do and see what we can move on the needle there. And the last thing is sort of a personal wish. I think it's about time that we take a look at the way that we kind of manage ourselves as a project, the way that we do our meetings and report on our successes, things like that. And I realize that this is a big thing and it might be a little bit scary. But I mean, we've been doing this for a really long time and it's probably as good a time as any, frankly, to look at what we're doing by habit or tradition and see if it still suits us. So that's my back of the napkin set of notes so far. Keep an eye out in the next couple of weeks for the annual big picture post so you can get some context, notes, and discussion opportunities. And of course, anything that has shown up that's a bit bigger, a bit more final will be in there as well. But first, our smallest of big things. Firstly, State of the Word had nearly 200 questions submitted and Matt has been answering the overflow on make.wordpress.org slash project. So I'll include a link, but head on over there to that post if you would like to catch up on those. And then the second item and last item is that you've got a few more days left to give us feedback on WordPress meetups in 2023 and give us an idea of what we can do to improve those. I believe those close on January 14th. I really love my local meetup and I hope that we can get some of that same sort of feeling going in all of yours too. And that, my friends, is your smallest of big things. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org slash news. You'll get a friendly reminder whenever there's a new episode. If you liked what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser. Or if you had questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at wpbriefing.wordpress.org. I'm your host, Joseph Hayden-Champosy. Thanks again for tuning in for the WordPress briefing, and I'll see you again in a couple of weeks.


married to take the roll. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Feel. Here. Chester. Here. Wolfe. Here. It's 11 present. We have a quorum. Thank you. Can you please join me with the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you very much. I need approval for the minutes of the meeting of June 13th. So moved. Second. Any discussion? Seeing none, I'll signify by saying aye. Aye. Those opposed? Thank you. Public form and on agenda items only. Does anybody here that wants to address the committee of the whole on the agenda items? Seeing none, we're going to go down to item 2-1, resolution 11-16-17 by Alderperson Bellinger, a resolution extending this special charge for residential garbage fee for disposal services provided by the city. I believe David wants to give us a little bit of a presentation. Maybe just to kick things off, recently the American Society for Civil Engineering conducted a national study. It found that Wisconsin ranked 48th among the states in terms of road condition. That really is the main thrust of our discussion tonight, is unfortunately, we fall into that category as a community. As a background, as most of you know, in 2012, city council approved a resolution creating for the first time a $7.16 garbage user fee. Subsequently, for the last three years, it's been $5. It was reduced from the $7.16 down to $5. And at that time, it was asked that every two years, the garbage user fee be reviewed. At the current rate of $5 per month, approximately $1.1 million is received. Your spreadsheets probably reflect a higher amount of $1.2, but $1.1, $1.2, again, the money is captured and accounted for in the general fund. And ultimately, it frees up money as it pays for the cost of providing garbage and recycling. Ultimately, then, that frees up money to be transferred to the capital projects fund and is, in essence, the largest source of funding for a street improvement program. In the 2016 budget, not all of the money was found in the general fund to be transferred into the capital projects fund. So I think a little over $700,000 on Nancy Buses in the audience, correct me if I'm wrong. So at this present time, the 2016 budget does not have $1.2 being transferred from the general fund to the capital projects. So depending on your deliberation, staff would need to find an additional half million of that $1.1, $1.2 to try and transfer to be a major funding source for the street improvement program that you'll be hearing tonight from your director of public works. Thank you. What I'd like to do is go along with that and give you a quick presentation this evening on basically where we're headed and where we want to go with our transportation. We've had quite a bit of discussion over the years, and I think you've all heard it as all the persons in our community that the state of our roads and our infrastructure are in need of repair. And I'm going to present some of that this evening and talk about a plan moving forward. And we're going to talk about the need as well as the funding of this program. And you'll be surprised, I think, and you'll see that we're talking about large types of systems. When we talk about the city as a whole of 200 miles of streets, that's quite a bit of infrastructure to maintain and keep in good working order. So with that, I want to quickly get into the presentation, and we're going to get right into this chart. And you've seen this chart in previous presentations where on the left side here we talk about the pavement condition, one being and zero being very poor and 10 being basically brand new. And over time, as the years go on, pavement will deteriorate with traffic and with age, weather conditions and so forth. If we're able to maintain our pavements early on during their very good years and good years with regular basic routine maintenance, be it crack filling, slurry seals, joint replayers, we're able to extend that and keep that pavement at a high level at a relatively low cost. Unfortunately what happens, however, we're unable to do that timely repair, the rate of deterioration starts to fall off at a steeper rate. And when you get past, let's say conditions of six, over time it gets very steep and the rate of deterioration occurs very rapidly. And what happens is when you get to that point in your infrastructure, the cost of repair becomes much more expensive versus being timely when we can do it. So let's talk about that. Over the years, since 07 we've been rating our pavements and longer than that. But the data that I have in charts this evening will be from 07 through 15. And as you can see as we go through 09, 11, not too much change, a little change in 13, and then in 15. And what you're seeing is a downward trend in our overall pavement ratings. And I think the next slide really hits home the impact of what's happening. We go to 07 and then we go to 15. That's quite a shift. 07 again, to 15. Eight years, quite a bit of shift in our overall average in our pavement rating. So another way of looking at that is we just look at it graphically. In 07, we had roughly 50% of our streets rated good to excellent. And only 4.6%, we're really in that failed category. Three, about 4.6%. Ratings of three, two, and one. In 13, we went down in our overall good to excellent category. Right around 42%. And our fail has now jumped to 6.5. When we go to 15, it becomes really evident. We jump up to 14% of our network has now failed. We're in that steep part of that curve that we mentioned. So you look at that from 07 to 15. Our fail has jumped from 4.62% to 14.08, about a 205% change over that time period. Fair has also increased. But our good and excellent, they have negative numbers. And in this case, negative is not a good thing. It's a trend that's showing that our good and excellent pavements are not at a high level. They're actually failing and going into the fair and failed category. So again, I have this chart just to demonstrate where we are in this curve. And by far, the majority of our pavements are in this 6 to 4 area. And if we don't do something quickly, we're gonna lose even more of our infrastructure. And it's gonna be even more costly as time progresses. The next slide is basically the costs of the different types of strategies that we can use as a department and as a city to work on our roads. What I'll do is I'll quickly show you some graphical pictures of crack filling, for instance. $5.50 a foot. Now, that's not $5.50 a foot to do the crack. It's actually right down the centerline. We average the cost on a street when we do crack filling from length to length. So if you have 1,000 feet, you're looking at $5,500 to do crack filling on that section of road, in other words. The next is asphalt road sealing. Started this project last year with, it's where if you have a little bit too much cracking, you just basically resurface the road with a mastic seal of asphalt. And that's at $6.20. This can only really be applied to those streets that are already with the asphalt pavement. You don't put this type of seal over a concrete road. Another strategy is chip seal, non-existing asphalt. You can see what chip seal is as you put down kind of that oily asphalt mix and then you add aggregate chips and then you add more and more oils and asphalt material on it and then you allow the traffic, the road, as well as tires to beat this in and seal it in place. We haven't really done this process in the city. It's typically a rural type of process, but more and more, I'd say, urbanized communities throughout the state are going to this as an alternative to extend the life. Everyone's kind of in the same predicament that the city of Sheboygan is, is that we're trying to preserve and maintain our infrastructure, yet at affordable cost for our residents. This is an alternative. One of the disadvantages of this is it's messy. The chips tend to be tracked. They track into driveways. They get into our storm sewer system, as I mentioned. It's more of a rural process with ditches and gravel shoulders where if the material does go off to the side, it's not that great of an impact. We're in an urban setting with curbing gutter, storm sewer. It tends to be a more of a messy, dirty type of product. We're doing this this year. We're removing and replacing curbing gutter in many of our streets prior to asphalt paving. That's at $48 a foot. Concrete panel replacement. If we can go into some of our existing concrete streets and we can do spot repairs where some of our concrete panels need to be fixed instead of doing a complete resurfacing, that's at around $90 a square yard. One of the things that we've done over the years is we've asphalted over new asphalt over existing concrete streets. What this picture is is with our city crew. This is our picture of our paver. It's a smaller type paver that we've used in intersections and some bicycle and recreation paths. It's not really set up for long mainline paving. As you can see, the wings are attached, extended far out to the sides. And when it gets extended out to the sides, the quality of the product is not nearly as good as. With the next slide is a full contractor asphalt paving machine. It's much more wider. It's set up for doing highways and large paving projects. And the quality of the product would be higher as well. Nevertheless, what the city provides is an alternative to the hot in place that we try. Especially one of the things with hot in place that we weren't able to do is do something on our existing concrete streets. And we have quite a large portion of our network is just concrete streets today. As I mentioned, concrete with a contractor is 5250. City crew, it's about $30 a foot. What's the difference? Difference mainly is that we're able to purchase our asphalt from the county highway department, which is at a lower cost. What do you do with the existing asphalt street that's in poor condition?  What this process does is these two types of machines are mills, they come in, they mill it off, they grind it off, and it's hauled away in dump trucks. Now this material is recycled. It's not just landfill or it can be recycled. It's taken to the asphalt plant and remixed and made into brand new asphalt. If we did it with a contractor, it's about $75 a foot to mill and fill. If we do it with our city crews, again, $42 a foot because we're getting our asphalt from the county highway department. And the last alternative is the most expensive is when the road's beyond any type of repair and we have to basically remove the entire road and start over and build a new road. And that's at $225 a foot. This might be a little difficult on the screen. I think you have the spreadsheet in front of you, but projects by rating and the types of different strategies that we would deploy. So for instance, we have quite a few streets rated one and two. And if we just did those streets that are eligible for the mill and fill with curb and gutter, that's $3.1 million. And we have about 2.9 or almost 3 million in just reconstruction. So just to take care of the streets right now, the rated one and two, we're looking at $6 million. Adding all the streets that are rated three, looking at 6 million of mill and fill with curb and gutter, 9.1 million of reconstruction and 6.8 million of new asphalt over concrete for a total of 22 million or just the streets that are rated three. Four, same thing across the scale. So you're looking at all the streets rated four, grand total for all the different types of strategies that we would deploy to fix them, 16.1. Streets rated five, 11.8. Six, 1.9. So the grand total going to fix just the streets and maintain them, if you notice when we get to 10 and nine, it's not expensive. We're looking at 500,000, 600,000, four. Again, the reason, because we're crack filling, we're doing some of those much cheaper alternatives. As you can see, when you get streets rated six, five, four, especially three and two and one, it's much more expensive to do those types of repairs. So just the streets, looking at the ratings in a different type of strategy, we're looking at 60 million. You look at, then you add the bridges that will need to be maintained within the next several years. And there's about $1.5 million worth of work on bridges alone. We've included in this spreadsheet as well as what we've included is what we had for capital improvements request for motor vehicle to upgrade our paving machine. Not necessarily to get a full-size contractor version, but a version of a step up from the one we have that will be a little bit wider so we don't have to extend the wings so far. We'll have a better quality product. And then that our crews will be able to go out using the asphalt from the county and be able to perform some of that work. When you total all of these types of projects, the streets, the bridges, and the equipment, we're looking at a grand total of $62 million over the timeframe to get their streets in our city back to where it needs to be. So what does that look like over time? We're proposing about a 14, 15 year cycle because that's the reason we went to 15 years, 14 years approximately is because that's when we do a project, that's what our warranty period is for an asphalt street. So when we special assess the residents for the work that we're gonna perform this summer, we started on 17th Street and 6th Street. When we do an asphalt mill and fill, we say that your special assessment is good for 15 years. If it fails before then you get rebated and you get prorated that basically warranty and guarantee of that street. Basically what we're looking at spending, and this is really where we need to be, is right around $4 million annually to maintain our city street network. If you take our 200 miles real quickly, 200 miles of streets and you spend 2 million a year, it's gonna take you 100 years to touch every street. And streets don't last 100 years. If we do 4 million, we get 50 years. It's a stretch, but we do get pavements lasting 50 years, especially a brand new concrete street. We've had several streets that have lasted 60, even some 70 if they're brand new, especially in residential neighborhoods. So the 4 million, I know it sounds as a large number on an annual basis, but in reality it's really where we need to be if we're gonna get through the entire community within the next 50 years in order to maintain and keep our city streets in a passable and a high quality level that I think our citizens have come to expect. So you look at the different funding sources on here, we have wheel tax that we currently have and that's around 800,000 a year. The garbage user fee on this spreadsheet as city administrator Hufflin explained it's 1.2, but it's probably more closer to 1.1. So if we took that 100,000 off for the next 14 years, it's another 1.4 million we'd have to make up. Special assessments are still included in this mix and it's roughly around anywhere from, it starts out at 250,000 that we would receive to around half a million that we would receive in revenue for special assessing the projects that is under our current special assessment rate. We've added the county sales tax at $400,000 roughly is what has been reported thus far. That just lasts for the first seven years because after that they have an opportunity to review that as well as a county board. So we didn't wanna put it out beyond 2023. And lastly we have our borrowing. We started our borrowing in 2017 at 1.6 million through 2023. And then in 2024 through 2030 it goes up to 2 million, roughly making up that gap of the potential of the county sales tax not being available. Tax levy, this is the 2015. Basically it just shows where our general fund, tax levy 14.9, library fund is 2.3, the debt service fund almost 2.9, transit utility fund half a million and capital projects a little over a million. So the total tax levy is 21.7 million or the rate per thousand of assessed value is 950 or based on $100,000 value home it's $950 annually for an average homeowner for the city tax levy. This next slide is the debt schedule from 2017 through 2030 showing the debt as well as the levy that we had in the previous slide of the 2.9 approximately, other sources of funds. And you can see on the very far right where we're over or we're short funding. So you see several years like 19, 2020, 2021, 2022 through 2024 we're actually short funding with this program. However, then in 2025, 26 and 27, 20, 29 and 30 we're actually have more funds. So this is assumption again of 1.6 million of debt per year at 3% interest from 2017 through 2023. And again, 2 million of debt per year at 3% from 2023 through 2030. So that tax levy increase needed to cover that shortfall as I mentioned in the far right column basically is 22 cents per thousand. So back to that $62 million figure over the next 14, 15 years approximately, the funding sources. The wheel tax would generate $11.2 million over that timeframe. Garbage user fee, if the council so decides to continue that at its current rate of $5 is right around 16.8 minus 1.4 if it's really 1.1 million we're looking at then right around 15.4 instead of the 16.8. Special assessments over this timeframe would generate 6.2 million. County sales tax for the seven years would be a revenue of 2.8 million. Then the borrowing figures of 1.6 for that timeframe of 2017 through 23 is 11.2 million that we would gain in revenue as well as the 2 million per year from 2024 to 2030 gives us 14 million. So the total borrowing between that is 25.2 equaling our total funding sources of $62.25 million. Here's that debt service, the tax rate impact, if you recall I think it was in a 22 cents, it was 9.50. It would need to go to 9.72 if we borrowed the 1.6 per year to make up those shortfalls during those years. So here's the citizen impact of the program in place. The cost 2017 through 2030 sources. The $20 wheel tax, that's an existing fee. Garbage fee per resident, per property owner is $60. The county sales tax and this was part of the Shaboygan press article we got off the website that was just recently approved is about $67 additional in taxes for community resident. And then $22 annually for the borrowing. And lastly special assessments as an individual property owner as we, it doesn't impact every individual property it only impacts those where we're doing the improvement. So basically a total of 169 annual costs to a citizen, a property owner. Questions? Alderman morning. Thanks Chairman. David I think I asked this at public works the other night but prevailing wage on these projects is gonna be going away if it hasn't gone away already. Are there any companies, paving companies potentially that are not bidding now because of prevailing wage that may wanna bid on some city prospects that would bring that somewhat closer to the cost of what the city does compared to the paver that you're using now which is where you have to pay prevailing wage? Not that I'm aware of and there's a couple of factors that are basically barriers for entry into the market for that type of operation. For asphalt for instance there's only two companies really in the state of Wisconsin that provide basically the asphalt plants. In other words they own the gravel pits they own the plants that produce the asphalt very expensive so any type of company that would be a new entrant into this field would have to probably contract with the existing paving company for their material, their asphalt, their gravel as well as the up front capital to acquire the equipment. We're fortunate that the only really reason that we're proposing of getting a paver ourselves is we're fortunate that our county highway department has our own asphalt plant as well as their own gravel pit. That's unheard of, that's pretty rare and in that case it's very cost effective which you'll find is also is any new type of entrant or anybody trying to site a new gravel pit would be very difficult in today's economy and environmental areas in terms of getting it zoned, getting it ready to go in other words getting it up to speed. So there's no smaller companies out there right now that would be interested in bidding on our projects that are non-union and they wouldn't tackle something as big as what we would have or just for the reasons you mentioned. Correct and it's been our experience when we bid out these projects for the last 20 years. We've had some very big years where we've had $2 million worth of work to some small years where we've had maybe $700 to $500,000 work, thinking that maybe you would get a smaller operator and they just can't compete with the large operator and typically the bids that we'll see we'll get a couple of bids but it's the same contractors maybe give or take a couple of different utility contractors if we have some storm sewer work or curb and gutter that's where you'll see the difference. You'll get some competition in the concrete curb and gutter work or maybe the storm sewer or sanitary sewer work but typically it's either you're gonna get the Northeast Asphalt's or the large paving contractors and either one will bid as the general. So it's a little frustrating but we're not the only community that's facing that. Up and down this side of Wisconsin you'll find communities our size, the Manitowawks, the Appletons, the Oshkosh Final X we're all in the same predicament when it comes to contractors. Thank you. Alderman Wolfe. Thank you, Chair. Dave, could you go to the prior slide? That one there, that one. Prior to this one? Yep, okay, thank you. Just correct me if I'm wrong but one and two would be years one and two, 17 and 18? Potentially, we'd like to, 17, 18, 19 and we're really trying to tackle the threes, the twos and the ones. We wanna get those fixed, that's the biggest impact but also we look at where the project is. What's its greater impact to the community? Is it, for instance, a collector or an ulterior street that has a large amount of traffic that it's serving the community? If it's rated a four, marginal or even a five but we can tackle it and get at it sooner rather than later, it's gonna have a greater impact on a greater number of users. So it's a balancing act where we'll try to do a blend of road repair projects every year. And the reason I was wondering is when you go to the next slide on 21, year 17, obviously you're looking at funding, accumulated four million and so forth. I'm just wondering how much of slide 20 you're actually gonna be able to achieve year by year. I mean, how long will it take us to get out of ratings one through four, let's say, how many years? Well, I don't know if we'll ever get to that point. It's kind of a perpetual program in terms of you're always gonna have some streets that we're not gonna be able to get to at $4 million a year that are maybe six or sevens and if we don't get to them, next thing you know, they're gonna deteriorate and slide on that deterioration scale. Yes, we're always gonna try to get those that are worse and get an overall average up. But the other factor in here is over time, if you look at on the next slide, that four million isn't really adjusted for inflation over that 14-year period. It's pretty, it's today's dollars. So that will be a factor as well. We'll probably definitely be doing less work in 2030 that we're at that $4 million mark than we're doing next year at 2017. Maybe just to mention, in addition to not indexing the cost or expenses, we also did not index the revenues. So we felt maybe they would balance itself out up to 15 years into the future, 14 years into the future. Thank you. Alderman Tresser. I guess it bothers me a little bit here. I'm looking at this chart and you've already spent the garbage fee for the next 15 years. That was supposed to be a temporary fee assessed for garbage pickup. And like every temporary fee that's ever been given to the people in Shiboyin, the people anywhere, it's become a permanent part of the budget process. I don't think it's fair. I don't think it's right that we should do this. And I personally, I think if you're gonna use it for roads, call it a road fee. And then you've got wheel tax, garbage fee, special assessment, county tax, and borrowing all for the roads. It just boggles my mind that we're not being honest to the public. Thank you. Alderman Donahue. If I could just provide a little background with respect to how he came to the name Garbage User Fee. Some of you sat in the chambers. These are either as alders or out in the audience. When the fee was established, the city, like all municipalities, is under tremendous budget strains because of revenue restraints that are imposed on us at the state level, starting with Governor Doyle and certainly continuing through with Governor Walker. We are also sharply restricted in terms of the kind of fees that we can impose, like almost no fees can be imposed that don't require us to make a dollar for dollar subtraction from the actual tax levy. So we have, since 2005, essentially maintained at the same tax levy rate. In other words, if you were to consider your family budget, if you were bringing in $30,000 a year and 20 in 2005, you'd be bringing in $30,000 a year in 2017, 16 or 17, irrespective of increasing costs and so forth. When the council was struggling back then with this fairly significant budget deficit, there was talk about, well, what we can do is separately assess something as a garbage user fee that we won't be punished for. It's a fee. We won't be punished for it by the state in terms of reducing our tax levy. And it is one small way that we can increase at a very minimal rate what we are charging our tax payers. So although there was a lot of debate at the time, the way that I have interpreted this is that the garbage user fee was not instituted particularly to cover the cost of garbage. We came at that amount by trying to figure out what garbage fees to the city cost, but that it was a way that we could balance our budget. And it is to the point since I think 2013, 2012 or 2013, that it's $5 per residence in the city. We really weren't being dishonest, frankly, in any way, shape, or form. We might've been a little confusing, but we were certainly not being dishonest. And it wasn't meant to be a temporary fee in the sense that come 2014, the fee is gone, that's the end of it. We really did subject ourselves to this continuing scrutiny, which is one of the reasons that we're here tonight. The continuing scrutiny of do we really need this money? Is it fair? Is there a better way of doing it? You know, how can we figure this out? So overall, the $1.2 million goes into our general revenue, our general purpose funding.  So it's not dishonest. It might be a little confusing. It is under extreme financial restraints about the only way that we can do business. And so for that reason, it's hard to believe, but our citizens really, that tax levy rate has maintained pretty even for the past 12 years in the face of minor inflation, but nonetheless inflation and so forth. I think what we're talking about tonight is if we do get rid of the garbage user fee or we reduce it, whether it's for garbage or whether it's road repairs, that money won't be there. And so what we'll need to look at then, and I appreciate Dave Bebel's slide presentation because it really brought home to me how dramatically in just seven years our road conditions have deteriorated. Now, I have constituents who talk to me about how bad the deterioration is, I'm sure all of us have, but Dave actually put it in black and white or the nice colors that he used, just how bad that those road repairs, the condition of our roads, how dramatically that has decreased. So if we're not gonna have the garbage user fee and yet we want to continue our service to the community, the only way I see around this is to increase our borrowing. And we have the room to do that. We can certainly do that. Citizens will pay for that as well, so we need to be careful of it. But in terms of, if you think of managing the city as almost managing a household, you can't do more when the money stays the same or the money is taken away. And that's really what we're looking at here. So excuse my long-winded response, but just from a historical perspective, whether we call it a garbage fee or a user fee or a way to fund our road repairs, this was a way that we could actually raise some money to bring to the road repair situation that really frankly has gotten critical as Dave's slide shows, $2 today, $6 if we postpone it. We're in the pickle we're in now because we just kept postponing it. You know, it's the old kick the can down the road. Well, now we can't even kick the can down the road because the road is in such bad shape. So we really do need, in my opinion, as legislators, as kind of the heads of household, we really need to take care of this now. And so just by way of background and also my argument as to why I think the garbage fee really does need to stay in place. Thank you. Are there any more questions for David? Look at Scott. I have a couple. First of all, one thing that I hear from a lot of people that ask about all these fees that they're always charged is where does the city get money to give to all these developers? Why can't that money be used instead of giving it to developers for everything? And then the other question I would have for Dave is the streets that you're talking about is that based on the number of miles of streets staying the same or is that taking into account streets that may be annexed into the city in future years or future streets and new subdivisions? Are those included in there also? This would only be our existing network. It does not take into consideration future additions. Typically when you do a future, let's say a brand new road and a new subdivision or let's say an industrial park in a new area, for instance, that total cost is specially assessed because it's brand new. However, if there's annexed roads that would come in and so forth, no, that is not included in this. Alderman Ballinger. Thank you, Chairman. David, I've just got a question for you.  I'm wondering why you wouldn't get, if we're gonna get into this business of doing more of our own paving, why don't we get a significantly better paver instead of just a step up? Probably what I was trying to say is it is a commercial grade, but it's not what you would typically see for highway type of work. We don't need one that large, but it is substantial and commercial enough that it would be comparable of what would be used on city streets by a contractor. So they have different, the one that was in the slide earlier, that was probably a highway paver. It probably has a screed 14 feet to 18 to 20 feet in width, and then they can do large passes of asphalt in one pass. Ours would probably be about a 14 foot max, so we can do one late in the time, for instance, and then as well as we can narrow it down to do the parking things. But it would be a high quality type of paver and screed. Actually the city of Appleton has this type of paver and we've kind of based the specification of that paver off of what Appleton is using. Thank you. Alderman Barn. Thanks, Chairman. One thing that gets a little frustrating after you've been on the council for 11 years, I'm starting my 11th year now, is that you have a history of a lot of stuff that's gone on since I've been on the council. I've been through the start of the municipal court, I've been through the start of the ambulance service, and when this garbage fee was sold to the council back when it started, it was sold on the basis that over the course of the first couple of years that there might be an ability to wean us off of the garbage fee. Well, I'm frustrated to say that I haven't seen any weaning and as a matter of fact, all our person, Trester, had it not been for my motion when this thing was formed, this thing would have went on forever. I was the one that made the motion to have it sunset so we could take a look at it, and that's why we're here tonight. Otherwise, this thing would have went on forever, and I've got the same problems with it that you do along with all the other fees. So it gets kind of very frustrating with all of these things that you hear historically that sometimes they don't come to fruition, and that's what really irritates me about this garbage fee is because I remembered definitely that it was being sold as temporary, and that through belt tightening and everything else, we were gonna be able to wean our way off of it, and here we are, it's sunsetting, and now we're talking about renewing it for who knows how long, maybe forever. Thank you. If there's no more questions of David, then I'll have, you're done, so. I guess to me what's at issue is here is whether or not we continue a fee. Just think for a second if our roads were great, and they're all repaired, that wasn't the issue. I would have to think that there would be people on this council and this city that would want to find that money to be spent somewhere else. It would not go away, and I have to agree with Alderman Born that when this initially came out, though it was disguised as a garbage fee, it was a fee to cap a hole in a budget. That's what it was, and now what we're doing is we're attaching a problem to a funding mechanism that if you don't vor for the fee, that means you don't want road repair. Well, that's not true. I want road repair. I'm just not too crazy about establishing a fee that'll go on forever and ever and ever when the initial reasoning behind it and what we were told was it was going to be going away. That's why we need to find other funding mechanisms if this is all possible to get the roads, but again, I think what's happening here is we're attaching a problem to a financial fee that quite honestly, though it would solve, it would bring $1.2 million in. But again, I think it's another way of getting money from the citizens that quite honestly, I don't think they all appreciate it. Alderman Belger. Thank you, Chairman. I originally drafted this resolution to bring it forward. I should say that it's not my original resolution. I was not part of the garbage fee when it was created, but I brought it forward because obviously it was going to sunset and for budgetary purposes, we needed to address the viability. Are we going to have these funds as part of our budget or are we not? So I brought it forward. I was hoping that this would have been dealt with sooner, but it hasn't and in hindsight, I'm glad now that it hasn't been dealt with sooner in lieu of what the county just did to us with the sales tax, and which I just think is extremely egregious when 43% of the population of the county is going to be contributing to the $10 million that's coming in for this sales tax and we're only getting $411,000. I think it's just outrageous and the rest of the county is all benefiting based on the taxpayers that live within the city and it's almost unconscionable to me that that's the way it was done and I'm obviously still very upset about it, but it is what it is and we have to move on. We've got, recently we enacted a wheel tax and I supported that because the wheel tax was a fee that people that own cars that lived in the city were going to have to participate in the very specific need and use of that money for road improvement and the garbage fee I voted to reduce it. I think Alderman-Born was one of the people that suggested instead of the $7.16 or whatever it was that we reduce it to five and I supported that reducing it at that time, but now on top of that we've got a county sales tax and we're looking at borrowing more money and to borrow more money costs to pay it back so we would be looking at increasing taxes to pay that back too. So it just seems like we're hitting our residents over the head with this tax or fee hammer and I don't know how much more they can take. They've got, everybody's benefiting from the amenities in the attractions that the city has and comes in here that don't live in the city and use our infrastructure and don't have to pay for it and it needs to be maintained. I get it that there's some parts of the infrastructure that's at a critical stage, but I still cannot put all this burden and I didn't mention the special assessment too. It's always fun to live in a district that is getting, having a special assessment, especially the size of Eisner Avenue that was done a few years ago. That was a lot of fun dealing with those phone calls. So what I would recommend is I would like to have an amendment to the existing resolution and instead of extending the garbage fee, I would recommend cutting it in half from $5 to $2 to $2.50 in putting the sunset for five years on that and what that would do is it would force us again in five years to look at this all over again and see where we stand as a city and if we do need that revenue or what we need to do with it. What that also would do is you would take the $1.1 million which this is generating and it would reduce that to $550,000 and in addition to the $411,000 that the county is so generously giving us, that would equate to $961,000. So it's almost the same as keeping the garbage fee. We reduce it by half and we still have a significant source of revenue and we're still able to do some infrastructure maintenance. So I would propose that. Thank you. I'll second that. Okay, let me see. Alderman Jose. Okay, I'm gonna speak in support of what Alderman Belger just suggested but first of all, I wanna point out that there isn't even a motion on the floor for this. Okay, I'll entertain a motion. I mean, you started, we started Dave talking and you mentioned the agenda item 2.1 but nobody ever brought forth a motion or seconded it. That's what I'm pointing out. Okay, then I'll entertain it. Are you gonna make a motion? If it was left as it is, I would vote against it but I'm considering voting with an amendment. I'm considering voting for it. John. Well, I amended the, Okay. You know, so do I need to? I guess we have. I mean, there's a motion on the floor to amend John, I'm saying there's at the opening of the meeting, there's no original motion. If you introduced your original resolution which was on the agenda and then if that's seconded and then you can just move to amend. Okay. I think that's what attorney Adams was saying this year. That's your legal opinion? Okay. No, no. Okay. Okay, I would introduce resolution number 11-16-17 by myself to extend the special charge for residential garbage fee and refuse disposal services provided by the city. Is there a second? Second. Okay. Okay, now I would like to attach my amendment that I just previously stated to that. So I would amend this original. Second. Okay, and there's a second. Okay, under discussion. Does anybody have any questions about what we're gonna be voting on as far as the resolution? Alderman Born. Thanks. I like everything that Alderman Bellinger said. I think five years might be a little too long. I would be more comfortable with three. So I would offer that as a friendly amendment. I would prefer to keep it at five. Do I have a second on Alderman Born's motion? I'll second the three years. Thank you. Under discussion. Okay, so then the. The amendment to the timeframe is the only thing that we can discuss at this point. That has to be voted on first. Yeah. So there's been a motion and a second. Right. We're gonna take a vote as to, for the amendment from five years to three years. Okay, very. Bellinger? No. Alderman Born. Aye. Bellinger? No. Alderman? Aye. Alderman? All right. All right. Alderman? Aye. Will? Nay. Okay, motion passes. So we're looking at the resolution with three years and a $2.50. And again, just so that I'm clear with my attorney sitting here, this is only a recommendation to the common council. This is gonna come in. Right, okay. So we're not establishing anything. So this will be at the next council meeting. All right, we have a motion of three years and $2.50. Alderman Teal. Now we can discuss the actual. Right. Garbage fee. Perfect, thank you. I think what happened tonight is the focus was mainly on streets. And I think that's what we looked at strictly here for this garbage fee instead of the other services that I think our citizens deserve also. I still have a concern that we cut three firefighters without being voted on by this, or by the council. And we haven't replaced those. And I also feel we need a few more police officers also. If I know that this type of fee is going to those services, it has my 100% support. I'm all about roads, don't get me wrong. I propose the wheel tax. I'm about fixing our roads. But we have other services that I feel need to be taken care of too. And I believe we need those three firefighters that we never voted to get rid of. And we need some more police officers. And if those are included in this type of budget, I'm in favor of it, otherwise no. Thank you. Thank you. Alderman Belger. I'll defer to the city administrator on this to address this, but wouldn't Alderman Steele's concerns be better directed at public protection and safety budget? And instead of the capital or this, what we're looking at right now, I mean, shouldn't that be where that concern lies and where it's addressed? And I mean, this obviously is not intended to fund additional protection services, whether it be police or fire. Correct. The issue of funding of operational budget matters, including staffing, whether it be police or fire, will be addressed as part of the 2017 proposed budget. It will be discussed at length at public protection and safety committee as well as all the other respective committee commissions and boards in the latter half of August. So approximately a month from now will be in the middle of those discussions. I don't want to diminish your concerns, Alderman Steele, because they're obviously legitimate, but I just don't think that this resolution that we're looking at is meant to cover those concerns. Alderman Steele, first man and Alderman Donio. But the garbage fee that goes into our general fund, correct? Yes. Correct, so that's why I'm bringing it up, because it does go into our general fund, so ultimately it can be used for those items. So whether we voted on $2.50 or $5, I would be in favor of $5 if I know that this is going for other services also, not just for roads. That's why I'm bringing it up here. Just as a follow up, at the beginning of the meeting, I mentioned that of the 1.2 that's identified on the spreadsheets, that is labeled as garbage fee. Again, our accounting system provides for that money coming in through the general fund, excuse me, and then ultimately transferred, the expectation on the spreadsheet is that it's transferred to this capital projects fund to fund streets. I also mentioned that the 2016 budget only transfers 700,000. So in order to accomplish what's on the spreadsheet, staff would need to come up with additional half a million, which is gonna be a challenge. In light of the motion that's on the floor of cutting this in half to 550,000, so that really what that means is 150,000 of the current fee could be allocated toward covering personnel related costs, whether it's firefighters or police officers. So again, based upon your concern about keeping the $5 intact, that would be a funding mechanism to potentially put those positions, whether it be putting those three firefighter positions back in, possibly other police officers, that would be the mechanism to fund that. Cutting it to 550 basically puts us back where we currently are with no funding available to assist the general fund in funding public safety positions. You mean 250, right? Reducing it to 250. 550 from 700,000, so that's 150 difference. So we have 700,000 currently going from the general fund to the street project. Okay. And by cutting it, you mentioned, I thought you said a 550,000 because we're really looking at 1.1 million, not 1.2. So $550,000 cut in ultimate revenue. But we're picking up 411,000 that we didn't have. But that's dedicated for transportation related. Right. Alderman Donning. From my perspective, the easiest way to look at this in terms of where the money is, is if we think about the city budget as a pie. And if we get rid of the, so taxes are the blueberries that go into the pie. If we take out 1.1 or $1.2 million or $550,000, the pie just gets smaller. And so what we're doing as Alders is deciding where the lines are drawn in terms of who gets what. But now it's a smaller pie. Our citizens will save $5 a month or $2.50 a month, but the pie will be smaller. So we'll have to figure out, can we get along without the additional three firefighters? Can we just stretch out the, can we just stretch out the road repairs knowing that it'll be more expensive as time goes on? So if we just think of this as the revenue that comes in is our pie and we get to figure out how we slice it. So I mean, the decision is up to us. I mean, if we take $1.1 million away, we can decide that that'll be less money we spend on roads or on fire or on the parks or whatever it is that we want to do. Aldermen was a first. I begrudgingly gonna vote for, if the amendment passes to reduce to 2.5%. I was actually gonna, if it was just left without an amendment, suggest we do without the garbage fee for a year since we have 700,000 in the budget and we've picking up 400,000 in this new county sales tax. 700,000 plus 400,000 seems to me to be 1.1 million, which is what we've been really collecting for the past couple of years. And but then we come to have this presentation and the ink isn't even dry on the county sales tax that's been put on our backs and the money's been allocated another direction. So I was gonna say, let's just kill the garbage tax all together for a year, taking the 400,000, the 700,000, creating 1.1 million out of that. But begrudgingly, since Aldermen, Belgium is proposed this amendment to push it for three years and reduce it to 2.5%, I would vote in favor of it at that level, 2.5%. The top part of me, $2.50, $2.50. Aldermen Warren, then Aldermen pressure. Darrell, I'm confused about what you just said about $700,000 has gone into the general fund from the garbage fee, and it's supposed to be 1.1 million at that. Is that because where we add in the year, the rest of it is gonna follow or can you explain that? Yeah, it's confusing. The 1.1 that the city is currently receiving through the garbage fee, only $700,000 is being transferred from the general fund into the street improvement program. So the city's general fund is spending half a million of the existing user fee for non-street purposes. So if this is cut to $5.50, then that means two possible outcomes. One is that you continue to transfer money, which would be, in essence, $550,000 to the street improvement program. But that means that you have a $550,000 hole now in the general fund that you have to come up with money. So in light of the levy limits that the state has imposed upon us, then you're probably looking at cutting staff. If you want to continue to have some sort of street improvement program, the other option is to borrow your way in order to have a street improvement program. Is there a specific place where the, is there a specific place where money that was intended for the garbage fee in the general fund is going? You said it's plugging about $500,000 right now. Where's, can you give us, is that going to the public worst department? Is it going to the fire department, police department? Where is it just a general balancing? It's a general balancing. It's not slated or isolated anywhere. When the 2016 budget was put together, it was just money put in to fill a hole. Paul McCrouser. So basically what you're saying is that there's no guarantees whether we have the $5 a month garbage fee or not that we're going to have money for the fire department or the police department because that money could be allocated for something else like buying the Boston store and tearing it down and all that money that we put into it that we lost. I think we need to be better stewards of the money that comes into the city. And I really and truly think we're bombarding the people of this city and we're not providing the services that they need. And the fire department and the police department are services that we need along with the roads. And we're not going in that direction. Right now we're talking about the garbage fee and the wheel tax and the special assessments and the county sales tax and the borrowing and the burden it's doing, the burden it is to the people of Sheboygan. We are building apartments downtown. We bought the Boston store. We tore it down. We're building the apartments on 8th Street. While this is supposed to be generating tax money, then use that tax money to help surface the roads and give the people in Sheboygan a break. Alderman, did you have something? Yes, it was my understanding, Gerald, correct me if I'm wrong, from your predecessor and from Alderman Hammond that well, in fact, what you said was true that 500,000 was being used for other purposes. In future years after 16 or after 17, I should probably say, that we wouldn't need to keep doing that because we would have net new construction coming on board and there would be taxes from acuity and from other things that would generate the additional revenue and therefore that while it may be a blip this year or on 17, moving forward, that's not an issue in that it was always the intention if we were to keep the garbage fee, that at that point in time then in 18 and moving forward, you would roll 100% of that revenue into streets or road repair. That's what was told to me from your predecessor and Alderman Hammond before and obviously I'm not holding you to that, that's what they said, but I just wanna know if that's an accurate statement or not. It really comes down to the Common Council and what your priorities are, whether you dedicate 100% of any new taxes that are received as a result of new construction in the community or whether those extra dollars go toward personnel costs to bring back the additional firefighters, the three firefighters or potential police officers. Of course you have a large existing staff and their benefits and their wages will be costing more every year, so that's another potential location for the new taxes that are received as a result of new construction in the community. Going back to a point earlier about other activity going on in the community, downtown redevelopment, Boston store, the city has approximately 20 different funds, accounting funds and legally there are restrictions as far as how we spend that money and when we receive taxes as a result of incentivizing developers what that money can use for and oftentimes we have up to a 26 year fix as far as that money has to be dedicated for expenses or related debt to incentivize the developer and cannot be used for purposes such as hiring police officers, firefighters or fixing streets outside the downtown as an example. So unfortunately we're often handcuffed in how we operate based upon state laws or even internal policies that you've established. Thank you, Alderman Dresser. You talked about a piece of the pie and I'm wondering what portion of the household budget pie you would like people to give up for the road repair. Some of the families in my area, in my district are stretched to the limit and the only part of their budget that they are going to give more money to the city from is gonna be their food budget. I personally am not gonna be responsible for families that are going to have to spend food money to pay these extra taxes for the roads. I think the roads need to be done and I think we need to be creative in how we do it without taxing our people more than they already are taxed. Thank you, Alderman Born. Thank you, Chairman. Just to expand on what Alderman Trester said as far as our constituents really living from paycheck to paycheck. If you take with inflation over the last eight or nine years, most people have lost thousands of dollars in income and I just, I agree with her. I don't know where our constituents and I think the $67 a year that the county came up with that on average people are gonna spend on this new half percent stale stacks. I think it's way, way under what people are gonna be spending especially if they somehow can afford to go out and buy some bigger ticket items that an additional half percent stale stacks, they're dreaming if they think that's only gonna cost the average citizen $67. So again, I agree with Alderman Trester with what's happened over the last seven or eight years, even 10 years when we go back to the recession, people's real money that they have to spend has actually gone down by thousands of dollars and yet $450 to $500,000 a year and additional salary and benefits and I certainly understand that you have to pay good wages and benefits to maintain your employees but our constituents are hurting, a lot of them are hurting. Thank you. Alderman Lewandowski. I just wanna say that we have to remember that the people of Sheboygan are not a bottomless pit of money and I've lived in this city my entire life. I have never seen any property in the city that's got a money tree growing in the backyard and I know for myself, my social security disability, I'm actually getting $100 less now than I did last year because I have to pay for my own Medicare which was deducted before and the state was paying for it. Okay, thank you. Any other comments? Okay, seeing there are none, there's a motion before us to amend the resolution to drop the price from the fee to $2.50 and three years. Would you take a vote on that please? Calendar? Aye. Aye. None of you? No. Right and then? No. Okay, motion passes. Okay, seeing there's nothing else on the agenda, I don't know when the next meeting is until, oh, I'm sorry, I don't know today. No. It's automatic. No, it's an automatic referral back to the council that it'll be on that resolution when you get your packet. All right, I'll entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. Second. Thank you very much and thank you very much for coming.