09-28-15 Common Council Meeting Minutes

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REGULAR MEETING September 28, 2015 John Murphy (Controller) (Presenter) - The only large one on here is a deduction of 1.5 million dollars. Offset by an increase of 2.5 million dollars for a waste water secondary improvement project that is being paid for with a combination of bond funds which are already appropriated plus this pay as you go capital fund, we’ve reviewed the refund balances in there. We feel we can do some pay as you go capital without having to bond so that’s what we are proposing to do with this capital project. Committee of the Whole Chairperson White- Asked for questions from the Council for questions seeing none. Committee of the Whole Chairperson White- Is there anyone wishing to speak in favor or in opposition seeing no one the Public Hearing is now closed. Councilmember Dr. Ferlic made a motion to send the Bill 53-15 to the Council with a favorable recommendation. Councilmember Gavin Ferlic seconded the motion which carried by a voice vote of seven (7) ayes. nd 2 Reading on Bill 53-15 Councilmember White Chairperson, Personnel and Finance Committee, reported that they met this afternoon on this bill and due to a lack of quorum there is no recommendation. John Murphy (Controller) (Presenter) - These are budget transfers from one type of account to another. It’s a requirement in Indiana that the Common Council approve these types of transfers. For example you might transfer from a services account to a supply account. That would require council approval. That’s what these are there is no additional appropriations in these budget transfers. Committee of the Whole Chairperson White- Asked for questions from the Council for questions seeing none. Committee of the Whole Chairperson White- Is there anyone wishing to speak in favor seeing no one In opposition- Jesse Davis PO Box 10205 South Bend, IN- I just want him to clarify. I had found a line item budget on here for a $158,000 for salt and winter materials. I would have already thought that was in the budget that you had figured out. I want to know is that additional money they are wanting for salt for this coming winter? Eric Horvath- That is additional monies to buy salt this winter. So we have a stocked shed of salt this winter. It usually goes over budget cycles and sometime it’s difficult to guess how much we are going to need. We do the best we can on budgeting. We take an average of the previous years. If we have a bad year, it is usually due to salt prices and the amount of salt you use. In the previous year not only did we use a lot of salt but the salt prices continued to go up. We recently rebid salt. We’ve got a price much more expensive than what we were buying it for but less than the state QPA. It’s about as good of a price as we are going to get. This one-hundred and fifty- eight dollars ($158) will be to buy salt for this coming winter. Councilmember Oliver Davis- Do you ever use our local weather forecaster to help you anticipate what type of winter we are having? I do value their expertise. Do you use them to forecast when it comes down to snow and salt? Eric Horvath- We haven’t because there is so much variability and they’re going to be predicting from a larger picture. There’s a lot of factors that we’re going to have in play. One is it could be anteceding conditions, it could be the temperature at the particular time, it could be how many small events do we get, do we have continue to put product down for, or is it just one really large event. All those things factor into how we spread salt. We have a snow removal policy that we follow and it’s pretty prescriptive so at certain temperatures we apply certain materials and at 29