Paul Szmal: Decided to do to us this morning, but now we're connected by phone. Yeah, there you go. Let's start off the recap of last night's City Council meeting by talking about a couple of ceremonial presentations proclamations that happened.
Chuck Mason: Sure. National Parks Week is this week in the United States the week of April 19th through April 27th and Mayor Genetino last night proclaiming National Parks Week here in the city of Auburn and on hand was on a Wilson who is the superintendent of the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park and then also from the Harriet Tubman boosters Laurel you let was here last night, and they both accepted this proclamation.
Auburn is proud to be home with a Harriet Tubman National Historical Park and with the park opening its Parker Street site with the restoration of the Thompson Memorial Ames Ion Church down on Parker Street last summer. We're just looking forward to more and more activity out of the National Park Service here in Auburn and on the mayor last night proud to announce National Parks Week here in the city of Auburn.
And the second proclamation was for Arbor Day, and you know Arbor Day and Earth Day always kind of fall at the same time. So the proclamation last night was kind of written to address both things but Arbor Day is actually today and celebrates the planting of trees and the importance of trees to our communities and on hand last night was Dominic Gambiani from the Auburn beautification Commission and he's also involved with the Cougar Climate Action Group and he was on hand to accept the proclamation for Arbor Day Earth Day and made the announcements last night that we talked about last week.
Tomorrow Paul is our Earth Day events in Auburn will be at 10 a.m. for a volunteer cleanup up at the Mill Street Dam area in Auburn for the cleaning of the Wasco River and then from noon till 3 at the Auburn Public Theater, there's a Swap shop you can trade. Bring some items and find some other items to trade with people and it's all the keep items out of a landfill so Dominic last night on hand to discuss those events with the council and the the mayor Genetino pronouncing today is Arbor Day here in the city of Auburn.
Paul Szmal: You know I just got a chance to meet Dominic yesterday at the Tim Morrison mini-golf tournament over at the Auburn Holiday Inn.
Chuck Mason: Yeah, excellent. Yeah, very very very cool guy very cool guy all right. Let's move on here this morning and talk about some of the resolutions and the presentations that happened first there was an author authorization of a real property tax assessment proceeding which sounds like a lot of legalese. Can you kind of simplify that for us Chuck?
Paul Szmal: Yeah? We'll try our best the McDonald's here in Auburn has two locations one on Grand Avenue one on Genesee Street, and they were one of those entities that fought their tax assessment. And this involves not only the city of Auburn, but the other taxing authorities of the Auburn and large city school district and the county of Cayuga. Rather than take it all the way through on a core settlement. They oftentimes will recommend these these tax settlements and so the city of Auburn joining with the school district at Cuyahoga County last night to sign off on this settlement agreement with the local McDonald's.
Chuck Mason: All right, so from that we moved on to a resolution establishing what's called a retirement incentive.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, this is for our city of Auburn employees, and it's one of the tools that's being used as we the council navigates its way through this year's preparation of the fiscal year 2025-2026 budget and what this will do is offer a one-time early retirement incentive to current city employees we we estimate that probably about eight to ten percent of the workforce is probably eligible for retirement at this time and this may be a incentive to get them to retire maybe a few years earlier than they would originally plan.
Would end up resulting in some cost savings from more senior employees retiring and being replaced with entry-level employees, so the council last night putting its staff of approval on this retirement incentive the city manager has been working with the city's collective bargaining units on spreading the word about this early retirement incentive and the first date that people need to notify the city would be May 17th.
So we'll know more in a few weeks if this is going to have a positive financial impact on the city's budget situation but the council last night putting its staff of approval on an early retirement incentive package for current city employees and speaking of budget the third wave of budget presentations happened last night.
Chuck Mason: Yeah, this was our final week and we marched through a lot of budget presentations from smaller departments last night. We heard from the Civil Service Commission the Corporation Council's office the city manager's office the staffing of the actual city manager's office itself and all of the departments associated with our finance office such as assessor and treasurer human resources and payroll and the comptrollers office and that as well we had the budget presentation from my department with city clerk with the vital statistics office and the dog control program. So we took a look through all those budget presentations last night.
Everybody's a very similar situation where we're really presenting budgets that are pretty scaled back to just the staffing as well as some minor operational budgets included in each department budget and then to cap off the night City Comptroller Mary Beth Leeson along with the city manager Jeff Diger did a overall budget presentation of where the budget currently stands.
There's some good news and the fact that city staffs been working over the last month to try to get a better projection of where we're at in the fiscal year. The budget is presented last night still has a shortfall that needs to be worked out over the next few weeks, but it's down to an amount of 2.8 million dollars was the budget shortfall number. They were working with last night significantly down from where we were a month earlier when she had added up everybody's department requests and and found a more significant budget shortfall, but there's been a lot of hard work so far it's really been a very bare-bones budget that's been presented across the board to the council.
Some of the factors like the early retirement incentive that was passed last night by the council will just need a little bit more time to see the financial impact of that tactic also the results of the state budget. We're still waiting on state final state budget numbers to be able to put the final pieces in place here. But last night the comptroller making an overall presentation as to how things stand right now.
It will rely on a tax increase the it'll be up to the council to make a determination over the next few weeks on exactly what that tax increase will be and then we'll take a look at some other other things such as refuse collection water and sewer over the next few weeks here at upcoming city council meeting.
Paul Szmal: All right, as always Chuck. We appreciate the info. Have yourself a good weekend.
Chuck Mason: Well, thanks and have a good weekend yourself. Thank you very much.
Paul Szmal: All right, that is Auburn City Clerk Chuck Mason joining us here on FLX morning. It's 851.
