| The last few weeks had several events and a national holiday. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. The biggest event in the village was the Christmas Tree Lighting and Holiday Festival of Lights. The festival was new this year and I am sure will grow in the future. Another great idea from staff! There were over 1,000 people at the event and many children were able to see Santa. You can see Santa’s arrival, my comments and the lighting here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACZYCOpcd-8 We also hosted the ever popular Polar Express. It was done differently, but many children and family had a great time. Additionally, Stan’s Donuts has officially opened. They used one of the economic incentives we put in place during the pandemic to help make this happen. There are more to come! Last Monday, we held a budget meeting that focused on restructuring our debt and a summary from each department. Beginning with the debt discussion. This chart shows our debt historically since 1991. I have worked hard since being elected to lower our debt as promised. These efforts allowed us to weather the COVID related revenue losses of over $7 million without taking drastic actions.  |
| The yellow shows the outstanding debt from 1993 to the end of 2016. The green box shows the debt at the end of each year of my tenure. The plan for next year is to restructure our debt to take advantage of the historically low interest rates. Taking this action will save approximately $216,000 while simultaneously lowering our annual debt payments, making more money available for capital projects. In addition, the debt will be split into three separate funds (General Fund, Water & Sewer and the Triangle TIF). This will be much “cleaner” and more understandable when looking at financial reports – thus improving transparency. This action will take place early next year. Next year we will be issuing approximately $34 million in new bonds to accomplish this restructuring and to finance capital projects. We will also be paying off the first installment of TIF Bonds through this process. At the end of 2021 our net debt will be $70M, a $4M reduction from the end of 2020. All of this while doubling our investment in roads in 2019, 2020 and 2021. I believe that this how to use debt responsibly and take advantage of historically low interest rates. Next, we discussed our various departments. One department of note was the police department. We are piloting a costly, but importan,t “body-worn camera” program. This program when fully instituted will require a full-time person to handle FOIAs, but the department is reconfiguring responsibilities to handle this without adding people. Currently, 97% of our citizen complaints clear our officer with simply the dash cameras. Chief Mitchell believes the body cameras will increase that clearance rate, protecting our officers and giving us an opportunity to improve training where needed. Chief Mitchell also identified that we, like many other municipalities, have a problem recruiting new full-time police officers. For this reason, he recommended sending our CSOs and others to a part-time police academy. By doing this we can “grow” new police officers internally. This is an outstanding idea and the very type of ideas I encourage from our staff. The remainder of the department briefings were well presented but nothing significantly new to note. I will however, point out that none of our department heads or leadership have been here more than 18 months, and most joined during COVID. They have done an outstanding job throughout this crisis. I would like to point out that many people try to continually worry about processes. While processes are important, it is really the people you hire that matter. No matter how good the process, bad people will screw it up. Good people will develop good processes that work, even if your processes need improvement. We will of course keep trying to improve our processes, but it is a lot easier when you have good people in leadership positions, which I think we do. During this meeting there were of course questions asked by a couple of trustees to set the ground work for political attacks. Those aren’t worth the time of day as they did not move the conversation forward. You can listen to the budget meeting here for yourself if you would like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmoZrJZ34sg A reminder that the last week for yard pickup is next week. Also, a reminder that the “Dine Orland Program” is ongoing. If you spend $100 at our local restaurants and submit the receipts the Village will give you a $10 gift card. Also, please join me for my campaign kick-off fundraiser at Papa Joe’s on December 16th at 6PM |
