City Manager Bill McDaniel was the keynote speaker at Monday’s meeting. After Rotarian Tommy Sparkman's introduction, Bill provided a detailed overview of the Oct 2020-Sep 2021 city budget, which ended up totaling over $100 million after about $6 million of CARES Act funds were awarded to the City. Despite the 42 slides of numbers, charts, graphs, and exotic words like “ad valorem” and “half-FTE,” Bill did a great job of providing an informative, understandable, high-level overview of the City’s budget to Rotarians of all cognitive capacities.
Before Bill dove into the numbers, he updated the Club on two recent milestones for the City:
1. The Sadye Gibbs Martin Community Center is open, and was dedicated on August 13. It is being regularly used by the community for basketball and other athletic purposes.
2. Fire Station #3 was recently dedicated, and will be fully functional in the next couple of weeks. This was a long, slow project, and everybody is pleased to finally reach the finish line.
Back to the numbers.
The original budget was about $94 million, but at the last minute, Plant City was awarded about $6 million in CARES Act funds that can be used for various improvements to protect staff and the community from the spread. Improvements range from plastic barriers between staff and customers to additional automated doors to investment in technology to improve and expand remote working and virtual meetings. Bill proudly said that the City’s offices are some of the safest havens in town. The only catch to these funds is that they must be spent before the strike of midnight on 12/31/2020.
Bill reviewed the $40 million General Fund, and thankfully started using more pictures in his presentation:
Notably, about half of the general fund is spent on police and fire services.
Bill touched on some of the other funds in the budget, and provided this tasty morsels of information:
- In the Solid Waste budget, funds are allocated to transition garbage pickup from manual (aka “two guys on the back of a truck”) to an automated service, when a single driver can handle an entire collection route. Funds will be used to purchase the new garbage trucks, and to purchase the special garbage containers.
- The Stormwater budget includes a long-overdue and muchly needed remediation to Roseland Park, which is prone to flooding. The budget also includes bringing the street sweeping service in-house with the purchase of a fine new fleet of vacuum-based street sweepers.
- The CRA budget includes adding some outdoor fitness equipment to the City’s two lake parks.
- Capital projects include, much to the delight of this reporter, a major upgrade to the public tennis center. The upgrades include improved office and bathroom facilities, and the conceptual drawings show a covered viewing / socializing platform.
Currently, there is no publicly accessible waterfront amenities in Plant City. Bill is looking to change that deficit, as they identified a city-owned property that can accommodate canoe/kayak/fishing activities.
Bill reminded us of the large project call McIntosh Park, which is 360-acre property that will become walking nature trails.
Bill encouraged the membership to meet the four candidates for Police Chief on October 19, 5:30-7:30 at the Sadye Martin Community Center. These candidates were narrowed from 72 applicants.
Our sincere thanks to Bill for his leadership and stewardship over our beloved Plant City!
