CITY COMMISSION SPECIAL MEETING - May 19, 2026

Good evening, even though it says good morning. Good evening and welcome to the May 19, 2026 City Commission special meeting. I'm going to call this meeting to order, and we'll start with Jen doing the Pledge of Allegiance, our city attorney. 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. Okay, first we'll do citizen input, and that is, does anyone in the audience wish to speak on a topic that is not on the agenda? This would be your time to come forward. Deputy Rene, anything you want to say? Okay, I will close public hearing, and we will move to new business, which we just have the one item, although a very important item, discussion regarding implementation of a fire assessment, and I will turn that over for a staff presentation, but starting with City Manager Jennifer Bramley. Yes, good evening. Thank you, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and Commissioners. So, this is a special meeting of the City Commission, and I want to be very clear that there is not a sense of urgency. That's not the reason why we called a special meeting. It's a special meeting of the City Commission because this is the only time we could get all five of you together with our attorney and Mr. Rowe, our attorney from BMO, who is a specialist, if you will, in assessments. So, we had to call the special meeting. So, I want to be very clear that that's the reason why we're having this particular special meeting. So, this is why I'm not listening to baseball tonight? Yes. The Toronto Blue Jays? Yes. Yes. Sorry about that. It's all good. Couldn't help it. Just kidding. So, as a result of property tax reform, and in order to address structural budget deficits, staff is exploring other avenues, other sources of revenue. As you know, there are several bills in Tallahassee that encompass varying degrees of ad valorem tax reductions. The current bill, which has passed the House, but not the Senate, would equate to about a $9 million reduction in ad valorem taxes for the City of Dunedin. Should one of these bills pass, we need to be in a position to reduce services, as well as identify alternative revenue sources, as well. This evening, we'll introduce one of those revenue streams, and that is a fire special assessment to fund fire department operations. No decisions are going to be made this evening. We're not asking you to make any decisions regarding implementation of a fire assessment. We've asked Chris Rowe from Bryant-Miller-Olive to explain what a fire assessment is and how it works. And as I said, Mr. Rowe is a very experienced attorney. He has a great deal of background in special assessments throughout the state. He's very well known for his knowledge, and he was also our attorney representing us for the franchise agreement for Duke as well. So, he's well known to us, and so we asked him to come here this evening to present to you. This is the first time that the City Commission is receiving this information, and this is the first time that you will have a chance to ask questions regarding an assessment and to discuss it amongst yourselves, as well. And, Mayor, I'm going to turn this over now to Mr. Rowe, and when he's done, and after you've asked your questions and had your discussion, maybe we can discuss next steps and what we're looking for out of this evening. Thank you, Mayor. Great. Okay. Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you, Mayor, and good evening, Commission. Can you hear me? Is this working okay? Are you able to hear me? Oh, she was right. I have to be right on top of it. Okay. Yeah, you do. Very good. I'll try to remember to do so. As mentioned, I am Chris Rowe. I'm with the law firm Bryant Miller Olive and law partners with Jennifer. At the firm, I've been there probably a little over 20 years now. I specialize in helping cities and counties develop and maintain revenue sources. That includes franchise fees. It also includes impact fees, community redevelopment, and tax increment. Probably the area I've focused on most over that whole period of time has been special assessments. And I didn't know what a special assessment was when I went to law school. I certainly didn't set out to become a special assessment lawyer. It just kind of unfolded that way. The lawyer I was most aligned to as a young associate at the firm did a ton of that work, and so I learned it from him, and I've been doing it ever since. The presentation I have probably take about 15 or 20 minutes to get through. It's about 12 slides. It includes some background, some just kind of overview on what special assessments are before focusing on fire assessments. Chris, hold up one minute. Is there – it is a little – it seems low. Do we need anything to be adjusted? Okay. All right. I think it's the rain as well, Mayor. It is, but – well, I've just been getting comments from the public. Right. That you can't hear, both on TV and sometimes in the back of the room. Okay, so – Should I stand at the podium? It might broadcast a little bit. I don't know. Let's try it. Let's see. Yeah. I think it's really important that you're able to hear this. Yeah, it is. It is. I mean, I can hear it. Is it any better? Maybe if I project a little more with my voice, can you hear me still? I think it's about the same. So if you want, you can just be comfortable. Yeah. Honestly. It might be easier to get closer if you're sitting down. Yeah. The presentation takes about 15 or 20 minutes to get through. You're more than welcome to ask questions along the way. I try to be pretty comprehensive. This is a presentation I've sort of tailored – very good. A presentation I've tailored for some of the local government groups I address on special assessments. It really is meant to be a combination of pure overview, but also enough detail to help you understand what a fire assessment is, how it works, how you would adopt one if you're interested in doing so. So the first thing I mention is that although some communities might not currently have a special assessment, it's not a new form of revenue. They've been around in Florida since the late 1800s, and in fact, they've been used nationally by different cities across the country. It's basically a recurring annual charge that you can impose to fund a particular service or improvement. With your general fund monies, the money comes into you each year, you put it in the general fund, and you could use those monies for any operating expense of the city. A special assessment is a dedicated revenue source. You impose it for a particular reason, and once the money comes in, you set it aside and only use it for that particular reason. And some of the common uses of special assessments have been for road improvements in the capital sense, sidewalks, water and sewer extension. Commonly see them in septic to sewer conversions where you're installing lines out into a neighborhood that doesn't have them. And then there's the so-called service assessments, which oftentimes fund fire, like we'll discuss this evening, storm water, street lighting, and also solid waste services. There are three primary legal considerations associated with any assessment, and these have derived from case law over time. A lot of lawsuits have occurred historically over the use of special assessments. Someone who is subject to a special assessment might not like the fact that they're being made to pay the charge, so they will file a lawsuit over it. From those lawsuits have developed a body of case law that kind of informs what needs to be done in order to oppose an assessment lawfully today. Those three requirements are special benefit to property. So whatever it is you're funding with the assessment, a service or an improvement, like the examples I mentioned, they have to convey a special benefit to the property that's subject to the assessment. Not to the person, not to personage that owns it, but somehow the property itself has to get some benefit from it. Sometimes that's an increase in property value. It doesn't have to be limited to increases in property value. Also, fair apportionment. This is an important distinction from a property tax. With a property tax, the formula for calculating it for each property is set by state statute. It's based on the value assigned to each property by the county property appraiser and the millage rate this board sets every year. You don't really have any leeway to deviate from the formula for calculating ad valorem taxes. With special assessments, it's not set by statute. The method of calculating the dollar amount imposed against each property is determined solely by the board in your discretion. It may be for a given project or service, there's five or six different ways that you could conceivably spread the cost among the affected property owners. You can choose any of those methods so long as you determine that for your community, on the whole, it's fair and reasonable. That's the case law jargon. You have to determine that it's fair and reasonable. And then lastly, due process. Any time you impose a special assessment, before you do the levy, you have to give affected... All of a sudden, I'm hearing my voice, Mayor. Thank you. The due process component merely means, in this context, that before you levy a special assessment, you have to notify each of the property owners that you're proposing to assess that you're considering it. You inform them of the amount that you're thinking about imposing against them, what it's for. And you tell them the time, date, and place of a public hearing where they can come and be heard before the board votes to actually implement the levy. So it's similar to a property tax in several respects, one of which is that it is a governmental charge. Payment is mandatory. It's not akin to a user fee in the instance of a park. If someone wants to go to a park and use some of the facilities, sometimes they'll pay a charge to be able to use the facilities. That's voluntary. They could just not go to the park and they won't be subject to the charge. With the assessment, it is, for the most part, mandatory. Now, you can set up an assessment program where it's based on consent, or you can even do a neighborhood assessment, for instance, at the request of the neighborhood. It's voluntary or consensual in that respect, but other than that, like a property tax, when it's imposed, it has to be paid. Maybe the biggest similarity between assessments and property taxes are that the assessments can be collected on the property tax bill that's mailed every November by your county tax collector. Very effective way of collecting taxes, your assessments, because the tax collector assumes enforcement responsibility. A couple differences. I think I've mentioned at least one already. It's a dedicated funding source, so when that money comes in, you have to set it aside and, in this case, only use it for fire. Things like the homestead exemptions and statutory exemptions that apply to ad valorem property taxes, they do not apply to special assessments. So property that might be exempt from paying property tax isn't necessarily exempt from also paying a special assessment. So you have some discretion there. You can determine to make it so. And as I mentioned, the calculation formula is set at local option and not by statute. So I mentioned that body of case law that's covered special assessments over time, and from that body of case law, we've gotten instruction on what a special benefit is and what services and improvements convey the necessary special benefit to support an assessment. Fire services can be specially assessed for because they convey the special benefits, stormwater, solid waste, roads, utility street lighting. Certain types of improvements, however, have been found by the courts to benefit the person instead of the property, and so they're not appropriate for assessment. Those include city administration buildings, police services, and EMS. EMS can't be funded with a special assessment. Excuse me. The reasonable apportionment method is just the method that you're going to figure out, okay, we need X dollars per year to support our fire department. How are we going to assess that among all the properties that receive the special benefit? And you can choose any method that works for your community as long as it's fair and reasonable. So some of the commonly recognized special benefits conveyed by the fire services are an increase in market value, enjoyment and protection of the property and the investment someone has made in their property, and reduced property insurance premiums. I mentioned that for a given improvement or service, you might have five or even more potential methods that you could allocate the cost. As it turns out in Florida, really two methods have developed over time, and these two methods are pretty much the only methods I'm aware of across the state for allocating the assessment among affected properties. One is known as the demand method, and that's based on historical calls for service and where calls for service went previously. And the other is it's newer. It's known as the availability or readiness to serve method. That is based on a different premise, and the calculation works a little bit differently. I'll get into some detail in the next slides about how each works. But those are basically the two different methods that you would expect to choose from if you were going to consider imposing a special assessment. Again, this is the method of how you allocate among affected properties. When a city considers a special assessment, oftentimes it assembles a small de facto team to work on the assessment. That's a staff person or two who are involved with the project, who know the city's funding needs, maybe have some oversight over the department that's going to be funded, fire chief commonly with a fire assessment, finance director, etc. You'll want to have a lawyer involved, if not the city attorney, then someone like myself who has experience with assessments and knows what to anticipate as far as potential challenges and try to gird against those at the outset. You also engage, typically, a methodology consultant. There's four or five firms around the state that do any volume of assessment work and have experience with cost allocation. And what the methodology consultant will do when he or she becomes part of the team is understand your financing needs, develop a methodology that he or she thinks works for your community, present the methodology to you, and guide you through how the methodology would work in your community, how much revenue it would raise, some of the details associated with the assessment. And then, ultimately, they prepare a report. It's sometimes called a fire assessment study or a portionment report. It's basically an evidentiary basis that allows you to defend your program if you're ever challenged on it. One way a program can be successfully challenged is if the property owner says, hey, there's no rhyme or reason to the way you're allocating the costs. It's essentially arbitrary. And if your program is found to be arbitrary, then you have to basically stop imposing the assessment. And in some cases, you may have to give a refund. The way that you gird against that particular challenge is by having an evidentiary basis upon which to form your conclusion. That's the form of the assessment report from the methodology consultant. They also help to prepare the assessment roll. The assessment roll is just that these days it's an Excel spreadsheet. It lists all the properties in the city that are subject to the assessment and the dollar amount to be imposed against each one. It's known as the assessment roll. All right. So I mentioned there's two methods in common use for apportioning fire assessments in Florida. One is the demand-based methodology. And this is basically a survey of where historical calls for service have gone during the study period. And it's either three or five years generally. But the methodology consultant will get all of the calls for service that have come in over time and determine where the calls for service are originating from. Who is the fire department responding to? Is it responding to residential property? Is it responding to roadside calls? Is it responding to commercial property, et cetera? And then based on that call history, the consultant determines, well, it looks like during that period, 60% of your calls for service went to residential property. Therefore, 60% of the amount of revenue you're trying to raise going forward will be collected from the residential property. And the balance from the commercial property is typically on the basis of square footage. Oftentimes, unexcluded parcel, undeveloped parcels are excluded from the assessment program. So if there's no structure on the vacant parcel, you typically wouldn't assess it under the demand method. This is a very rough example. Better? So this is an example that shows how the demand allocation method would work based on raising $1 million for your fire assessment program each year. However, the consultant does the study and determines that 60% of the calls went to residential, 40% went to non-residential. So 60% of the overall million you're trying to collect will be assessed against residential properties. And then it's divided on the number of dwelling units typically. So that's also something the methodology consultant helps you determine for your community. So you take the residential component of $600,000, divide it by the number of dwelling units, and that gives you your rate per single-family residence, basically. And in this rough example, that would be $100 per dwelling unit. The balance reflecting the 40% of calls that went to non-residential properties, $400,000 in this example, is allocated to the commercial properties and typically assessed on a square footage basis. So the consultant will analyze the square footage present for each of your commercial establishments and factor that in, do the math, and come up with a rate per square foot for the commercial fire assessment. And this is the so-called availability method. I think there are seven or eight communities in total that use this. It's, like I say, it's newer. It developed about 10, 11 years ago. Both of these methods, by the way, have been challenged in court and have been upheld. So generally, the two methods can sustain against challenge if you were to field one. I typically like to stay with the tried and true for a methodology because of the likelihood that if we get challenged, we have precedent to demonstrate, hey, this has been upheld by the courts before. What we're doing is fair and reasonable. It meets the evidentiary standard for a fair assessment. Some communities will take the two basic methods, whatever one they choose for the community, and they'll make some tweaks or refinements to meet their community needs, and that's totally fine. But switching to a completely different assessment program is a little bit problematic because, again, you want to avoid the kiss of death for assessment programs, which is having your program determined to be arbitrary. I mentioned that word before. An example of arbitrary would be something to the effect of, we are going to apportion the fire assessment according to the color of the house. If your house is blue, you pay $100. If your house is red, you pay $200. That has nothing to do with the cost of delivering fire services. That's essentially the definition of arbitrary. That particular system would be subject to being thrown out if you were challenged. These two methods I've gone over, however, have been upheld. So with the availability method, it basically breaks the overall cost into two components, or tiers as they're known. One is based on the value of the improvements associated with each property. So you would, basically, the consultant obtains the property value data from the property appraiser's office, figures out the value of each building on each parcel, and each property pays a Tier 1 assessment amount based on the value of the improvements on their property. It's sort of like insurance premium. It's thinking of fire protection services almost like insurance, where if you have more expensive improvements, you pay more in the form of the premium. And then the secondary tier is a portion of the overall budget that's assessed against each parcel on just a straight, flat, per-parcel basis. And it can differ from community to community, but each property pays a flat charge, including undeveloped properties, by the way. And then only the developed properties pay that additional tier based on improvement value. And this is an example calculation for how the availability method would work, the same million-dollar target for raising revenue through the assessment. In this example, 35% is associated with Tier 1. That's the improvement value tier. 65% with Tier 2. So in the first tier, the methodology consultant would determine the total value of all improvements citywide, and then basically do the math to determine what the rate is. And in this example, the rate ends up being $1.17 for every $1,000 worth of improvement value. Then the balance of costs are done on a per-parcel basis. So you take the amount to be collected, $650,000 in this example, divide it by the 6,000 parcels in my example community, and that gives you your rate per parcel. So someone who has a developed property would pay the flat rate of $1.08 plus the $1.17 for every $1,000 worth of improvement value. The total assessment is the combination of both tiers. A number of detailed considerations associated with every assessment program. I mentioned having the methodology come in and assess with developing the methodology at the outset. Typically, you want to have the methodology come back periodically, the consultant come back periodically to review the data upon which the assessment is premised, to make sure that it's fresh and remains legally defensible. Especially important in the demand-based methodology because the rate structure is dependent on that five-year look-back. You know, what the rates were, what the rates are determined by where the calls for service went during that five-year look-back. Well, that ratio could change over time. So it's important to have the study updated periodically. Level of funding is an important consideration. You can assess for almost all of the costs of a given fire department budget. So in my example of $1 million, if your fire department is right there at $1 million, you could get pretty close to that as far as the amount you recovered through the assessment. You can't fully fund in most cases, but you can get pretty close. But the funding level is entirely a matter of discretion for the board to determine. You can determine as a matter of policy. We don't want to fund 100% of our fire department with the assessment. We'll go with 70% or 50% or 10%. The percentage is really up to you. And it varies from community to community. It's somewhat rare to have a city fully assess for fire. Not unheard of, but it's a little bit rare. There's almost some continued support from the general funds, but the assessment can make up a very substantial portion of it. And once it's in place, once you go through the mechanics of levying it and imposing it, it tends to be a reliable revenue source from year to year. You can increase the amount or decrease the amount. But it's a little bit different than a property tax because, again, it's not based on the assigned values from the property appraiser. The amount doesn't necessarily vary from year to year based on downturns in the economy or other forces beyond the city's control. So level of funding is a big consideration. Exemptions. I mentioned that the exemptions that apply to ad valorem taxes do not automatically apply to special assessments. You as a board can make policy determinations as to whether or not you want to exempt certain properties. Common exemptions, especially in the fire space, are all the properties that are owned by nonprofits and oftentimes churches as well. And the underlying rationale there is that the properties that provide services such as churches and nonprofits, oftentimes those same set of services have to be provided by the city. So they're providing a public good, even if they're not public entities, which is the basis for your ability to exempt them. Important to consider, though, if you determine to exempt churches and nonprofits, that's effectively revenue that won't come in. Because what you can't do is say you determine to exempt all those properties and you realize, oh, that's going to result in $100,000 less of revenue every year. You can't take that $100,000 and make it up by increasing everybody else's assessment. Because that would violate the benefit and apportionment requirements I talked about earlier. Instead, you would determine to fund that $100,000 cost of exemption from your general funds. And in many cases, that's not a problem because it's rare to fully fund the assessment anyway. You're going to be contributing something anyway. So you can use your contribution to cover the cost of the exemptions. Also important consideration is the collection method. Basically, two methods you can go about collecting the assessment. One is you can send property owners a direct bill. Following the hearing you have to impose the assessment, you send everyone an invoice that says, hey, your property has been assessed as of resolution 2026-14, adopted on such and such date. Your assessment amount is $100 to cover fire expenses for the upcoming fiscal year. Please remit payment within 30 days or what have you. That system is effective, and that was the only way to collect assessments for many, many years in the state of Florida. However, if someone doesn't pay the direct billed assessment, the only way you can enforce upon them is to basically foreclose, sue them over it. And that's problematic when you're talking about $100, $150 assessment, you know, forcing the sale of their property. The modern way that most governments go about collecting assessments is through the tax bill collection method. That's by including the charge on the tax bill mailed each November by the tax collector. Very, very helpful because the collection rate goes sky high. It goes from about 50% to 70% for direct billing all the way up to close to 100% because most people pay their property tax bill. But importantly, if someone doesn't pay their property tax bill, you, the city, don't have to enforce. The tax collector enforces on your behalf through the tax certificate tax deed process. It's very, very efficient. One wrinkle of the tax bill collection system, though, is timing. You have to announce to the tax collector, the property appraiser, Department of Revenue, and the citizenry that you intend to use the tax bill collection method the calendar year before you start collecting on the tax bill. So you do that by adopting a short resolution saying, hey, we, the city, may impose an assessment next year to fund FIRE. And if we do, we are going to consider using the tax bill collection method. That resolution has to be adopted in December of 2026 if you wanted to start collecting the assessment in November 2027. So Jennifer mentioned there is no urgency here. This is if you were wanting to use tax bill collection, the earliest this could be is November next year before you could start collecting the installments. The direct bill method doesn't have that same time limitation. You can impose a direct bill assessment at any time of the year, even mid-year during your budgetary cycle. You would just adopt the assessment and amend your budget to reflect the new revenues. Some local governments which find they need the revenue but can't wait the full year, they start by direct billing. And then in the second annual cycle, they move on to the tax bill. And that can be effective because if you have holdouts or delinquent payments from the first year, you just roll those onto the tax bill in year two and you get current by that second year. It's a pretty effective approach. And then there are certain startup and annual administration expenses. There is the methodology consultant. They do charge for their services. The lawyer in the suit, he or she will charge for some attorney hours to facilitate the process and act sort of as the quarterback for getting the assessment in place. You'll have mailing expenses. You have to send a mailed notice to each affected property owner. There's a publication requirement. So a handful of expenses that can be recovered through the proceeds of the assessment if you wish to do it that way. And I mentioned that the tax bill collection resolution, you'd opt it by the end of the calendar year to start collecting the following year. There are statutes in place, state laws, which authorize the imposition of special assessments. But they are very sort of bare bones as far as guidance on how to administer the assessment once it's put in place. So I typically recommend what we call the procedure ordinance, which is an ordinance you would adopt early in the process that lays out the process and procedure for imposing the assessment. And not only in the first year, but for administering it from year to year thereafter. It just fills in some of the details and is helpful for staffed resource for them to turn to if they should field questions about the assessment mid-year that you can't readily answer by turning to the statute alone. And then following that ordinance, you adopt an initiating resolution. We call it the initial assessment resolution that describes the purpose for which you're imposing the assessment, the revenue amount you're trying to generate through the assessment. It describes the affected area, which more often than not for a fire assessment is the entire jurisdiction of the city. It schedules a public hearing to be held typically four to six weeks away and directs the mailing and publication of notice. It also describes the methodology and the special benefit conveyed by the services. Then you come back for six weeks later after that initial resolution and you hold a public hearing. And this is where you hear input from the citizenry, the affected property owners who have received that notice, before you vote to levy the assessment. I've done assessment programs around the state for maybe 20 different purposes. I mentioned earlier the sewer to septic conversion. As you can imagine if you haven't done sewer to septic conversions before, the cost of running utility lines into a neighborhood that's currently served by septic or wells is really, really expensive. And sometimes when those notices go out, the notice says, we are assessing your property, for instance, $20,000 to cover the cost of assessing, of putting the lines in your neighborhood. We're going to collect it over 20 years at $1,000 a year. So people see that and they realize, oh my goodness, that's $1,000 extra I have to pay for this conversion. They basically make their determination whether to come to the public hearing and object based on the notice and the dollar amount they're facing. And I've done septic to sewer conversion programs that were double that amount and there might be 10 or 12 people who come to the public hearing. The community basically accepts it, but some come in and say, please don't do this or I can't afford it, whatnot. I haven't yet been able to figure it out, but there's something about the fire assessment that turns people out. So when you get to that public hearing, I wouldn't be surprised if you're going to send citywide notices that this room would fill up with people who got the notice. And they say, hey, I'm here because I got this notice. I don't understand what's going on. We love our firefighters, but we don't think we should have to pay for it with an assessment. Find some other way to pay for it. Is there a better way to do it? I only mention this because the legislature, by requiring this due process and notice and public hearing process, has made it difficult to impose an assessment. It's meant to be politically difficult because you have to basically hear those objections and sometimes the crowd is a little rancorous about it. I don't like this. Don't do this. I'm going to sue you if you do it. That's a good one. That's one I've heard many, many times. So it's probably the most difficult part of the entire process, more difficult than getting the methodology chosen, getting the team assembled. It's that public hearing when the folks turn out. There are ways you can make that a little bit easier. You can undertake additional meetings that aren't strictly required under the bare minimum for the process. You can have workshops. You can have flyers or information on your website about the need for it, what it does and doesn't do, how much it can be increased in the future without additional notice. And what I've found is setting up some sort of a hotline where when someone gets that notice, it says at the bottom, if you have any questions about the assessment, please call this number. When they call, a lot of times it's just kind of confusion about the letter itself. It has some legal lease in it. It's required to have it by statute. So sometimes if they hear a voice on the other end that says, this is what we're doing it for. This is the revenue we're raising. We're asking everybody to pay toward the fire department through this assessment. A lot of times the confusion, the anger goes away, and those folks don't end up turning out at the public hearing and exerting considerable pressure in some cases not to do the thing. I think that's just about, oh yeah, the mailed notice kind of got ahead of myself there. But this, it's typically two pages. We do it front and back to keep it down to a single page for the mail out. It goes to every affected property owner at least 20 days before that public hearing, describing the service, etc. Describes the schedule of the assessment. If it's a fire assessment, it's usually ongoing from every year, from year to year. You don't have to go through the mailed notice process each year, but you typically do have to do something in the way of administration, particularly setting the rate for the upcoming fiscal year and approving the assessment roll. And importantly, it says the time, date, place of the public hearing. I like to include a line item in the notice that says, the upcoming assessment for the fiscal year starting on October 1 for your property is proposed at $150. Thereafter, it can go up as high as $170 without further notice. That gives you a little flexibility to go up in the future without going through the mailed notice process anew. And again, here's some of the annual administration steps. It's usually, administration is accomplished with adoption of a single resolution that approves the assessment roll for the forthcoming fiscal year. Once you adopt that resolution, typically during your budget setting process, you forward a copy of it along with the assessment roll to the tax collector. So he or she includes the charge on the forthcoming property tax bill. You usually don't have to give notice of that each year, so long as you haven't gone above what you explained as the maximum rate in the earlier notice. If you're adding new property, which doesn't happen that often in a citywide assessment program like this, but if you were doing a neighborhood assessment and two or three years into the assessment program, you determine that other property special benefits and you want to bring them in, you have to give them notice before you can assess them. It's all tied to that notice. Some communities include notice of the annual meeting where the resolution will be adopted to set the rate on the trim. Sometimes that's required by your local property appraiser. And you generally complete the process by September 15th of every year in order for the assessment to appear on the November tax bill. And I've mentioned earlier some of the timing considerations that go along with tax bill collection. This is a general, very basic timetable for how something like this would work. You do the resolution expressing intent to use tax bill collection in December. You engage a methodology consultant and they come in and they meet with staff. They learn about your funding needs, the call history, everything. Through May or June, they come in and they basically present the results of their study. They get input from you on whether or not you like what they've come up with, if you want them to make any tweaks, if you'd like to shoot for some revenue target below the 100% funding level. You adopt that first resolution I mentioned sometime around June, July, and then you have your hearing four to six weeks later, but in any case, no later than September 15th, which is the statutory deadline for getting this process done. And then the assessment will appear on the tax bill in November. The assessment, just like property taxes, is subject to the early payment discount. Somebody pays their tax bill in November, they get the 4% discount of the assessment as well as their property taxes. And that concludes the presentation. Thank you. I know that's a lot of material and dense. I'm glad to answer any questions the group may have. Okay. Do questions? I'll start on this side. Commissioner Gao. Thank you, Mayor. And you might have mentioned answers to any of these questions, so I apologize. But if we were to go ahead with this, for the administration of the process, would we have to hire additional staff? No. Oftentimes, most cities elect to, the methodology consultant who comes in and helps to develop the methodology at the outset, they will prepare the initial assessment rule, which, again, is that list of all the properties, and they will handle delivering it to the tax collector on your behalf. So they, other than the interaction we'll have with staff, they try to take as much of the workload off staff's shoulders and do the work themselves. That's true not only in the first year, but if you want them to, they come back and they help you with annual administration of the rule every year. So they're updating the assessment rule to remove properties that are no longer going to be assessed, add new properties that are subject to the assessment. They change the rate to whatever it is you're considering for the upcoming fiscal year, and then once it's approved, they transmit it to the tax collector's office. So there is some work that has to be done in the course of annual administration, but the methodology consultant, if you want, they can be present to get that done for you. Okay. And if there's no increase in the assessment, then there's no notice? Right? Generally, that's right. Yes, sir. Okay. And just to clarify, under the annual administration, it says new property. So we're talking about new property, not new property owners. That's right. It's the property. So if we were to implement something like this, as people buy and sell their homes, there's not a notice that needs to be given out every time a house sells. That's right. That's right. Okay. And off topic but related, has there been any movement at all in the special sessions on this topic at all in Tongahassee? On the topic of property tax reform, I know that they're calling a special session later on in June, I believe, to discuss it specifically. And in my willingness to share questions, I will pass it on. Thank you, Mayor. Okay. Commissioner Dugard, questions? Generous to a fault, are you? Is there any limit to the number of special assessments a community can have? There are no legal limit. There approaches a practical limit. Yeah. And a political limit, of course. Cape Coral, for instance, I think they have eight or nine different assessments that they impose, some for capital, some for annual things like stormwater, fire, solid waste, et cetera. If you're doing a capital assessment program, oftentimes you're bonding it. Like you create this revenue stream for a new road in a neighborhood and you borrow money against the assessment stream and use the assessments to repay the million dollars you borrowed to fix the road in the neighborhood. The bank or the lender, in some cases, is going to want to understand what the burden is on the property as far as the total assessment and make sure that if the property were ever sold through the tax collector's tax deed process, to get comfortable that it's not so overly burdened with special assessments that a forced sale of the property wouldn't pay all the debt. But that's not something that would typically factor in if you just had two or three service assessments, like a fire assessment and a stormwater assessment. It's really stacking capital assessments on top of each other. Jurisdictionally, does a special assessment find itself always geographically limited to the entire city, or can it be a subset of the city? Oh, it can and typically is limited to a subset with a few exceptions. Those are exceptions for citywide services such as fire, stormwater, solid waste. Those are really the three that go citywide. Almost every other program I'm aware of is done on a neighborhood or area subset basis because the special benefit of what you're providing or constructing with the money is really of benefit to that neighborhood alone and not communitywide. You said this was almost 126 years old as a tool. It's very old. What was its original intent to solve? Roads. Roads. Roads. Only probably the last 30 or 40 years they've been started to use for services. It was historically a mechanism for paying for capital improvements like roads, then sidewalks, water, wastewater facilities. And then about 30, 40 years ago, local government started using them for fire and stormwater. I'm looking at this as also the political issue. When this becomes a question to the population or the electorate, what is the primary benefit to them? So the property owner, how is the property benefited? The theory of benefit is a little bit different depending on which of the two methods you use. With the availability method, the premise is that all property, whether developed or not, receives some degree of benefit from the fact that the city maintains constant readiness to serve. Regardless of whether they pick up the phone in a given year and make a call, they're still benefited by the city's constant readiness. And the city incurs costs in order to provide that constant readiness that convey basically a special benefit to the property for which that portion of it can be assessed. A lot of times the way the methodology works is that the methodology consultant will analyze your budget and determine which of the expenses on the budget are basically, in accounting terms, flat or fixed, and divide those on the per parcel basis under the theory that it doesn't matter where a call originates from, a skyscraper or a single-family residence, the cost to maintain dispatch, for instance, and readiness is the same. It doesn't vary according to the construction on the property. The properties that are developed receive the additional benefit of the protection against loss of value of the properties, and that's where we basically assess the balance of costs on the value of improvements. More expensive property would basically pay more through the special assessment. Under the reasonableness test, is it possible to have a special assessment associated with the square footage of more than just commercial but also retail? Yes. I mean, not retail, but residential. You could. With the work that the methodology consultant does, they typically, if they need to determine the square footage of each and every house, for instance, it may be that the information they need to do that isn't readily available from the property appraiser's record, so they would have to spend the time to go parcel by parcel, and that would be super inefficient because the cost for them to do the study would perhaps rival what you're trying to collect through the assessment to begin with, or it would be more significant costs that you'd have to deal with. And you're not required to go to that level of detail and figure out, you know, that. Instead, what is developed over time through these two methods is a system where, basically, in the demand-based approach, all single-family residential properties pay the same thing, which helps you a little bit with administration. Staff knows, you know, if you're a single-family residence, it's going to be $125. And then the square footage tier for the non-residential property reflects the amount of fire resources that have to be dispatched in the event of a fire incident. So if you've got a Walmart, you know, you're going to require more response and more expense for the response than, say, a smaller retail establishment. What is the frequency of getting this process started and then aborting it inside communities? Very. I work with City of Brooksville. They revisited it five times. Bradford County, four times. Before, the need for the money was so great that they just said, we have to do this. Thank you, Mayor. Vice Mayor, questions? Thank you, Mayor. So just to confirm here, it looks like the variables that we as the Commission would be essentially making decisions on would be the amount of the program. The amount of revenue that it raised, yep. And related to that, it's not really clear to me how that is assessed or how you determine that amount of the program. So in a given fire department budget, depending on whether or not the fire department offers EMS services, the consultant will go through the line item of the proposed budget and identify any costs which cannot, under state law, be funded with an assessment, primarily EMS-related expenses, and carve those out from consideration. If you don't provide any EMS and your firefighters are trained at some basic level, that's okay. It's the ALS or the advanced life services that the courts have said, hey, that's more a benefit to the person. It's not appropriate for assessment. So if you engage in transportation or intubation, anything more than just stabilization on scene, you exclude those costs. What the consultant will do is estimate conservatively if there is a sense, well, that expense at training, say we train, that's something we're not quite sure. I think it could go either way. They generally exclude it from consideration just to be on the safe side and prevent you from having a challenge in the future, which, again, it typically isn't a problem because, again, I don't know the specifics of how the numbers would break out for your community, but it might be that if you have a $10 million fire budget and you could assess almost all of that because you don't give much in the way of EMS services, the rate per single-family unit might be so high that you wouldn't be comfortable getting there anyway. A $1,500 annual assessment for the average single-family residential property, it might be politically impalable. You don't want to go that high. So you would determine in that case, well, we're only going to fund $3 million of the fire cost through the assessment anyway. So you've eliminated that $7 million that's funding your EMS and various other things. Another mandatory exemption, by the way, is governmentally owned property. You usually don't impose an assessment against property owned by another local government. You can't unless they consent to it, and they usually don't do that. Yeah, and you actually touched on another question I had was how you split out the EMS and the fire component. And, you know, I think I'm tracking on what you said, but there's some nuances that, you know, the devil's in the detail specifically. If you look at our first responder workforce, you know, we strive for everybody to be fire in EMS. How do you, okay, one individual certified to do both, how do you account for that labor? Is labor going to be part of that? Yeah, for the average, the typical fire assessment program, it's really funding the operation of your department, the personnel costs. So to the extent that a portion of personnel costs are for EMS-related training or EMS-related services, the consultant would help to isolate that and take it out of consideration for the fire assessment. Okay. Yeah, that totally makes sense. Can I jump on that just for a minute? Yeah. So would that be relatively, I don't want to say simple for us, but we already break that out, right, for EMS because we get the EMS money paid by the county. Yes. So those parsing all those little things would probably be pretty easy for us. That's right. Yes. Okay, I just wanted to jump on. No, great. I appreciate that. I think if I may, there might be a little more detailed work we'd have to do to make sure that we meet all the legal requirements, but yeah. Right. Yeah. Okay. No, that's, yeah, that's perfect. So just taking a look at the collection method, you know, and just making an arbitrary assumption that, you know, tax bill collection would be the way to go. What sort of, just thinking about the tax collector office and everything associated with it, I'm sure they have requirements for us to be able to do this. Can you give us a little bit of an insight into what that looks like? So the tax bill collection statute that authorizes use of tax bill for assessments lays out the responsibilities of the property appraiser and tax collector. And basically the law is that as long as this board takes all the steps that are required under the statute, then those constitutional officers don't have discretion to refuse to help the city with its assessment program. Okay. If we've done the steps we're required to under the statute, they have to put the assessment on the tax bill. What I've found in doing this work, though, is that sometimes the tax collector or property appraiser will adopt local rules and timing requirements. It basically imposes on the cities within the jurisdiction that do assessments. I'm not convinced they have the legal authority to do that. But if the requirements that they're imposing are reasonable and they can be accommodated without undue expense or effort in administration, it's always a good idea to just abide by those requirements because you want to have a good working relationship with both your constitutional officers. And they do basically provide an integral role, a very important role, in getting these assessments billed every year and collected and remitted to you. By the way, each will charge an administrative fee that's set forth in the tax bill collection statute for their assistance. So what you do when you're developing your rate structure is you want to account for the fact that it's going to be subject to 4% early payment discount. You assume everybody's going to pay to get the discount. So in order not to come up with revenue shortfall, you increase the amount by 4%. Somebody pays early, they get that wiped out. But then you also account for the tax collector's reimbursement, and that's generally 2% of the collections. They'll net 2% right off the top, so you build that in as well. And then the property appraiser, what they charge differs from community to community. Sometimes it's a dollar per parcel. They're giving the parcel data to you from which you assemble the assessment roll, so you'll end up paying them a little something too. Okay, that's perfect. And in terms of the administrative part of this, are there reporting requirements, any sort of state or some other regulatory commission oversight, or how does that work? When you adopt the intent resolution at first, which again is for purposes of notifying not only the constitutional officers and the public, but Department of Revenue, that you may use the tax bill collection system. You basically got it on their radar that, hey, we may be using this system. And then I think there is some sort of ongoing reporting requirement. It's not extraordinary. I think it's part and parcel of the tax bill, the property tax process. But it's not like you have to generate a dedicated report every year that shows collections, delinquencies, et cetera, and provide that to Department of Revenue, or either the tax collector or the property appraiser. It might be more survey-like. We do impose an assessment. We impose one for fire, storm water, what have you. Yeah. No, it seems to me a lot of that administrative part would be the periodic review of the program in terms of just making sure that it's doing what we intended it to do. That's right. Once every four or five years, you factor in having a consultant come back and take a look at the program, make sure it's still up to date. Yeah. The last question for the city manager, actually. I know you're going to be looking for consensus direction from us to go forward with an RFP for the methodology consultant. What, I guess, the RFP, assuming we go forward with this, what is our level of commitment going forward? I mean, are there off-ramps on this? Because obviously we've got, you know, we have a requirement to make sure that we're getting the due process with our community here. Yeah, absolutely. So I would say there are many off-ramps for you as we go through the process. First of all, and I was going to go through the timeline, but if you'd like me to, I can do that now, Mayor, if that would be helpful. It's up to you, Mayor. Oh, sure. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, it might be helpful to the discussion. Yeah, I think so. So we have started developing the RFP. We have not finished it because we were waiting for this discussion from the city commission. I didn't want to commit any more staff time to that until we had consensus direction. So we will put the RFP before the city commission. I think it's very important that you understand what it is that we're asking the methodology consultant to do and to bring to the city commission. Then we'll put it out for about a month and then bring it back to you to award and then commence the work. You can jump off at that point as well. Then we'll start spending money, though, because the methodology consultant will start working. We would do the... It takes approximately 12 to 14 months for them to do their work, and then we'll present the results. All along the line, there are going to be touch points for you, for all of you. And I would say that you could jump off at any point along that line as well in terms of... Depending on what's happening in Tallahassee, right? Depending upon our budgetary requirements moving forward and so on and so forth. So I think that we are most definitely committed in September, right, of 2027, we decide to put on the tax rolls in November of 2027. So obviously, you know, your jump off... Your off-ramp would be before we start spending any money. We don't know, though. We won't know until June what's happening in Tallahassee or may not even know then. We don't know what's going to happen next year. So this would be a tool in our tool belt moving forward as well. So there are all sorts of decision points for you along the way. You know, first of all, who is going to do the work? Who's going to be our attorney? What we're going to put in the RFP? How it is we're going to assess either the availability or... And so on and so forth. And so each... At each step along the way, there's a touch point for all of you. So the... Like I said, but... You know, I would assume that you're most interested in before you start actually, you know, expending funds. So, yeah, good. Yeah, no, that... Yeah, that... I think there's a lot of important distinctions there. So thank you. That's all I've got. Great. Commissioner Sandberg in questions. I guess some of my questions are... I've been trying to think, based on your experience, what we will experience. So in this case, the Dunnean Fire Rescue, this would be their money for their apparatus, their training, their equipment, new facilities going forward. So they would be able to stand on their own going forward. Actually, if I may. You may, yeah. Thank you. That depends on what is in the methodology study. Methodology assessment. It depends on... Because we really need to put it together, a plan for you, in terms of what would be in this assessment, what would be in penny, moving forward, if it's approved, and so on and so forth. So they're... You know, staff's going to be hard at work in terms of exactly what we're going to include in the assessment and what we would include in the penny, moving forward. And if penny doesn't pass, what it is, we would, you know, incorporate into the assessment and so on and so forth. So it's going to be very much of a moving target, I think, until we know exactly what's happening with a penny for Pinellas in 2028. As a Dunnean resident, what about when our Dunnean Fire Rescue is called to fight a fire outside of our city limits? Would there be any type of reimbursement since our Dunnean City taxpayers are supporting the fire? You have a mutual aid agreement where you... Yes. You respond to calls outside city limits? Yes. The methodology consultant will help to determine the cost and estimate the cost for service outside city limits and will exclude that from assessment. No one in city limits will bear the cost of responding to calls outside city limits. Okay, good. That's what I wanted to hear. And is this more common in a rural community than in a city like the size of Dunnean? Hmm. No. I don't think so. I've done these for rural counties, dense metro areas, Cape Coral, which is kind of a hybrid. Not really. There's a number of independent fire control districts in the Lee County area, Manatee County, and their sole source of revenue in many cases is the fire assessment. So there's basically wherever you go in either of those two counties, you're going to get a fire assessment, be it from being within the jurisdiction of the fire district or if you're, you know, in a city. Okay. How are we going to explain to that elderly widow that walks up right there who's been able to get by in her 900-square-foot house for 30 years and all of a sudden it's going to cost her a lot more money to live in that 900-square-foot house? How do we explain to her? It's hard. That's why I said what I said earlier. Expect it. That is a difficult concern to respond to. Okay. And what if there's a shortfall and we have to hit her again the following year? A shortfall in the funding necessary for Dunnean Fire? Anything that's not made up with the assessment would be paid through the general funds. So during your budget process you'd estimate what you can expect through the fire assessment revenues and then you just factor the rest into your millage. And will the rep... City Manager wanted to jump in on that too. May I... So much like the forecasting that we do now in all of our enterprise funds we roll whatever capital we need operating and those types of things. Understanding we would consider in this as part of the methodology assessment as well we're going to be working on a collective bargaining agreement as well through the fire union. All those sorts of things we're going to look at and roll into the assessment. Capital then, you know, in those terms again whether or not Penny for Pinellas passes. So we'll have a... If there is a shortfall it's purposeful shortfall to keep the assessment down. And if... Sir, if I... I wanted to follow up on your last question. So fairness and equity with regard to any form of taxation it's subjective. It's a matter of opinion. Some communities have determined and this may not be the case for your community it may not be the case for each individual board member but some communities have determined that oftentimes the portion of the community that is using the service like fire that most often either doesn't contribute to the cost of it or under-contributes by virtue of homestead exemption save our homes exemption that they don't they don't pay a lot. With the fire assessment it's not subject to any of those. The fire assessment everybody in the community pays something. Again, with a single family residence it's certain 150 it's a flat rate. So some people might feel that oh yeah but I'm still being asked to pay more for something that I'm already getting. Can't you find another way to another person might say well that's kind of fair maybe my millage rate will see a little decrease because I'm also paying this fire assessment. And by the way that's not a legal requirement if you generate a new revenue source like this you don't automatically have to ratchet down your millage to account for it. You can stack it on top of your revenue. In fact, most people use this as a new revenue source. But you could you could lower the millage which would affect you know the portion of the community that pays a lot in property taxes and maybe doesn't use the service all that often. That's good because this is my last question it kind of goes along with that. But the revenue could fluctuate based on property values. I mean we're in a pretty Dunning's a pretty solid you know forward thinking progressive city as far as real estate values. But if all of a sudden again we got it 2007-2008 where there was a severe downturn then our revenue would also take a downturn. Your ad valorem taxes could take a downturn. The fire assessment generally doesn't. The fire assessment would not? It is stable from year to year which is one of the advantages of it. If you're overly reliant on one particular revenue source to fund any given service and that revenue source is impacted by forces outside your control recession downturn in the real estate market etc. Then you're left trying to struggle to make up the gap. If you fund it through a combination of sources then you kind of create a more stable foundation for the revenue that comes in every year and you won't necessarily be in the same position of having to pay catch up if your property value stakes a big deal. I think you touched on that earlier. That's all I had Mayor. Great thanks. So kind of going back to that so I get the mutual aid part but I mean I guess I'm looking at our guys back here and Jennifer so if it's part of our fire district even if it's unincorporated would they be included or you get paid back for that from the county anyway? Generally your municipal home rule powers stop at the city limits and if you're going to exercise extraterritorial powers outside city limits you have to have a statutory authorization to do it and there's no statutory authorization I'm aware of that would allow you to impose a fire assessment outside city limits. But we do get reimbursed from the county for that. Yes we do. So that's not really an issue. Okay good. So just out of curiosity and it sounds like you were saying you can't do something like this for EMS and that's because it's too personalized? The courts have found that EMS services don't benefit the property. They primarily benefit the person that's receiving the service and so anything funded with assessment has to benefit the property. That's the rationale even with police. Same with law enforcement. You can't fund police generally with an assessment. Probably debatable but okay got you. I think so. It's all probably debatable. That's right. Okay let's see. So what percentage of cities counties have this? So I know the League of Cities does a survey. I mentioned a survey where they poll their members and they say do you have an assessment for fire for storm water and I think I saw the results of a survey four or five years ago that suggested somewhere in the neighborhood of about a hundred cities out of the 470 or so there currently are have a fire assessment about a third of the counties of the 67 counties and then there's numerous special districts like the ones I mentioned in Lee and Manatee that impose them. And I know a couple communities around us are looking at it right now so they're actually ahead of that curve. Let's see what else. So yeah one of my questions was kind of and I'm going to ask city manager this because I still think I must have misheard something that 48 percent of our residential households don't pay any property taxes. Les do you recall what the number was? It's the assessed value of $200,000. Les you have to come up because I just thought I was hearing things when I heard that and I say it to somebody else and they're like how could that be true? Good evening Mayor, Vice Mayor Les Tower the finance director. Yeah it's about 40 percent is what that gentleman said about 40 percent are not paying. So 40 percent of our residential properties don't pay. Property tax. That's right. There are values under the 50s so they would pay no property tax. Right. So there goes exactly what you're saying. People that don't you know don't pay anything now. I mean I call that skin in the game and that's important but but still it's still a tough pill to swallow. So okay let's see what else. Yeah thank you Les. So I want to be clear too. So if a residential property so what so a condo, an apartment, an ALS facility like how does that work? Assisted living by the way. The ALS facility you mean? Independent apartments. Oh assisted living. Apartments. So is each one no matter how small square footage a residential property or do condos and apartments are they handled as commercial? Often the single family residentials are treated kind of like their own separate class and then it's basically residential and non-residential. Non-residential meaning everything else. Okay. So you would do that on a square footage basis. So it's really the homes. It's the single family homes more than gotcha. That's right but it really depends on the specifics of your community and what your wishes are. You have some you know you don't have to like when the consultant comes in and presents the method if you want tweaks and refinements ask. Right. Because chances are they can make an accommodation. It does make more sense to me that they'd be treated somewhat differently because I think they are different but so what I just want to make sure I'm clear then so churches and non-profits by being exempt so all that would be one big basket and there's a ball and whatever percentage let's say they're 10 percent all that would be factored into the rates but they just wouldn't be paying it. That's right. That's right. You would consider them. And is that true of the governmental property as well? The governmental property are a little bit tougher. There's conservative approaches that treat them exactly the same way. Some methodology consultants I know are a little more aggressive and they say no we're not going to shift that over to the general fund. We're going to basically include it in the amount of the assessment. It's kind of like who your residents are paying it one way or another. Through their property taxes through their assessment they're paying for the county administration building's fire service. Gotcha. Okay. Okay. That's it exactly. Let's see. I think that is... Oh and by the way ma'am that's the whether to exempt churches and non-profits that's purely discretionary. That's not required. You don't have to exempt. If you do though I recommend not just exempting the churches but to exempt all property that receives an exemption from the payment of ad valorem taxes which would loop in the non-profits. And the idea there is that many times churches and non-profit establishments they provide polling places, they provide community services, evacuation centers, etc. that provide a public good. That's the rationale for basically exempting them from the assessment. So I have this distant memory and maybe you remember Chris but that some community, large community in Pinellas County was trying to actually have the churches pay and it was insanely political. Okay, yeah, okay. Alright, I'm not going to say who it was. It was a while back. Bear in mind that you can make changes to your assessment program over time. So if you determine at the outset that we're going to exempt the churches and the non-profits and you put the assessment in place and two or three years later once the community is acclimated and everybody's used to the fact there's a fire assessment, well maybe we need to revisit those exemptions and see if they should still apply. Okay, so two questions for you Jennifer. Who will be the project manager on our side of this? So on our side Nicole Delphine is the project manager and she reports directly to me and I will be participating to a great degree as well. Yeah, I mean you could even need a little bit of a team on this one. Oh, absolutely. Okay, but I think it's a great choice. Actually, I'm sorry, I meant to loop in Les Tyler, our director of finance as well, and Chief Handoga. So there definitely will be a group which will be shepherding this. Our new intern, Olivia, right? Glad you're here. Welcome. I got that right, right? It's Olivia? Yeah, that's what I thought. Okay, let's see. And then my final question is, so I'm looking at our budget and I'm thinking because I think in general the county pays about 33% of it. That means 66% of whatever our number is probably still possibly equivalent, but then you take away all the exemption pieces you might have, but then you add whatever capital you might be putting in and, you know, because again, we don't know what's going to happen with the penny for canelis either. But that's, you know, but I get what you're saying because there'll be that, you know, once you see the real numbers, you know, and the real effects on people, it'll be interesting. So that's all my questions. So does anybody else have any other questions that have popped up? Commissioner DeGuard and then Commissioner Gow. Thank you, Mayor. What control over this assessment ability has Tallahassee on us? Can they just do the same thing they're doing with us on property tax? Can they just eliminate it? Or what control do we have over this particular assessment? They could. Okay. They could restrict your assessment powers. I know there are bills on occasion that do that. So far, nothing has had much in the way of traction. If you use the assessment proceeds to service a loan to finance a new fire station, a new fire truck, and you commit that revenue source over a period of five or ten years or however long it takes you to repay the loan, then they would not be able to eliminate the assessment in that instance because that would be a violation of the constitutional provision which says no laws shall be passed which impair contractual rights. By entering into that loan, you have entered into a contractual agreement with your lender that says I will continue to collect this assessment in sufficient amounts every year to pay the loan over time. So if they were to attempt to basically eliminate assessments, they would have to have a carve-out to make sure they didn't inadvertently cause an impairment of contract issue. They'd be sued and lose over that. Linguistically, we only use the term assessment for an obvious reason. Is that the case? Only use the term assessment? Assessment. We're not using the term tax. We're using the term assessment. Oh, very, very good point. So the case law that I mentioned, the Supreme Court issued written opinions on special assessments, upholding them, overturning them, et cetera, has made it very clear that a special assessment is not a property tax. And in saying that, they've distinguished it from ad valorem taxes, like I said. It's different from an ad valorem tax. So I've actually heard some people in public settings say, this is not a tax, it's an assessment. From the property owner's perspective, it's a new tax. But it's not subject to the same legal requirements as property tax, because it's not an ad valorem property tax. It's got its own body of law. It's a special assessment. And I try to be somewhat precise with the language and refer to it as an assessment, because it is subject to a separate section of laws. It's from the end user's perspective, hey, I've just got hit with a new tax, they want me to pay $100 extra a year for whatever the amount is. To them, it's a tax. But under the case law, strictly speaking, it's distinct from a property tax. Thank you, Mayor. Mr. Gow. Thank you, Mayor. In previous conversations, talking about benefits to the residents, is there any benefit to the residents regarding their property insurance? So many times the benefit is couched this way in the report that's prepared. The report will not only describe the methodology, but also the benefits conveyed. Very often there's a section in the report that talks about insurance. And there is a board that chief knows much better than I, I think it's ISO, the insurance service organizations. They issue ratings to each fire department based on, among other things, response times, how well staffed, how well equipped a given fire department is. Water pressure? Water pressure. A whole range of factors. And generally speaking, the lower, the lower the ISO number, the more favorable your property insurance rates are. So the report will say by virtue of having a well staffed, well funded fire department, it keeps the ISO rating low and results in the benefit of lower insurance premium than would be present if you were not funded so well. Okay. And where that rating lies, is there a difference between whether the proper funding of the fire department comes from an assessment or from the tax rolls? I don't believe it does. No. So it's all on the quality of the department service and the water pressure. Okay. Thank you. I'm going to keep that water pressure. Any other questions over here? Okay. It seemed like I just had one bit of, oh I know what I was going to ask. So it's all semantics here. I'm going to just ask this question straight out. So assessment is the legal word. You use the term new tax. I consider it a fee because you're paying for something very specific like a utility. I mean, because that's what we call stormwater fee. So, you know, everybody likes it. I don't say new tax. So, um, is that fair? Semantics are important. And in Florida law, there's a distinction between special assessments, impact fees, property taxes, user fees, and utility fees. They're all, they originate from different sources of power available to a city. I try to be careful about calling it a user fee, case in point city of Ocala. They adopted a fire user fee, not a special assessment, but they actually characterized it as a user fee and they were challenged, uh, and lost the challenge. And they were ordered to refund four years of fire fee collections to the tune of about $50 million. The service had been provided. Everybody got the benefit of the service, but you can't fund fire through a user fee under Florida law because the law governing user fees doesn't fit much like the law for special assessments won't allow you to assess for EMS. Okay. Okay. All right. Well, cool. I guess we took care of that. Um, so, uh, before we talk about consensus direction, I do. It's sometimes called a non-ad valorem assessment. The, the old term for it is special assessment. It's referred to as a non-ad valorem assessment when you're collecting the thing on the tax bill to distinguish it from the ad valorem at the top of the bill. Sorry. Well, I'm going to call it a new assessment and then I'll try to explain it beyond that. Um, okay. I think I want right now to open it up for public input. Anybody in the audience wish to come forward and speak on this issue? Okay. Seeing no one coming forward, I'll close public input. And, um, Jennifer, before we do our final comments and, uh, what you, you want consensus direction to go forward with, uh, um, with preparing bid specs. Is, and anything else as far as next steps that you need to? I, I do. Yes. Um, so we would prepare the, uh, proposal, uh, and, and all the bullet points, if you will, within that proposal, uh, bring it back to the city commission, uh, for your approval of that, uh, proposal. And, uh, you may not approve it on the first, first, uh, uh, run through. Uh, we're going to most likely need to call, um, in regards to that either a special meeting, if we can fit it into a workshop, that would be wonderful as well, because you're going to want to discuss it. There's going to be a lot in there, um, as far as what we're, we're, we're expecting the consultant to do as we started off the meeting with saying, this is not, we're not in a state of urgency. And usually because when we call a special meeting, there is a state of urgency. Usually we're declaring a state of emergency because there's a hurricane or something, but we're not there now. We're going to do this slow and steady and very, very carefully as advised by, by Chris. Um, we will, I also want to bring back to you when we bring back the final version of the RFP, what the communications plan is going to be moving forward as well. Um, Jorge and I attend the city managers consortium breakfast. As you all know, we heard from two cities, uh, Kissimmee and, uh, Winter Garden. And one had a assessment, uh, that passed and one failed. I don't remember which one was which, to be honest with you. And actually the one that, that failed in was when the city commission had pulled the plug at very late stages, um, as a result of, of, of, uh, some, some, um, consternation, if you will, within the community. But what the city manager, the one that, that passed, uh, had advised is that involve the public and call public meetings. And this is Dunedin and that's what we're going to do. Um, we need to involve the public all along the way. Um, we need to have, uh, public meetings in regards to this town hall meetings and those types of things before we bring it to you for final approval and, uh, that will be part of the communications plan. So we are asking for consensus direction from the city commission to complete the RFP to bring it to you, uh, in June, we hope, along with the, uh, with the framework of the, uh, communications plan. Thank you, ma'am. Okay. Um, well, I mean, I could ask if there's consensus direction, but I think probably everybody wants to say something. So I'm going to start with the vice mayor. Uh, thank you, mayor. Um, you know, we're, we're, you know, aside from the fact that we're in uncertain times here with regards to our, our revenue stream for the general fund. Um, you know, I, I think, I think at the onset here, um, this makes sense. Um, there, there are, you know, there, there are things about this that really could put us in a very good position to actually be able to have a measure of flexibility going into next year's budget with regards to maintaining, uh, village, uh, or, you know, even, even a rollback. Um, but I think, uh, you know, I'm, I'm in favor of this and, uh, you know, I'll look forward to seeing the RFP and moving forward. Okay. Thanks. Okay. Commissioner Sandbergen. No, I, I think I heard some things tonight. I was glad to hear, and I, I think we could make it work. Um, but there's also some things that, that I, I'll really keep my eye on. Um, you know, that's what it's passed on to the taxpayers, the citizens. Um, when we talked about, I think, uh, Dunedin's a ISO PC2. I remember many, many, probably three decades ago, I think we're PC6. So we've come a long ways and we never want to go back. It's, uh, yeah, we've, we're starting to get, you know, it's under control now, but, uh, you know, that, that, that, that, that house it's, you know, it's been, somebody's lived in for 30 years is, is prone to fire as a, as a nonprofit. And, uh, it sounds like something we can address as a, as a commission. And I think everything, it needs to be treated fairly because everybody in town is exposed. So, uh, I'll definitely support it going forward, but, you know, be a lot of questions between now and when it finally begins. So I'm good with that mayor. Right. Okay. Commissioner Gow. I was a little concerned before the meeting, uh, but a lot of the questions have been answered and as long as we're going slow and as long as the public is involved, uh, I, you know, I'm in favor of moving forward. Okay. Commissioner Dugard, final comments? It would not be a surprise to the manager to hear me say initially I was somewhat resistant to this thought. Uh, you don't have to go very far to take a look at the affordability issue and the general public as well as ours and realize that nothing is more welcomed or at least less welcome than an additional possible assessment in the area of affordability. However, the other doctrine that I have is fairness. And tonight I learned something I did not know, which is that 40% of our residential facilities are not paying any tax whatsoever. Under the fairness doctrine, I'm interested in proceeding further with this. Um, you know, obviously I'm, I share everybody's concerns about this. We'll have a lot of questions as this moves along. Um, you never want to create a new assessment if you don't have to. Um, I, um, I think it's absolutely an important way that we control our city's destiny, right? Um, it's clearly under attack. Um, I, every representative of the state level that I talk to, I say the same thing. Like, you continue to make it less and less equitable with what you're doing and less and less fair. And, um, and so, and, you know, more and more people with no skin in the game, even though everybody knows, everybody's got a lot to say. Um, I think that the tough part will be the, some of those properties that are, you know, struggling that, you know, figure out what's the right assessment. But by far, it's so much more fair and equitable in terms of a, you know, a service and a, and a assessment that provides that service where it has just not been eaten alive by exemptions that property tax. And again, that's continuing. So, and again, I think you said it too. So that's another reason that fire assessments more stable. And I think when you look at what's the best stability and long-term vision and controlling our city's destiny, that means destiny, you know, to me, just, just makes total sense for us to look hard and heavy at this right now. And, um, I wouldn't have done it if we hadn't been pushed this way, you know, because I've seen some of the politics of it. But, you know, when I put that against, this is our city's destiny. This is where people want to move to, want to visit. There's reasons they do. And I want to make sure that we control our city's destiny in a responsible way. And I will say, like, you know, we're way, I mean, this is, this is way down the road here. But having been involved in the original Dallas County Sheriff's Office contract, when the Dunnington Police Department went away, and we saved two to two and a half million dollars a year, you know, we had successive property tax decreases of 10%, then 5%, then 10%. And, you know, I think we'll understand that as we move along, right? But again, it's interesting because we're going from, if we give property tax decreases, it's way more muted because of all the things they've done to make it inequitable, whereas this one will be equitable, and those will, that'll be its own thing, too. So it's kind of pulling those together to create some equity within overall payment of government services. And again, I think it's all about communication plan as well and how we communicate. Personally, I think the sooner we kind of know where we're going with this and have talking points at everything we go to, we should be explaining it. Not decided yet, but these are the reasons we're heading down this track. I think if we get ahead to that track, you know, then, you know, again, when there was a referendum to go back to our own Dunnington Police Department, city staff and elected officials went, well, or city staff because there was a difference of opinion, so that gets touchy, but went to like every committee meeting, whether it was a church committee, you name it, any kind of social club, book club, went to everything to try to make sure people understood. So I think that's part of it. But first and foremost, we're at the very beginning stages. I think it's just all about understanding it and does this give us better ability to protect what this citizens have, what our citizens have told us they want from this community. So, and of course, you know, obviously fire is easy to promote because we have a great fire department, so I'm definitely in, you know, in favor of the next step. So is that all you need? It is. Thank you, Mayor. Okay. All right. I think this meeting is adjourned.