Published in the High Desert Advocate March 21st, 2019 Edition.
Items on the agenda:
1) CBA Negotiations 4041-…to Authorize the City Manager to proceed with the forthcoming 2019 collective bargaining agreement negotiations associated with AFSCME Local 4041 for the contract period beginning July 1, 2019…
Chris J. Melville, City Manager/Director Community Development-
As with previous negotiation cycles I am requesting that you authorize me to proceed with the upcoming negotiations with AFSCME Local 4041 with regard to our collective bargaining agreement. As you might recall last year Local 4041 neglected to meet the statutory requirement on filing a request to negotiate which resulted in us agreeing to a one year extension of the previous agreement with no changes. In January this year, Local 4041 did file with me a timely request to negotiate for what will be a two year agreement; thus lining things back up to a three year cycle. As part of my team I will have our new CFO Debbie Sanchez joining me as well as labor relations attorney Jordan Walsh assisting again. Jordan previously worked for Allison MacKenzie out of Carson but began working this month as an associate with Holland & Hart out of Reno. (Approved)
2)… Renewal of the lease of a 420 Caterpillar Backhoe…
Chris: We had a 3 years lease ending this year, the lease has escalated somewhat, due to the undervaluation of the machine when we leased it from Cashman through Caterpillar financial, with the hours we have put on the machine up to that time, that is worth more money today … due to the cash reserve in the compost fund and that is what it is paid for out of, and to may be trying to finance a couple of new garbage trucks this year, it is my recommendation that we enter a 4 year lease with Caterpillar Financial for the amount of $9,470.62 a year for four years and the associated property taxes who go along with that. (Approved).
3) …An appointment by the Mayor and Ratification of the Council for the City’s representative to the Elko County Recreation Board, appointment Debbie Sanchez …
Chris J. Melville, City Manager/Director Community Development-
The appointment of Debbie Sanchez, CFO, to serve as our representative on the Elko County Recreation Board. This position was previously held by former CFO Michelle Giovo. With the appointment of Debbie, she will be able to exercise authorized representation of the City of West Wendover and also be able to exercise appropriate voting with the Board. Debbie has already attended her first meeting with the Board where she applied for our usual yearly request of $88,000 which is used to help fund the tourism operations at the Welcome Center along with the related advertising programs that we do. We do not ask for the total amount contributed back because the ECRB uses some of the funds for their operation and to pay the auditing firm they use to ensure the Board operates within the statute guidelines as required. In recent years, the average annual amount the ECRB has received from City of West Wendover has been between $91,000 and $93,000. Of course with the new situation (January 2019 forward) of tax not being paid on comp rooms across all the hotel facilities in the city, the estimated decline in collected room tax could be somewhere around 25% from previous years based on what I’m seeing now with January and February’s numbers. Granted we only have two months of new numbers, so we will continue to monitor it going forward. If that level of decline holds, that would result in a total tax collection decline of around $400,000 or so which does line up with the information I was told from the finance folks in the gaming industry about the change. That type of decline leads to $15,000 less for ECRB which will result in our request dropping from around $88,000 annually to the mid to low $70,000, which will require an additional amount of transfer in from the general fund for the tourism operations. So the comp room scenario does have an impact on at least this aspect of our budget. As a recap the ECRB receives 5/8 of 1 percent of the transient lodging tax collected by the City. The remaining amounts collected are divided between the State (3/8 of 1 percent); the City’s 1% Committee (1%) and the West Wendover Recreation District (14%). (Approved)
Reports from different departments and from the city councilmen and councilwomen:
Chris J. Melville, City Manager/Director Community Development – I will be attending the Wendover Utah Council meeting this Thursday evening, March 21st, … … (see front page story on Johnson Springs Report)
Councilwoman Jasie Holm:….I just want to do a little bit of a report on the Maddie’s Pet Project (the is a pet project from Nevada). It is a 2 year project, and we just finished up their first year. Sounds like some other communities where farther ahead of us that we were, so some of the things that they did earlier were not as successful, so we kind of reevaluating going into ours so we don’t make the same mistakes. I went to a conference last week in Vegas and going to one tomorrow, and to New Orleans in April. It is all paid by Maddie’s Pet project. They have a lot of stuff going on, they are trying to help us out from all over the state now. We have from Vegas, and Reno we are in the Pet Nevada world now…
Councilman Nick Flores: We are still on the planning stage here for the Cinco de Mayo event, on May 5th. It’s going slow but we are moving forward. Also I am looking about a meeting with Senator Rosen( Jacky Rosen D) Thursday to talk about healthcare here in Wendover.
Councilwoman Kathy Durham: We just got back from the League of Cities and . I tried to help out for the waterline I went to a workshop for funding infrastructure… . There is no magic money for your water, I went to a workshop for …Boys and Girls Club, it was kind of a tough day to be in that workshop because the proposed budget came out and in that budget there were a proposed $1, 5 Million in cuts to education funding and all of them were looking at cutting out after school programs such as 21st Century which is a program that we currently have at the elementary school, developing some networking and will see if its develops into something. . I went to an opioid epidemic workshop, from my perspective, … there were very valuable information Police Department and …No matter were we stand in this City, I know that we are not going to tolerate, opioids, methamphetamines…
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