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ARDEN HILLS SPECIAL CITY COUNCIL WORK SESSION — SEPTEMBER 23, 2024 6 Finance Director Yang said the City has the option to choose. When she ran the numbers at $455,000 it came to $3.86. We have the flexibility to choose that rate. Councilmember Monson said basically the City can weight fees however we want it. Mike Wilhelmi confirmed. He said you can set it how you want at $0.25 increments. Councilmember Monson said we have control of weighting which customer classification pays what. Mike Wilhelmi confirmed. He said all of the options laid out are just options that you can deviate from, as the City wishes. Discussion ensued regarding how the decision was made to charge franchise fees for electric but not gas. Councilmember Monson would like to see what the individual resident impact would be if the franchise fee covered the $542,000 annual debt service for a 10-year bond. The current calculation of $3.00 per resident is based on the $375,000. That is just under $200,000 less than we were hoping for. Mayor Grant said he understands Xcel would prefer an even dollar amount. Mike Wilhelmi said they prefer $0.25 increments. Mayor Grant thought rounding up to $4.00 is possible. That would equate to just over $455,000 annually. Councilmember Monson confirmed but we'd still fall short of the total. Mike Wilhelmi said if Council provided a number to target, he could put together some options. He said the $3.00 is what most communities do. Some go as high as $4.00. Some a little higher. Councilmember Monson wondered if Staff should work with Xcel on what each customer class would look like. Mayor Grant thought they have already done that. Finance Director Yang said she had used previous break outs for that. In order to get updated figures, Staff would have to work with Xcel. Mayor Grant thought it would be worth our while to have Mike Wilhelmi work with Staff to get those cost options. The intent is to use the franchise fees to pay for the fire station and spread those costs over the entire city, including the non -profits. Councilmember Monson agrees Staff should work with Xcel. She wondered what the advantage of scenario #2 that has a higher interest rate.