City Manager's Progress Report: January 2022

Items Discussed:
Edmond Electric Luminance and Holiday Ice Rink (00:14)
AMI (Advance Metering Initiative) / Smart Meters (02:28)
CityLink Public Transportation System (04:35)
Sales & Use Tax (06:50)

1. Edmond Electric Luminance and Holiday Ice Rink at Mitch Park
This holiday event kicked off its fourth season on November 20th and ran through January 2nd. This year’s estimated attendance was 83,400 visitors a 15% increase. Luminance also launched their own website at edmondlights.com as well as their own social media platforms with Facebook and Instagram. Edmond Electric debuted one display, bringing the total number of displays to 36, and the goal is to add new displays each year. Sponsorship sales reached $21,000, with the goal again to ad more partners every year.
Jessica Lyle is the Community Program Manager for EE and the City’s point person for this growing event. An Advisory Committee of business leaders meets throughout the year to help with planning and coordination. Staff focused on special events, including a Merry Marketplace which featured a pop up shop event on kickoff night with 10 vendors, 5 food trucks and special holiday guests.
The EEDA has projected this event generated $250,000 in local sales tax dollars, with a total economic impact of almost $7.7M to the Edmond community.
The outdoor ice rink operated by Express Ice (Dmitri Logoutine) had another successful year with over 15,000 skaters. However, total attendance was down for this twelfth season since OKC reopened their rink that was closed last year.

2. AMI (Advance Metering Initiative)/Smart Meters
Our people continue to work with various vendors in implementing the interfaces between the several software systems that are necessary for this project. These platforms include the Landis & Gyr meter data collection field network, the Smartworks meter data management platform, plus the internal work orders, GIS, and billing systems. About 60 electric meters and 60 water registers have been installed to date in the test area to facilitate interface testing. The goal is roll out the remaining 470 electric meters and 140 water registers in the test area by late March so full system interface testing can be completed.
At that point the system-wide rollout will begin throughout the community, which will include approximately 40,000 electric meters and 29,000 water registers. About 7,000 water meters will also be changed out by our people as part of this process. The plan is to begin the full project in May and be complete in about 18 months.
Our Electric and Water Departments are sharing the cost of the Smart Meter system, which will be around $16M.

3. CITYLINK Public Transportation System
This is the 13th year of service for Edmond’s public transportation service, which includes four local routes, an express route to and from OKC and an on-demand paratransit service available within three-quarters of a mile from the fixed routes and is a fare free service to everyone.
All transit systems in the area experienced ridership declines of 50% or more due to the pandemic. Our pre-COVID numbers were around 211,000 per year. The good news is that CITYLINK has been at full service throughout most of the pandemic and we are now seeing ridership return to pre-pandemic levels, especially the paratransit service. An additional ADA Van was added this year to enable us to serve more of the community. For the first half of our fiscal year ridership was almost 70,000 people, an increase of 20% from 2020.
As with most transportation systems nationwide we are facing a shortage of CDL (commercial driver’s license) operators due to the present employment situation.
CARES Act funding for COVID-19 provided approximately $2M that provided valuable support capital, operating and other system expenses. Recently we were also awarded an additional $635, 885 in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds for pandemic relief.

4. Sales & Use Taxes
The numbers continue to be very healthy for these critical revenue sources, and this report includes revenue received for the month of November. Sales tax collections were up 9.3% over the same month last year, and now are up 8.3% cumulatively for the fiscal year. Use tax collections were up 28% from a year ago and cumulatively %16.8 above lst year. Combined collections are up 10.3% for the year.
The annual budget projects a 3.25% increase for sales tax and a 10% increase for use tax.

City of Edmond: http://www.edmondok.gov

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