The El Dorado City Council has scheduled its last regular meeting of the year at 5 p.m. today in the Council Chamber of City Hall.
The opening prayer and Pledge of Allegiance will begin at 4:55 p.m.
Council members have plenty of business on their agenda to tend to as they close out 2023, including proposed resolutions to approve the city and El Dorado Water Utilities' budgets for 2024.
A line item that is likely to be included in the next city budget is $51,000 for contract for services between the city and the El Dorado-Union County Chamber of Commerce.
Each year, the city contracts with the chamber to provide economic development services and on Tuesday, the chamber presented its annual funding proposal to the El Dorado Works Board.
The EWB approved the $51,000 request, up from the $45,000 level at which the contract has been funded for the past several years.
The increase includes an additional $5,000 for a host sponsorship to promote El Dorado as a "Strategic Lithium Player" for the 2024 Arkansas Lithium Innovation Summit, which will be held Feb. 15 and 16 in Little Rock.
Additional funding will also help to cover increased costs, including insurance rates, for the chamber.
The EWB will forward the request to city council members today for consideration.
The council will also consider appointing Toddy Pitard to a vacancy on the EWB.
Pitard, who serves as chairman of the El Dorado Civil Service Commission, was one of several candidates who applied to join the five-member EWB, which oversees the one-cent El Dorado Works tax -- a city sales initiative that is dedicated to economic-development, municipal infrastructure and quality-of-life projects.
If approved by the council, Pitard will step into an unexpired term that opened when former EWB member Mumtaz MF resigned from the board last summer.
The five-year term expires in 2025.
Billy Green, a member of the EWU Water Advisory Board, is up for re-appointment to the advisory board.
Council members are also expected to hear updates on several ongoing city projects and issues, including a contract for services with the Murphy Arts District; a large drainage improvement and repair project that has closed a section of 10th Street for the past several months; and the status of an effort to appoint a civil traffic warden to enforce the downtown parking ordinance.
A parking attendant has not been assigned to the area since 2019 and the newly-created position of civil traffic warden will be manned by an existing city employee and fall under the direction of the El Dorado Police Department.