Councilmember seeks ordinance language making bonds contingent after staff flags unpaid Missouri contract

A City staff member said the State of Missouri has issued a contract to the city but the federal funding that would pay it has not yet been received, prompting a councilmember to propose language that would make certain bond obligations contingent on the federal award.

The councilmember said the proposed committee substitute would add a Section 6 to bond ordinances stating that bonds are contingent on the federal award being provided to the State of Missouri. "You will see we have a committee sub for this ordinance actually in several of, couple of other ordinances as well, adding a section 6 that indicates that these bonds are contingent upon, the the federal award being provided to the state of Missouri," the councilmember said.

The staff member described the near-term problem and how it interacts with local partnerships: "State of Missouri has, issued this contract with us. Effectively, they have not received any funding for it. So we are in a bit of a predicament there, especially because as was noted in in some of, these slides, we do subcontract out to others in the community. So what we want to avoid is putting ourselves, putting the city in a position where we are on the hook for funds that have not actually been awarded yet." The councilmember said they had asked for the additional language to be added to the city ordinances to reduce that risk.

The councilmember closed the discussion by saying there was an intent to introduce the committee substitute if there were no objections: "So thank you for bringing that to our attention. And if there's no objection, we will we'll introduce this committee sub, into the ordinance. But I wanted us to talk about it first." The transcript does not record a formal motion or vote during this discussion; the committee substitute was described as planned introduction pending absence of objection.

Discussion points focused on three items: (1) the contract issued by the State of Missouri for which federal funds have not yet been received; (2) the city's practice of subcontracting some work to community partners, which could leave those partners or the city exposed if federal funds do not arrive; and (3) drafting an ordinance provision (Section 6) to make bond obligations contingent on the federal award being provided to the State of Missouri. The councilmember said they had asked staff to add the language to the ordinances. There was no recorded vote on the language in the provided transcript.

Next steps in the transcript: staff were to incorporate the contingency language into the committee substitute for the ordinance and the councilmember planned to introduce that committee substitute if no member objected. No timeframe or additional procedural steps were recorded in the provided excerpts.