County Executive Jeffrey Richardson presented the recommended fiscal year 2026 budget to the Board of Supervisors, outlining a 4-cent real property tax rate increase (from 85.4 to 89.4 cents per $100 valuation) to address public safety obligations, school funding, and affordable housing. The $480.5 million general fund budget represents a 9.7% increase ($42.5 million) over the current year. The presentation emphasized strategic budgeting through three lenses—economic vibrancy, service delivery, and quality of life—and highlighted multi-year financial planning to manage out-year obligations.
Thank you. Thank you for your time today. Not only today, but as you know, we've been working in earnest really since we uh put the last year's budget to bed. We started talking uh recently as July, or as far back as July, and we've worked our way through this year, and now we're at that point. I'd also like to welcome our community that's here today, either in person or listening online. Thank you for your interest in Albare County government. We appreciate your leaning in hard and connecting as today we talk about our recommended budget. I also see key partner agencies in the room. Uh, thank you for being here today, certainly our schools uh where we are attached at the hip on a day-to-day basis, and we appreciate everything that they do to make our community better. Uh, Mr. Chair, thank you for recognizing the the staff across the front row. I won't go back through, but we also have our budget team here today that has been working the entire year to get us to where we are, as well as our department heads uh who are connected, connected and far. At the end of today's presentation, I'm going to talk about what's next. And uh I've got 36 slides that I will share with you today and walk you through the the manager's recommended budget. But but you'll see at the end of the meeting today, at least 16 opportunities. 16 opportunities with 16 public meetings. That's that's what we know for sure at this time. That's where we will invite our public in to listen, to learn, and to share at times their thoughts on this recommended budget. This board leans in hard during the budget process with a number of dedicated work sessions, uh, looking more closely at what this budget offers, what's left out, and the board does a great job every year of asking questions and keeping staff on their toes. So, with that, we'll start today, and again, I appreciate the opportunity to be here in my eighth year as county executive. It is an honor to serve this community. So, uh today's agenda. Here's an overview of what I'll be covering today. The first part, really the strategic budgeting, it's how we approach budget development with an eye on our strategic plan. The second part of the agenda is the trends, the drivers that we're seeing in our local economy combined with our revenues, our obligations, and we'll talk a little bit more about that. The third part is key investments, and that's recommendations for initiatives and strategies as we go forward into next fiscal year. And then finally, the fourth part will be next step wrap up, making sure that the board and our community understands that today is really just the beginning of this process. It lasts for several months, and we're going to land this budget uh we hope on May the 7th this year. So we're looking forward to the work that we have ahead of us with the board and with our community. So, first part, strategic budgeting. Let's take a closer look at what we consider when we say strategic budgeting. I really like this slide, and the reason that I like this slide is that I think that it represents lenses, and I'll use that term a lot today: lenses, and what I'm asking for the board to consider is look through these three lenses. I believe that these are the lenses that our community most oftentimes pick up when they think about local government. They think about local government through an economic vibrancy lens, a service delivery lens, and a quality of life lens. Let's take a second to explore just a little bit about economic vibrancy. That's really the health and the competitive strength of our economy. What does that look like? What are attributes like? Attributes would be uh job opportunities, our business environment, the sustainability of funding that would then go and pay for our local services that we provide. Let's take a second and look at service delivery. What are we talking about? We're talking about our workforce, our Albemar County workforce, our ability to uh and the capacity to respond to the service needs of the community. Third, the investment in our business processes and our technology. We'll talk a little bit about that today. That's a refined lens. So the first lens, our economic vibrancy lens, that's a broad lens. The second lens, service delivery, it's more refined. And then finally, our third lens, which is quality of life. And please, board, let's not forget that our ability to serve the public, our our quality of service directly affects the public's quality of life. And that third lens, quality of life, it's subjective.