All right, good evening, everyone.

Good evening, everyone.

We're gonna go ahead and get started.

All right, good evening, everyone.

If I could have your attention, please.

All right, good evening, everyone.

Good evening.

I'm uh excited to welcome everyone this evening to the school board uh meeting room for the city council uh school board joint work session on the FY27 budget.

And uh we did get can you hear me now?

Do I need to start the whole thing over?

Okay, all right.

All right, well, welcome everyone to the City Council School Board work session on the FY27 budget.

Um I just mentioned a couple members that we have joining us virtually this evening, and um at this time I'm gonna turn it over to Mayor Gaskin so that she can go ahead and do the city presentation.

Oh, we're first, remember?

No.

Well, we don't have our do we?

I think so.

Okay.

We're ready to go.

I'm happy to go at any time, always prepared.

Um but so whenever we get it loaded, let's rock and roll.

It's always different when you're not facilitating and you uh come in with an agenda and then it switches.

Okay.

Uh let's see, is there a clicker here?

All right.

Okay, well, good evening, everyone.

Um, let's dive into the fiscal year 2027 budget for the city.

I don't think many of I mean much of what we will present should be familiar because it was presented in the manager's budget.

But what we hope to go over today is really the context in which we prepared this budget, the proposed operating budget for our transfer for ACPS, talking about our capital budget as well, and then finally ending with changes to how the council will be moving forward in FY28 with our allocations to ACPS.

And let's slide.

So when we prepare the budget, part of what we have to focus on is what else is happening around us, recognizing that no budget is prepared in a vacuum, but it is really based on local, regional, national, as well as global context.

When you think about our city, some things that have been impacting our community are really changes at the federal level, um, particularly changes to the federal workforce.

We are a city that has over 13,000 federal workers.

We are also a city that is starting to see rising unemployment.

And so recognizing kind of what type of economic situation our residents are navigating.

This year, some of the other factors impacting the state of the budget were just how we're seeing changes in other tax revenue.

What you this shouldn't be a surprise, but as the economy is uncertain, people are spending less.

When they spend less, that means they're not going out to eat as much.

That means they're not staying in hotels as much.

Um, and so really looking at how that impacts our overall budget.

The manager's proposed budget is about 977 million dollars.

ACPS continues to represent about a third of our budget and is the fastest growing section in our budget.

One of the things I find most interesting is when you look at some of the other categories like safe, secure, and just that represents public safety.

That's the next highest, and it's not one department, it is police, fire, sheriff, deck, and multiple emergency management as well.

And so multiple other departments across the 30 something that we have in the city are really sharing the bulk of the rest of our funding.

In terms of where our revenue comes from, the largest source of our revenue is really the places where people live.

And so looking at property taxes related to single family condominium, as well as multifamily apartments as well.

And you can get a deeper dive on this.

Uh, should you wish?

So this year we were presented with the calendar year 2026 property tax assessments.

What we saw was while there was an increase in total total taxable property tax of about 3.41%.

I think something we should all pay attention to is how this came about.

Honestly, we were projecting about 2.2% growth.

And then in the end of December, we had a large increase in both sales volumes and sales in the old town area.

So it was a last minute surge that came in.

Of that amount, it equates to about 20 million total dollars.

Of that 20 million, the 12.7 million went to the city operating and capital.

I want to point out that 12.7 is shared by over 30 different departments.

I think it's important to pause here because in every budget, we start with ACPS and thinking about how we give our new revenue to our schools and to our to a critical priority for the city and making sure that we have well run, well managed and supported schools for our young people.

In terms of our revenue overview, one of the things we look at is sort of as we grow, what is the impact on the average rev resident?