The work session of the Annapolis City Council for Thursday, May 21st, 2026, will be called to order at 2.04 p.m.

And at this time, will everyone willing and able, please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance to the five of the United States of America and to the Republic.

What I nation undervisible liberty and justice for all.

Thank you.

Yes.

The first item on the agenda is ID 7926, discussion on budget amendments submitted created by the Finance Department from ideas and recommendations submitted by the council.

Thank you.

Uh we have before us obviously the finance team.

Thank you all for joining us.

In a moment, I'll ask you to just introduce yourselves, all four of you at once, and then if you want to, I will uh Alderman Huntley as chair of finance, I'll uh turn it over to you to start the discussion.

How you want to.

I know we're you have an agenda laid out that we've all seen, so thank you for doing that in advance.

So please introduce yourselves, and then we'll uh turn it over to Alderman Huntley.

Uh Darren Johnson, senior budget analyst.

Capri Turner, budget analyst.

Hey, thank you all for uh joining us in all your hard work to get us to this point.

Alderman Huntley.

Thanks.

Yeah, I'll just give another shout out to the budget team.

Uh I said this to them when we talked, I guess it was yesterday, but it's like they're playing with the man down, and you wouldn't even notice it.

So these guys have just been uh an incredible been doing an incredible job.

Thank you so much.

Uh also uh congrats to our our new city manager.

Happy to have you.

Uh all right, so folks uh as I laid out in my email last night.

The first thing we're doing is just walking a little bit through the rest of our process for the budget and when that's gonna happen.

So we're having our meeting today.

Next step is that we still need to do a little bit of work.

I think on grouping our uh the amendments into categories, one-time funds, recurring operating capital, and exempt.

Uh, if you take a look at our working spreadsheet, which I know normally we try really hard to make sure that the public has access to whatever we're talking about.

I've had a couple folks ask me for that today.

It was intentional that this is not published because these amendments are not final, but for any public members of the public watching, we will have in advance of our June 1st meeting the final amendments that we'll actually be voting on published.

Um that to say that we're still working a little bit on making sure that all of these amendments are in the right categories.

But we do have the operating recurring, the exempt, uh, one-time funding, capital, and yeah, and that's it.

Um, we intend to send out a set of spreadsheets.

Each council member will receive a spreadsheet with these amendments on them, in which you will have a column that you can mark each one with a score about how much you care about it.

The scoring system I came up with with the city manager, with the finance team is from negative one to three.

Meaning negative one is I'm opposed to this.

Even if it were free, I wouldn't want you to spend money on it.

Zero is neutral.

One is I like it, two is I really like it.

I'm strongly supportive of this.

And three is this is one of just a few top priorities.

The point is that you really do want to spread these out.

Um don't put everything as a three.

Don't I guess don't put everything as a zero either.

That would be kind of boring.

But um be able to express your opinion so that we can use them to order the list that we later vote on.

Keep in mind this is not voting, this is just a straw poll.

This is just for us to get a sense of where everybody is.

So the hope is that you'll be able to submit that uh by the end of the day on Monday.

I know Monday is a holiday.

I also know all of us sitting up here on the dais uh have been known to work on a holiday or two.

So we're giving everybody the the whole weekend, the whole long weekend to work on that, so then the budget team on Tuesday when they come back can have all of our responses.

Um on Tuesday, then we will have that uh use that information to inform an ordered set of of spends and potentially depending on what we're gonna talk about later, the pay fors.

Now the this is really the point of our discussion here is we've been talking mostly about spends.

Everybody wants to spend money.

That's that's a lot more fun than cutting money, and so uh I don't know, sometimes I have a good time cutting money.

But uh that's generally the case.

And so what we've been trying to do with this new system this year is really work through how should we most appropriately account for the trade-offs that we are making in the budget while also being fair among folks having different levels of experience, while also um making sure that it's not arbitrary, right?