All right, we have a quarter, so we're gonna go ahead and get started.

We'll call the afternoon session of the Arlington City Council meeting to order.

So right now we're gonna go into an executive closed session.

Okay, we're gonna go ahead and call the afternoon session of the city council meeting back to order.

We're gonna move on down to 3.1.

And ain't nothing we love more than this time of year diving into the budget, Trey.

Yes, sir.

Uh it's that uh that time of the year, and uh Mary commented about welcoming everybody back, hope everybody had a good break and all that, and um the staff at the same time was um doing a lot of things, working on preparing the budget, um, but also out there doing a lot of really unique and kind of cool things this year, right?

So uh it's there's been a lot going on in 2026, and I think we just saw the the kind of the culmination of it all this most um last month or two with FIFA World Cup and just uh just wanted to take a minute to say thank you to everything you guys did to help enable us to go do the things that we needed to.

Um Jennifer Wickman and the whole uh leadership team there as far as what all of our staff did police, fire, uh, finance, public works, traffic engineer, everything.

It was a ton of work to execute all that stuff on a global stage and to make it all really go smoothly, and I'm very proud um of the team and what they were able to achieve.

And uh that's not able to be done but for uh enabling things like what we're talking about today, you know, what's in the budget, what are the tools, what are the authorities that we have to uh help do things on behalf of our residents, our visitors, et cetera.

And so that's what we want to talk about today, but I wanted to start with by just giving a huge thank you to you all and to really all of our staff who um have pulled double and triple time uh this this summer in particular on some of the things that were going on, and so um we've done a few things here to hopefully recognize a little bit of that.

So what I want to do today is hit a little bit about where we've been recently, also what the current tax policy environment is and kind of where we're proposing to head for 27.

Um you all have seen and uh we've um relinked them here for you all in the public, but each one of these little lined things is a past presentation, and you can click on it and pull the data so that I don't have to go through some of the comparisons in particular, but looking at some of our forecast, uh love the benchmarking that we do against all the other cities in the region as it relates to per capita expenditures and tax rates and homestead exemptions and all that, and you'll find as usual we're more than competitive and holding holding things very strong there, but all those are there for you to look at.

Um and then of course we met back in the springtime and kind of revalidated what it was our priorities are because we can while we can do anything, we can't do everything.

And so what are the things that are the most important?

What are the things that are truly the priorities?

And we have areas that kind of categorize on that into mobility, the economy, our financial stability, as well as uh our broad community.

So as we've worked on this budget, there's been a number of things we're trying to do.

This is a lot of work that's constant and ongoing.

It's really a 24-7 uh 365 kind of situation.

But uh working a lot on making sure that we have uh redundancy and kind of uh different kinds of resiliency in our financial policy so that um we're able to weather some of the storms that are out there for us.

We'll talk a little bit more about that.

We're doing some managed competition.

We always do a lot of outsourcing, uh now we're doing some kind of competing of insourcing and outsourcing, putting things side by side.

Right now we're in the uh Meadowbrook Park area looking at the uh the running of the golf center, and uh we'll have something on that later in the year.

Kind of see what that looks like.

Always looking for interlocal uh partnerships and more innovation to drive costs down.

And then the kind of the big question mark out there a lot is AI and what does that mean for efficiency of services and productivity enhancements, and we're learning a lot and we're deploying some things, but also being um consistent with the law and smart and savvy about how we're how we're doing it.

Part of that smart and savvy elements really relates to a lot of the best practices that we rely on, no matter you name it, um out there with planning or parks or police and the emergency.

If there's an accreditation or some kind of best practice, you don't really have to take our word for it.

We're letting others from outside organization come in and look under the hood and kind of tell us some things that we ought to be doing to work on and improve and uh really really proud of of all of those.

Now, probably most proud of though is what we did in 2025.

Um we all know we had a severe kind of market dislocation in fiscal 25 that led into a lot of work that we did this time last year and even before for fiscal 26.

But I wanted to pause to first start by kind of celebrating some of the good work.

Um, uh, you know, things like the active.

I mean, I was just over there the other day for a retiree uh reception.

And I mean, the place was just vibrant.

It was just full of people in the whole building in the pool and all the gyms and all the rooms.

We got that facility uh open, and as you all know, that carries with it a subsidy to operate uh that facility, million and a half a year to support that, not just to build it, but to support it.

But up and done.

Reaffirmed our bond ratings, including our triple A rating from SP instituted programs that are gonna help us be more efficient out there, such as uh drone as a first responder program, improving corridors and the clean team as far as uh sign removal and median uh mowing, and then innovations like what I've seen with uh UTA and the PD on their cold case efforts, right?

I mean, how cool is that?

The code case efforts that the police department have undertaken in the last say 18 months are just off the charts uh outstanding to draw closure and to solve things that people thought long would not be solved.

And in fact, the the fact that we were working with some other tools just right across the street trying to help is also really, really helpful.

We did all that in 2025 while facing unprecedented financial challenges, and we did it that year, adjusting our budget, minimizing our cash uh flows, and ending in the black uh with no drawdown on reserves and no audit findings.

I mean, that's just a really strong team committed to executing financially at the highest levels to keep the machine running, but to do that all financially in that way.

Now, we made a lot of changes that year during mid-year, and then in preparation for fiscal 26.

Fiscal 26 has really been um almost like clockwork.

It's been right according to plan.

Um, really uh the work that we did last year has helped us get where we needed to be, and so those decisions uh have worked.

We again have reaffirmed our bond ratings, um, maintained again the triple A with SP, but we did more things for the community, reopening a brand new fire station eight, getting ready to open the NOR the updated North Northeast Library, opening this the Al Rollins Park down southwest, uh groundbreaking a new economic employment center at the airport with eSpace, working to deploy and improve traffic through our city with the new traffic management system, renewing things on Division Street, such as the Caravan Court Hotel, and hosting, as I alluded to a moment ago, truly world-class events.

Uh Arlington welcomed the world during uh all the World Cup, and then unique events like um Grand Prix, which we'd never done before.

These have all been really new experiences, let alone baseball, football, concerts, those things uh continue to all add up and are good for our tax base, which we'll talk a little bit about in a few minutes.

Last year at this time, we were talking about our challenges, and I wanted to give kind of an update to those challenges.

So uh ARPA, the um COVID funds, American Rescue Plan Act, um, that's essentially solved because we concluded this this fiscal year with all the matching drawdowns and all that, 100% complete.

The senior tax freeze, I would call stable this year because the growth in the senior tax freeze amount is kind of level.

Uh, we'll talk a little bit about why that is in a minute, but um not a real issue for us to manage this year.

Traveling housing finance corporations, thanks to y'all's uh empowerment of attorney to to go and seek um uh court intervention, we were able to stabilize that, and we've not continued to see the loss of imported dollars that are coming from other places just being taken, taken out.