The Metro Council held its second budget hearing for the 2026 fiscal year on November 20, 2025, starting at 3 p.m. with a hard stop at 4:45 p.m. The finance department and parish attorney’s office presented their proposed budgets and answered council questions. No votes were taken; the hearing was informational.
Welcome. Welcome to the second council budget hearing of 2025. Thank you to everyone who has come today to join us in the chamber and to hear these presentations by the finance department and by the parish attorney's office. Thank you also for everybody who is watching at home. We are very grateful to have the opportunity to be able to broadcast this and have people who are engaged and care about their city parish and who are watching from their desks and from their homes. Just want again want to say I'm so sorry that we had to have this one at 3 p.m. today. And so we have, I'm letting everybody know we have a hard stop councilman, councilman. We have a hard stop today at 4 45 p.m. So we need to get going. So first up, I would like to welcome head of our finance department, Angie Savoir. Thank you, Angie. Hi, thank y'all for having me. So I do represent the finance department, but the finance department also is involved with the formulation of the annual budget. So I was asked to give a high level overview of the entire budget, and then I'll do a high-level overview of finance. So the first slide you'll show as most of y'all have seen in the budget, our total budget is 1.1 billion. Of that, only 28% is undedicated and represents the general fund. The enterprise fund is the second largest funding within our city parish budget, and this is made up of the airport, sewer, solid waste, river center, stormwater, and our parking garage. The capital improvement funds is made up of mainly MOOC BR, some libraries, EMS, and then our special revenue funds include EMS Library, Mosquito, Council on Aging, our TIFFs, the Fire Fund, and the Fire Districts. We also have some debt service, and then we have our pension trust, which pays pension benefits to the employees participating in that program. And then we have our internal service fund, which is the fleet program. The next chart is a history of our personnel allotments. So over the last four years, we have decreased our allotment by 422 positions. This budget is recommending to delete 234 positions, of which 213 have been frozen since 2025. So going into this budget, we are reducing our workforce, and mainly these positions that are being deleted are within the general fund. If you go to the next slide, we'll show you a comparison of the budget from the 25 to 26. The largest reduction is in the general fund, which this is the second year of adjusting the budget due to the incorporation of St. George. Our special revenue funds did increase, decrease, and mainly because of the library reduced their budget by 11 million, but of 11, 9 million was related to capital improvements. The capital improvements is attributed to the decrease in library, which is being offset by the Move BR program. The enterprise funds, as I discussed, are the sewer solid waste small increases. The pension increase is due to the benefit payment schedules that are scheduled to be paid out in 2026. So overall, our budget decreased by one or 11 million dollars. Next slide. The general fund, which we mentioned before, is 332 million or 28% of our total budget. The majority of how the general fund is supported is by sales tax. So sales tax supports 86% of our operations. And you can see how over the past two years in sales tax, I mean in revenues in general, we have lost over 49 million dollars. The city sales tax, we didn't assume a half percent growth for city sales tax. We're assuming 10 million increase, but it's being offset by a 19 million decrease in parish, which is a net decrease of 9.3. And then the next slide is just a history of our fund balance. I thought this was important for everyone to understand where our fund balances are. So the legislative auditor recommends that you have two months of operating cash within your reserves. So our total budget is $32 million, which would require $52 million in your reserves that are not dedicated or obligated for special purposes. So if you look at the chart above, currently we have $36, which is about a month and a little over a week. So we have all made a commitment to strive to build this up to what the best practice is. Um it's important that we maintain our reserves so that if there is an unforeseen situation, we are able to respond. You know, we we are prone to disasters, unfortunately, and and BEMA does reimburse, so you have to have money to be able to start reacting and recovering to those disasters. Next slide. And then the next largest expenditure is a general government, which is the central service agencies, the constitutional offices.