The Baton Rouge City Council held its third 2026 budget hearing on November 24, 2025, receiving presentations from the Department of Development, Buildings and Grounds, Department of Maintenance, Transportation and Drainage, Environmental Services, and the Big Buddy Program. Departments detailed service reductions, staffing cuts, and revenue challenges. No formal votes were taken during the hearing; the next budget hearing was scheduled for December 3, 2025.
Good evening and welcome to the third of the council budget hearings, the third time for the uh 2025 year in anticipation of the 2026 year and 2020 budget. So thank you to all of our council members for making time to be here. Thank you to our staff that has stayed late, and thank you very much to the members of the media and the public who have taken time out of their busy lives. I know everybody is defrosting the turkey and baking the pumpkin pies. Um I know that that all feels more immediate than what we're doing here, but in my mind, there's nothing more important than what we're doing here today. So let's get started. Um today we're gonna be talking to a lot of people from public works. So let me call up Rachel Lambert with development. Miss Lambert. I'm gonna go make sure my present okay, good evening, council. Um you have a paper copy in front of you, or you should. I brought some copies. Um can we move to the next slide? All right. Here's a recap showing the 2025 and the 2026 budget, um, how it's allocated between the four divisions of the Department of Development, which are administration, subdivision engineering, permits and inspections, and neighborhood revitalization, also known as Blight. Um we also have the allotments for the current year versus um 2026 year. Um you can see a list of the contracts and professional services listed below each year. We um, and I'll talk about it a later slide, but we are having a significant reduction in contractual services. Um next slide. This is a breakdown of the budget category for each division. You can see those on the four pie charts on the outside, and in the big in the middle, the big one is all of the department of development in whole. Um, as you can see, salaries and benefits make up around half of our total budget. Professional services makes up a good chunk, but that's um the permit office is the majority of that. Um we're a pretty heavy vehicles and fuel um department, as in you know, we have a lot of inspectors out there in the field, so we're we have quite a fit bit of EUC and fuel usage. We have some contractual services, legal actually takes up quite a bit of our budget as well, and just supplies and off and and office, you know, things. Next slide, please. So here's gonna be some of the impacts to services. Um the department is seeing going to see about a 1.1 million dollar in reduction. Um division engineering, we're gonna have to eliminate our second engineering position, which is only gonna leave us one engineer on staff in that department, um, which is a planned government mandated position, the chief development engineer. Um review times will likely be longer, so we'll we will have less you know um support staff permits and inspections. We're gonna decrease the permits and inspections plan reviewers by two. That's in our South Central planning contract. Um review times will likely get longer, though, as you'll see in one of the further slides. We are very fast. We're at less than three days in plan review right now in permits, which is pretty unheard of. Though review times may get longer, we're still aiming to meet the guaranteed turnaround, which is seven days for residential permits and 24 days for commercial permits. Neighborhood revitalization, we're going to have zero general fund dollars for contracted blight abatement. For reference this year, we've spent about 2.2 million dollars in contracted blight abatement. Um we will have to rely solely on in-house crews for most blight abatement. Um there is some CDBG dollars from Office of Community Development that we have been allocated, though there are some pretty significant areas of town that are ineligible for those dollars. That means that there has to be an environmental and historic preservation review for each of those structures in order to be deemed eligible for those dollars. And there's three areas in town, um, South Mid-City will call it, um, South Baton Rouge neighborhood, and then a good bit of um Scotlandville are ineligible, which are quite a lot of structures that we you know are seeing come through our doors. The locations of the budget reduction on the right side, we're eliminating 31 positions. We're reducing contracts by you know around 900,000. We're gonna eliminate all overtime, and we've also, since we're eliminating positions, we've had a reduction, a significant reduction in equipment and fleet. Um we have are proposing some mitigation solutions that will hopefully come before you early in 2026. We want to increase certain permit fees, specifically the reinspection fee, which right now is $20, and it costs us approximately $75 in order to make an inspection. Yes. So we are also subsidizing the average residential permit to the tune of about three to four hundred dollars. So we're looking to try to break even on that.