Belmont Audit Committee Meeting - June 5, 2025: FY 2025-26 Budget Review and Recommendation
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Belmont Audit Committee Meeting - June 5, 2025: FY 2025-26 Budget Review and Recommendation
The Belmont Audit Committee met on June 5, 2025 at 1:00 PM in City Hall Conference Room #360 to review the proposed Fiscal Year 2025-26 budget and recommend approval to the City Council. The meeting included a detailed presentation by Finance Director Castaneda and Budget Manager Joanne, highlighting key revenue and expenditure projections, long-term fiscal challenges, and capital improvement plans.
Consent Calendar
- The Committee approved the minutes of the regular meeting of April 21, 2025 by unanimous consent.
Discussion Items
- FY 2025-26 Budget Review: Budget Manager Joanne presented the proposed budget, noting total operating expenses of $80.8 million (including fire), CIP of $13.5 million, and a citywide total of $94.3 million. Headcount remains at 144.75. The general fund shows resources of $32.9 million against requirements of $34.3 million, a $1.4 million deficit, but the Vehicle License Fee (VLF) swap of $1.7 million from the state is not budgeted; if received, the deficit would be eliminated.
- Revenue Detail: Property tax accounts for 40% of general fund resources, with secured property tax (63% of property tax) primarily from residential properties. The VLF and ERAF (Educational Revenue Augmentation Fund) make up 18% and 19% respectively; without full VLF payback, the city faces significant risk.
- Long-Term Forecast: Without VLF payback, the city projects a $30 million loss over 10 years, and reserves (currently $28-29 million) would fall below the 33% reserve policy limit in 2030-31.
- Capital Improvement Plan: $13.5 million budgeted for FY 2025-26, with 90% for street, sewer, and storm projects. Major projects include St. James Pump Station and two street projects over $1 million. Over five years, $62 million in CIP is planned.
- Fire District: The committee noted that the fire district budget is separate and stable, with $16 million set aside next year for fire station capital reserves (growing to $24 million in five years) and legacy costs for the previous fire JPA.
Key Outcomes
- The committee voted to recommend approval of the FY 2025-26 budget to the City Council for the June 10, 2025 meeting.
- The committee discussed the fall 2025 meeting calendar, which will review the FY 2024-25 audit results, tentatively scheduled for November (last meeting of the month).
Meeting Transcript
Okay, are we ready to rock control then? Yes. Okay. So here we are on June, Thursday, June 5th at 1 p.m. in City Hall Conference. 64R committee agenda. I'll begin by calling doing a call to order. Yes, committee member Jordan. And committee member um Pang Meganars. I'll move on to it number two. Is there any public none were received? Beautiful. Then we shall move on to item four consent calendar. Do we have any question about the consent calendar? Second. I'll be over. Of course. Yes. And now we are it's time for a presentation. The purpose of our this meeting today. So who's doing the honors? I'm passing it on to our budget manager, Joanne. Um so you know, first want to introduce her. This is her first budget cycle, only with the city of Belmont, but uh municipal government, local government. So uh obviously it was a um uh a steep learning curve for Joanne and uh she took it on and uh really uh went through the process of very smoothly, and even though there were many long uh hours uh as it happens in every annual process. I've been um nothing but impressed with her uh work ethics and her attitude and you know like her performance. So um I want to you know give the um uh stage over to her and um let her present the um proposed budget to the both of you. Great. Well welcome Joanne and we're looking forward to this. Yeah, it's my pleasure. So to recap as um can we move to the next slide? I think let me see if I need to go. Sorry, that's got to it's not entertaining no, I think I have to uh you need to go and I'll try there oh all right there you go. So to recap, as you have probably heard during our budget introduction meeting last um last week, uh the upcoming year's budget continues to align with our council strategic focus areas. Um we focus on infrastructure and capital improvement as well as um power ties and community needs, so that's um still our main focus this year. Um so here the next slide you see there's uh high level overview of our next year's budget. Um so the total operation budget, including fire is budgeted at 80.8 million, uh total CIP at 13.5 million, and so a total uh city wide budget is at 94.3, and there's no change in the number of head counts, which stays at 144.75. So in the next few slides, we would take a deeper look into uh our general fund. Um so yes, so for here you can see the resources versus uh requirement for our general fund. Um so but the for the resources is budgeted at 32.9, which is uh 1.4 million less than the requirement. So but I do want to point out that uh uh VLF uh shuffle is not budgeted in the in this uh budget here, which is 1.7 million. So in another word, if the state paid us back the 1.7 million, we will have a balanced budget without the need of using general fund research. Yeah, that's can I ask a quick question? This is off on topic, but really off topic. As I have been doing the your voice your Belmont presentations, I have gotten questions about what our budget is for the city. And I got confused on whether I should say what our general fund is or what our overall budget is. So what do you think I should be saying? I I you know, usually when people ask me that, I would say like the citywide is about 100 million, but most of our essential services are from the general fund, and that's about 30 million. Okay, yeah. So I usually for me, I usually say that just because like most of our essential services are funded by the general fund.
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