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.
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.