All right.

Um welcome everyone to the Ben City Council work session for February 25th.

Uh we'll start with um a quick roll call.

Um why don't we start Council Black Sorry, you just find it checked.

Uh Steve Platthee.

Megan Norrishi her.

Melanie Keebor, she here.

Mike Riley, he Alamendez, she here.

Gina Francesa, is she here?

Megan Parkins, she her.

Thank you.

So we've got five of us here and two online.

Um so we will start with our financial strategy discussion.

I I will kick this off.

I want to welcome Senator Nelson and Dan Quick from our finance department uh to uh alongside me and presenting this information.

This is really a follow-up from our budget deliberations that we had last May with the budget committee, where we uh really spent a lot of time focused on the financial health of the city and reserve levels and the general funds.

That is that is sort of the uh key indicator of the financial health of the city and uh a lot of attention paid to it.

Reserve levels.

So remember we have uh 16 a pa financial policy um that has us at 16 percent of general fund reserves, which is about two months of operating dollars.

Um so we looked at that in parallel to some one-time revenue um through June through land sale proceeds from Juniper Ridge.

Um so we're gonna talk about that, and if you go to the next slide, the purpose today is to really kind of marry these two things together.

So we had some sort of uh question marks uh w in the budget related to just needs around uh housing and homelessness uh um service areas.

So you're gonna hear how we're incorporating that, as well as the transportation funding at the state level.

So given those uncertainties, we said let's have a a conversation with you all um as we have more information.

So that's really this moment today as to what what resources do we need to make sure that we make that commitment to our uh to the council goals, the this biennial 2527 council goals, as well as really fully understand the context of the financial challenges across the organization with at the mid and long-term level.

Uh so what we want to do is offer a recommendation as a starting point for use of some one-time resources, and that's really those Juniper Ridge land sale proceeds.

Um all while staying within our reserve policy.

So I want to be really clear.

We're not talking today about reducing reserves or anything like that.

We're still forecasted in fact to end our biennium with about 21% reserves above that 16% target.

We're not talking about that.

We're just talking about uh the land sale proceeds, how we might want to use some of those proceeds to address some immediate needs through the council goals, um, while also understanding those longer term challenges.

Um so that's that's really our goal today.

We're gonna talk about the kind of the the punchline up front so you will know what we're asking for from council, and then we'll provide some detail with uh Samantha and Dan's help uh to get there.

So if you go to the next slide.

So what we're saying right now we have 10 million dollars available in Juniper Ridge land cell proceeds.

We can go into more detail if needed about how we got to 10 million available.

So this is from land that we sold uh mainly to Brooks Taylor, the developer out there of a hundred acres that was sold at Juniper Ridge.

Uh so we're not recommending as staff to spend all of that.

We're recommending to spend 4.1 million.

Um with a focus on council goals.

So you're going to hear about transportation, some of the uncertainty that that costs, and wanting to keep the momentum going of improving safety according to council goals.

You're going to hear about housing and homeless homelessness, recommendations to implement some of the recommendations from the home committee, as well as just filling in some gaps as bridge funding for our shelter system.

That is mainly funded through a statewide shelter framework.

And then really kind of an eye towards long-term sustainable funding plans for public safety and taking some resources and exploring some options for a shared governance model.

So we're going to go into more detail about how we got to that recommendation, but I wanted to have that up front.

And then we'll come back to that later on as well as those future considerations that Samantha will cover.

And so council, I would love to have the staff go through the presentation entirely.

So if you can note questions that you have, and then we can always go back to any section, but let's look and get through everything because it's all kind of connected.

So okay.

I will try to be as distinct as possible because I could probably spend hours on each one of these slides if I were to drive them to the details.

So I will try to contain myself.

As you recall through the budget process, this fund is subsidized by the general fund to the tune of about $9 million for the biennium.

It's supported by state gas tax as well as franchise fees.

So it has a limited revenue stream that comes into this fund.

I would say that although we have a balanced budget for this fund, oh let me back up.

Also, the transportation fee also comes into this fund.

Although we have a balanced budget, I wouldn't say that we met all of our community needs that we would like to meet in the timeline that we would like to meet them.

We're doing the best we can to get there, but we do recognize that we have more demand than we have resources available to do everything we would like to do around transportation.

One of the things that we're what we're trying to do to limit cost in this particular program is kind of the same method you're gonna hear me say probably multiple times, you'll get tired of hearing it, is we try to contain cost to the best of our ability because that's the biggest thing that we have control over.