So I'd like to call to order this meeting of the special fiscal committee of the Bloomington Common Council for Thursday, August 21st, 2025.

While we have committee members, Hobie Stasberg, Isab Asari, and myself, this is about not Smith present.

And then from the Office of the City Clerk, we have City Clerk.

Nicole Bolden, Deputy Clerk, Safe McDowell.

From the council office, we have Lisa Leonor, attorney.

And then we have Deputy Mayor.

Yeah.

Matt.

It's been a long way to.

And we have control of Justin.

So thank you all for being here.

Thank you to any members of the public.

Oh, and Councilmember Rollo is in the waiting room.

So come in.

We will have complete committee here.

All right, I'd like to start by maybe moving things around a little bit on the agenda because I believe Councilmember Asari has to leave at 12.

Is that still true?

Yeah.

Um so he is kind of our liaison between the uh fiscal committee and the budget task force.

I wanted to move up item number five in the agenda.

Um, which is plans to follow up on the 256 budget process.

Um move that ahead of item number two, and then firstly down.

Council member SRA.

Yes.

I will vote yes, Council Member Stasford.

Yes.

Okay.

Thank you.

Um because we were maybe getting ahead of ourselves on Monday at the first budget hearing, asking, well, how do what do we do now?

How do we follow up?

How do we get feedback process?

Um, I wanted to kind of open that up.

Um, and I know council member Asari has some ideas on that.

So maybe I don't know if you want to go first, uh, Isok.

And yeah, yeah.

I mean, and and I think it's uh it may be more useful to hear from Gretchen and the controller.

I mean, what is you know, I the question that that I think a lot of us have is like, what is what is useful and needful feedback at this time, um, you know, and and and what's the sort of um horizon of of impact there.

Um that's in terms of I think the sort of process questions, right?

And so so because in every single presentation, we've asked these questions about, you know, have we determined the outcomes correctly?

Have we how do we present this, you know, those type of questions.

Um, but then I think that there's also the question, and as we're doing it this year, what do we want to do between now and the time that we actually submit the um appropriation ordinance or whatever the ordinance is called, um uh in terms of discussions, because I mean, you know, the way that we've done the the budget hearings, we haven't given ourselves a lot of space really um to to sort of opine or to debate or discuss.

Um, and so sort of I think those are those are the sort of two um uh question marks uh um for me.

Um I said like I'm I'm very happy to write up like a white paper, for example, answer, you know, with with uh attempts of answering all of the questions that are laid out in the in the packet.

Um yeah, so so first sort of what's what's helpful, what's needed, um and then thinking thinking ahead of this year specifically.

Um well from my staff on Uncle first, and then you can go by thinking about our process.

Sorry, there's somebody in the waiting room.

I just want to make sure I get it in.

Sorry, sorry, no problem.

Um, you know, we don't need to answer each and every one of those questions in the budget board immediately because they're big long-term questions, but um, I think if we can all understand kind of the three stages of the process and the software, that will really help because if we do the first step right, the second step and the third step get much easier.

Um, and so the first step that we have to get right is the program inventory.

And this is super tedious work.

I just want to acknowledge this in advance.

No one wants to talk about where certain dollars for really boring routine city functions go, but every single dollar has to be allocated to a program.

That's the foundation.

So there will be a lot of really boring work.

So I think for me, what would be most helpful from you, and I think actually next Monday's presentations will be a good kind of compare and contrast is how granular do you want the programs to be.

So when we come in next week on Monday, you'll see two very different approaches from parks and from CFRD.

Parks naturally has divisions like youth sports, adult sports, things like that in their the way they do their work, the way they budget already, because they have such a unique budget structure with revenues, they they approach it that way already.

And so they didn't bother to go through and say youth soccer, adult soccer, youth, you know, pickleball or whatever.

They just say youth sports, uh adult sports.