I also love the plants.

Like it's like every inch, acres of landscaping.

Okay.

Good evening, everyone.

Welcome to the January 9th meeting of the Bozeman City Commission.

We are glad that you're here with us this afternoon.

A few uh disclaimers and how to participate items before we get started.

Anyone in the room, of course, you're here.

You'll have opportunities for public comment associated with general public comment consent and our action item tonight.

Uh if for anyone online, the same offer is extended.

Um, if you're uh joining via the meetings video page, or you can follow along passively um by calling in or uh streaming it uh from our website as well.

Cable channel one ninety is also an option for folks that want to, you know, watch it, watch us on the tube.

Um if anyone ever needs any accommodations to participate, follow along or anything like that.

Our deputy clerk, Mr.

Newby will be the point person.

Um please do not hesitate to let us know, and we want to make sure that everybody can participate.

Um for anyone that gave uh submitted written public comments prior to noon today, those were distributed to um the commission as well as at times.

I mean, there's folks that have emailed us individually throughout the day today, so I think there might be some that we'll bring in um to that conversation as well.

Um, but without further ado, please uh join us if you are able in standing in the Pledge of Allegiance and a moment of silence.

Thank you.

Not what I should be saying up here.

Uh moving on to changes to the agenda.

City manager, I understand we have one change.

That is correct, Mayor.

Due to noticing requirements, we need to move action item J1 to after 6 o'clock.

So we'll do the budget presentation for the general fund and special revenue funds first, and then we'll be at the action item J1.

Understood, thank you very much.

Moving on to FYI.

Is there any FYI from the commission this evening?

Yeah, Commissioner Magic.

Finish chewing.

Um let's see.

I was just gonna mention uh street signs are going in the stop signs in my neighborhood, and I suspect throughout town, very cool, um, but different.

All of a sudden there are stop signs where there have been for like a hundred plus years.

So just to have people, you know, kind of look around.

He has some caution, but really glad to see our street department on this, and I think it's gonna make a difference in some of our neighborhoods.

Maybe maybe we need a year or two of the flashing stop signs to really make it clear that it's there.

Anyone else?

Commissioner Bowie.

Yeah, first I just want to commend the efforts of our streets department for putting up all the traffic calming.

It's been delightful to see um little kind of painted um shapes and polls spring up in different neighborhoods.

I actually had uh a friend of a friend visiting um from New York who works on uh traffic and streetscapes in the big city, and he complimented the efforts as well.

I think that's um telling.

And then secondly, I had a number of people tell me how great the city garden party was, that they really enjoyed um all of the activities and everybody had a really quality experience with all of our staff.

So just want to thank our staff for putting that on and make sure that they know that um I heard great things.

Thank you for that.

Any other FYI?

Um, I'm sure nobody uh has noticed or heard about it.

Uh, but the World Cup starts on Thursday, and that's uh, you know, people should be scrapping in.

Um I presumably I'm not showing up to a meeting for the next two weeks, um in focus of the of our watching our boys.

City manager, any FYI from staff.

I do.

I have um three things that I'd like to share.

The first one's a little bit sad, but I want to acknowledge a passing of John Alston.

John Alson was a 35-year employee at the city of Bozeman.

Started on the back of a garbage truck in 1987, and moved his way um up through uh the superintendent of the water department all the way up to director of utilities for the city of Bozeman.

Um retired three years ago and um wasn't able to enjoy the plans that he had with his wife uh due to a terminal brain disease.

Um his services will be held on Tuesday next week.

We'll put all the information in the city update, and I asked that you keep John's family.

Um, I think one of the saddest things would that his son Killian was stationed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Persian Gulf.

And uh it took literally an act of Congress to get John home or Killian home, and he was three hours late for his father's passing.

But um, it's sad, it's life, and uh the things that we have to deal with, and when you have friends and family around you, it makes it so much easier.

So, John Buddy, we're gonna miss you.

The second thing is um you've probably seen the news of AI uh around.

Um, and I want to talk about um what we're doing with AI in the city of Bozeman.

One of the contracts that you just signed, the City and Contract, it collects traffic, data, not license plates.

I want to be crystal clear on that.

There's no LPR in that software, it does not capture license plates.

They may be in the video, but it does not read the license plates number.

But it's going to allow us to take those crash reports, analyze that information, and have really more focused and intentional um efforts on traffic safety in our community.

So if anybody has any questions of that, I would encourage them to reach out to our director of transportation, Nick Ross, and he will more than happily have a conversation about what that is going to do.

And that's that's an experiment.

I'm really excited to see how it impacts traffic safety.

Also, last week our communication specialist uh shared some important news from the neighborhood services division.

So we did um traffic um site triangles are critically important at intersections.

So when you pull up to an intersection, you're supposed to be able to see both directions.

And it's not intentional, but people's landscape typically grows up hedges, um, trees, and it's important that the citizens um private property owners maintain those site triangles for the safety of the community.

Well, we had a social media post about that.

Ben and his team were out and they came across this resident who was out there trimming their site triangles because he just read about how important it was on social media and was out there proactively addressing it.

So the communication that we have is amazing.

Uh we have an amazing community who wants to do the right thing.

Just don't know what that is sometimes.

So thank you, Ben, and your team for paying attention to those things and just I'm really grateful for an engaged public that sees that, takes action on their own.

And those are the three things I had for you tonight.

Thanks, Mayor.

Thank you, City Manager, for highlighting those and um yeah, for lifting up and and honoring and recognizing Mr.

Alston's contributions and and tragic end um to a life of great service to this community.

Um, I think I speak for the commission in wanting to extend our our thoughts and condolences to the Alston family.

Um moving on to disclosures.

Any disclosures from anyone on the commission related to any items in front of us this evening?

Okay, seeing none.

We do have some minutes to approve.

Deputy Mayor, would you be able to help us out with some minutes?

Oh, I was waiting for the next the next deputy mayor.

I was waiting for the city manager to give us an overview.

I moved to uh a move um to approve items G1 through G3 as presented.

Sorry, we're on just the minutes, which is at the very top.

It's cut, it's split in half.

Yes, it is.

Yes, it is.

Just the minutes.

I move item F1 as presented.

Great.

Do we need to take public comment on minutes?

Let's do it.

Any public comment in the room this evening on the approval of city commission minutes?

Second request in the room.

See none, Mr.

Newbie.

Any requests online?

No, Mayor, there are no requests.

Okay.

It has been moved and seconded.

Correct?

No.

I second.

Okay.

Now we're cooking.

We started at four.

This is the gears are getting there.

Mr.

Newby, could you help us out here?

Put us out of our misery, please.

Deputy Mayor Fisher.

Aye.

Commissioner Magic.

Aye.

Commissioner Bodie.

Aye.

Commissioner Sweeney.

No.

Mayor Morrison.

Aye.

Minutes are approved four to one.

Now moving on to consent.

Commissioner Magic, can you help us out on consent?

I'm going to do public comment before I even ask you.

Public comments in the room on consent this evening.

Second request for public comment in the room.

Mr.

Newby, are we seeing any public comment requests online?

Mayor Morrison, I see no request for public comment online.

Okay.

Um seeing no public comments, we will bring it up here for a motion and vote.

Commissioner Magic.

I move to approve consent items one through three.

Second.

It's been moved and seconded, Mr.

Newby.

Commissioner Magic.

Aye.

Commissioner Bowdy.

Aye.

Commissioner Sweeney.

Aye.

Deputy Mayor Fisher.

Aye.

Mayor Morrison.

Aye.

Consent is approved five to zero.

Um now we are moving on to general public comment on non-agenda items falling within the scope and purview of the Bozeman City Commission.

So this is the opportunity for public comment on anything that we're not already noticed and discussing this evening that falls into the scope and purview of this body.

Folks will have three minutes to give public comment.

We just ask that you start with your first and last name and tell us your relationship to the city, you know, whether you're a resident, a property owner, business owner, et cetera.

And you will have three minutes in the way that you'll know is the time's moving on.

One, there's a time we're looking at you.

When the light turns yellow, that means you've got one minute, and then it will beep, telling you that your three minutes are up.

Good afternoon.

Not all at once, you two.

Good evening.

My name is Courtney Johnson.

I'm a resident and business owner.

I'm here to speak on behalf of Johnson Metal Works.

Um wanted to highlight a really positive community engagement item this last year.

Um at Dove Tails with the end of school and with the parks department.

Um last year I was asked to speak with U.S.

Um Department of Education Secretary Mahomes, and it was a wonderful advocacy for education and the trades.

We've worked with Gallatin College, but this year we decided to work with high schools.

So what started as a very small idea reached out to the school district, the career coordinator Carl Schwartz and I said, hey, let's reach out to the parks department.

Maybe we can do a small project there.

Um it got the attention of Governor Gianforte, the Department of Commerce director, the Department of Labor Director.

It blew up into a very large project with not one but both high schools.

Um my staff probably put in over a hundred hours.

We hosted a workshop, uh shop tour with over 50 kids that the governor attended.

Uh we put him to work.

He said he only had 15 minutes to tour, but he spent over two hours talking with the students and the importance of the work that they're doing at the high schools.

Um so we were in the classrooms talking about design drawings, fabrication drawings, um, and a lot of work in the shop doing QC, and as a result, we are proud to say that we got four park benches out of it.

So uh they're they're beautiful.

Uh we had so much fun, however, we ran out of time to install them for the parks department.

So we had an idea of maybe showcasing them in City Hall.

I'll put a formal request in, but I thought for the summer, why not highlight what happens with good partnership?

Um the other two great outcomes of that.

Uh, Matt Workman reached out.

He was doing some spring cleaning in the yards and had a ton, I mean hundreds of tons of rail that cannot be recycled because of the alloy.

So we picked it up and we got to teach the students how to use a gas axe, which is as terrifying as it sounds.

And um, we delivered not only scrap material from the city of Bozeman, but also Johnson Metal Works to the school, which is a heavy expense that they have a hard time doing.

So we had a blast.

We hope to do it again in the future, and so if there's any city projects, we'd love to put the students to work.

So um, and John Alston gave my son his first hard hat when he was two years old.

So very sad to hear that.

But thank you guys for letting that partnership take place this year.

It's lots of fun.

I'll send more pictures.

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

Hi there, uh Mark Campanelli, Bogar Park neighbor.

I just thought I'd take this time to comment on last week's meeting on the budget, which I did listen in to as I could uh passively to use your word.

Um so uh the first is the fluoride in the water.

Um so when I was a kid, probably too young.

I watched Dr.

Strange Love with my dad, how I learned to stop loving, how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

So if you guys want to know why I'm so screwed up, like that's one reason.

Um but anyways, there's this funny scene where the colonel who's trying to start like nuclear Armageddon is talking about fluorination of the water and it's a communist plot.

Um, it's it's pretty funny.

So I always wrote off fluorination as being a communist plot that conspiracy theorists um worry about.

But I actually did my own research and looked into it, and um, the people who really pushed it in this country, and like no other countries do this, right?

Like very few at least.

Um, it's fluoride was originally a byproduct product of aluminum smelting, and people who are in the aluminum industry happened to be in the government when they were pushing putting fluoride in the water.

Um, I do your you know, you can fact check me on that, but I'm pretty sure that's true.

Um, it was something they didn't know what to do with.

Um, and then all of a sudden there was kind of a questionable study about it helping with teeth.

It actually is much better to just put on your teeth like they do at the dentist, as opposed to like imbibing a corrosive chemical against, you know, there's arguments that it's it goes against the Nuremberg, Nuremberg trials because it's a treatment that people aren't consenting to for like a life necessity.

But anyways, I'm really not for fluoride.

Um, and if it's gonna save us money and keep the workers safer, I'm all for it.

Um, so uh the second part was kind of like the quiet part out loud about us supposedly having savings because we don't have enough studies city staff to keep up with the growth to actually spend the money that we're allocating to try to keep up with the growth.

Like that that's a huge problem.

Um, so I hope we really can like address the elephant in the room.

Um I don't really consider that savings.

I consider that not being in balance in some way.

Um I'm running out of time here.

Um you might review the TIFF developers, so a lot I've heard economic development tell us that developers are leading TIFF instead of the city leading TIFF.

That's a problem.

I wonder why we don't have enough money for infrastructure, right?

Like maybe the city should be deciding where those tax, those diverted tax dollars are going.

Um where and how was the federal COVID money spent?

I know there was talk about this delaying, maybe that money was not spent on the water system like it should have been uh to get us through.

Um, and then just this bigger picture idea keeps coming up of expecting residents to step up versus trusting them less um and policing them more as Bozeman grows.

Uh I come from New York.

I've seen a lot of policing to keep people in line.

I just think that's that's a bigger idea that I don't have good answers to, and I hope you guys are kind of struggling with that question too.

So thank you for listening.

Thank you.

Is it Mr.

Muldowney?

Uh with an EY.

If you know my name, that's not a good sign.

Good afternoon.

Good afternoon, Mayor.

Uh, and good evening, commissioners, or good afternoon, rather.

My name is Bob Moldowney.

I'm a resident of Bozeman, Montana.

Uh, last week's meeting I spoke about satisfying the downtown URD series 2020 refunding bond, the downtown district's sole remaining debt obligation, and releasing the currently restricted fund balance for disbursement to all taxing jurisdictions.

That action would also begin to address the growing public safety deficit in the general fund caused by 30 years of downtown property tax increment being directed to the TIFF account rather than supporting fire and police.

This evening, I'd like to step back from the mechanics and speak more generally about fairness.

Every property owner in this city pays taxes based on what their property is worth today.

Taxes flow to the city, county, and the school district.

The downtown urban renewal district, the taxable base is frozen at 1995 values.

About 90 cents of every dollar those properties pay in taxes, close to three million dollars a year flows to the TIFF instead.

Not to fire, not to police, not to schools, to a separate account that benefits a hundred and twenty-eight-acre district that is less than one percent of the entire city.

At a 9.7 million dollar balance, this is not a sign of a healthy district making prudent reserves.

It's a sign of a URD district that has accomplished this purpose.

Developers do not need incentives to build emboseman, and the city's own economic and market update makes that clear.

With the warming, uh warmer weather on the west side, the street racing has started again.

Motorcycles and cars running long straightaways, mostly in the evenings.

There have been fatal accidents on the roads, as we all know.

The outlying neighborhoods of this city deserve the same level of police presence and protection that downtown receives.

The police station sits just north of the downtown URD, south of the cannery district, and east of 7th Avenue.

I'm not suggesting that's a deliberate placement.

Geography is geography.

And where resources are concentrated tells you something about where the focus has been.

Every business in this city needs the same thing.

Um that when something goes wrong, someone shows up.

Fire and police, the general fund pays for that.

Downtown success is real, it's worth celebrating, but 30 years is long enough.

It's time for downtown property taxes to support fire and police the same way every other pro same way every other property owner in Bozeman already does.

And I save some time.

Anything else you want to impart?

No, but I did it does bring to mind an interesting, you know, the point of I remember seeing an article in uh New York New Yorker magazine.

Um I'm from back east originally.

Um, the the East Coast version of what the country looks like.

New York, George Washington Bridge, New Jersey, Pacific Ocean.

No concept.

Some people in this in the in Bozeman would argue that, again, not a slight, this is not a dig, but that Bozeman City sort of looks at Seventh Avenue, the you know, the mountains and its butte, and there's a lot of us out there.

You know, the lot in this in the the west side is entirely different, just the makeup of the composition, the way the street, you know, the we're running on old farm roads, basically.

And you get a lot of people with a lot of very fast machines out there doing bad things.

We could use some more police.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Any further public comment requests in the room this afternoon?

Second request for comments in the room and one final request.

Mr.

Newman, are we seeing any public comment requests online?

Yes, Mayor, we have Cindy Smith on the line.

Ms.

Smith, are you here?

I am.

Can you hear me?

Yep.

Great.

Good afternoon, city commissioners.

My name is City Smith.

I am here again asking for transparency regarding city funds provided to HRDC.

I have raised serious concerns involving HRDC, and I have not received a response from public officials willing to ask even the most basic questions about city funding and accountability.

That silence is difficult to understand, given this commission's willingness to become involved in other matters involving private entities.

The city commission participated in a letter to a private owner of a mobile home park, even though affected residents did not live within city limits.

That showed the commission can act when housing stability, public concern, and organized political pressure are involved.

The City Commission has had an extensive relationship with Bozeman Tenants United.

I am personally aware that several commissioners have relationships with BTU as a special interest group with political influence.

So my question is simple.

Taxpayer dollars should not be used to avoid accountability, protect reputation, or consider suspected wrongdoing.

Public funds require public oversight.

If this commission can ask questions when politically organized groups demand action, then ordinary residents should be able to ask questions too.

Transparency should not depend on press coverage, political relationships, or special interest influence.

It should be the baseline expectation whenever public money is involved.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Mr.

Newby, are we seeing any further public comment requests online?

Mary Morrison, I see no further requests.

Okay.

Seeing no further public comment requests on non-agenda items, we'll move on to our first special presentation.

City manager, would you like to tee up our director?

Thank you.

I would.

I want to welcome Mitch Overton, our director of parks and recreation.

Um presentation tonight is the power of parks and recreation.

Routinely get a lot of public comments about how great our parks are, and they're getting our trail system, and they're getting better all the time.

And I think uh Mitch and his staff for a big reason, have city commission and the public uh providing those resources, makes all this happen, and I'd like to welcome Mitch.

Thank you, City Manager.

Good evening, Mayor and Commissioners.

Again, for the record, Mitch Overton, your director of the parks and recreation department.

And tonight um we are bringing the our national theme for parks and recreation month, which is next month in July, and that is the power of parks and recreation.

So we'd like to take um this opportunity during this special presentation to give you a high-level overview of that and some of that power that parks and recreation can bring to our community.

But first, I want to start with a quick uh department overview.

Um, don't expect you to be able to look at the, you know, see all uh the positions and everything that's within these org charts, but these are the org charts for the department.

We um split our department up into five divisions, and they're all listed in here.

That's parks and trails, recreation and aquatics, administration, cemetery, and forestry.

That's a total of 135 team members, and that includes all full-time, part-time, seasonal, and short-term workers that manage 942 acres of public park land that includes 47 neighborhood parks, 27 natural area parks, 22 linear parks, nine dog parks, eight community parks, eight special use parks, and six pocket parks, as well as two public swimming pools, a 73-acre cemetery, 28,500 public trees, 125 unique recreation and aquatic programs, 79 miles of in-town trail, and then we also have our great Urban Parks and Forestry Advisory Board, and then the newly formed Bozeman Parks and Recreation Foundation.

Now, through the power of public of public parks and recreation, we're going to quickly highlight and provide local examples of the power of connection, the power of play, the power of community, the power of nature, the power of belonging, and the power of well-being.

We're going to start with the power of connection.

A few examples of where this occurs regularly might be at the Story Mill Community Park, or at our local dog parks, or within our recreation and aquatic programs at local community events, or through volunteerism, as you as is in this picture of our Arbor Day this year and volunteer plantings that occurred.

Next, the power of play.

From playgrounds to programs and youth sports, play fuels creativity, joy, and lifelong learning.

A couple of fun facts.

City of Bozeman has 54 playgrounds in its inventory, more than twice the median of our peer cities.

And in 2025, we had over 4,500 participants in youth athletic programs in our parks.

The power of community.

Public spaces offer room for everyone to gather, celebrate, heal, and connect.

And Bozeman, you see this regularly through programmed and unprogrammed use of our public spaces.

At the Story Mill Community Center and its programs for all ages.

At the Story Mansion String Jam, which is every other Wednesday evening and pictured in on the slide.

Or such as this evening at T-Ball at Beale Park, in our community gardens, at our public swimming pools, or in one of our 19 park pavilions, where on any given evening or weekend you'll see graduation parties, birthday parties, reunions, and weddings.

The power of nature.

Nature restores and inspires, and parks ensure everyone can access its benefits.

A few small but very important examples include our parks provide public access to our rivers, creeks, and waterways.

You experience the power of nature on our city trails in our wetland parks, such as the Adam Bronkin Wetland, and experiences with wildlife in areas such as the East Gallagher Recreation Area or the Story Mill Community Park Nature Preserve.

The power of belonging.

Welcoming parks and programs make every person feel valued.

This is very important to us, and some recent examples include the accessible trail at Lindley Park, the All Abilities Playground at Christie Fields, pictured on the right on your slide, non-traditional special use parks, such as the Westlake BMX Park, also on the slide, and the Kirk Park Skate Park.

Or one of our latest endeavors, girls' park nodes.

This is a specific planning effort to create areas within parks to make young women feel safe and comfortable in our parks.

They're open to everyone, of course, but they really target this audience to increase their use and feeling of safety.

The power of well-being.

What's important here is this is not only physical but mental well-being as well.

Some examples for in Bozeman Parks and Recreation might be water fitness, lap swimming, winter recreation, such as ice rinks, which is what your park staff is doing on the left-hand side of your screen, and winter trails, or just time in nature close to home.

Now I want to end with this photo of 65 of our full-time, incredibly dedicated and professional staff.

This is from our all hands meeting, December 15, 2025.

High level of professionalism and care, a great deal of retention in this department, extraordinary knowledge and pride in what they do and providing these services to the community.

Often when we tell people what we do, and I tell people we say, Oh, you do the fun stuff, and that's true.

We want to do the fun stuff.

But I'm telling you, to this group and to many of the people in this community, fun is serious business.

Thank you, Director Overton.

Just for the public's knowledge as well, we're not going to do questions, comments on special presentation, but it's one, another one in the belt of our series of division presentations on the amazing work that the city's doing.

We had the library a couple weeks ago.

City manager.

Thank you.

Mayor and commission.

Tonight is our second um night uh where we are going to discuss our budget tonight.

We're talking about the general fund and special revenues.

Fine.

And as we talked about last week, the general fund is about 24% of our total budget.

But it gets the most scrutiny, it gets the most conversation because it is the uh area of our budget where we have the most discretion.

So, in preparation for this, it is literally months of preparation with the director team, their staffs putting together their asks, submitting them to our finance department, and um Melissa and her team analyzing each of those requests, adding the uh staffing components, adding the um operational aspects of each request, and putting that in the budget here tonight.

As I said last week, we have taken and included as best we can your adopted priorities, and um those are included in the budget in concert with uh the director team in terms of how much they thought they could get done this year with available resources.

So here we go on 24% of our budget, but the part of the budget that gets the most conversation.

I'd like to welcome Melissa Hodnet, our finance director.

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

Just before we get started, since we ran into this last week.

Are we going section by section, then questions, how many sections so that we're able to plan.

Oh, here we go.

I've got an agenda this time.

Um so we are going to do a quick overview of timeline, but then we'll talk about some of our special revenue funds.

We'll um stop for questions after those, and then we'll talk about the general fund at a high level.

We'll stop for um questions after that, and then we'll talk through the general fund department budgets that have significant changes or are significant um drivers.

And stop for questions then.

Great.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you.

Good afternoon.

Um, as a reminder of where we are in this process, we are talking about general fund and special revenue funds, which make up about 24% of the overall appropriations.

So we talked about um the majority last Tuesday.

And I did add one more um box to this slide than what I've I've showed you all.

And I it just wanted to be a reminder because we're talking about the general fund tonight, that there are a lot of assumptions included in this general fund budget, um, and we do not know what our taxable values are going to be until August 1st.

So even though we are going to look to adopt a preliminary budget on June 23rd, um, on August 18th is when we will come back and we will actually know what those revenues will be for fiscal year 27 and have another discussion about our general fund budget.

Um just want to start off with this right off the bat since we looked at this last Tuesday as well.

Um, we'll be talking through property taxes, is really the only um rate or assessment or tax on this slide that we'll talk we're talking about tonight and didn't talk about last week.

Um, and we'll talk about the reason for for some of those percentages.

But um overall estimated homeowner impact, again, without knowing what certified taxable values look like is 4.7 percent in total for city rates fees and taxes, and um 6.7 percent in fiscal year 28.

So I'm gonna um run through this really quick, but basically the grayed outs um boxes here is what we've already talked about last Tuesday, and then um the green ones are blown up a little bit here to show you what we'll be talking about tonight.

So um special revenue funds first will um talk through, and I just want to acknowledge that we are not gonna talk specifically about senior transportation.

I don't have a slide, but if you have questions on that, please feel free to ask them when we um get to the end of special revenue funds.

And then general fund are going to be all your purple departments here.

Um, and we are we don't have specific slides, we do have backup information on some of the smaller departments that make up one to three percent of the general fund, but we'll be touching on those with significant changes in those that are larger.

Okay, um, I was gonna stop for questions.

I don't think there's probably any questions yet, but I'll stop since I said I would.

Okay.

All right.

Um, so our first of our special revenue funds is our building inspection fund.

So, this is part of our community development department and accounts for all of the enforcement work that the city does on building codes.

Um, the majority of that is going to be salaries and benefits.

There are some significant changes in this fund, um, 500,000 for our edge permitting software modernization.

We're working on that right now.

We are recommending the addition of one plans examiner in fiscal year 27.

And with that, that will result in a drop in consulting costs.

We do use some consulting costs for third-party review.

So we're showing that reduction in fiscal year 28 once we have somebody on board and fully trained.

And then we do have 10 months of reserves budgeted at the end of the biennium based on the budget that's recommended in front of you.

Just as a reminder, the building department is fully funded by building inspection permit fees.

Planning fund.

So planning fund has a mixed funding model.

It's partially supported by permit fees and it's partially supported by the general fund.

And traditionally that's because some of the work is applicant driven in current planning, but there's also broader community interests, long-range planning, historic preservation, and public engagement work that is related to really the community as a whole.

So you can see probably your eyes are initially drawn to that cost recovery chart there, and we have been slowly reducing our cost recovery over time, really just because of the structure of our budget and as costs are increasing.

We really needed to reevaluate our permit fees and we have started that process.

So we have a planning fee study that has already begun, and we're looking at evaluating the cost of service for our current planning services, and we'll be coming to the commission with a recommendation based on the work that the consultants are doing.

So some significant changes I do want to highlight again, edge permitting software modernization is a fairly significant increase in the planning fund in fiscal year 27 when we plan to start implementation.

We also have 100,000 budgeted in fiscal year 28 for historic properties inventory.

On the revenue side, there are two all-purpose mills that we dedicate to long-range planning, which is about 455,000 each year of the biennium, and then this general fund subsidy of nearly $2 million a year.

And that's where, you know, this is not new.

We have always subsidized planning fund with general fund.

That number may sound rather large, and that's again why we are working on this planning fee study.

We are assuming that 15% fee increases are incorporated in this current recommended budget.

But again, we do we do anticipate that the results of that fee study will help us move closer to a higher cost of service and cost recovery.

And then I would just wanted to quickly highlight the development engineering fund because this is actually new.

So we have broken out some of the costs of our engineering department so that we can clearly see what is the cost of development review versus the cost of internal engineering services on internal infrastructure type projects.

So we implemented updated transportation and engineering fees last biennium, and that's when we created this fund to start keeping track of those fees and whether or not they're supporting supporting costs.

And these fees were just a small portion of what we can look at as part of this fee study that's ongoing.

So some of these development engineering services will be evaluated as part of the fee study that we've started.

The last special revenue fund I wanted to highlight, and really this is funds, is our community housing department.

So there are two funds in our community housing department.

We've got community housing, which this chart on the upper left here is highlighting, and community housing is a special revenue fund, but it really doesn't have special revenues.

It has a general fund subsidy.

The commission has historically wanted to create this as a special revenue fund to make sure that we can build up a fund balance in order to do some larger projects, even if we don't necessarily have enough in one single year to transfer from the general fund.

So accounting for it this way allows us to make sure that we maintain that fund balance and roll it forward from year to year for community housing projects.

We also relatively newly have been eligible for community development block grant allocations.

You can see those allocations on the bottom left.

We do keep track of this in a separate fund.

There are a lot of requirements that come along with taking federal funding, but it is another source of revenue to help us support our community community housing initiatives.

Some of the highlights here are the Fowler Housing Project, which is in process of the consensus process to determine exactly how and that will move forward.

There are also some improvements for family promise, and most of this is funded by our CDBG community development block grant allocations, and this will open up three transitional housing units that currently are not able to be opened based on their connection to infrastructure.

The other thing I wanted to highlight here is that in fiscal year 28, the general fund subsidy is about 900,000 more than what we have planned in our operations and capital plan.

So that can either be used for the Fowler Housing Project depending on the results of the consensus process or for future housing initiatives.

So we're continuing to make sure that we put as much as we can into that fund out of our general fund in order to support ongoing housing opportunities.

Alyssa, if I could interject on the um on the CDBG money for the family promise project, that looks like on the surface it should be easy to spend that.

There's been an enormous amount of work, it that is in the Genesis Business Park, which is currently outside of the city limits.

And our staff, Greg and others have been working with the property owners within Genesis Business Park, and we are really close to them submitting a petition to Annex, which will allow us to provide those municipal services which allow the kind of density that family promise needs to make their improvements on their site.

So it's one budget item in this giant budget, but it requires and has required a ton of staff time working with some really interested folks in that development to move toward annexation.

I just want to highlight that because of that's something the cities contemplated.

We're getting them off their little sewer system and onto city sewer.

Um we're gonna phase in the water and uh it's come a long way.

So I just wanted to point that out to the commission and the community, all the work that's gone on behind the scenes.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Are we moving on to questions?

Yes, and I was just gonna acknowledge while I am stopping for questions here.

I know a lot of these do have significant general fund impact, so we don't have to answer all the questions on these specific funds right now.

We can um answer some after we get through the general fund too.

Okay, um, so any pressing questions on this section so far.

Yep, Commissioner Magic.

Yeah, thanks, Melissa.

Another night put for us here.

Um I had just a quick question about increasing uh fees.

It seems to me that we've done a pretty good job of keeping up with uh fee schedules and our various departments.

Do you happen to know when we last updated the planning department community development department fees?

Um I'm not so we updated them for both fiscal year 25 and fiscal year 26.

We talked about this a little bit during the last biennium budget adoption, and at that time we did do 15% increases to permit fees as well.

So we've known that this is something that needs to come, and um we've just with the adoption of the updates to the UDC and everything.

We we had to kind of prioritize projects.

So we're really doing our best to kind of keep those current.

Yes, um, along with that.

Um, do I remember correctly that we added the ability to increase those fees annually based on inflation?

So inflationary increases.

I would have to double check that.

I don't remember that specifically.

We'll find out and get back to you right away.

The um various commissions throughout the years have had um different tolerances for general fund subsidies for planning.

And this time, when through this fee study, part of the conversation with the commission will be how much you want to subsidize development fees with general fund money.

Now there is a there's a um important part of the planning department budget that is long-term planning for the city that really has nothing to do with development projects.

That should be that's appropriate to fund with the general fund, but the conversation about you know how much should development pay its way, how much uh should um development cost here, I think is a really important question that uh the commission needs to weigh in on, and part of our fee study is going to provide a set of options for how much tolerance the commission has for um increasing planning fees.

Any further questions?

Yeah, long with uh just want to plug again that seems like every fee schedule in the city should have that automatic cost of living increase happen annually, so if we do get caught up in the UDC and stuff that uh we're increasing appropriately, um real quickly on the community outside special revenues, um just curious with the CBD uh being kind of a new thing on our plate.

Are we optimistic that those funds can be used for the majority of things that we wish within the community housing uh portfolio?

Yeah, there are a lot of restrictions on that funding, but also a lot of eligible uses of that funding.

Um, so I I believe in the next few months, maybe a little bit longer, the next annual action plan will be coming to the commission.

There's a lot of community engagement involved in that process.

The annual action plan is published 30 days before it comes to the commission, and there's a lot of opportunity for public comment and input.

Um so that's when um really the the specific projects that CDPG would fund would be decided.

Okay, and um Commissioner Magic uh phone a friend, I think somebody so I just heard from the planning director that yes, we do the inflationary increases.

Um that was before the two fifteen percent increases.

We plan to do another um in July or September of this year.

Perfect, great, thanks, Brent.

Um Commissioner Bobby.

Yeah, can you go back to the community housing um fund slide?

I'm just seeing that that's varying year to year, and apologies if I missed it, but can you help me understand why it is different in fiscal year 2027 versus 2028?

That's good question.

Um, historically, we have tried to allocate approximately one million dollars per year.

Um, so going back to 2025, that additional 250 was an amendment made by the commission at the time to add 250,000 to that original budget.

Um in 2027 and 2028, what you're seeing um primarily is the way we have that Fowler project budgeted currently, the 1.5 million is what we need in 2027 to balance the annual budget for community housing.

And um, in total, we have just really tried to increase over that million as much as we can to support that fund, knowing that bridging the affordability gap is one of commission's priorities.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, Deputy Mayor.

Sorry.

Well, while you're there, we're trying to just to everybody hop in when we have a question.

I just have a fair on this if you don't mind.

Well, how much is in that community the fund today?

Do we know that?

That's a good question.

I should have that in my notes, but it's in here.

It's in here.

You can point me to a page.

We've got approximately 1.2 million projected to start the biennium.

Okay, thank you.

Mr.

Sweeney, if you want it.

Yeah, any questions on this section?

Yes, thank you.

Um, not on this slide, but I was wondering if we could go back to the development engineering fund.

Yes.

So uh since we have this new updated wetland code, I think there's a few hiccups in the review process because that are maybe potentially outside of our control from state or federal entities.

And I'm just wondering.

You know, I'm really appreciative of the choices that you guys have made for the full-time staffing additions over the biennium.

I am sort of wondering if there were any requests for a natural resource staff person to navigate this new and then also help us apply our other natural resource codes.

And in fact, I guess actually that balloons into a bigger question.

Is it possible for the commission to see every department's ask for new staffing just as information?

Yes, we can provide that to you to answer your specific question on wetlands.

I'd like to ask Nick, Ross to come.

Oh, thank you.

Commissioner, thank you for the question.

Nick Ross, Director of Transportation Engineering.

I get the uh privilege of overseeing our wetland water course code.

So, excellent question.

Um at this time, uh the reason we have not requested that full-time equivalent.

Two things.

One, uh the total hours, we we my job is to ensure that we have a productive two thousand and eighty hours worth of time that is necessary for a full-time equivalent position uh to be on our staff.

Right now we are quite a bit short of that in what we utilize, and this is really the better point.

Um, an absolute expert in Dr.

William Kleindle as our primary uh consultant support for wetland and water course review.

Um I would struggle to find anybody better, um, possibly in this country, uh, to take on the primary review of development projects that have impacts to wetlands and water courses than Dr.

Kleindel.

And so um the relationship we have with him has been working so well that uh right at this point, sometime he might retire.

Um I wish him the best.

That would be the time where I would suggest we look at bringing that in-house right now.

We get such great value in his services though.

Thank you so much.

Yes, I have enormous confidence in Mr.

Kleindall.

So that is wonderful to know.

And then I as you're standing here, thank you for being here.

Um I just have one other question that potentially you can answer.

Um, I know for development review of certain size of projects, we do contract out the engineering review, only for uh single family um building permits, and so all other development engineering uh is done in-house.

So wetland water course review, so specialized services, and then um the the opposite end, just the very, very small single-family home permit.

Um, that's all that we use our on call contract with TDDH for the rest is done all by our five dedicated plus a lot of support across the rest of the engineering division.

Okay, excellent.

For some reason, I expected we would like outsource the five over ones and do the one single-family homes in in-house, but no, okay.

We quite frankly, we want our own people serving our public on those more contentious and difficult complex projects.

A little higher risk.

Okay, thank you.

Um I think that's all the questions I have on this section.

Okay, Deputy Mayor.

We should go back to building department.

Or building inspection, yes.

So, um, this whole notion about the beginning balance versus ending balance.

I mean, to end with what you said 10 months of reserve at the end of the biennium.

Feels like that's a lot of kind of building permit fees we're holding on to.

And I'm um I'm just wondering kind of how you feel about the pros and cons of of collecting more and just holding on to it.

What do we need that kind of a reserve?

Is there a rationale behind that?

Sure, I could take that.

Uh the um the state allows us to keep three years of operating costs in reserve.

And uh we live this in 2008-2009, uh, where uh when we take somebody's fee for a building permit, we are responsible for providing city services all the way through that project to the certificate of occupancy.

Whether we collect another building permit fee from anybody else.

So I think the state recognizes that it's healthy to have a uh a surplus, a operating revenue uh savings account to be able to provide those services in the event that we had something like the recession that we saw in 2009.

So we're allowed to have three years.

I think that's a little much, but um we can't predict what's gonna happen economically in our country or uh our state or our city, so I think that's healthy.

Thank you.

That's helpful.

Great.

All my questions were asked.

I think we're ready to keep moving on.

Okay, let's talk about the general fund.

Um, so total general fund resources and requirements are 137.8 million, and you'll see in the resources chart that fund balance makes up approximately 20% of those resources, and we'll talk about how we're using that fund balance to make sure that we're not um unbalanced when it comes to operating revenues and expenditures.

Our requirements include our reserves, so we're expecting to have approximately 9.4 million in reserves at the end of the biennium, and that is our 16.67%, which is required by our city code.

Um that's also in line with the government finance officers association's recommendation.

So we feel comfortable with that reserve number.

Um the vast majority of the expenses in the general fund are salaries and benefits, and we'll talk through some of the revenues in more detail.

So the property taxes make up almost 70% of our total general fund revenues, and um that makes it pretty difficult when over the last couple of sessions the legislature has made some significant changes that impact um and limit our ability to um collect property tax revenues.

Right now we are um estimating a pretty significant um decrease in our mill value for fiscal year 28, and I'm gonna stop talking about that and talk about that in a later slide.

Um, but state shared revenue is our other largest portion of our revenue is about 11%.

That based on historical increases, we're estimating to increase about 2% per year.

There is a portion of that that's based on population, but most of the allocation of state shared is based on whatever your population was at the time this legislation was established.

Um so we don't see that that's actually increasing the faster that we we grow.

County shared revenue is another significant portion of our revenue, and most of that comes from a portion of motor vehicle taxes and also support for the library that comes from the county because they don't have a county library.

Program revenue makes up about five percent, and um what that is is things like police court fines.

We have a contract with MSU for fire protection services, any recreation fees come through there as program revenues, and they help offset the cost of those services.

Um, other is essentially made up of um primarily interest income in that category.

So I won't pause on here too long because most of the changes that the legislature made happened in tax year 25, so last year, but we are still seeing the results of what the legislator changed in fiscal year 27.

So I'll focus on kind of the right side of this slide.

Um they've changed the tiered tax rates for residential property owners, and now they're based on median state assessed values, and there also will be higher rates this year for second homes and short-term rentals.

Unfortunately, there is not really a good way to predict how this is going to impact our taxes.

So that's why at the beginning, I just wanted to remind everyone that in August is when we will really be able to see what's happening here.

We did get an estimate from the Department of Revenue, and they estimated that our certified taxable value in total will decrease by approximately 1.3% from fiscal year 26 to 27.

So these are the total revenues.

We do have a couple of different levies that are accounted for in the general fund.

There is the all-purpose levy, which is where we are primarily restricted by the legislature.

There are also staffing levies for police and fire.

So even though we're estimating that our mill value and our certified taxable value is going to go down, we are estimating an increase of approximately 1% in total property tax revenues in fiscal year 27.

There is also a factor in there of newly taxable value.

So we're estimating right now that we get approximately 7.2 million of newly taxable value in the two years of the biennium.

Just to kind of, you know, help with some scenarios on that.

If we were to see a $1 million decrease, so only $6.2 million rather than $7.2, the impact would be about $250,000 in the general fund.

Okay, I'm gonna skip that since we looked at appropriations already.

But what I do want to talk through is the difference between operating expenditures and what we consider non-operating expenditures.

So about $109 million of what is recommended in our general fund is what we would consider operating expenditures.

And that's all the salaries and benefits of staff.

That is any operations and maintenance charges.

So primarily what's in there are things like consulting for third-party review, any contracts that we have for janitorial services or financial advisory services, things like that, materials that we need to do our jobs.

We have a small amount of debt that will always have to be paid for, and then we also have internal charges.

I also want to point out here that internal charges make up a pretty significant portion of the general fund budget this year, and it's a significant increase if you look at the 2025 biennium budget.

And the reason for that is the restructuring that we talked about last week of those internal service funds.

So we've taken a number of departments, including finance, city manager, HR, facilities, IT, and we've moved those out of the general fund and into internal service funds.

And so what you'll see overall is a decrease in salaries and benefits and operations, but you'll see an increase in internal charges, and that's how the general fund is paying for those services.

Non-operating revenues on the right side are made up of our capital outlay and our transfers.

And the transfers, we've already talked about most of them, but those are all of our general fund subsidies.

So that's that almost 2 million per year for planning.

It is the allocation to community housing.

The only other large item in that transfer category is $2 million that's being transferred to the internal service funds, and that supports the edge project.

So that's our citywide data efficiency project where we are replacing three of three different systems that we hope will really improve the way that the city provides services and make things more efficient.

So that project was adopted in the five-year capital plan.

The total project cost is three million dollars.

It was always budgeted for and planned to be paid for out of the general fund, but we did take one million of that and we ran it through the cost allocations when we moved the departments out into internal service funds.

So this waterfall chart kind of helps with that tracking of how we get from our beginning balance of 27 million down to our ending balance of 9 million.

And the green bar on this chart is representative of what our operating revenues are, and then operating costs is that 109 million that we looked at.

So 19 million of our total beginning balance is being spent on kind of one-time projects and one-time initiatives.

We do try to factor in a lot of those subsidies, especially the subsidy for community housing into our long-range financial planning.

But we do consider that technically a non-operating cost in the general fund.

And then this just shows our kind of six-year plan.

These are our general fund operating revenue and expenditure projections.

So we're showing kind of like we did with our enterprise funds that we do expect our revenues to be at least equal to or greater than our operating expenditures over the next six years based on the recommended budget that is in front of you today.

Okay.

That is all I have for the overview of the general fund.

Are there questions before we get into department budgets?

Great.

Any questions on just big picture general fund?

Yeah, Commissioner Body.

Yeah, thank you.

I heard you say that we're estimating about $7 million in newly taxable value.

Is that after we've collected the taxes from that value, or is that just the evaluation of those new buildings, then we we collect the smaller tax portion?

That's just the valuation.

Yeah.

Okay.

So the I won't overexplain if you're not asking, I'll let you go.

No, no, that's that's great.

So I just to summarize we shouldn't be expecting seven million dollars additional in our general fund next year from these newly taxable um buildings or properties.

Correct.

A million dollars in newly taxable generates about 240,000 dollars per year.

Okay, great.

Um I attended a kind of online webinar um yesterday or the day before about our kind of new tax legislation from um this previous legislative session, and I was trying to wrap my mind around this newly taxable value rules and certain classes of property are not taxed at 100% with our our new legislation, um including some types of of housing and businesses.

They they newly get taxed at like 50% of their assessed value or 75% of their assessed value.

Um I'm trying to understand if somebody builds a new home in Bozeman, are they going to get taxed at the same rate as someone who has an existing home of equal value?

Yes, assuming they're both primary residences.

Okay, but is there some situations in which a new development of the same value as an old development might get taxed less?

Not if they're the same type of property.

So the classes of property determine what your tax rate is.

So as long as the class of property is equal, one property with the same assessed value will always pay the same as the the second.

Even though newly um newly taxable values come in at a lower proportion.

Yes, okay, I understand what you're saying.

So um what the I'm gonna back up a little bit.

The way the legislature limits our all-purpose property taxes is that we're limited to a dollar amount increase.

So um we can only increase what we collect by the rate of inflation for the last three years, then that's used to calculate our mill value and mill rate.

Then we get to apply that mill rate to the 7.2 million of newly taxable value.

So what happens is our mill rate is the same, each individual property pays the same tax rate, but we get to collect more because we get to apply that mill rate to that new seven million of newly taxable value.

Um, the seven million is assuming that we see that reduction.

We don't know exactly what that reduction is going to be, but we're assuming that most properties are going to be taxed at approximately 7% of their um of their total assessed value.

Great.

Yeah, I think I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around how this is actually gonna look on the ground, as is much of Montana.

And I I think it could help me to maybe after the evaluations come through, do like a couple case study comparisons of here's two houses that have the same value, once new, once old, what happened with each of them, and that's more discussion.

So we can talk about that later.

But thank you.

This is helpful.

Any further questions on this section?

Yeah, Deputy Mayor.

I'm afraid I need to build off Commissioner Bode's excellent questions.

So we're assuming that, or I sorry, the Department of Revenue is assuming that the taxable value of Bozeman or of the state is going to go, or I guess the Boseman's gonna go down 1.3% for existing stuff.

But we're expecting with the new that new what $7.2 million worth of increase new stuff, we're going to see a uh an increase of 1% total taxable value for the city, right?

Yes.

Okay, all right.

And then even if we're off by a million or two, it's roughly $250,000 per million dollars in total taxable value.

Yes.

Okay, thank you.

And then I hate to do this, but I need to uh dive deep into the appendix.

Appendix A.

You have um, so that I think this is my answer to my question is we had um in fiscal year 26 on appendix A, page 241 for those following at home.

Uh salaries and benefits is 41 million dollars of our general fund, and then for fiscal year 27, it jumps down to 35 million, but the internal charges jump up by nine million.

So, so that is that what you said where the salaries and benefits are moving into internal charges.

Yes.

So we're not actually suddenly seeing a decrease in salaries.

No.

Okay.

I think that is that is really helpful.

That six-year plan, by the way.

That was a thank you for showing that.

That's also helpful to see.

Are we still concerned that the state is undervaluing um new construction coming in?

Um, you know, coming onto the tax rolls.

We had some pretty good meetings with the department of revenue about that and some of the other local jurisdictions.

We have contacts at our local department revenue office.

We do plan on continuing to double-check um when we get those certified values if they're significantly off from what we're projecting here or what we've seen historically.

We plan on reaching out to them immediately to make sure that it looks right.

We do have some of our own permit data we can compare it to.

So we do have some double checks.

Um, I would say that you know, we we are in contact with them and we'll be working with them to make sure that the data is right.

Okay, thank you.

That's helpful.

That was my next question.

Um, so glad that we've got that out there because I feel like August is gonna be another month of stress.

Commissioner Bodie, another question.

Yeah, sorry, I missed just a couple, and if we're gonna talk about this later, we can you know pin it for that moment, but um kind of following uh deputy mayor Fisher's line of questioning on salaries and benefits.

I also saw kind of the line below that in the um general fund overall budget, says operations and maintenance is actually going down for fiscal year 2027 and 2028 compared to this projected year.

Um can you speak to that?

Yeah, I mean, that's mostly gonna be the same thing.

So, like the finance department, for example, we've got salaries and benefits, we also have operations and maintenance.

Um, sometimes there's capital outlay, especially in the facilities management fund that moved out.

Um, so pretty much you're gonna see reductions in most of those categories where departments are moving out into an internal service fund, and you'll see a corresponding increase in internal charges.

Okay, great.

I'm also seeing a decrease in our kind of projected interest income for this biennium compared to the last one.

Um, does that also have to do with internal services or just kind of the changing landscape of interest rates?

Yeah, that's mostly the changing landscape of interest rates.

We've seen some particularly high um return on our investments in the past couple of years, and we don't want to count on that in future years to balance the budget.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Thanks.

Great.

Any other questions in this section?

I just want to thank you because a lot of the things that you addressed were in the email that I sent earlier.

So thank you, thank you, thank you.

Um, yes, my my questions were asked.

A similar appreciation.

That the metric of a billion dollars in assessed value, 240,000 in general fund is also a nice mental calculation that's rough and imprecise but helpful nonetheless.

I think we're ready to move on.

Okay.

We'll start talking about overall general fund cost drivers before we dig into the individual department budgets.

So we are recommending new positions in police, municipal court, and economic development.

In economic development, I'll highlight that one now because really that's the only major change happening there, is half an FTE, and that is helping us fund some of the additional legislative work, and also we are looking at hiring an urban renewal coordinator.

So I think that was probably discussed during some of the tax increment financing meetings.

Overall vacancy savings is trending downward.

So when you're looking at individual department budgets, there's a couple things happening with vacancy savings, but you're seeing in the fiscal year 25 actual and in the fiscal year 26 projection that there are vacancy savings incorporated there.

We are rarely fully staffed, but we are trending upwards in terms of having all of our positions filled as much as possible.

So in fiscal year 27 and 28 in the budget, we are not assuming that those vacancy savings continue.

So in a lot of these departments, it might look like there's a fairly significant jump between 26 and 27, especially, and a big reason for that is going to be vacancy savings that we hope not to have in future years.

Operations in total in the general fund is increasing by 9%.

There's two drivers of that.

One is going to be our insurance premium allocations.

Really, this is not a significant increase to the general fund overall, but what you're seeing in individual department budgets is going to show as an increase.

This is because insurance premiums used to be accounted for in a non-departmental section of the general fund.

Part of what we've done to increase transparency and to make sure that costs are allocated appropriately to the cost of service is eliminate that non-dependent departmental department in the general fund.

So all of those insurance premiums are now allocated based on the same basis we get charged for.

So we get charged for liability insurance based on the number of positions, and we get charged for property insurance based on the value of our vehicles and equipment and buildings that are insured.

So we use those actual basis to allocate those out to departments.

So it's looking like a pretty significant increase in the individual department budgets.

Another fairly significant increase that we incorporated is a 20% increase in gasoline and oil.

But we do want to make sure that we have the funds available.

We kept that flat in fiscal year 28.

Again, we are hopeful that we don't see that continue, but something I think worth noting when we're looking at these overall drivers.

Again, the admin internal service charges are going to be new, new lines on each individual general fund department budget, as we discussed.

And then the general fund subsidies supporting planning, housing, and edge are accounted for separately.

There's a separate page in here for general fund subsidies where historically that might have been in that non-departmental section of the general fund.

So again, we'll look at some of the biggest departments here and some of the ones with major changes.

And obviously, when we get to questions, if there are questions on any of these other departments, feel free to bring those up.

So we'll start with our police department.

In the police department, we're recommending the addition of four sworn positions each year of the budget, three officers and one sergeant.

We are also recommending half of a special services officer that will be split with library to increase our security at the library.

We're also recommending one intel analyst be added to the police department budget.

The increases that you're seeing in police and operations and maintenance are primarily those insurance premiums, which again, that is not a total, an overall increase to the general fund, but you can see when you're looking at the department page, it looks rather large.

The other main highlight there is installation costs for mobile data equipment.

That mobile data equipment is adopted in the capital improvement plan, but the installation costs would not be capitalized.

So those are here recommended as part of the operating budget.

One other thing I did want to highlight here is with the addition of additional public safety, additional police officers, one other thing that we have recommended is a new FTE in municipal court, which would address rising citation volumes and court caseloads.

Okay, the general fund in the fire department makes up about 22% of our general fund.

And if you're looking at the salaries and benefits line, it looks a little confusing because it shows that it is reducing, or maybe it's a very slight increase.

I don't have the percentage written down, but there is a reduction in our anticipated overtime expenses in uh fire.

We are seeing the same driver of insurance premiums as we are in police, and there is ballot education for fire station four included in the fire department budget of 70,000 per year.

We do have in our construction funds 19.5 million in our CIP plan in order to fund fire station four for the growing west side, and um we look to potentially start ballot education in the first year of the biennium.

Um recreation and aquatics makes up 12% of our overall general fund, and they operate a number of facilities, which I think we heard a lot about in our special presentation today.

Um so I'll hit the highlights here.

There is an increase in insurance premiums there.

There is a recreation fee study incorporated into the budget.

So there's also, you know, we do look at cost of service for recreation.

It is um we don't necessarily have a target, but it is something that we'll look at as part of this fee study to figure out at least what the cost of those services is, and then determine how we want to recommend we fund that.

Um, all the capital plan is consistent with what's been adopted, but I did want to highlight that there are some major projects we've been talking about for a long time, and we'll be getting to this biennium uh renovation of the Bogart pool and the Lindley Center remodel.

The library department, um, there is an increase here, half of a special services officer again to increase our internal security available at the library.

And then we're also recommending a half position to increase a children's services librarian position to full time.

Um, that we also have some increased contracted security in this budget recommended.

Um we've actually started increasing the hours that security is at the library already as part of our fiscal year 26 projection.

There's also a strategic plan update incorporated there.

Um library makes up 9% of our general fund.

And then I wanted to highlight some of the community programs and partnerships uh that we have in the general fund.

And I will also highlight that we do have in the budget document a new department called community programs that most of this funding is in, but I do want to highlight some of these because they're not all in that department in particular.

Um, so we have funding for streamline, we have funding for the warming center.

We've got tenants' right to council, which is currently budgeted at 250,000 per year.

We do have a contract with Heart of the Valley.

We support the senior center, which is largely facilities improvements there and maintenance, and then we have the belonging and Bozeman plan there.

Our community programs and partnerships for the biennium make up about 2.2% of the overall general fund budget.

Okay, that's all I have there.

Great.

Any questions on this section so far?

Yep, Commissioner Bodies.

Yeah, thank you.

Um, can you go back to the fire slide?

I am curious why we are planning ballot outreach and education for two years rather than kind of the typical one year of ballot education that we do.

And I know previously we've kind of targeted 50K as our expected amount for ballot education, and I'm curious about that 70K number.

Yes.

So we do want to get further ahead, I think, of um when we went to this didn't make it onto the ballot, but when we when we went into this ballot education last time, there were a lot of questions and there's a lot of information to pull together as a part of this.

And I think that there is more effort needed and more time to get that information out to the community to make sure that they are educated on what that ballot initiative will do, and to make sure that we have the time to engage the right people in the right groups.

As far as the amount, uh I think partially we're just anticipating that the consulting costs might cost more than we did in prior years.

Um it's also a requirement, a legal requirement that we call out our ballot education in our budget document and in our budget presentations.

So we would rather um be safe and make sure that we're calling out maybe a maximum that we might spend and not potentially looking to increase that for any reason in the future.

Great.

That's that's helpful.

Um, I see our city manager wanting to add in.

Um I don't think we anticipate spending 70,000 a year for two years on this.

So we'll have to talk about that more.

I agree with the 70,000 dollar number 50 uh was what we have spent on previous efforts.

Um I think that uh that um 70 is not unreasonable, but I think any more than that we um I don't anticipate spending that.

Okay, um, and would you say like 70?

It's sort of our our new benchmark for other ballot um education efforts.

If you know, we we are gonna have our conversation about which levies and and bonds we want to prioritize, and I'm just curious if that 70,000 number is specific to kind of the task of educating about a fire station, or if it's kind of just like the inflation of what it costs to educate people.

That's uh that's a great question.

I I think we'll be able to do um more of this internally.

Typically, this has been um I think what we need to do is um do a uh a survey.

Um, it's called polling in other places, but a statistically valid analysis about the concerns of the public, their um willingness to uh tax themselves what the limits of that might be, and I think that will help us do a better job in uh education.

I think it will help us kind of understand what the concerns are and uh um respond to those in a more timely and appropriate manner.

In the past, I think we've done really good work and we've been successful in most of our campaigns.

The public's changing, the environment's changing, um, people's uh the state law is changing with respect to um taxes.

So uh and bond asks, so all that is put into the mix.

I think we need we need to understand that and we need to respond to that, and we need to ask our citizens more questions about about um these really important issues.

Yeah, I totally agree with the polling.

I'm excited to um know that you're thinking about that strategy in advance of going to the voters for questions, and it just kind of feels like it's overlapping with our other fund of um some statistically valid surveying, and um, I'm I'm curious.

Uh maybe maybe um the director already noted the importance of of kind of separating out what our intended costs are for ballot education specifically, but could we be planning to use some of that um statistical survey funds that we've already separated out for this kind of um ballot education effort?

I think the answer to that is we don't know.

Um we don't know what the commission is going to um prioritize, and the commission's gonna authorize asks for.

I think that there are other things other than taxes that we're interested in learning what the community, how the community is feeling.

So I the what I what I am especially proud of is the efforts that we have made, this city has made at the commission's direction to do this engagement.

And engagement is just not putting information out.

Engagement is pushing and pulling information in a conversation with our community as opposed to some attempt to make people believe what we want them to believe.

And I don't mean that that we haven't done made really important efforts with that in the past.

I'm really excited about how we can talk with our community in the future and even right now.

So I think we'll we'll figure that out as we go.

Melissa mentioned it, we have to have this funds in the budget, the adopted budget, in order to expend them.

We can't just say, oh, this is we're gonna spend this much on engagement.

We need to show that ahead of time before we do.

Gotcha.

Okay, thanks.

Um the community programs section in our budget.

I don't actually see heart of the valley um listed or belonging in Bozeman there.

Are those in a different part of our budget?

Yeah, so um Heart of the Valley has historically been a part of the police department budget, um, just being connected to some of the animal control services and belonging in Bozeman, the majority of that is in the city manager's office, but the most of it will be general fund funded.

Okay, so they're just kind of named here as as community programs, but kind of exist in our budget lines in other places.

Yes, okay, awesome.

And then um the HRDC warming center line says um 345,700 for each of the years of the biennium.

I have a memory of previously allocating 500,000, and that that it gets split up between Haven and Family Promise as well as HRDC, kind of like a ratio that they determine.

Um, can you give us kind of some context on why this number is decreasing from what we've previously allocated to those nonprofits?

You're speaking specifically to the 345,000, yes.

Um, pretty proud of I see Heather in the back of there.

Heather has done uh we talked about this with the commission uh during our HRDC meeting, strategic planning meeting yesterday.

Um homelessness, mental health, support services are community issues, and um they are not solvable, nor do a lot of people feel they should be solved squarely on the shoulders of the Bozeman city taxpayers.

Heather understands that Heather provides Heather, not Heather person, but HRDC, Heather leads HRDC, understands that and understands that real solutions involve community collaborations and community um partnerships, and she has done uh really amazing work.

Um we've talked about it in going out to other partners in this particular case, local governments, the city and or Belgrade and the county, even three forks, haven't cracked into Manhattan yet, but we're still trying.

But to um work with them to own some of this parts of the solution.

So because Belgrade and Gallatin County are participating at a higher level, the city of Bozeman gets to participate at a lower level, not significantly lower, but that's real money, and then we get to expand the the days that the shelters open, and now we're working on ways, and I think they talked about that for day services.

So that impacts our the entire city budget, but it impacts police and fire in a really direct way.

So I'm really excited about how we work with HRDC, I'm excited about that expanding idea of these services being community-based and not just Bozeman-based.

So just to repeat back, the total amount of funds going to HRDC Haven and Family Promise are greater than they were previously, but we're paying less because our um friends in the Gallatin County and City of Belgrade are pitching in too.

That's correct.

Okay, great.

Thanks.

Um I am just gonna ask one more question and then pass it on, so I'm not hogging the mic here.

Uh I would love to go back to um let's see that the senior center facility maintenance.

Um I'm not sure if it was really highlighted on this slide, but in our in our budget document, I'm seeing that it's kind of increasing a little bit year to year.

Is that is there some kind of um metric for the anticipated cost of inflation of maintaining that building worked into the senior center's allocation?

What we're doing is we're allocating the facilities management expenses the same way that we do with the rest of the city.

So primarily it's based on square footage unless there's a specific project that's allocated to the senior center, but our facilities department does maintain that, and so they're they're kind of paying their portion of that overall maintenance the same way another city department would.

Okay, and our um kind of facilities plan includes like a little bit of a inflationary measure of okay, it's gonna cost a little bit more next year than it does this year.

Yeah, and it incorporates the cost of the whole department, right?

So um all the salaries and benefits are part of that new facilities management fund, and so that gets allocated out as well.

Okay, great.

That's helpful.

Thanks.

Just a little quick add to that.

Uh, we've talked about this before with the commission, this idea of a facilities conditioned index and more in-depth understanding of the condition of our of our assets in the city.

The senior center is old, and um it needs some more attention and elevator replacements, hugely expensive, those kinds of very critical part of that building.

Um, the kitchen's got commercial kitchen, uh, aging um HVAC system, heating ventilation, air conditioning system, and so we have a more sophisticated look at our facilities and a more sophisticated preventive maintenance and capital equipment and replacement program.

Yep, Commissioner Smeedy.

Even though I have no concerns about this item in the budget, I feel like I should disclose that my stepmother is the president of the senior center.

Just so you're you didn't make a ton of money off of what we fear.

I'm gonna I'm gonna really go full board with the senior center here.

Okay, uh Commissioner Magic.

Thanks.

Uh I have a couple of questions about the library's uh special services officer.

So um half uh contribution from the police department, half from the library, and I assume that's gonna be result in one FTE.

Is that correct?

Perhaps a question for the library is one FTE sufficient, to cover some of the issues that are happening there, and then two, is this gonna be predominantly like a law enforcement presence, or are we anticipating any kind of social service social worker presence?

Sure.

I I will take the first part of that.

Um I um just yesterday and last week I met with the um employees at the library, and there is an overriding concern uh for safety, their safety as employees and the safety of the patrons.

And we want to make sure that the library stays a welcoming and safe place, and um with the recent uh incidents we've had over there, a bomb threat, different kinds of really poor behavior.

Um Susan is has um taken that responsibility seriously, and we hired a private uh security firm to come in.

At the same time, we're doing this pretty amazing thing with our special security officers in the police department.

They're not sworn, they don't have powers of arrest, but they are trained in de-escalation and training security measures, and we're building that capacity in the police department for all of our city facilities.

So we're at this place where we still need the private security while we're building up and creating that capacity.

So the SSOs provide security at all our city facilities.

They do all the screening at the public safety center, they provide their court security in the courtrooms.

City Hall, we have one officer sitting in the back at every city commission room.

So to build that capacity, and I just talked with the police chief about this today.

We're gonna run a report to show how much how much presence we have, but just that presence of somebody who's not a police officer, but that presence of somebody in there.

But just that presence makes the patrons and it makes the staff feel a whole lot a whole lot safer.

So we're trying to be proactive about that.

We also have had conversations about our crisis response team moving over there, but um that's probably not something we want to do.

Uh we probably want to keep them uh co-housed with at the safety center for a lot of reasons, which we can go into later if you would like.

So homelessness is not the issue.

There are a lot of well behaved folks who are unhoused.

It is the behaviors typically associated with mental health challenges that are concerning.

So as we work with our partners, the Gallatin Behavioral Health Coalition, our partners who uh provide that service, not a direct service from the city.

We're trying to address that, and I the commission knows we're doing a have put in an application for three and a half million for crisis receiving and stabilization center.

We're gonna continue to look for longer term permanent funding for our crisis response team.

So all this to say, Commissioner, that it is at the top of our minds, how we do this.

We don't want, I don't think it is good for the library to be a destination for people to go to to receive mental health services, but it should be part of our part of our plan that we know that that happens there, and how can we refer them?

How can we get them wraparound services to help them in their time of crisis?

And that's not something the city can do by itself, and we're not trying, we're working with our partners.

And you may have mentioned this, but we talked about this yesterday, but basically other places for people to go.

The library is warm on a cold day, and it can't be the only warm public place that is available for someone to go warm up and spend the afternoon or day.

That's correct, and that's another area where we want to increase our partnership with HRDC at the warming center to provide those day services, uh, job training, um, substance use disorder referrals, those kind of things to help folks in their time of crisis, but also how to get help them get out of it and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

So let's don't think that library is a place to house those services, and we believe that we need to continue our partnership with HRDC and other providers to provide a place for that to happen.

Um, just another um chunk of questions here.

I really appreciate kind of the multifaceted approach.

We've talked about this many times, the many services, and it just cannot be one solution.

Um second uh round of questions on some of our key facilities, so like you know, like the Beale Center, Lentley Center, Story Mansion.

Are any of those facilities self-sufficient, kind of taking in enough revenue to kind of cover their costs of operation?

Um right now, no, none of them are self-sufficient.

They all have a cost recovery percentage and a portion that's covered by general fund discretionary revenue.

And I don't recall, and I could have missed it here in the past five and a half years, updating any fees associated in user fees, have we on these facilities?

Yes, it is a topic of discussion now and in previous commissions.

There has always been a um direction from the commission to subsidize our recreation programs, particularly with related to children, adult programs, maybe get 100% recovery from.

But we're talking about that.

I'd like to ask Mitch to come up to talk about our current efforts to answer your question specifically.

Thanks.

Yes, uh, Commissioner, we do have a rate study um in the budget for this year uh to go through our rates and fees.

Uh we those have not been updated since just prior to COVID.

Uh we did a rate study um in 2019, and our um prior to bringing that to the commission, that runs through our urban parks and forestry board, and at that time with our commission liaison was determined that was not the time to increase rates and fees.

So we're back to a rate study this year to analyze those and look at them.

Great.

That's kind of a long time.

Yes, it is a lot increase.

So it could be we see some significant fee increases.

It could be, that's right.

So those options, uh, rate and fees and rate increases do come back to the commission or approved by the commission.

And so it's it's correct.

It's likely we have to analyze do you stair step?

You have a plan to steer step those in, um, right?

Do you have a higher one initially and then and then lower?

So we'll have to bring that back to the commission upon the completion of the study.

But again, that is in FY27 budget.

And some of these places, like I haven't been to an event at the Lindley Center for quite some time.

It could be a reflection on me not getting invited to events or whatever it might be.

No.

Um I'm uh just curious as to how often they're being used, and what efforts we make to kind of spread the word that these facilities exist, kind of marketing to make sure that they are being utilized to their highest potential.

Sure.

Well, the Lindley Center is is not because you've been overlooked for invitations.

That one is currently out of commission.

And is under re feel better and is under a remodel.

Yes.

And is it is in the midst of quite a bit of um in-depth work to make that usable um and and safe again.

Um that facility in particular was is a beloved facility in the community and is used for many, many different community meetings as of as of our many of our facilities.

So I mean, we market them, you know, in the program guides and online and website.

They again, I think our rate study will help us, and that'll come back here to the commission, but there's no question, they do provide a very approachable, affordable facility for folks to rent and utilize.

They are regularly used, uh, right?

Even the Beale Center, which is now office space and then is now only reservable on on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, is essentially every weekend at that time it is reserved.

So the example this past weekend was graduation weekend, everything was booked out for graduations.

Um, some of them Lindley Center was one was regularly used for weddings story mansion, as well, as one of those that that is so is Beale for that uh for that matter.

Um it's they're well loved, and yes, they are affordable and approachable for for the community.

Okay.

Real quick, yes, free marketing.

When might the Lindley Center open its doors again?

Well, um, we're it's it's in-depth work, and we're working closely with our colleagues and facilities to get that that going.

So it will not be this year.

Yes.

Okay, all right.

Thanks.

Thanks, Mayor.

You're welcome.

Yeah.

Any further questions?

Um, thank you.

Yeah, I'd I'd like to dive look a little deeper at like the police department.

Um I'm just wondering what's what's I not to get too too granular, but what's driving the rises in the salaries and benefits in the police department?

Just looking at, you know, it is our, I think it is our biggest chunk of employees in the city.

Um, so it's you know, you'd expect to see more cost there, but but we're looking at raises over the past since fiscal year 25 through 28, it's about two million dollars a year in salaries and benefits.

Um that's roughly between fiscal year 27 and 28 if I did my numbers right, that's two-thirds of the total increase in salaries and benefits for the city, even though city the police account for, I believe the budget at least accounts for 45 percent of the total spending.

So I'm just they seem to be growing faster than the rest of the city.

And um, is it just police are paid, you know, paid more?

I mean, what's driving that?

Um, primarily it's the new position.

So in fiscal year 25, um, I believe, and I forgot to put it in my notes, but I can look it up when we get to um kind of discussions.

I believe we added six or seven positions in fiscal year 25, and um those were not hired on July 1st.

It took us a little bit of time to get those positions hired, so a portion of that is going to be those six and seven positions.

Um we've also got the 9.5 that we are recommending in the budget this year that are going to be incre increasing.

So if you add up the cost of all the new positions between 25 and 28, uh the total of that is actually almost exactly two million, got it right.

Okay, and so that's the I guess that's the other question I have is is kind of stepping back.

How would you get it's kind of a question for us as a commission?

How do how I guess do you as staff do you advise us in approaching kind of spending on police and staffing on police?

And it built a little bit off Commissioner Magic's line of questions of like, you know, we heard yesterday during the HRDC strategic planning discussion that a lot of police response is for people in a mental crisis.

Um, and do we invest in in kind of almost like the the downstream, you know, the I guess the downstream police that to deal with the problem or the upstream folks who can help us kind of prevent that problem?

I mean, so we have uh roughly we have well, 9.5 full-time equivalent.

That's what FTE is down, right?

FTE.

Yes, full-time equivalent.

So 9.5 FTE in the police over the biennium, we have an 18 total new FTE in the entire budget.

So more than half the salaries, new new positions are in our police department.

And I guess I'm just wondering how do I, as a commissioner, how do we as a commission make a decision on you know where to put the the emphasis in our um in our funding on public safety writ large?

Sure.

I'll I'll start and then police department is our most difficult department to staff.

And we have been fully staffed.

I think it's a joke, like it's an old joke, but I think it's true, like for an hour in the last 15 years, so um we have to be competitive with our wages and the benefits.

Our police officers um are um amongst our highest paid city employees.

That's that's not atypical for cities.

If if we were fully, so we we tried, we attempted to address this in the last staffing levy, and we um were about 30 sworn police officers down.

So that failed, and the question to us was well, what are you gonna do now?

And we talked about adding as we could afford to police officers annually to get up to where we feel.

So our staffing, last time we did a staffing plan was before the pandemic.

It typically takes a year and a half to do a staffing plan.

There are two companies.

I just talked to the chief about this this afternoon.

There are two companies that do it.

It's about a year and a half effort.

So if we were fully staffed, I think that would be a more urgent need to do that staffing study.

We're not fully staffed, and that is based on a lot of metrics, both calls for service and this desire to have about 40% of the officers' time unallocated to provide proactive policing.

So we've had lots of conversations about our traffic, dangerous driving in our community and the impact that it has on our on our traveling public, the impact that it has on on our community.

So we were able to, and the chief talked about this earlier, able to create a traffic dangerous driving uh function within our our police department.

It's already paying benefits.

So in order to fully staff a uh a traffic safety division within the police department, we need four officers and a sergeant, and that's what you see in our budget for this coming year.

That's my recommendation to the commission as the city manager.

So our job is to take all of the staffing requests, all of the resources requests that we get, and based on what the community expects us to do, and what the commission directs us to do is allocate those as best we can.

The answer to your question is we need both.

We are not adequately staffed in our police department for the amount of um uh activity crime in our community right now.

So that's our first priority is to get up to a level of staffing that provides a service that our community expects that provides the um eliminates the burnout of um two or three officers taking calls for a 12 hour period.

So those are the things that we talk about, those are the things that I take into account, and that's what's real that's what is realized in your in this budget request.

That's helpful, thank you.

Any further questions?

I you had your hand up for it, right?

Yeah, Commissioner Sweeney.

Thank you.

Um, so my question is about the funding for the tenants' right to council.

Um we are creating a new program that is intended to operate in perpetuity, and I just have a couple questions about that.

So I see allocated 250,000 per year.

Um, is that a really hard cap?

Like I know typically these services are underused, but you know, say we start approaching that, is that a pretty hard cap?

Like we'll cut off.

We would look.

Um, I know that our legal department is currently reviewing the proposal for that.

Um, we would look to find savings if we needed it in order to fund the proposals that came in.

Okay, and then my other question is sort of a systemic.

Did we what I've always, and this is not a secret, had an issue with this being funded out of the general fund.

Um, have we explored options for other funding sources that could be dedicated directly to this?

Um, I know for a minute, the community development block grant potentially seemed like it could be good, and maybe the legal department is not here, but um, have there been investigations into something else because this is like not a one-time expenditure, this is a whole new program that we're creating.

If I may, Melissa, um, it's an important question, and we spent a lot of time on it.

So the direction that we received from the commission on the eligibility for the tense right to council is that we don't uh screen uh applicants for their CDBG fund requires um income level screening, uh income level requirements.

So we are are not doing that.

We did a request for proposals, and we selected them.

You'll remember there's three parts to the program.

There's the representation, there's the education, and there's the mediation.

And we um had interviews with uh um some respondents to our RFP and now um Anna Savaru from the attorney's office and Cole Rolly are negotiating uh scope of work and um conditions for the program.

So to answer your question, it we are looking at 250,000 as a hard budget item.

If and we don't know what the utilization is.

So this first year is definitely a pilot program.

We're trying to put very firm sideboards on it.

We're trying to um um set up the program so that uh there is a healthy balance between representation and and mediation and education, and we don't know how we're gonna do, but we're gonna look at it, we're gonna do our best, and we're gonna come back to the commission with a report.

We're pretty excited about it.

I think that if this is it if this is successful, the utilization will go down because tenants feel like they're protected, landlords are educated, tenants are educated, there's accountability on both sides, and we have research to the best of our ability where cases end up in uh justice court, and we've talked to attorneys and we've talked to uh we have focus groups of tenants and we have focus groups with um landlords, and we learned a lot, and we're gonna learn a lot more as we go through this program.

So I guess my actual question was like maybe we could have our grants coordinator search for some kind of stable funding source, like outside of the general fund.

It was about funding, not about the program.

Yeah, I can I add a little bit there.

Just so when we had uh talked with others that had done these programs, they they warned us that asking for income, um, is tough just logistically.

It's not like a transparency question, it's like a somebody might be walking into the courtroom, and then the attorneys having to sit there and screen and say, Oh, do you qualify or do you not qualify?

And for a service that's typically underutilized, it's it's wasn't that helpful.

However, um it could be a part of the program that the uh contractor does that they ask those questions anyway, and we may see because I I think I felt similarly like, oh, we've got this CDBG money, this is going to be able to hugely supplement this.

Um, but because we have to ask for income, and we're not currently, um, but perhaps next year we see, oh, it's actually not that onerous, and maybe we could weave in um some of the CDBG dollars to offset.

That's sort of the some of the background that we've had on that, but at the moment, I apologize.

I didn't answer your question specifically.

We are leaving no stone unturned to try to find other funding sources for this.

I think the exciting part is that the um the group that we're um negotiating with on legal representation does that income qualifying, and we may be able to take this case where the where the um where they qualify and fund that with CDBG money.

So uh that has to be part of our plan, our CBG plan, but yes, I apologize.

We are looking leaving no stone unturned for um more ongoing permanent funding.

Excellent.

Okay, and maybe after a few years of data, we'll know like where we can maybe look and go.

Okay, thank you.

Any further questions?

Yeah, Commissioner Manchin.

I'm just gonna address and ask questions for regarding the public comment we received but last week and this week, Mr.

Mogdoni who uh submitted a letter as well.

So has there been any discussion about his question of taking our downtown urban renewal districts TIFF funds, and he suggests about two million and putting that money into the general fund?

I think specifically he is suggesting to you know to help solve our issue with the police uh staffing.

Has there been any discussion along those lines?

I don't think we've had serious discussion about it.

Um the TIFF district has a hard deadline, ending deadline of 2032.

Um they have uh um allocated, they have about six and a half million dollars worth of uh funding um available.

Um I think that this is a question that's a fair question to ask.

Uh they have plans, they're trying to do some important work with parking inventory supply downtown.

Uh that's ongoing.

There is still a reserve for the 1.6 million dollars that they allocated for the housing project that isn't um going uh right now, so that looks like that will be returned to the TIFF.

Um I think that it's fair to have that conversation with them, and I think that um I commit to having a conversation with Ellie about that and just kind of exploring if there's any excess funds, uh, if there's expected to be excess funds.

Um can they release those now and pay for some of that now?

I don't know the answer to that, but I can certainly ask the question.

And the release of the housing funds for the prior station, is that this October or next October?

What's the I'll have to look?

I just received some a letter from their attorney uh asking to be released from the um deed restriction for that property for the affordable housing units uh in consideration of um you'll remember the city sold that at a below market rate uh as a part of that agreement, got a um deed restriction for 40 or so market uh units in that.

That project didn't pencil out interest rates went up at the same time they had to do that, and there's a lot of reasons why, but they want out of that.

Um they they made an offer.

I think we need to negotiate that offer, and we'll be back.

That's a commission decision, not my decision, a commission decision, but we'll come back to you with um some options on that.

So that as a part of that agreement, getting into the weeds here.

I apologize, but I think it's important they would um release that 1.6 million dollar that they're holding and the 12 parking spaces that we gave them as a part of that.

So we tried everything to make that project happen.

It just financially did not pencil out.

I think parking was problematic.

I think construction was too.

That's a 1963 building, and uh, you know, to try to turn that it's it's all concrete and brick, and it's there's just a lot of issues with that building, it needs to be scraped, and they need to start new, but yes, parking was an issue as well.

So, to summarize to answer Bob Moldoni's question, the city really needs to talk with the downtown Bozeman Partnership folks, Elite Staley, who runs that, and then um talk.

I I would want to hear from our URD board or B R URD board.

I think they'd want to weigh in.

Uh so there it really would be a series of steps and processes that would need to happen to make that a reality.

That's correct.

Thanks.

Yeah, Commissioner Bodie.

Thanks.

Um, I want to kind of pick up where I left off with my ballot education question, and I'm just it's occurring to me that we have a number of other uh ideas about voted levies or bonds that may come up in the next two years, and I'm now worried that we're gonna put ourselves in a bad position, having not put them into our ballot education, like named them in this budget.

Is what would be the mechanism in the future if we decided to run a different levy or a bond to get that ballot education line in our budget?

We would take a budget amendment to commission to make sure that that is publicly noticed.

There's public comment on it, and it's out there that we plan on doing ballot education for some different initiative.

Okay, great.

Um, I know you said that you weren't gonna talk about the senior transportation fund, but I do have a question, and it's okay if we need to get back to um mean and some kind of email later, but I just noticed that FY 26 has a lot higher um revenue funds and appropriations um than what is budgeted for fiscal year 27 and 28, but it kind of looks like that was an anomalous year compared to FY25 as well.

I'm on page 65, too, if that's helpful.

Um, yeah, it's about 40 469,000 compared to 269,000.

Um do you have any sense for why that has varied so much?

Yeah, a big driver of this is just timing.

So, really what you should see is that we don't have any beginning fund balance in this fund, but we were carrying beginning fund balance.

Everything that goes into this fund belongs to the senior transportation program.

Um so at the end of the year, we are updating our end of year processes to make sure that we transfer that out before the fiscal year closes.

Okay, great.

So it is a more relatively similar amount increasing slightly each year.

Yes.

Okay, awesome.

Um I want to also look back to the deputy mayor's questions on um the police department.

I heard our city manager kind of start to explain some of the um ways in which we set our targets for the number of um sworn officers we need to meet the community's needs.

I heard you say um wanting 40% of their time to not be um used for kind of responding, but actually proactive.

Are there any other targets that we have helping us identify what our ultimate um staffing goal is that in the police department and like how do we know that we've made it?

I'm gonna ask Jim Belcamp to come up here.

The I think that each community is different in the amount of policing that it needs and the amount of policing that the community desires.

So Bozeman is different than Billings, different than Great Falls.

There are some um ways that you look at staffing one per thousand, all those things.

We I think are more have been and continue to be more sophisticated than that.

We talk about what our local community expects, what we hear, what we see on the street, uh the amount of crime we have.

Um all those things that go into that decision, and Jim is in charge of it all.

Great.

Thank you for the question, Jim Bellcamp.

I'm the police chief.

It would be really simple if we just had one metric we could go by, so many police officers per thousand population.

Uh, that is not the best way to do it.

I think there's a perception at time that that is the way to do it, but the city manager teeded off very well.

That's absolutely not the way to do it.

There's too many factors that go into it, which does make it difficult to determine the numbers.

So if you hire a staffing, a company that does a staffing um analysis and also an operational analysis, they're gonna do exactly what we try to do, which is put all the different factors into they look at a whole bunch of different factors to determine what their recommended number is.

Uh so the the number per thousand can be a confirmation metric that, yeah, we are probably correct.

So at times we do look at to some of the um other agencies in the state and look at how many do they have, right?

A similar size city like Great Falls, but that is not the sole metric and not the one we should go by.

What it goes back to often is what does your community want from you?

So we have to look at what are the needs and desires and wants of our community.

Clearly, this past year that has been traffic safety.

So we took a look at our current staffing, which I believe is low compared to the number of calls we get in our population, and we tried to make some changes, looked at hours of the night and the day where we could move officers over and then assign people to traffic.

So we've got to look at a wide variety of of things like what is your community want, right?

We do uh surveys and ask the community what are your needs?

What do you want us to be doing in your community?

Uh, the next thing can be your crime rate.

What are your crimes per thousand?

We are very fortunate in the city of Bozeman to have a relatively low crime rate, but that does not mean we are not a very busy city.

There is a ton of activity going on in the city, uh, just busyness.

Um, how many events do you have, right?

We had uh another cat grizz this past fall.

We have events we have to staff up almost on a weekly basis right now.

We have a university compared to another city our size that does not have a university.

Uh there's a a wide variety of things.

Uh more that come to mind are how many staff members do you have?

The city has been very good to us the last few years in trying to reduce the number of officers we have to add by adding other staff members.

We just talked about our security officers.

That was the result of trying to uh not have to add more police officers.

What duties could we take and assign to security officers?

What could we assign to information specialists, a sufficient animal control officers, crash investigators, forensics unit, a lot of other staffing.

So a lot of it depends on that.

I've heard companies that do staffing analysis say, Well, do you want your patrol sergeants taking calls or you want them supervising the officers that take calls?

Our choice is clearly have them supervising the officers taking the calls, so that then increases the number of officers you need because you're not having your sergeants to take calls.

So it's a wide variety of things, and there isn't one simple answer.

Uh, going back a few years to the last staffing plan that we had.

We have not reached that number by what they should said we should have had a few years ago.

But adding the staff members that we've requested and that are in the budget the next couple years would get us back on track that would match all the metrics that we have seen that lead to the number we believe we need to have.

Thanks.

It sounds like it's really complicated.

Um, I'm sorry, there's no simple answer.

Yeah, no, for sure.

Um, and I this is a very specific question, so if you need to get back to me, that's totally okay.

But um, can you remember the the recommendation from that staffing analysis for what we needed a few years ago and kind of where we are right now?

Ironically, I uh printed a sheet that had that exact information on it.

So they said in by 2021, we should have had 79 sworn officers.

So today, uh depending on what day it is, we are running around 70 to 71.

We've been a couple higher than that, but we had a couple retirements lately.

Uh so we're still about nine-ish short of of where we should have been back in 2021.

And that's partly what I what I'd lead to if we got to the number that we're asking for by the end of this biennium.

I think it's very reasonable by the end of 2028, seven years after that, to have about 10 more.

Okay, so the goal by by 2028 is to have 89.

Correct.

Okay.

And do you know how many we've authorized right now?

I mean, you said we have somewhere between 70 and 71 actually hired, but I I heard vacancies is a problem here.

Yes, as of today, we're authorized 76 sworn officers.

Okay.

Um, that is super helpful, and I really appreciate you having that that sheet out.

You um you predicted the future.

I did.

Okay, so I just have um let's see, one more question, I think.

For um, you know, policing, and this may or may not be for for you, Chief Fulkamp, but I I saw that we are a leasing um, we're paying debt on some leased vehicles, and I am just curious um, kind of our methodology for you know deciding to do uh a leasing.

I I know typically we we'd like to lease when we know the expense is gonna be.

I see Director Hotnet Hardy stepping up.

Um, yeah, I know we typically decide to lease when we want to spread out the cost over a longer period of time to make it more fair to the taxpayers.

Um, and I also know that our our police cruisers have a pretty high turnover.

I think it's like five five years.

So are these um leases for for cruisers or is it a different type of vehicle that lasts longer?

Um no, these ones actually are for cruisers.

We don't anticipate doing that um regularly in the future, but at the time we were wrapping up a bunch of different vehicles and equipment into our lease purchase financing, and we were looking at the time to free up some general fund money.

Um, so in the general fund, it's a very short term, it's five, I believe it's five years on those vehicles.

But um, yeah, to your point, we typically would not um lease purchase finance police cruisers.

Okay, um, that's helpful.

I think that's everything I've got.

Okay, I'll pass it on.

Commissioner Magic.

Yes.

Uh a question for the chief, please.

Well, we're on the topic.

It's about traffic enforcement, and at one point in a recent meeting, you described kind of uh what your dream team of traffic enforcement might look like.

So I just wanted to give you an opportunity to state that on the record again, and whether or not this budget is gonna help you get there, and if not, what will?

Yeah, thank you for the opportunity.

So we currently have two full-time officers assigned just to do traffic, and we have a staff member, so a civilian who is a crash investigator.

My dream team to use your words, would consist of a sergeant, which is in this year's uh proposed budget, who would supervise that group.

The last thing I want them doing is randomly driving around town and not uh effectively looking at the best places, the most critical places, the high uh the the places that are the highest risk of crashes and focusing on those places.

So I want a sergeant as we grow this unit uh who can lead this team and make sure they work cohesively, and then I would like to add two more after that.

And yes, this budget will absolutely get us to that point where we could fully staff a traffic unit.

The issue that we have is as the calls go up and as the citizen population grows, we have to respond to the reactive calls, and that leads less capacity for the unallocated time and the proactive time.

Uh, this proposed budget and staffing plan would get us to that point where we could have enough of that unallocated time and enough staff members to dedicate to a full-time traffic unit.

Uh, my my dream unit.

Great.

Jim, would you mind reminding us how many uh officers you're up?

You're authorized for 75, but how many officers are actually in a uniform in a black and white patrol car versus all of the other functions detectives, school resource officers, and administration.

I think we have 70 some police officers driving around, we don't.

There's a lot less than that.

Correct.

Um as of today, we have right at 37 officers on patrol, six sergeants, and two lieutenants in a captain that makes a patrol.

So we have the detectives, we have the community resource officer, we have the school resource officers, we have command staff.

Uh, there's a lot of other people that are not just out taking the calls, uh drug task force, a wide variety of other people.

So when you look at the total number of officers, what we try really hard to do is not over-assign other duties.

I've actually seen that happen with our other agencies where they haven't grown the patrol unit much.

They keep assigning everything to other stuff, and we need to strike that balance where as we add, we can add a patrol officer and assign and then add a traffic officer.

Add a downtown officer.

Um, that is something that the communities wanted as well.

So we've got to strike that balance between patrol officers and those assigned to some kind of specialty unit or special duty.

One last question.

Um just to get it on record for this meeting.

We've talked in the past, recent past, about traffic tickets and some of the barriers that we experience.

A lot of people think all the tickets, the money is coming to us, we're making a lot of money.

Can you explain please uh why that's not happening and changes potentially that need to be made to traffic tickets?

Sure.

Um ironically, I'm I've been at a conference this week with the association of chiefs of police, and we were collectively discussing this issue just yesterday.

We find that the issues we we face, every community is facing the same issues.

So, no, we do not uh make a bunch of money through our traffic citations.

The sole goal is to change behavior and change behaviors to reduce injuries and crashes and risk to the public.

Uh I think one of the things that you're you might be referring to is the fact that the fines are set by um the state, and those fines are very low.

And so um having more traffic officers out there is not helping the general fund near as much as you think it would.

Unfortunately, it's kind of like some of Mitch's facilities.

They have to be subsidized to keep them going.

It's the same here.

We are not making enough money to fund these traffic officers.

I hear that frequently, but it is a wise investment.

I've heard numbers, I don't have them, them in front of me, but the amount of money that is saved within a community with every fatality that you prevent, with every crash you prevent, is huge.

And I'm gonna put Greg Sullivan on the spot.

This is a ask him to come up here to talk about the different kinds of tickets.

So we have we have abilities to have our local tickets that don't go on a driver's record versus state tickets that do.

And I'm gonna sorry, Greg, but you and I've talked about this enough that I'm sure you can answer talk about the different kinds of infractions and what the commission and this community might be able to do.

So Greg Sullivan, city attorney.

Um cities made a decision to cite under state law for the very important reason of making sure that citations that can be cited under state law go on someone's driving record.

Um there are fines in the municipal code for very similar types of offenses, and those fines are higher than what's in state law.

So obviously the ones in state law are set by the state and the bond schedule set by the state.

Um we have investigated whether the municipal fines can also be allocated to a person's driving record, and the answer is no.

So that's a decision made at the state level.

So I think that's what we're getting at, and how do we influence that change to be able to address both a higher fine level and something going on in someone's driving record because both of both of those is the chief had said are deterrence to help uh adjust driving behavior?

We don't have an answer for that right now, and we need the legislature to help us with that.

Those are built request things in state law that need to be changed.

Um perhaps.

Perhaps.

Perhaps the legislature, as you know, Bozeman was the first city to sign a contract for red light cameras, and we can certainly have an ethical conversation about red light cameras.

They do change driving behavior.

Um we're prohibited from doing that.

The state has um bristled at um uh the highway patrol getting tougher, they've bristled at um meaningful fine uh increases.

So I think we have an uphill battle, doesn't mean that we shouldn't try, but that's how you change behavior.

And driving on the interstate is different than driving in a town.

Let's just be honest about it.

And we're talking about dangerous driving.

We're not talking just a few miles over the speed limit, we're talking about dangerous driving, running red lights, not yielding to pedestrians, um, speeding in school zones.

Those kinds of things are where we are going to be able to, in our opinion, impact the safety.

And that only comes through enforcement for some people, and it's the people that aren't following the rules that we need to focus on.

The vast majority of our community are safe drivers.

There are some that aren't, and those are the ones that unfortunately cause the accidents, or the ones unfortunately that our our police department spends the most time with.

So I have Commissioner Smee.

Thank you.

Um I would also just like to ask um Chief Beltkamp a question or two if I card.

Thank you for being here tonight.

Absolutely.

Um I think after the most recent fatality, a lot of people in the community did notice a much greater presence on our streets of officers in patrol cars.

And I know behind the scenes you mentioned you had to do some maneuvering in order to achieve that presence.

And I just want you to speak a little bit about um like is that a sustainable rearrangement for you to maintain that level of public presence with current staffing needs.

Not with the population growth and with the uh increasing number of incidents, the events we have to patrol, the tragedies that occur just like happened downtown a couple weeks ago.

Um it very much concerns me when we're we're trying to plug holes and move people over to fix one issue, and then you might have not have as many people officers working as you should when something else bad happens in the community.

That's that's one of the many things that keeps me up at night.

So yes, we have to increase the staffing.

Um we had actually assigned a couple officers last fall already to traffic, and people had noticed before that.

But yes, it it always comes at the expense of something else, and I mean my goal is to ensure the safety of the community 24 hours a day.

Um we don't want to overstaff, I fully recognize that, but we also don't want to understaff when the bad things happen.

The good part is the times when we don't have as many officers on, we have very good community partners with our other law enforcement agencies.

Uh Montana State University Police Department, Sheriff's Office, Iowa Patrol, they've been great to work with.

Uh, but we have a duty to make sure we have enough officers to respond to those incidents that happen.

Thank you.

Um, and I also wondered if you could speak a little bit about the training for de-escalation and um you know mental health response incidents.

Our officers are very well trained in that, I I hear.

Yes.

So there's there's so many different types of incidents they respond to.

Um I get a lot of questions about how many of your calls um are related to mental health issues, and that is a tough question because it depends what you're counting, right?

We have a lot we have a calls we respond to where they have reached a point where now they're calling 911 where we're facing a critical incident, whether that's a threat of harm to self or others that we have to respond to, try to de-escalate it enough.

The Gallant Mobile Crisis can come.

They've been great partners.

Uh they respond uh at least up to at least to at least a couple calls per day for the few hours they're on each day, so we're using them uh immensely.

Beyond that, there are many times where we have someone, for example, um, going into various stores causing uh minor problems, we call them a criminal trespass, or the store owner wants them to leave.

Uh, is the behavior related to mental health issues or another issue?

And it's not to the level where there's something we should take action on, but it does take some of our time.

Other times you may have a car crash with someone who clearly has mental health issues, but that didn't contribute to the car crash.

So it's very difficult to determine how many of our calls are related to mental health, but it is a common issue.

The thing we have with the officers, we have to train them how to recognize uh mental health issues, but again, there's so many different types of issues that they need to be aware of.

We do train them on that.

We train them how to de-escalate just a normal situation.

People often have uh very unique, highly emotionally charged responses to various types of incidents.

Uh people who wouldn't normally act a certain way will act a certain way after a critical incident.

And so there's just so many types of calls they have to respond to.

Um we have to rely on the training, which we do train them well, but also most of them have just been in so many situations that they recognize or remember something that worked in another similar type of call, and so they take that experience uh to guide how they're gonna handle this call.

Excellent, thank you.

And I just have one final question for um either you or Director Hudnett.

Um, we do not currently receive any funding for the police through an impact fee, is that correct?

That is correct.

So the challenges of the growth are not offset by an impact fee.

They must be offset entirely by the general fund.

We are looking at impact fees at the commission's direction.

For police departments specifically, it does not cover the kinds of things that we would expect it would.

For instance, a patrol car might be $100,000.

Less than half the cost of a patrol car is equipment in it.

So we that's not eligible.

It doesn't have a 10-year service life.

They use a lot of equipment that that is it's not disposable, but has a very finite service life.

Or deservice never buy a used patrol car.

I've seen the crash.

It's illegal.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

So we really have this.

This is where we pay for it.

Any further questions?

Yeah, Deputy Mayor.

While we're talking traffic and we we have the chief here.

Some of the police offices talked about the traffic unit.

Invariably you've mentioned that you want to bring a motorcycle unit back.

And I will say the reaction of those around me has been universally like, oh yeah, let's do this.

But I don't see uh motorcycles in the uh budget.

And I just want to make sure that's still part of the plan.

That's because we already own them.

Yeah.

What?

We own them.

They're in the garage.

Yeah.

Harley Davidson police edition motorcycles.

Just haven't had the people to ride them.

All right.

I drive the City Hall Prius around.

Knowing that we had access to a city of Bozeman Harley.

Um one other question, maybe a little more serious.

Um, for about following up on the TIFFs.

We or the U the uh URDs, the uh urban renewal districts.

We read don't we refund the increment back to the of the the sh uh to the school district?

Is that just for midtown or do we do that for all our all our increments?

We do that just for downtown.

For just for downtown.

Yes, okay.

So that's our biggest, and that's our biggest increment that goes back to the school district, and it goes back to the county too.

Is that right?

Okay.

So we just take the city share and keep it in the downtown.

We do.

Thank you.

Yeah, Commissioner Boat.

Yeah, I have just one more question for the chief.

I'm sorry, you're doing a lot of up and down, Chief Bellcamp.

Um, I am curious what your um kind of anecdotal opinion is about the investments we've made into the transitional housing fund and um kind of moving some people maybe off the streets and into uh more permanent housing.

Um what what impact do you think that's had on the the calls that you've received for your your officers?

I'll use your word uh anecdotal because that's all this would be at this point.

Uh what I hear is that the call volume has gone down as people have found stable housing.

Um certainly as HRDC has capacity, uh it does create at times a little bit different issues, but I would say overall it has had an impact.

So uh we absolutely need more police officers to patrol town and keep the streets safe.

However, there we also see an impact when other services are offered.

Uh upstream, to use the deputy mayor's word, that help prevent us from having to respond to calls.

I think there's some time of belief that that those two are in conflict for us.

They absolutely are not.

Um officers want to investigate crime.

That is what they do is want to keep their community safe, help people on a bad day.

Uh so the more we can do and fund some of the the transitional housing and get people into into stable places, get them jobs.

Uh definitely the better off the community is, and the police department wants to be a part of that.

Great, thank you.

Um I have a few questions that probably also pertain to um Chief L Camp, though I might might be city manager as well or or finance director because the first question is is really uh unfortunately maybe hairy, but it is the process by which uh negotiations for raises are done.

So I've always felt this sort of odd pattern or this this like odd system that we have where um unions negotiate with you all on what their raises, what is palatable, what you know they're willing to take.

And then it comes to us where we were not party to those negotiations, and there is a commitment to fulfill those raises, those benefits, et cetera, that the union fights for.

And I've just always found that to be a little strange.

Like, what if we decide up here we don't want to do that amount?

Are we in trouble?

Like, what's the what are the relationships here that get us to these yet large year-over-year wage increases that we aren't having to negotiate with them on.

I'll take that one.

Um, yes, that is some of the most important and the most difficult work we do is to negotiate.

We have four collective bargaining agreements, and before, usually before, so typically they're three-year agreements.

So it's it's a three-year promise, a three-year commitment to the labor group that we really do have to follow through on.

Um, this commission and previous commissions have placed a lot of trust in your uh administration, that we will negotiate fare raises, that we will negotiate raises that we can afford, and that we will negotiate raises within the market conditions.

So we we do our best to do that.

Um, usually it uh um, you know, the old joke that if both sides leave a labor negotiation a little unhappy, that's probably the best deal you could get, and that's true.

So, um we have we have four labor groups, typically three-year agreements.

We build those projected salary increases into the budget, but we try to keep those not political.

It's I think that's really important that if if a labor group could come to a city commission and you know bring all of its members here and force you to do something.

Um, that's a different that's a different environment that we've had, and that's what you get with a manager commission form of government.

So, to your question, we don't.

This is none of this is arbitrary.

We have a list of about 18 comparators that we've put together over a period of years that we determine the market for uh all of our positions, and it's different, it's different.

It's based on the position itself, it's based on its um uh um it's uh you know whether it's got a uh a comparator in a private sector job, or whether in things like police and fire the only jobs are in the public sector.

So we take all that into account.

It's a uh very sophisticated process.

We meet with our representatives for employer groups or period of weeks at the SUNIS, months, and we negotiate and we talk about it, and it's a give and take, and it's a very sometimes it's easier than other times, but it's something we spend a lot of time in.

We want our employees to feel like they're being treated fair, and that yeah and we that costs money.

So I don't know if that answers your question or not.

If you decided that you weren't going to fund the salary increases that we've negotiated with our unions, you have the right to do that.

Um the possible consequences it would be that we would get an unfair labor practice, or we would have to make cuts in other areas of the budget to fund those increases.

So there's a lot of trust there, there's a lot of work that goes into that, and um, yeah, it's not easy, but it's critically important to what we do.

So I appreciate that, and I I think that sort of leads to my my follow-up here is to one, um, was nervous about asking because I know this is an odd dynamic of of this of this form of government and would never insinuate that we would be better negotiators or should be the negotiators.

Um that that's not the point.

The part that I'm feeling is that we're often we're hearing from the community.

One, I would say we're not just hearing, we at times here, we need more police officers, but I also think many say, um, or even those that are saying we want more police officers, it's not just we want more police officers, it's we want our community to be safe.

And when there are so, there's such a huge menu of tools that can improve public safety, but there is this one that's growing quickly because of good negotiations of wages and things like that, that we want to make sure that we're competitive to retain people, et cetera.

That's the the crunch that I'm feeling in this role as we're seeing what are the what are the upstream interventions we want to make that are not in conflict with this in sort of ever increasing part of the general fund that's competing with with everything else.

And so I guess that's the thing I'm trying to make heads or tails of is how do we measure whether that is like the balance of retention benefits, et cetera, versus lower pay, which would mean we could hire more officers.

I mean, those are the things that I'm I think we're feeling that I've heard from folks.

You know, we're trying to figure out like what is the way to make this pie translate to the most safety injection into the community.

And this part does feel, you know, it's a hairy part of it, but it's it's a big part of the conversation.

I am not afraid of this conversation at all.

Um I do not believe any of our employees are are overpaid, so it's not a it's not a uh a result of slick negotiation uh abilities from one employee group to another.

Um, you got more, you got less because you weren't as good a negotiator.

I think the practices that we have in place, the professionalism of our negotiation team, which is led by our HR director, and our finance director, uh, and the director of the group that we're negotiating with.

See, this is this is an issue, and we talked about this.

Um, this is the hard conversations that happen in a general fund.

The exact same thing that you just described with police and fire happens with Teamsters and MFPE.

So it's it's not, but it's it it's buried more in rates.

But when a teamster gets an increase, that impacts utility rates.

So we look at that, we do our best.

Are we perfect at it?

No, but I think we do a really great job of of looking at the pay for the position, not the ability of the negotiation team, or we look at the market, we look at challenges with retention, recruitment and retention in certain divisions.

Um, we look at uh a compression within the divisions, and that it's it all goes into how we negotiate our labor contracts, how we prepare our budget, um, and that's ultimately what the five of you get to decide.

You get to grade us on our on our recommended budget.

I'm required to present a recommended budget to you, we do that every every time we talk about it, and you get to put your fingerprints on it and decide if it meets your vision for our community.

But I I will tell you I'm proud of the amount of work that's gone into it.

I'm proud of our staff, I'm proud of this process, um, but no, it's not perfect.

And I mean, not to get into discussion, but I mean the caliber of staff that get attracted to this place is you know shows the return that we're getting on on those negotiations and that process.

I guess the question that I don't know if either of you have a reaction to or that I hope that we could get into is I think every time we have this conversation of what are the what are the chief components that are squeezing the safety apparatus of the community.

It's overwhelmingly like substance use, drug use, uh mental illness.

And we have an unwilling, perhaps I'm not gonna use other words, unwilling partner with the state of Montana on deploying, you know, transformative amounts of money to meaningfully address the mental health issues.

But so now we're here with an imperfect system, but still a challenge to address public safety, and we continue to seem to just mostly focus on investments in policing faster and more than the other tools.

That's the thing.

Which one are we raising first and faster?

Like I I hear the question, the testament that we're behind, but we're really behind in mental health, you know, responses.

We're really behind in you know resource navigation at our libraries and things like that.

So which the question for us then is what how do we decide and how do we as a as a city create plans for how and why we move which up?

And I think there's a fundamental difference in this conversation.

One, it is the city's responsibility to provide policing within its city limits.

I think the challenges with mental health and housing are community challenges and require community solutions.

We don't expect the county to pay for our police department, but I think we need to involve the county and our other municipalities and the state of Montana.

Yes, I agree with you, mayor, 100%, in those solutions.

We I don't think we could ever fund a um and then how do you determine somebody's eligibility if it's if it's city tax dollars paying Fort Mental Health treatment?

Is a person that doesn't live here?

That comes from another place.

Are they eligible for those services?

You've made that decision with tenants' right to counsel.

You have to be a city resident, live inside the city to get those services.

I think that's a that's the challenge, and I said it yesterday at the HRDC.

I think we this is this is not a switchy flip and it's fixed.

This is a dial that you turn up, you keep talking about it, you keep partnering with our with the other groups that that we need to solve this for the community, and um I think that's happening.

Is it happening as fast as we need it to happen or as we want it to happen?

Absolutely not, but it's happening.

We're talking about these things as community issues now, and we need to keep on doing that.

I think Commissioner Fisher or Deputy Mayor Fisher's, you know, talked about when we did the police and fire staffing levies and bond, it was like, what do we need to do?

What do we need to ask our taxpayers for to that upstream services?

And it's a fair question, and it's one we struggle with every day.

We're having those conversations with the county, we're having them with Belgrade in ways that we haven't before, and I know we need to keep continuing doing that.

Great.

Yeah, Commissioner Sweeney.

Can I ask um for you to talk a little bit about the crisis stabilization grant that we applied for?

Because I think we mentioned it in the HRDC strategic planning session yesterday, but I don't believe that was recorded, and there was no members of the public there.

So and I personally would like to learn a little bit more about what this could potentially do um for our community on a mental health front.

Sure.

So we have been working for a number of years on a place where people could go themselves, a place where loved ones can take somebody, or where the police department can drop somebody off who's in who's experiencing a mental health crisis or a substance abuse episode overdose.

We had a really great plan a few years ago with the hospital and with Gallatin County.

We went to Tucson and looked at what I think is a really great model.

Arizona funds this as a state function, Montana.

We haven't got there yet.

Um, but it is a um literally a no-wrong door.

You have a challenge, there's help there for you instantly, and it's quite amazing.

It's it's not an institutional setting.

Um I have a passion for this, so I I could talk for hours.

I promise I won't.

But this is a place where where people or families were friends and loved ones of folks with experiencing a crisis can go get help instantly.

They're never turned away.

They're welcomed in, and we had that opportunity through connections and Bozeman Health.

Um, the CEO of Bozeman Health left, and that whole program fell away.

So we've been spending the last few years trying to figure out how to do this.

Um, it's taken about every dollar we have to keep the existing programs going and support the um crisis um response team.

So all the while uh um Cola Rowley, our assistant city manager, when she was with the county, she was working on this.

Uh the county didn't have the capacity to do it, so the Bozeman became the sponsoring agency and made the application for this.

We haven't heard back yet.

We think it's a solid application, but we don't get to make those decisions.

What it would do is it would fund this crisis receiving and stabilization center for three years, and then excuse me, a community function, not just for Bozeman, it's a community function.

We're a partner.

We need we have good partners, we need to be a good partner uh in this work.

So, anyways, that's that's um exciting.

The three years we could operate it fully while we look for long-term ongoing stable funding.

That's the dream.

Um yeah, there's a little bit of risk in doing it, but nothing nothing good happens without some level of risk.

We think it's manageable.

Uh, we're working with our partners, and we'll just see if we're awarded that grant or not.

Thank you for that.

I'm excited to know more about that.

Thank you.

Okay, any further questions.

We have more sections, right?

Or is that the last one?

Not really, just a couple of recap slides.

Okay, let's do recap slides, break, come back to public comment.

Does that sound good?

I I just wanted to revisit your previous question about um opportunities for disability um and ADA projects.

Um, I'm I'm curious if if staff have any um additional guidance on on the mayor's question from from the previous week, or maybe just a reminder, Mayor Morrison, if if that was a question you were gonna ask.

Um we have to still look into that a little bit, but I think uh city manager answered that last time.

That um a lot of that is in our transportation budget, and we can get some more information.

Yeah, thank you for that.

Um, also in the belonging and boseman coordinators work, there are specific actions related to Ability Montana as a partner, they were partner in building the belonging and boseman plan, and that is part of that ongoing work.

Um, yeah, the big expensive things are, you know, the curb cuts, uh, sidewalks, sidewalks are responsibility, the adjacent property owner.

I know we can do a better job of um working with property owners to identify problem areas within the city.

Not talked with Nick about that specifically, but that's on our list.

We got a lot of things going on right now.

This is another important thing, um, but I know that it's important.

We know that it's important to the commission, and it's important to us.

Okay, just one more follow-up question.

I know we've had a conversation about how um you've kind of reviewed the job description as as loosely as it was defined in the belonging and boseman plan for an ADA coordinator um and disability liaison and kind of found that it doesn't seem like we currently have 40 hours worth of work for that position.

Um, I am curious if you have a kind of estimate of how many hours of work do we have for for somebody like that.

If we were to hire yeah, I think that is a part of the analysis we're doing with um the Boeing and Bozeman coordinator.

I think Nick and I have to have some some more conversations about that as well.

But I I think that's the deal.

The same thing you talked about the wetland work where we don't have 20, 80 hours to spend on this, and I'm also concerned to be honest with you that that if we have somebody just focused on this looking uh at projects, that we're gonna quickly overwhelm our ability to complete those projects and fund those projects, and then I think that creates a level of frustration that that won't be helpful to us moving forward.

Okay, okay.

Um, so just wanted to bring this back up the how homeowner impact slide and remind everyone that those property taxes are definitely an estimate, and we'll look at those again in August.

Um this is assuming that your residential home increases an assessed value by 3%.

That's another factor that is very difficult to predict and depends on what the Department of Revenue comes back with.

Lastly, just want to highlight the next two meetings that are upcoming June 23rd when we'll be looking at um hopefully adopting this budget and August 18th when we will be looking at establishing and fixing those mill levies based on the taxable values we receive in early August.

Yeah, Deputy Mayor.

So can I go back?

So our assumptions about these property taxes, which I realize will all be answered in August.

But we so the Department of Revenue was saying, as we said in the beginning of this, beginning of this discussion, is increase a decrease of 1.3% in taxable value.

But we're assuming residential homes increase 3%.

How does that so um the assessed value of a home is different from the taxable value?

So your home's assessed value.

Um in this case, the six six hundred and fifty-two thousand one hundred and twenty-six plus three percent plus three percent.

Um the tax rate is calculated based on that.

Um so the the tax rate, I think we're expecting with the legislative reductions to be approximately 0.9%.

Oh, I see for the typical homeowner.

Um, so that tax rate's being applied to the home.

Yep, so they're different numbers.

Got it.

Right.

So I guess so residential home buys are increasing, but our property tax rate is decreasing miraculously.

And so what happens then, I guess, if we don't see that that um residential home increase, uh like if we're off by, because I believe we were all we we kind of were surprised uh a couple a couple years ago.

Yes, and we saw that most homes actually did not increase in price at all in assessed value at all.

So if there were not a 3% increase in fiscal year 27, you'd actually see that your property tax bill would go down based on our assumptions here.

Oh, so.

Wait, but then how do we manage to get the revenue in if the property tax, yeah?

I don't understand that math at all.

Yes.

So the amount that we're allowed to collect on property taxes is based on a dollar value.

And then that dollar value is assigned to each individual property based on the class type, your tax rate, and your assessed value.

So that dollar distribution changes whenever the state changes what tax rates are, whenever the DOR changes your assessed value.

So then we'd have to be making some really tough decisions about because we'd have to make cuts.

We would have less money available to us in the general fund, is that what I'm hearing?

No.

Um let me think about how to explain that for a second.

The so we're right now we're looking at just an estimated homeowner impact.

So when we were talking before about the general fund property tax, we're talking about what we're going to collect from commercial properties from centrally assessed properties from a number of other types of properties.

So the 0% that we're seeing here is not directly correlated to the 1% increase in property tax revenue that we discussed.

Got it.

Okay.

Yeah, I I'm sorry that I I keep getting tripped up by all of this, but thank you.

Okay, I think I've got it.

Any final questions?

Okay.

Um, I think we'll as a break feel desired.

Okay, I'm seeing unanimous nods.

Um, oh God, it's a set seven minutes.

Till 7 p.m., we will reconvene at seven o'clock.

I, All right, we're getting the show back on the road, four minutes delayed.

I hope everyone savored every moment.

Now we are moving on to public comment on the proposed budget.

So this is just a work session, there's no decision being made.

Um this evening, that hearing is for a couple weeks still.

Um, but this is your opportunity to provide any public comments related to uh our special revenue funds and our general fund presentation and discussion from earlier today.

Um for those that are wanting to give public comment in the room, the same same rules will apply.

You'll have three minutes to provide your public comment.

There's a timer up on the podium to start with your first and last name and your relationship to the city.

Good evening.

Hi, good evening.

I am Katie Madison.

I'm the executive director at Haven.

Um, and I really just want to thank the commissioners and the city of Bozeman for prioritizing investments in emergency shelter operations to support the work of Haven, HRDC, and Family Promise.

At Haven, we work with survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, sex trafficking, and stalking.

We know that 80% of women with children experiencing homelessness have been victims of domestic violence, and that more than half of unhoused women stay at DV as the primary driver of their homelessness.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good evening.

Hi.

Hi, my name is Alison Braddock, and I'm the executive director for Family Promise.

Um, I too just want to echo my thanks and gratitude for your continued support of our services of our collaboration and our partnership to work with the homeless here in Bozeman and provide some services.

I just wanted to share a quick story uh that shares a little bit about how the funds have been used for one of our families and the effect and positive impact it's had on them.

Family Promise of Gallatin Valley is grateful for the opportunity to support families in our community as they move from housing instability to permanent sustainable housing.

Thanks to the bridging home funds through the city of Bozeman, we've already been able to make this a reality for many unhoused families with the excitement of continuing to assist more families to get into stable, permanent, and positive housing.

Recently, we celebrated an important milestone with a family who's secured a new home after experiencing homelessness for more than three months.

Much of their income was spent on hotel stays when night-by-night shelter space was unavailable.

Without access to a kitchen, the family also faced significantly higher food expenses, further straining their budget and limiting their ability to save for permanent housing.

Over time, the family, with the help of Family Promise, identified a housing opportunity that fit their budget and would allow them to build long-term stability.

While they could afford the monthly rent moving forward, the upfront costs of securing the unit, including the security deposit and first month of rent, were out of reach after months of elevated living expenses.

Family promise work closely with the family throughout the housing search process, helping them identify an appropriate rental opportunity, understand the leasing process, and successfully navigate the application requirements.

To help make the transition possible, family promise provided financial assistance for the security deposit, prorated first month's rent, and an additional month of rent, ensuring the family could begin their tenancy on solid footing.

Today the family is settling in to their new home and looking forward to a brighter future.

With stable housing and significantly reduced monthly expenses, they now have room in their budget to meet their family's needs, participate in meaningful activities together, and begin rebuilding the family's savings for the future.

Most importantly, they have the security and peace of mind that comes with having a place to call home.

Thank you so much for helping make this possible for our community.

Thank you.

And congratulations on the new role.

Thanks for introducing yourself to us this evening.

Good evening.

Hi again, uh Mark Campanelli, Boker Park neighbor.

Um I just want to start with a quick story.

When I came out here in 2001 for the graduate uh work in math and the math department here at MSU, we had our welcoming party at the Linley Park Center.

It was still open.

It was so fun.

It was uh, you know, I was fell in love with Bozeman right away, and that was just like, yeah, this is cool.

So concerning TIFF, uh, the staff of the city's economic development department consistently describes the tax deferral of TIFF as delayed gratification.

Thus, I'm really opposed to replacing the TIFF district with a local option sales tax after it's done because the expectations are being set about this windfall to happen later.

And uh, I mean you're gonna get a thousand letters to the editor out of me if we replace like if TIFF expires and then we replace it with another tax.

Um, we should be getting that money then to use it for those things.

Um concerning, I'll try to keep moving here, a big long list.

Uh concerning the cost of police salaries.

I really appreciate your question, Mayor Morrison, and the discussion.

I think that was a great question.

Um, it strikes me as much more expensive for others to police the population for them than the people to meet the expectations of behaving responsibly.

We obviously have a lot of student population here and other people moving through town as tourists, so it'd be nice if we can have you know the self-policing aspect, and then that's kind of all this other stuff churning through our society that we have to hire police for, especially traffic.

And I have lots of stories about people in rental cars cruising through Bogart Park, but I'll save that for later.

Um tenants privilege to privilege to council, not right to counsel.

If a government puts a limit on funding, the so-called right, then it's not a right.

My right to free speech doesn't depend on the city being sufficiently funded.

The term is up there along with free health care.

Um, I'm not a I'm a proponent for covering people's health care publicly, but it's not free.

It's not a right, it's a privilege that we pay for.

Um, so just like when I was a driver, bringing it back to traffic, I was told driving is a privilege.

I'm driving on public streets.

That is a privilege, it's not a right.

So does another fire station affect our ability to fight wildfires, respond to a major flooding event, prevent natural gas explosions, have like a web that responds to these bigger types of things.

I will be much more likely to vote yes on some bail initiative if I see that piece in there.

So take note.

Um, the county seems to be in a state of financial disrepair and not passing audits, apparently.

So I'm wondering if anybody's got it on their radar that what if the state swoops in and takes over for the county?

I don't know how realistic that is, but it seems like it could be a bad time for Bozeman.

Um, I'm curious as to what proportion of the seven million in new taxable expected money is to be taxed at this non-exempt rate for partial, like when you're not living there full time.

I'd love to know the proportions.

That new tax structure, I think, offers an opportunity to get some transparency on how many people are actually living at the Henry year round.

I would love to know that.

I think we can see that transparency with these numbers.

Again, people have to be honest about uh living there or not uh full-time, and then trying to wrap it up.

What is the rate of inflation and who determines it year to year?

Because I can guarantee you I'm not suffering from two percent inflation.

It's gotta be more than that.

So, anyways, thanks for listening.

Thank you.

Good evening.

Good evening.

My name is Anthony Smith, and my phone number is 406-2090-50.

For the last 24 months, I've stood before you speaking out against police brutality and the municipal policies that enable this level of abuse.

The years 2023 and 2024 were especially brutal, and the consequences of those years are coming to a head right now.

Over the last couple of months, the family of Mr.

Rogel and his dog have been fighting the city of Bozeman in federal court.

This summer you are heading into a settlement conference where a deal may be struck behind closed doors.

For the sake of true justice, I do not want to see this swept under the rug.

I want to see this case proceed to trial where the policies of this city will be publicly scrutinized, where the body cam footage will be laid bare, and where the testimonies of officers and witnesses will be forced into the light.

I have watched your silence, and as and as I and others have made repeated requests of you, I have brought you video evidence only to be met with a collective response that there's nothing to see here, but your silence is revealing.

It shows exactly who you are based on how you choose to ignore these problems.

When you finally watch the footage of police officers shooting out the windows of a man's truck while he and his dog are trapped inside, what is your plan?

How many millions of taxpayer and insurance dollars will be spent before this commission decides that human life is worth changing your policies for?

If this commission votes to take a settlement deal after the summer hearing, I insist that no dollar amount is agreed to without mandatory immediate structural changes.

First, we must outlaw the torture tactics utilized, utilizing so-called less lethal force in this town.

We are not safer since the police got beanbag guns and tear gas.

In 2014, citizens warned this exact commission about the dangers of federal militarization and the combat culture they bring.

Everything we fared then is happening now.

Second, we demand a policy shift that takes mental health crisis out of the hands of armed officers and puts them into the hands of treated mental health professionals who de-escalate rather than escalate violence.

I am calling on you tonight to enact an immediate ceasefire on the use of less lethal force in Bozeman.

Look us in the eye, stop hiding behind legal settlements, and change these policies.

Thank you.

One other thing I'd like to say is I completely agree with Chuck about not cutting police salaries.

That's not our problem here.

We need to train people so we don't have turnover rates.

But when police damage a human med uh a body, Medicare pays 10%, and the hospital writes off the rest.

The nurses pay their union dues, but cannot afford to live here.

We need to change this.

Thank you.

Good evening.

Hi.

Um I don't have anything really prepared, but on page 111 of the um the budget, there was actually a link out to the downtown urban renewal district, the work plan.

Um I'd have to really look at this more and go back to the actual, you know, the ordinance that set up the TIFF for downtown, the 1409.

A lot of this stuff doesn't seem that is this really are we really trying to resolve blight or just doing nice to haves, which I don't know if the TIF, I mean, you guys would know better than I'm not trying to, you know, cast dispersions, but it seems like a lot of the stuff might be nice to have.

And it also seems like it the idea is to spend down whatever budgets that that remain.

I mean, I just we found out tonight that we're making 2.97 million off of those diverted funds, you know, from the 1995 um cap on downtown property taxes, because we're already getting we made it at we made, you know, the already this the uh county and the state are getting or this county and the school are getting though get getting theirs.

So we're making a lot of money off this 1995 base that's just going to this TIFF account, but it looks like also we're first of all the the Bozeman executive director or the Bozeman downtown, they created this budget, which strikes me as a little odd, you know.

They're they're sort of and they're paying their own salaries, um, and they're doing this five half a million dollars on a some sort of a parking plan parking supply management planning and data collection.

I could tell you there's no place to park, and I'd do that for free.

I just did it now.

Um that'd be a smart aleck.

Uh I don't know.

It I would need to go through this and take a look, and again, I'm not a CPA, I'm not a lawyer.

I just gotta take a look.

Cause it it seems like we are no we are no longer a blighted community, and it seems like we're we may be purchasing nice to have where this stuff could go back into the general fund.

You know, and we it could be pay for more police.

That's all I got.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Any further public comment requests in the room this evening?

Second request in the room, and one final request for comments in the room.

Mr.

Newby, what do we see in?

Mayor Morrison, I see no request for public comment online.

Okay, seeing no public comment request to come before the commission on this item, bring it up here for commission discussion.

And I think I think it's up to the discretion of anyone here of what they want to opine on discuss.

I mean, last week we didn't discuss that much because we're not making any decisions, but I think there's space to, you know, describe concerns, amendments might be looking at things that you'd like to scrutinize further over the next two weeks.

I think we're should we start with Commissioner Magic?

Sure.

Um I'll just do a really quick summary.

Really appreciate those members of the public that are both here listening but participated in the discussion.

Uh it wasn't a lot, but it was more than we've had in years past.

Uh also want to thank staff.

I know these are long meetings.

I'm glad we started at four, because if we started at six, it would be quite a bit later.

So thanks for just adjusting your schedules to meet up for today.

Um, I'm always impressed just with the process that was described by Melissa, everything that goes into creating this budget up until these days that it comes before us.

Obviously, is a ton of work that goes into this.

Um, a couple of my takeaways real quick.

Um, the importance of keeping fee rates current.

It seems like this that needs to be an annual routine.

And I've mentioned that before.

I'm I'm curious about the TIFT fund and transferring some of that money, but once again, I want to check with the people who are currently uh the stewards of that money and overseeing it.

There are some, and there are not many requests from different groups that I would like to discuss and probably make amendments on at our next meeting.

Uh, one was a request for a thousand bucks to go into studying chronic wasting disease in the area.

Dear.

Uh we received a request for funding for Bozeman Creek, kind of a continuation, and I'd love to have the assistant city manager kind of talk about the need of that uh at our next meeting.

Was there another request for funding?

If there are, I'm gonna share that with the city manager and be prepared to kind of have a discussion on these additional requests.

I'm hoping to talk about that here in two weeks.

And I think that's kind of it for me.

I'm gonna take this home, think about it, and be able to comment more in a couple weeks.

Thanks.

Commissioner Bowdy.

Yeah, thank you.

Before I give my comments, can I just um clarify?

Did you say $1,000 for the CWD study or is that hundreds of 1,000?

1,000.

That's all it's gonna take, huh?

I don't know that I've ever heard of a request.

You do enough studies, you get a free.

Yeah, that is very small.

Um, okay, great.

Yeah, I will um also echo uh Commissioner Magic's appreciation of staff and all of the work that went into putting this together.

I know you probably started um immediately after our last session on this a year ago, and here we are again.

Um, and I also am just really grateful for staff being able to answer so many questions in such detail tonight.

That was really helpful for me.

Um, some things that I am kind of mulling over right now is um we have historically allocated 400,000 to streamline, and that number has stayed the same year after year, but the the costs of um providing that service are increasing year to year.

And I would be interested in adding sort of an inflationary increase to that for percent.

If we were to choose that number, would be an additional $16,000 to that 16 or to the streamline budget.

And um, I I'd be really interested in hearing kind of feedbacks and thoughts about that in the context of all of our other um needs this year, and um know that we're uh looking at a lot of different um really important things to fund.

I am also kind of wrestling with this um allocation that we've previously given to HRBC Haven and Family Promise.

We we used to allocate at 500,000, and I I know that we we really worked with our partners at the county and the city of Belgrade to bring that down and put that more in um fair proportion to each of our populations.

And I'm really excited to see that work.

And and at the same time, I am hearing that that transitional housing has already housed over 20 the one-time traditional transitional housing allocation we gave has already housed at least 20 families and more stable housing, and that um anecdotally our police force has seen a kind of decrease in some of the types of calls that they were giving at our conversation we had um yesterday with HRDC.

We heard from our fire chief that there's these really like easy treatable problems happening with physical health where somebody is calling the ambulance for something that they went to the ER the previous week for and just didn't keep up on their um their changing of their bandages or taking their medications and kind of end up in these systems of um of medical debt because of really like what seems pretty preventable things, and and that adds burden on our our fire EMS and police um police departments, and so yeah, I would be interested in trying to allocate a little bit more money to those upstream fixes, and that might look like transitional housing, it might look like some kind of um funding for some more caseworking support through the HRDC's homeward Point building.

Um, and yeah, I'd like to be in conversation with my my colleagues up here, and and also um our housing nonprofits that are you know in the audience right now about what's been successful and if we were to allocate a bit towards those upstream efforts, what what is the most important thing that we could be doing?

Um let's see.

So disability, I know that we made a commitment in our belonging and Bozeman plan to make steady improvements on accessibility in this community, and having a belonging and Bozeman coordinator is certainly a really good step towards that.

And the amounts of feedback that we received in public engagement in the creation of the belonging Bozeman plan directed us to consider hiring a full-time ADA coordinator and a part-time disability liaison.

And I'm I'm grappling with what I've heard from staff that it doesn't seem like we have enough work for um one single full-time person, let alone a part-time and a full-time person, to do that work right now.

But we're also hearing from the disability community through Building Montana that there are really important projects that we can be working on right now.

And so I am interested in figuring out how to how to carve out a little bit of funding for projects that will improve our accessibility in our community, whether that's through the streets department or parks department or more larger systems-based, like how people interact with our website.

I know we received a complaint about the readability of our website being difficult for for folks with um lower seeing abilities, and I just know that there's a lot of projects and a commitment from the city to improve this for our residents.

So yeah, I'd be interested in talking about um how we carve out some some projects money and or similarly to how we are meeting our need for um for wetlands uh delineation.

Is there the potential to start a you know smaller-term contract and contract as we have these projects?

Um, and then if we see this growing into a larger need, um, we could consider a position at a future time.

I think I'm gonna stop there and we can look back if um I have other thoughts.

Thank you, Commissioner Sweet.

Thank you very much.

And um definitely thank you to Director Hodnet because she did make time for a one-on-one for me, as this is my first budget process, um, and that was really appreciated, and also addressing a lot of my I send a lot of emails, uh a lot of my email questions.

So that's thank you very much for helping me to understand the process and and what we're doing.

Um I'm really happy that um there is suggested uh police staffing.

Um, after taking the Citizens Police Academy, I was incredibly impressed with the philosophy of our department, the way they hire people, um, and the way they conduct themselves in the face of really a lot of crime and incidents that I think a lot of us don't understand is happening here.

Um, and they keep that from us, and that's that's their job, and they're doing great.

So I I am really glad to see that.

Thank you guys for including that.

Um something that I would be interested in doing, and I don't know if any of you would like to join, or if this could be a city facilitated thing, but um, you know, sometime in the next few weeks, maybe a coffee with a commissioner that is dedicated to having conversations about what the public wants out of the budget.

Um, we received a public comment today from someone who suggested that we do some outreach.

It's you know a very transparent process.

We are here doing this, they have access to this.

Um, but I'm personally interested.

It's since it's my first time in maybe going out into the community at an event and getting some more feedback.

Um, and you know, we have until August to you know, hopefully, projections are accurate and we don't have any scary decisions to make, but um I would like a little more public input in case we do have tough decisions to make.

So um that's a question for further conversation.

I'd I'd love to do an event with the public.

Um, and then you know, kind of just one more thing that I would like to talk about.

Um, you know, when I get my property tax bill and I look through it and I saw, oh, you know, two mills for planning.

I sort of figured that was like how we funded the planning department plus fees.

Now learning that actually there's a lot of subsidy from the general fund to the planning department, and I understand the reasons for that.

Um I do just want to maybe pose the idea that um, especially since we are sort of farming out or contracting out the planning review for these single family home type structures.

I would like to have the conversation about allocating some of that general fund subsidy to us creating a menu of pre-approved plans for small infill that would have neighborhood buy-in, neighborhood um, you know, supporting creating them, so that you know, that way average people who maybe have a big lot and they want to put an ADU or they even want to put a small home, can have a menu to choose from that is pre-approved, so that saves time, doesn't need an architect, which could save hundreds of thousands or eighty to a hundred thousand dollars right there, and then if we do these plans with a neighborhood, it could come with a COA, a certificate of appropriateness for the neighborhood conservation overlay.

So right there, that is removing a huge burden for this kind of infill housing, you know, to really create the village that we want to live in.

Um, so that's a conversation I'd like to have with each of you, and uh maybe on the 23rd we can have discussion about that.

So those are the only three comments I really have about this tonight.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Deputy Mayor.

Yeah, thank you.

I just I do also want to appreciate staff and and just appreciate Mr.

Wynn your this budget.

It's uh there's a lot of prudence in this, a lot of tough decisions, a lot of balance.

Um, and you manage to kind of get the nuts and bolts of what we need to run a city.

Um, you know, I'm excited by what we've got for our parks.

I'm excited about what we've got for streets.

Um, I think we did a reasonably good job of holding our kind of assessments, you know, um the increase is moderate, but but also me making sure that we're we're we're prepared for the future, and so um, and then I also really appreciate the sensitivity we're showing with property taxes.

Um, and then uh, you know, I appreciate also the the the you're hitting the priorities, the affordability, the the you know, we're honoring kind of the heritage of our city, we're honesting uh we're investing in economic development, um, so I'm uh I think this is a this is a solid document for us to work with.

Um, I do think the uh I don't I would also say I'm time grateful for the timing for having the two weeks now to kind of chew on this and to think about some of the different things we want to, you know, the tweaks we want to make.

I'm not hearing a lot of big changes, which I'm grateful for, and I'm uh and I don't think I have any big changes here either.

Um so it's mostly, you know, um it, but it is really nice to have some time to talk to the community to to sit and think with this.

Um just a couple of really specific things.

We spent a lot of time tonight talking about the police, and I I heard the need to kind of have both to um we need uh public safety, we need officers that are that are uh staff that's adequately um uh a force that's adequately staffed to um for the activity that we're seeing in this and this and the security and the safety we expect out of this community, and we need to be thinking about some of those kind of upstream or mental health um and and housing components that drive a lot of our calls, um, and how we make that balance, I think is is something I'm I I think we need to have a discussion on the 23rd about, you know, and and think about that.

But I also I think frankly, that's that's worthy of its own discussion outside of a budget where we can think we're not making a, you know, I guess as we bring up our numbers to kind of where they were supposed to be back in 2021, we can then assess where we want to be, you know, going forward in 2930 on and onward.

I think it's a much more longer term kind of question we're dealing with that may not be appropriate for this budget cycle.

Um, I do think, you know, I and I I also was heartened by um Mr.

Overton's comments about our public facilities are kind of an affordable, um approachable way to bring people together, to bring this community to, you know, to have a family reunion, a memorial service, a birthday party.

So I you know, and I think that's something we as a community should embrace.

So I don't, you know, even though I don't rent the Beal Center or the Story Mansion very often, you know, to me it's it's important.

I think that we as a community provide that.

And I so I I don't have a problem with a subsidy or with us as a community paying for to support those things and to make those approachable so that all of Bozemanites can have a really nice place to gather.

Um we can attract more more cappanellies into our into our community with if we we have more parties there.

Um and then I think there's also something to be said about having you know, our our permit fees, there's that tension there with with that's that's an affordable, you know.

We could put all these costs into our permits and our building permits and our fees, and that drives the cost of building up and up.

And and so there's that tension there in terms of how we how we find that as a city, and that's a further discussion.

But um, other than that, I'm just looking forward to taking the next two weeks to chew on this and and appreciate the discussion.

Thanks to my colleagues for your comments, um, and to staff.

I think we talked about this last week, uh, both process-wise.

I feel like we've really kind of hit the sweet spot of breaking up funds, breaking them into different meetings, making June as it is in many cities, is just sort of the budget gauntlet over the course of a few meetings to give everybody a lot of chances to dive into these things.

Um, appreciative of just yeah, I think similarly to what Commissioner Magic had to say.

We didn't get a lot of public comments either at this meeting or submitted, but they were thoughtful and and informative and um really carefully crafted that I do think were were really interesting things to be able to to chew on.

I think we'll be able to discuss more on the on the 23rd.

Um, there's always this uh I'm just gonna hope offer a few thoughts on just what I think when we are looking at budgets or even when we're passing policies that really at the core of everything that we're doing is about public health and public safety.

You know, when we are changing our road policies, those are public health and safety measures.

When we are changing our policies around trees, those are public health and safety measures, um, as well as of course law enforcement firefighters.

But I think when we're trying to really focus on what are the returns for everyone, you know, that's that's just like it's just a tough part of trying to figure out what dollar for dollar um is the right thing for us to be investing in for public health and public safety.

Um, like how many, how many lives are saved by you know a rapid rectangular flashing beacon that isn't as glamorous as new police cruisers or a new fire station, but you know, they're all part of the same the same system, and trying to slice out where and when and how, because to to the deputy mayor's point, you know, this is the third time we've sat right here, and I feel like each time we've come to this discussion, we've said we don't have a plan for something other than police as our primary safety implement.

And we're not gonna have one next year, and we're not gonna have one the year after that until at some point we decide we need to start investing in in other alternatives as well.

And it just always comes at a time when we are feeling like the budget is scarce and tight and hard to find anything, and then I think we get fatigued and defeated, and then we just sort of, you know, we go with what's proposed in front of us because it's it's it's hard, it's messy.

Um talking about public safety is like so politically fraught in our in our country.

Um so I'm I'm just appreciative of you all being willing to have that conversation toward our city manager who's willing to show some of the sausage baking of our union negotiations uh angst, and but I'm really looking forward to our our discussion on the 23rd.

Um, that's all I got.

Commissioner Bodie.

I forgot to say a couple.

We've also started to kind of soften our tones the way that we do at the end of a meeting, and we have another item after this as a reminder for everyone.

Um yeah, I I forgot to mention um that there were two public comments that came in um advocating for some disability funding that um I received after noon.

They went to the public comment email but were CC'd to me, and I just want to give a heads up that those will hit the public comment repository later, and I encourage you to look at them.

Um and then um secondly, I just wanted to respond to um earlier in kind of a question and the answer um portion on policing between the the mayor and our city manager.

Um I think um our city manager said policing is not something expect the state and county to do for us.

We we flip the bill for our own policing, and that's kind of how it works, but mental health is a regional issue, and so we need to be asking our partners for help.

Um, and I I agree and also want to add a little bit of a caveat to that, which is that um police intervene when crime is happening in the city of Bozeman, period.

Like we we don't check if somebody is a resident of Bozeman first and say, Oh, you're a county resident, like we gotta call the county officers for this one, you know.

Um and we also depend on the state and the county to staff their own police officers, and and so I think that we have this intertwined mental health and physical health problem with both our city residents and non-city residents, but regardless of where they're a resident of, um, they're impacting our city policing loads if the conflict happens when they're in our city limits.

Um, and sort of conversely, if a Bozeman City resident was having a mental health crisis outside of Bozeman City Limits, they would be utilizing the taxpayer dollars of whatever jurisdiction they were in.

So I think it's sort of a both and.

And yeah, I I completely agree.

The county and state should be helping with mental health, um, but we also need to be doing our our share.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, we will wrap up our work session on this item and move on to our one action item for this evening, our rates for EMS transport services.

City manager.

Thank you, Mayor and Commission.

This is a resolution updating our rates for the emergency medical services.

Transport.

And here is our fire chief, Josh Waldo.

Thank you, Mayor.

Commissioners, good evening, Josh Waldo, your fire chief.

Greatly appreciate the earlier start today, and you're more than welcome to keep the softer tone through through this presentation.

A little bit of background on EMS transport.

So the fire department has been providing what we call backup EMS transport since 2007.

For the first 15 years that we did that, we made zero attempts to recover the cost associated with that.

So to give you just a kind of a quick summary of how that works.

So today, somebody calls 911 in the city of Bozeman and they need an ambulance.

If your primary responders who are American Medical Response or AMR are unavailable, we don't want people to wait on an ambulance.

So your firefighters will come off of the fire truck, they'll get on one of our two ambulances that we have in the city, and they'll go take care of that call.

AMR does provide the overtime coverage.

So the minute we deplete that fire truck of firefighters, we send out a call for people to come back to work.

AMR is covering those costs.

Any other costs though associated with us providing that service from supplies, the staff that are on that ambulance at that point, materials, drugs, you name it, that's that's all coming back to us.

And so that's why in 2022, uh we started billing, was to offset some of those costs because uh as a fire department, that's what we are.

We are the fire department.

We were never set up to be the EMS transport uh that we are today.

I will tell you that in my time here, almost a decade, we've gone from transporting I would say one to two people a month to we're averaging 177 a year.

So you you have to do some quick math there.

Um so the demand is has certainly risen for the fire department, so we had to do something.

Uh the rate schedule uh that we adopted in August of 2022 has not changed since August of 2022.

I know we've had a lot of discussion tonight about keeping those rate schedules up to date.

I'll touch on that here in a minute.

And then as I said, uh we're averaging 177 EMS transports over the last three years.

That's based on a calendar year.

So that's 177 times on average that someone called 911 for an ambulance, and your fire department had to provide that ambulance because AMR was unavailable.

So when we look at updating this schedule, uh we work with our third-party billing service that we use to analyze uh some of the other agencies across Montana, but we really look specifically at Gallatin County.

Uh so you have three other fire departments who provide EMS transport that's Central Valley, Big Sky, and Highlight.

Uh we look real closely at their rates because it gives us a little bit more accurate view than if we look at all across the state.

Um we also calculate the cost associated with us doing it.

We look at our salaries, uh, supplies, uh the fuel, the equipment replacement, all that comes into these kind of equations, and it leads us to the chart that you see on the right.

Uh, and I'm glad it showed up pretty good.

I was worried that my numbers would be too small.

Uh, the numbers in red were what we adopted in 2022, and you'll see the numbers in black are what we're recommending uh for adoption tonight.

Um the other change that we will make is that instead of going four years in between uh being in front of you for a rate change, is we'll just adjust everything with the CPI every year.

Uh so uh that would begin if if you adopt this tonight, uh, these rates would be adjusted July 1 of 2027, 28, and then somewhere in that three to five year window, we'd take this kind of hard look at it again to make sure that we're not falling too far behind.

But by doing the CPI, it's gonna help us close that gap and stay ahead of the curve, as opposed to these big jumps that you see here.

I will tell you that if you look at the numbers uh that we're proposing uh of the four county fire departments, you know, that I've just mentioned that are providing these, uh these numbers are gonna always have us either second or third in terms of cost.

We are we're not the most expensive, we're obviously not the cheapest either.

Uh so we're trying to be somewhere right in the middle.

So second or third, uh depending on which one of those categories that you look at.

To give you just a little bit of uh, I guess context here and some things that we're doing, uh, we will continue to balance bill.

And what balance billing means is if you take a ride in the ambulance and your cost is $1,750, whatever your insurance doesn't pay is still the responsibility of the patient.

Uh, that's no different than if you go with AMR or any of the other ambulances, uh, or if you just go to your general doctor.

Your insurance pays so much, you have a responsibility at the end.

Uh we continue to use a third-party billing service.

Uh, I'll just be quite honest with you.

Uh, we don't have the capacity, and I certainly would not want to ask our finance department to understand Medicaid and the health insurance uh uh complexities.

Uh so we use a third party group.

Uh they charge us 8% of whatever they collect, so there is some incentive for them to do good work to work with insurance people to get the money.

It's not a flat rate.

Uh that's been super productive for us.

To give you kind of an idea of what we collect, uh, we averaged in 2025 $561.

So if you go back and look at the slide before, uh there's still a lot of money that we end up having right off is what we call bad debt.

Uh, you're just never gonna get that money.

Uh a lot of insurance companies already have pre-negotiated rates.

Doesn't matter what you bill, they're not gonna pay it.

They're gonna pay you what their their corporate policy says, and then it gets passed on to the patient.

Uh Medicaid is even tougher.

Uh, Medicaid, depending on the level of service, you're gonna start out at somewhere between they're gonna pay you $150 up to $292.

There's a few additional add-ons in there.

I'm never gonna get more than $319 out of them right now.

That's just that is set at the federal and the state uh rates.

There's no negotiating that.

It is what it is, and so while those numbers on the previous slide may look like we're charging a really high number, we're never gonna get that number.

And I will tell you that of everything that we charge or we bill out, uh we're collecting it about 42%.

So 42% of what we bill, we actually see back in the other 58%, it gets written off as bad debt.

Um I will tell you that 42%'s pretty good compared to the national average, which is somewhere around 34%.

So anybody who's gonna try to convince you that you're gonna make a whole lot of money doing EMS, uh, I'm gonna I'm gonna professionally disagree with them on that.

Um that said, we do have procedures in place uh for folks who might not be able to afford uh the balance of that bill.

We have uh kind of two paths.

One is a payment plan.

If it's something that they say, you know, I can't afford this, I just can't pay it all at once.

We will absolutely set something up with them to let them repay it over time, or we also have the ability for them.

If they can show us the financial hardship, we'll wipe the slate clean right there, and that's part of that kind of that bad debt that we are we're not gonna go after them through collections.

Uh, that was something that was decided back in 2022.

So we do have options for folks uh who just cannot afford these big bills.

I know we had this discussion yesterday about how you know people get in this cycle of just racking up medical debt, uh and we don't want to be part of that.

We want to be uh responsible to the taxpayers uh and providing this service, but we also want to be mindful of you know what we're charging our folks.

So with that, uh I'll open it up for any questions that you might have.

Uh, pretty short and simple here, we hope.

Great.

Thank you for that presentation.

Are we to Commissioner Sweeney?

Any questions for the RG?

Okay.

Deputy Mayor.

I don't how do those fees that fee schedule compared to what like what AM AMR chance uh would charge?

Like if so if AMR shows up, I presumably you're also getting a bill.

I don't how do ours compare it to AMR?

Because AMR is a private corporation.

Their fees are considered to be private, and we do not know what they are.

Really?

Correct.

Wow.

Even just anecdotally, I mean, from folks who's saying, hey, here's the bill that I got.

More than us is the best I can say.

That was my more than us.

If it wasn't so expensive, I'd call it up.

That's how I get home.

If I get stuck here, I just got to ride home with AMR.

If I charge, I charge it to Chuck.

I can give you some insight on that later.

Can we go back to the specific fees?

Yes.

Just curious.

I didn't see administrative, and you talk about having a third-party um bill.

Is that just in bed in the fees?

And in the straight of the year.

Yeah, so it and then like I said, it's based on what they collect.

So it puts some incentive in them to actually work with insurance, work with Medicaid to see that these things get done.

If they collect a thousand dollars, then they get eight percent of it.

If they collect ten dollars, that they get eight percent of that.

So it's it's really it puts the onus back on them.

And I will tell you that of all the vendors that I use, uh they're one of my favorites in terms of their service and and their delivery.

I was just thinking the line item that said administrative costs.

So you're recouping or trying to recoup you know the cost of those services to recoup the fees.

Um, so we don't have it in the fee schedule, it is outlined in our contract that we have with them.

So we did the contract with them in 22 as well, um, it'll be up for renewal being next year.

Uh it's got a couple of auto renewals, but we have to sunset these things at some point, come back and revisit.

So it is in there, but we could certainly add it to the fee schedule if you if you wanted that for transparency.

Uh to be charging people for the administrative fee, except you know, maybe it's just inherent in each line item that part of that includes an straight of fee.

And I would tell you that it it is pretty well baked in there.

Uh the other agencies that we model, they're all using the same billing company, so that it's baked into the road.

Okay, good.

Thanks.

Commissioner Bowdy.

Yeah, I'm seeing in that bullet point like calculating the cost includes supplies, personnel, fuel, and equipment replacement.

But I also heard you say that AMR pays for our personnel.

Um, can you explain what what is the personnel charge there?

Yep.

So the personnel that we're covering here are the actual the firefighters who are on duty who come off of the fire truck, get on the ambulance, and go.

When that happens, we're immediately requesting overtime people to come back to work because we don't want that fire truck to sit empty.

For us to run an EMS transport here in town from the time we leave, get to the hospital and get back, we're an hour and a half.

We don't want that fire truck to sit empty for an hour and a half.

Uh so AMR is responsible for the overtime cost of those people coming in, the personnel cost that we're speaking to here are the firefighters who are actually on the ambulance providing that service.

Gotcha.

Okay.

That was my only question.

Okay, my only question was the comparison of oh, go for it.

I remember it.

What do you got?

Um okay.

So I'm looking at these cost increases from 2022 to to present, and they seem pretty substantial.

I don't have like a toll here, but is that just like keeping up with inflation, or would you say 2022 was kind of undervalued?

I'm giving you a little bit of both.

2022 being our first time out of the gate, we we didn't want to go too far.

Uh so we we kind of shot where we thought was good working again with the third party of like this feels right, uh, and looking at our comparators.

Since 2022, though, right on the tail end of COVID, health care has gone really expensive.

Supplies have gone really expensive.

Um, and and just to be quite honest with you, some of these numbers we have to come in that high to get insurance to pay as much as we can get out of them.

So to answer your question, yes, all of the above.

Yeah, we'll we'll save a commentary on the medical system for another day.

Any further questions?

Okay.

Seeing none, thank you for that presentation.

Um we'll open it up for public comment.

Um public comment in the room this evening.

Not Mr.

Cardi, not Mr.

Campanelli, nor our city attorney is interested in giving any public comment this evening.

Uh Mr.

Newby, are we seeing any requests online?

No, Mayor, we are not.

Okay, we will close the public comment portion of this item and bring it up here for commission motion discussion and vote.

Commissioner Sweeney.

I move to adopt uh the commission resolution updating the fee schedule for emergency medical services transport as submitted.

Second, it's been moved and seconded.

Commissioner Sweeney, would you like to speak to your motion?

I think these rates are incredibly reasonable, and I'm happy the fire department's gonna be better compensated upon passage of this.

Deputy Mayor.

I yeah, I see no problem with this.

I do um I do worry about the you know, the it's um I'm glad to see we have a hardship kind of um off-ramp um for folks because this it can be really expensive.

Um, and and uh, if Medicaid or whatnot is only paying a portion um, and we you get settled with that, the credit your credit rating, all that stuff gets consequences.

And so um, I think this is these are reasonable fees.

I presume these are reasonable fees, and uh, even though it seems like a lot of money to me, um glad to see us getting current.

I'm glad that we have some uh sympathy in the system.

Thank you.

Commissioner I'm gonna support the motion.

I agree with uh Deputy Mayor Fisher's sensitivity comments, um, and really appreciate that from here on out there's gonna be that annual TIP increase.

That's helpful.

Commissioner Boone.

Yeah, so similar thoughts.

I I think the the conversation we had yesterday is definitely weighing heavily on me thinking about the people who um are kind of stuck in the cycle of using ambulances to get to um the ER for really treatable things, and so it's tough to see the the cost of that service increasing, and also it seems like they are um well reasoned and um likely more affordable than um the the private services, so I'll be in support.

Great.

I have nothing to add, I'll also be supporting the motion.

Mr.

Newbie.

Commissioner Sweeney.

Aye, Deputy Mayor Fisher.

Aye, Commissioner Magic, Commissioner Bodie.

Aye, Mayor Morse.

Aye.

Motion passes five to zero.

Any FYI from the commission this evening.

Yeah, Commissioner Sweeney.

Thank you.

Um, I just wanted to comment on my no vote on the minutes.

Um I'm really grateful to staff for the work that they are currently doing to try and find us um a better um written record that is obtainable within our budget, and so um yeah, supporting that work and hoping that we can come to uh some sort of compromise.

Obviously, for me, I would love to pay a local person a full-time wage to be a professional stenographer and make proper meeting minutes, but that is not the world we live in.

So I just I really find citizen access to government incredibly important to me.

Um, and I I still firmly believe that meeting minutes are a document that you should be able to sit down for 20 minutes, figure out what was discussed, who questioned what, what decisions were made, and how things were voted.

And so and I do worry about increasingly relying on digital video.

You know, if you've ever tried to search the minutes past like 20, I don't know, 16, 17, things are formatted differently.

It takes a public records request.

You have to, the clerk has to do a whole bunch of work that I'm not even sure what it entails.

But I just I want to see us get back to good written meeting minutes, and I have faith that we'll find something that works.

Um, so thanks.

Thank you.

Any further FYI from the commission?

Any FYI from staff?

I just want to say thank you for your uh input and our conversation on the budget.

Um we have some notes, and we're gonna endeavor to bring uh back um answers to your questions and see where we can um make changes based on uh individual commissioner comments.

I think uh I'll be interested in knowing if three of you want to do things as opposed to one idea.

That's how we make this happen.

But I'm internally grateful to the five of you that we get to work for you.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Um seeing no, we would have been wrapping up right now at 10 p.m.

if we'd started our normal time.

Look at that.

Um people can still make plans.

The night is young.

Um seeing no business for the business to come before the commission, this meeting is adjourned.

Goodbye.