The Brookings City Council met on September 10, 2024, at 6:00 PM for a budget study session followed by a regular meeting. The meeting covered the first budget workshop for the 2025 fiscal year, several public hearings, and a contentious debate over a reasonable accommodations ordinance. The council approved a property tax levy, a cable franchise, and a home occupation permit, while tabling a townhouse conditional use permit and the reasonable accommodations ordinance for further refinement.
Call the meeting to order. Please stand for Pledge of Allegiance. Will the clerk please take attendance? All council members are present, Mr. Mayor. Councilmember Doran is participating via teleconference this evening. All right, thank you. Action to approve the agenda. Entertain a motion. So moved. Set. Any comments from the public? Council have any comments, questions? Please call the roll. Neymar. Hi. Rasmussen. Specker. Hi. Tiltenburn. Hi. Wendell. Hi. Avery. Doran. All right. Move on. Budget workshop number one. Jake Meshi, our deputy city manager, will present this item. Good evening, Mayor and members of the council. This will be our first budget workshop for the 2025 budget. Just to give an overview on the budget workshop schedule. We are present here tonight on September 10th. We'll be giving an overview of the 2025 budget, really focusing on our operating budgets, primarily the general fund, and we'll be looking at our outside agency recommended funding levels as well as the 10-year financial plan to look at sustainability over the next decade. On September 24th, we'll look at the uh 10-year capital improvement plan as well as the consolidated fee schedule. We leave the October 8th meeting open and optional. Uh the purpose of that meeting is if council has any additional discussion that they would like staff to dive deeper into if there's any questions that we're not able to answer either tonight or at this September 24th meeting. The slide before you shows the official adoption process of the 2025 budget. At our last meeting, we had the first reading of the property tax levy ordinance. Uh tonight, to coincide with our budget workshop, we'll have the second reading of the property tax levy ordinance. Uh the reason we have to do that in advance is because the state law passed a couple years back that allowed us to push our budget back further in the year, but we still need to certify our property tax levy with Brookings County by uh the end of this month. On October 22nd, we'll have the first reading of the 2025 budget ordinance, and then on November twelfth, we'll have the second reading of the budget ordinance as well as the adoption of the 10-year capital improvement plan and the consolidated V schedule. I also want to mention that we want to keep the presentation semi-informal. So, council, if you have questions as we go, please feel free to interrupt and we can address them as we're there. And we'll also have time at the end for more questions. The slide before you just shows the uh gist of what we'll cover in tonight's overview presentation. We look at the budget as usually a collection of uh a lot of numbers, but we also like to bring back and remember that the budget serves as a policy tool, an operations plan, uh our operations guide, a financial plan, and a communications device. In short, uh the budget and where we put our dollars are the priorities that we want to accomplish in 2025. So really where we allocate our funds really shows to council staff and members of the public the initiatives that we're prioritizing in the upcoming budget year. The budget also considers the city council's five focus areas, which are listed on the screen, and these serve as the pillars of city council's strategic plan.