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.

As we go through as staff and bring forward a recommended budget, we keep these pillars top of mind and really try to tie all the budgetary dollars that we recommend to these five pillars as we make our budgetary uh decisions throughout the year.

Some of the highlights that we'll go over in this upcoming year is that we are going to present council with a balanced general fund budget.

What that means is that your revenues coming in will be equal to your expenditures going out.

In short, uh that shows that the city is living within its means in terms of the dollars that we're collecting and making uh sustainable financial decisions with those revenues.

We will show positive sales tax growth year over year.

We do have a couple of slides that will go into more detail on our revenue assumptions.

We are projecting a $475,000 increase to general fund expenditures from the 2024 adopted budget.

That is equal to a 2.2% increase.

Primarily that is driven by staffing increases, which are accounted for in the budgetary dollars that we're presenting tonight.

Overall, this is a relatively low year-over-year increase, and another reason for that is we had some one-time tax increment financing revenues that came in in 2024 that uh artificially inflated the general fund by several hundred thousand dollars.