The Bullhead City Council held a full-day budget work session on Monday, May 13, 2024, from 9:00 AM to approximately 5:30 PM, to review the proposed 2024-2025 fiscal year budget. City Manager Toby Cotter and Finance Director Robert Drexler presented a balanced budget with no property tax, highlighting a $21.1 million police department operating budget, a 4% cost-of-living adjustment for employees, 11 new positions, and a general fund reserve exceeding $40 million. The budget is constrained by the state expenditure limitation of $64,120,690. Department heads presented their budgets, and the council discussed priorities, capital projects, and strategic investments.
Budget Overview & Financial Health
Judicial Budget (Judge Speer)
Legal Budget (Garn)
Development Services (Wendy/Johnny)
Police Budget (Chief Treves)
Public Works (Angie Johnson)
Technology Services (Randy Shefford)
Executive & General Services
Human Services (Jeff Tipton)
Utilities (Mark Clark)
Capital Improvement Plan
Good morning, everyone. This is Monday, May 13th, 2024. It's 9 a.m. We're here for our 2024 through 2025 fiscal year budget work session. Can I get a roll call, please? Well, council members are present. Uh, Councilmember Heck is joining us via telephone. Can you hear me, Council Member Heck? Yes, I can hear you. Thank you. All right, we're gonna turn this over to Toby and get to started. Good morning. Mary Dimiko Council members, good morning. Community, good morning. This is streaming live. So we will uh anticipate a full day of budget hearings, and uh hopefully we um answer all your questions and collaborate on our next fiscal year budget to your liking. Uh we are presenting a balanced budget as we've done every year since I've been your city manager, and I think you'll see in our report that Robert and I are about to give that uh uh we're in a position uh probably unique to many communities across the country. Um, we're we're balanced, uh we're uh having a very productive uh couple of years, and the financial world uh investments are good. Um our staff is is extremely excellent, and so uh today. Well, we probably are gonna have a lot of questions from you all. Um, what we're not doing is we're not facing deficits, we're not facing problematic situations like other cities across the nation, including our own county, who in their you know, last couple years have really faced some of those difficulties. And so we're gonna explain some of that to you this morning in our presentation, go over the budget surpluses, show you um where our investment income is at, and just talk to you about uh what you'll find to be a very uh solid uh engaged budget that meets the needs of our community. And of course, as I've been your city manager, what's always been uh you know, the priorities, priorities of public safety, a huge investment in our police department, streets, parks, and the other amenities that make our community great. So we will walk you through this PowerPoint presentation, so if our team can pull that up on page two, uh, it just gives you the overview of the discussion points that we'll be going over. And then if we go to page four, I'd like to highlight some of those significant accomplishments. Our restaurant sales collections have grown to the highest level in the city's history. It's not by chance. We work hard at it. We've recruited a lot of these businesses, and we're actively recruiting more. Um, outside of the summer. And our hotel motel tax collections are at the highest levels they've ever been, and that's not by chance, it's by hard work. We've worked hard to not only bring in new hotels, which we have at least two, three that you've seen in your conceptual reviews, but we have some additional opportunities we're working on right now. My prediction is that we will see three or four new hotels in the next couple of years. It takes a minute to build new hotels. We're also working with a new hotel to remodel one of our one of our older hotels. So we'll be talking to you about that in the future as well. It's our largest reserve fund ever in the city's history. Um again, doesn't happen by chance. It's conservative council, conservative staff budgeting it appropriately, building up a fund reserve, a rainy day fund, a savings account, like many of you have at home. Also, this year we approved taking over the full jurisdiction of Highway 95. It's the future of the city. In order to make this roadway better in our community better, we have to have control over it. The right turn lanes, which are in this budget, are a big part of that. The new bridge is a big part of that. Can't make our future better if we have ADOT running our lives every day on Highway 95. And I thank the city council for having the will to see that and approve that. We remodeled the municipal court, which was long overdue, the dispatch center and their parking lot. We received millions in grants. Our pickleball players came to you a few years ago and said, hey, our demand is high, we need more. So those new pickleball courts and tennis courts were built.