The Bullhead City Council held a fiscal year 2025-2026 budget work session on May 8, 2025, from 8:30 AM to approximately 2:00 PM (with a break and continuation if needed). The session covered proposed revenues, expenditures, and programs for all governmental funds. City Manager Toby Cutter and Finance Director Robert Drexler presented a balanced budget using one-time reserve funds for capital projects. Key priorities included adding two police officers, funding a new animal shelter, investing in infrastructure, and continuing progress. The budget totals over $52 million in all fund reserves, with a general fund reserve of over $41.6 million. Proposed expenditures include $2 million contingency (later adjusted to $3.4 million), and capital projects totaling $3.6 million for city facilities and $2.6 million for parks and recreation.
Good morning. This is Friday, May 9th, 2025. It's 8:30 AM. Uh, we're here for the 2025-2026 fiscal year budget work session. Calling this meeting in order. Could I get a roll call, please? All council members are present. Thank you. All right, Toby. Good morning. It's great to be here. Thank you for joining us for our annual budget workshop. And our session should uh pretty much last most of the day today and into tomorrow morning if need be, but we're hoping we can get through our budget workshop today. So we'll start right here with a presentation by Mr. Drexler, our finance director, myself, and that'll work through each uh session. I know the new council members for Mr. O'Neal, Mr. Newland, Stallman. I mean, this is the first time you're officially here. It's not just my budget and staff's budget, but it's your budget. It's the community's budget, and this is why we do what we do. Some 600 plus pages strong of a budget workshop that has all the you know, all the fingerprints of all of us. And so it's not just the police chief and the city manager or the public works director, it's all of us and your priorities. And so when I was thinking about it this morning, you know, what's the headline? If you Google other cities right now, some of their headlines aren't that great. But for us, it's a continuation of progress. Uh over the last couple years we've been in a great fiscal position where we've been able to hire more police officers, buy more police vehicles, invest in our infrastructure, and you know, we're we're so delighted to be able to do that again today. So we're presenting a balanced budget. Uh we're using some one-time uh reserve funds for some of our capital one-time capital projects. And um, I think you'll see as we go through this project uh list and capital list later in the day that these are not new, these are things that you all want us to do. Uh especially with the new animal shelter, that's a main priority that we'll be talking about later today. So our budget in Bullhead City really is it's designed with prosperity, with progress and with projects. And even last year we could see with the new bridge, a new ATV, UTV, uh trailhead, um, new senior enrichment center, those are just the things that we started a few years ago and we completed. But the budgets we have are also intentional. And let's just talk about like two recent examples. A few weeks ago, someone stole the mail truck, then stole the river taxi and made their way to the condos across from Lowe's, and then they started shooting at our police officers. That's not what a budget's all about. But is it right? It kind of is, right? Because that officer and all the officers that supported him were trained, which is part of this budget, we're equipped, which is part of this budget, and we're paid, which is part of this budget. So let's say we didn't do any of those things. We didn't do the training, we didn't do the equipment. Well, if you saw the video that was released by the sheriff's department and police department, there was a guy in a mailbox. There was a guy at the gate. Could have shot those, you know, poor residents who who were there for that. Tuesday was a great example. We were all here Tuesday, having a long council meeting. It got black outside at four o'clock in the afternoon. And what happened? Our staff mobilized immediately to deal with a storm.