The Carmel City Council convened a two-day budget workshop on September 15, 2025 to review the proposed 2026 city budget. Due to state property tax reform (SEA 1), the city faces significant revenue constraints. Mayor Sue Finkam's administration presented a $143.3 million general fund budget, $300,000 less than the 2025 appropriation. The workshop covered multiple departments, with major discussion on the proposed “Experience Carmel” nonprofit, fleet management and take-home vehicle policy, and outsourcing of economic development functions.
Welcome everyone. We start the budget workshops for 2025 to do the 2026 Carmel City budget. This will be two days. There's a schedule out there if you'd like to see where you're at, and for the department heads, we will try to keep you updated on how the time is moving. We're gonna try to keep everything on schedule as much as possible, but we also don't want to shut down important conversations. I did want to make one note before we started because it was asked to me. I um and he did ask me to do this, but counselor Taylor uh will be unable to attend in person uh today and tomorrow. He will be uh watching but not um participating. Um he had uh a surgery last week that had some complications, and he was in the ICU and it was scary there for a minute. Uh but fortunately he is back at home. I went and visit him at his home yesterday, and um if you he was worried that people thought he skipped the meetings, but if you know anything about Ridge Taylor, it would take something this uh drastic for him not to be here. So I know we want to thank him for all his hard work that he put into this. Um with that, we will get started with the first um item on our agenda, which is the mayor's office budget. Good morning, everybody, and thanks to those who are watching uh remotely. Uh, first up, a department overview. Uh, I think most people don't understand what the office of the mayor does, but we oversee city operations, uh, enactment of laws and policies and representing the city's interests in a wide variety of um uh places and things. We engage with residents, visitors, and businesses wishing to interact with the city and coordinate the representative city for local, state, and national initiatives and issues. From a success standpoint in 2025, um we advocated for city the for the city with state leaders as property tax reform is considered in the state legislature. As you know, we're dealing with a lot of that. Um, but we put a significant amount of emphasis from a lot of different departments, especially in my personal time advocating at the state house. Uh we have an active engagement with both large and small businesses. We've spent a lot of time visiting our larger businesses. That work will continue as well as promoting small businesses in our community. Um we also participate in regional, statewide, and national organizations to ensure we have some regional cooperation and also that Carmel's voice as an edge city, as a leading city, and as an Indiana city is represented across the country. Uh we are selected for a grant to participate in the Bloomberg-Harvard City Leadership Initiative. This now has five of our staffers involved. I actually think six including me in a month-long deep data dive project, which will be exciting because we'll use this not only for our police and fire, but the rest of our departments when it comes to talent retention and attraction. We also advanced our city's sister city initiative. Quatinegano delegation visited this year. We also received an award for the best sister city for cities 100,000 to 300,000 for the 2024 activations. And we were supposed to have France come here, and they just canceled uh because of the uh turmoil that their uh political scene is in right now. So we they were supposed to visit the first week of um December, that's been postponed to 2026. And lastly, we've been active with the move with the mayor goal destination. This is a nationwide healthy community initiative, and we were active and it recognizes one of seven cities with a gold designation of 120. Getting right to the budget request, we're requesting 1.158149 this year. That's an 11% decrease from last year. And we fund three areas the personnel area, external engagement, and administration. From a personnel perspective, uh this reflects 945,000 and some change here. It reflects the mayor and four FTEs, including Carol at the front desk. Uh that reduces one FTE position from 2025. As for programs, uh, this is a primary meeting in which we engage externally with the residents and our visitors. It has four different areas. The Carmel Fund, uh, which has funded 50,000, which is consistent with what we've done in the past. Promotional items, that's for visitors, maybe a legislative luncheon, something like that. Honors and awards are two areas, the Rangeline Pioneer Award, and which we are developing an actual award, which is just a plaque right now. And then uh we gave uh some larger challenge coins to everyone who had participated on a committee commission or board uh for this year in 2024, so that would continue in that line item, and then external hospitality. As for the administration bucket, uh that's 146,000 608. That includes organization and member dues. That's largely AIM is the big piece of that, which is accelerating Indiana municipalities, which all of our um departments participate in. Uh, also uh the U.S.