On September 16, 2025, the Carmel City Council held the second day of budget workshops for the proposed 2026 budget. Departments presented their requests, with discussions focusing on staffing, overtime, capital needs, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, a potential seventh fire station, and efforts to reduce expenses amid projected revenue constraints. Council members provided feedback and requested additional data, with a follow-up meeting scheduled for September 23, 2025.
Welcome to day two of the budget workshops for the proposed 2026 City of Carmel budget. We are starting off today with the city court. And uh Judge Quindexter, take it away. Uh good morning, Count. Court's uh 2026 budget uh notable items, and I do apologize. I tend to round up. So when you look at the court's general budget, uh it shows a one percent increase. That's probably not as accurate as it need be. I round up to get good even numbers. That way they're easier to discuss and two, it's easier to see if they've been changed. Uh so I don't really believe that we're probably at a one percent increase, probably something slightly under that. And you can look across items where there were ups and downs in terms of uh what we were requesting from the year prior. Uh the rest of the court's budget is provided out of fees the courts collects from court cost and other items that the court is allowed to retain. Uh judicial salaries fee fund uh was a ten percent increase. Uh I can't control the cost of postage meters and some other office machines. We've been taken by surprise in a year or two. Our budget is small enough, so if you had two thousand dollars, it ticks it up by a percentage point or four. Uh I think those were our two big items that we were allowing more money because we have been caught in surprise almost flat footed one year when they took a huge increase on the cost of the machines. They'll send you a letter in the mail and says we're no longer gonna service that machine, you need to buy your new one, and you don't have much of a choice. The public defender fund, as I've explained before, uh that refills the slowest. So some years we don't request any money uh come out of that fund that that has recharged, and the court is asking to use the money in the fund that is accumulated in its entirety. It shows a 100% increase in the request. Well, that would be because now there's money there. We'll spend that first before we spend any of the money out of fund 101. So money is collected from other sources we spend first, try to save the city money. With regards to the record perpetuation fund, uh that's the healthiest fund on the court's docket. We've tried to uh attribute as many expenses into that fund as we can. It also again this year it includes a $15,000, what we call other contractual services. The court began the process last year. We intend to continue it this year with your permission. Uh essentially uh transferring fifteen thousand dollars from the court's budget to IT. Uh we don't really have a cost allocation formula for services for IT to the court, so I looked at every machine and the enterprise that does work for the court. That includes the clerk's office, and did essentially a thousand dollars per machine to attribute, like we did a basic maintenance contract with a third-party provider in the public sector to be close to that with your permission. We'll do the same this year, and when we get an invoice, we'll transfer the money to them. Uh, if we hadn't done that, they would have probably been a decrease in terms of the request out of that fund. All the funds are healthy and currently funded. Uh issues before the court, not uncommon. Uh we've got a lot of new police officers. Uh, once they come online, they write more tickets. Uh we'll see what that means for the coming year. Staffing goes up, businesses will go up, staffing goes down, business will go down. We are losing, and I hate to hate to say this, but we had one of the finest public defenders that's ever served the city uh of Carmel and maybe the state of Indiana retired Judge Flaging uh did announce that uh at the end of this year, he will be retiring fully from the uh practice of law. So we're losing a really fine public defender, so I'm in the market to find somebody hopefully equally as good, equally as skilled that we can provide the public with excellent public defender funds. And aside from that commentary, I answer any of the questions that the the council might have. All right, who's got questions? I think that you're the first one that we didn't have any questions on. Fine, I'm I'm open book by law, so I I will leave. Thank you. Have a good morning now. Hey, thank you so much for being here.