The Charlotte City Council held its first budget workshop for the development of the Fiscal Year 2026 budget on February 10, 2025. The workshop focused on an economic outlook, revenue and expenditure projections, public safety costs, compensation and benefits, and strategies to balance the budget. Council members provided comments and requested additional data. The meeting concluded with a motion to enter closed session.
For those of you that made it possible for us to have a quorum, we are really grateful for that. And to start it in a reasonable amount of delay. So good afternoon. I'd like to call our first council budget workshop for FY 2026 budget development into order. As you know, this is one of the most important and impactful policy items that we work with together each year in developing a plan to allocate the city resources in alignment with our strategic priorities and the needs of our community. So I want to thank every one of you that came in on time today for joining us, and I'm going to turn the meeting over to the city manager. So mayor, thank you, uh Mayor members of council. Um so we'll just jump right into it. We have an economic outlook and a budget update. This is not dissimilar to what we've done in the previous years, which what is a bit different is we tried during the annual strategy meeting to go under the hood a bit more in terms of what's in the budget in terms of all of the different funds today. We will be focusing on the general fund uh as well as what's happening around public safety, and that's a little prelude to the uh conversation we'll have tonight, also. But with that said, Mayor, if there aren't any questions, I'd like to turn it over to Marie and uh the budget and finance team. Thank you very much. Let's see, there you are behind that way, Marie. Thank you. Thank you. And good afternoon. And as we get started, then as the manager mentioned, we're gonna do a budget overview quickly, an economic outlook, and then get into some of the real considerations as we're moving forward with the development of our fiscal year 2026 budget, and then looking ahead. And first, of course, you're all familiar with your strategic priorities, council strategic priorities, but we really wanted to make sure and put this front and foremost because all the funding decisions and decisions we make and performance metrics we come up with are weighed against advancing your strategic priorities. And along with that, the budget is one of your main policy documents, it touches all of your priorities and in particular well managed. This is how we allocate your resources, the community's resources to advancing your strategic priorities and set a strong foundation, financial foundation for all we do. And then just quickly for your building upon what we discussed at your annual strategies meeting. We talked about the triple A rating we have and how important that is to and how we've built that over time and are continuing to protect that. We put talked about how city services are provided at a comparatively low cost than other North Carolina cities, and how property tax, although it's our greatest revenue generator for the general fund, it's also flat and not growing. It except it doesn't grow when we get reevaluation, and it only grows with new construction being added. And we also talked about how we may, even though we're a good value, how we monitor performance and the trade-offs between efficiencies, cost savings, and performance, and that public safety costs continue to drive the budget, and each of these we're going to build on today further. And again, strong financial management practices. This really helps the city. We shine forward with debt and creditors. It allows us to do more with our money. It allows us also to be seen as a strong financial foundation for what for institutions granting, giving us grants and things like that as well. And as we talked about in the retreat, the come comparing the costs of government, and one thing we talked about briefly at the um at our committee meeting. You know, some residents say yes, your property taxes are flat, but other fees increase, and yes, um, all fees increase over time, not just with our city, other cities as their contract costs increase. But this graph is not just property taxes, it's fully loaded for an average resident with property taxes for the city and the county, sales tax, our solid waste fee, and storm water and water. So we still are very low compared to our peers, and our property tax is low too, but that's something we have to keep an eye on how we can keep maintaining good value at the same time meeting the service expectations of our community. And this is a whole lot of words on this slide, but this is I believe at the strategy session, council member Mitchell mentioned we don't do enough to highlight our success, and and this is very much a success. Council has adopted strategies recently that really support our workforce. And this is important to note in 2018, the minimum hour wage was 1358. It is now 23 dollars an hour. That's a 70% increase that council has put forward. We've over time with COVID and the health care costs going up. The City of Charlotte's absorbed more of the cost burden to help relieve some of that cost from it still goes up for our employees, but we've helped to balance it with the city in some instances taking on a greater share. We've in council has recently done shift differentials, so it's new in the last couple years, and commercial drivers license premiums that have really helped our operations positions, and really this is a real highlight. I know it's a lot of words on the page, but do you realize in police fire and our hourly all since 2019 have increased over 30% in salaries? And that's that is a really big deal. And then as of November 2024, 90% of our staff are making at least 50,000. So again, there's a lot of words on that page, but it's important to highlight. Oh, sorry, yeah, that's it. Not sorry, 97% are making at least 50. Sorry.