We're going to get started.

Would you like us to go first?

Okay.

All right.

So my brother pushed it on while you want it.

Oh, it's under budget.

I'll show you pictures.

Good morning.

Yeah, I'm doing all right.

Okay.

Good.

Well, good morning, Council.

So all of us are super excited for another installment of legendary memory work sessions.

Oh, I have to work.

My goal with with kind of this follow-up from the mayor's presentation last week is I want to be simple.

My goal with with kind of this follow-up from the mayor's presentation last week is I want to be simple, I want to be clear, and I want to try to be concise just in the interest of we have we've walked and talked through a lot of different um pieces of information and kind of cross sections of data over the course of the last few weeks.

So what I try what I'm trying to do today is just kind of simplify and synthesize so that there's clarity around what the administration is is proposing at the 199% mill.

Um I would suspect that some of you in the room saw something online that I saw that um our friend Nathan Bird posted, and it was a Venn diagram, and I thought to myself, self, that's very clever.

Um, and so I ran with it, and I thought how can I kind of set this up to help us contextualize what what the competing kind of notions that I think that we're trying to wrestle with as we as we think through what is the right rate to um appropriately resource fire and police, and then from the administration's perspective, also appropriately resource some of the other needs that we know that we have.

And so you've kind of got these three um, I guess, baseline desires, right?

On on one side, you've got I want reliable services on another side, I want community improvements, and on another side, I want my taxes to stay the same.

And for anybody who has renovated or built a house, um, you know that there are three options, but you can't have more more than two between good fast and cheap.

And I think that this is kind of a similar framework because if let's say you want reliable service services and you want your taxes to stay the same, what we've been talking about in this room is that well, over time, you are going to have a steady decline in those services because of inflationary forces and and the ever increasing cost of um of doing business for the city, and it's gonna continue to be a steady erosion of the purchasing power on every dollar.

On the other side, I want community improvements and I want my taxes to stay the same.

Okay, we can do that, but that means pretty disruptive cuts to to the baseline public services in the interest of doing net new things in the community.

And so if we want all three, well, you can't really have all three in this framework because the two on the on the top expose the need for um new revenue.

So with that as the challenge, this is this is the plan that the Kelly administration is is putting forward to try to responsibly fund all three, right?

And so I want an affordable tax rate, I want reliable services, I want community improvements.

Um the administration believes that it is possible to make meaningful progress on all three fronts, and we believe that 199 is is the rate to accomplish that.

So why 199?

We've talked about all of this already, but just to kind of rehash some of the high points.

One 199 um gets us adequate funding for first responder pay.

I'll I'll note and we'll talk about it here in a minute in a subsequent slide, that it also gives us a little bit of margin to do some additional things in the public safety space that the administration feels strongly we need to do.

Um but then it also provides a little bit of incremental revenue to help buffer um the impact of of rising costs, which we've talked about.

So between 22% cumulative inflation since 2021, um, as we talked about last week on a slide, the city has had to eat 35 to 40 percent increases to real costs for things that we have to buy.

And you get you guys know this is true.

Think about how many resolutions you have had to approve of change orders to stuff coming in, and and I don't think any of them were um adjusting the cost downward, right?

So cost costs are going up all around us.

Um and we are trying to find that right right balance.

Um then of course it's a 26 cent decrease from the last adopted tax rate of 225.

So and I understand fully why the folks snicker, but I do think that it's it's um our friend Councilman Clark made the point poignantly, I think last week, when he was talking about we don't have control over property assessments, we have control over setting the rate, and it's our responsibility to set a rate that tries to strike a balance between these competing priorities in a way that's fiscally responsible.

Um, and that's also it does right by the residents that we all represent.

And I think that um you know that's what we're trying to do here.

So we believe that the one at 199 and with the proposed expenditures that would accompany the uh the incremental revenue, we think that this is a resident-focused, targeted and high impact measured and balance approach, um resident focused, in that you're gonna see here that the overwhelming majority of what we are proposing to spend this money on goes directly to public safety.

Right after that, um a significant chunk of it goes towards uh paving and public works, which is the front lines of constituent services, and um I think where you guys experience a lot of of pressure out in the field as residents are are coming to you as requests, and so we've we've got some line items in there that we think will help create additional bandwidth at public works so that we can service those requests and um and continue to make gains along the lines of innovation and service delivery.

Um and again, we think that it's we think that it's measured and balanced in this way.

So if we were just going to keep it uh fire and police, fire and police only you're gonna land around 173, 174.

Um, you could probably put downward pressure on that and and get by with maybe a little bit less than that, but let's just for the sake of um this convenient talking point.

Um 199 is right between holding it at 225 and 174.

And so we feel like we're effectively splitting the difference between between the two options that we think are are um before us.

So we showed this graph in the past, but I do just want to remind you that if you look back at his historical trends for the city of Chattanooga, the trend is that funding for the city has generally kept pace with the growth over the years, and there's a separate chart that I'm not gonna rehash from last week that kind of showed the inflationary swings over time going back to 1989 and how the corresponding um adopted tax rates largely followed those swings.

155 it would be a significant departure from what historically the city of Chattanooga has done, um, and we believe that it would set us on a course of hollowing out our ability to serve residents at a level that they deserve, at a level that I think we are all accustomed to, that they are all accustomed to, and at a level that we want to continue serving them.

Whereas 199 is about trajectory, right?

We're not trying to hug that top line.

We're not trying to go all the way to 225, we're not shooting the moon, right?

We are we are just trying to capture what we think is a reasonable proportion of the available incremental revenue to be able to continue to uh keep momentum and make progress towards the priorities that we know people agree with, that we know people want, um, and that this council has largely tracked with us on.

And so let's talk a little bit about what it would cost at a um district by district level.

Um obviously these are averages, right?

And so these are median averages, so half half of the folks will be paying less, half of the folks will be paying more.

But you can see here that that this is not a um it is not insignificant on a monthly on a monthly basis.