The Chattanooga City Council met on August 19, 2025, for a public hearing on the fiscal year 2026 budget amendment. The hearing focused on Mayor Kelly's proposal to set the property tax rate at $1.93 per $100 of assessed value, generating $44.85 million in incremental revenue. The meeting began with an invocation and pledge, followed by a presentation from Chief of Staff Kevin Rowe, and then public comment for one hour. A second public hearing on Councilman Henderson's alternate $1.69 rate proposal is scheduled for the following week.
All right, guys, we have the thumbs up from Rick. Thank you, Rick. I call to order this meeting of the Chattanooga City Council for Thursday, August 19th, 2025. I'd like to invite Councilman Davis to lead us in our Pledge of Allegiance and invocation. Moment of prayer. Father, we lift up to you today, all of those who've been affected by the flooding in our city this past week. God, we just pray that you would bless them as they recover. And we also, though, give you thanks and praise for the many ways we've seen your spirit at work in this city through your people over this past week for the many many acts of braveness, bravery, kindness, generosity from our first responders. Amen. Our our city officials and employees, our churches and nonprofits, and just individual citizens. God, we we thank you for all of these ways that you've been at work amongst us. And finally, we pray that you would guide and direct this council today and pray that your name would be glorified in all that we do. Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Okay, I'm now going to turn the chair over to our budget chairwoman. Councilwoman Rikita Dotley for the public hearing on our 2026 budget amendment. Yes, ma'am. All right, hello everybody. Thank you all so thank you so much for coming and being uh committed to civic engagement. So uh just a reminder uh we'll call the public hearing so order. Uh this is a public hearing for the uh fiscal year 2026 budget amendment. The mayor's proposal uh reintends to exceed the certified checks rate to 1.93. So first we will start out with uh Chief of Staff, Kevin Rowe, he's gonna come and do a uh brief updated presentation uh regarding the mayor's uh budget amendment proposal. Well thank you, madam chair, and I also want to thank everybody for being here, whether you support or um you're here in opposition of 193. I just I think it's great that everybody's here. Um Bible says that in an abundance of council their success, and I know that when we get to the end of this process, we're gonna land in a successful place, and we are gonna hopefully move in that direction some more today. So just a recap, we did the the Kelly administration did come out and adjust down the initial rate of 199 to 193, but the fundamentals are all still the same. We want we're trying to find the right balance between affordable property taxes, reliable services, and community improvements. Um, and I made this graph five minutes ago because I think that it's important just to realize that the fundamental issue that we are trying to bring to the the forefront here is that irrespective of what the rate is today, we know that the city of Chattanooga has critical needs for resources and for programming and for services that our citizens and our businesses rely on every day, and we know that they cost an amount of money that is going to probably continue to rise that those costs for those services and for those resources. And then we also know just time value of money that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. And so, what the mayor has put forward is what we believe to be a fine-tuned, calibrated approach that um effectively splits the difference between um high end of 225, which is what the previous adopted tax rate was, and what we've heard some other council members um throw out there around the 169-168 figure. So let's just talk about what 193 will do. Current for FY26, the current projected general fund revenue is a 345 million dollars. Well, we're proposing at 193 would move that number from 345 to 390, producing 44.85 million dollars of incremental revenue over and above the enacted amount. So what will we do with that revenue? Well, 31.5 million dollars of it is going to be for operations purposes, primarily around public safety and infrastructure priorities. Obviously, police and fire are our number one goal here. That's it's the impetus for the whole endeavor. Um, but we're also proposing that we fund some other critical needs that we know that we need as it relates to both public safety and to um to infrastructure and and some other items. Then on the capital side, um, we would pull $13.35 million dollars to continue to fund similar types of expenses, but that would be categorized as capital expenses. So that would move the new capital budget from I'm sorry, yep, the new capital budget from 191 and change to 204 and change, which is just under a 7% increase if we were to adopt this proposal. And then on the operation side, it would move what is currently a $345 million operating budget. Um it would increase it by about 9% to $376,746, and then the median impact, the incremental cost that we are asking Chattanoogans to um to invest, is about $34 a month again on median average. And then the asterisk here is the 390 figure in the operations ordinance, it's going to show 390 because we have to first capture all of the revenue before we can transfer the capital portion of it. But then at the end of the day, those two numbers for the respective budgets, capital and operations would be what they show there. And then um again, on average, $34 a month would be the incremental cost for your average Chattanooga, and you can see how that breaks out across the respective council districts. And then just a reminder you know, we want to constantly be thinking about well, how does this stack up kind of in a broader context? So you zoom out a click, and you can look at Knoxville, you can look at Nashville, and then you can basically just run simple division to get to an operating dollar figure per resident whose dollars go to get those services and those resources provided by these respective municipalities. And you can see that that even with a rate of 193, um, we are by no means out in front. You look at Nashville and Knoxville, and one of the things that the mayor says is you know, directionally, what kind of city do we want to be in?