The Chattanooga City Council met on May 5, 2026, for a regular business meeting. The meeting included a presentation of the FY27 budget, a proclamation for Public Works Week, discussion and voting on several zoning and ordinance items, and public comments addressing homelessness and light pollution.
The meeting adjourned after public comments.
I'll call the order this May 5th meeting of Chattanooga City Council and recognize Councilman Henderson to lead us on our pledge and invocation. Congratulations of the United States of America and through the Republic for which it stands. One nation under God's draw. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Reading from Numbers chapter six, verse 24. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face towards you and give you peace. Would you bow with me in prayer for just a moment? God, in times of turmoil, I pray that your face would shine upon us and give us peace. Amen. Amen. All right. Thank you, Councilman. As we get started, I just want to welcome everyone who's in the audience tonight. Just a reminder, if you would make sure your cell phones are silent so we don't have any interruptions as we go along. And also want to give just kind of an overview of how our meeting will operate, so you'll know what to expect. We do have a couple of short special presentations here at the outset. After that, we will approve our minutes from our last meeting, last week's meeting. Then we will look at our agenda for tonight's meeting, and following that, we will look at the agenda for next week and then three weeks out. And as we go through all of those agendas, we'll take any questions or comments that uh council members may have about those items so that we make sure that we're well prepared for those things that are coming before us over the coming weeks. Uh next, we will have a planning and zoning committee meeting. Um, and we'll take a brief recess after that. Um, and we will come back after our recess and we'll vote on all of the items that we've discussed in that first portion uh that are on our agenda for tonight's meeting. And then finally, at the end of our meeting, uh, once we're done voting, there will be a time for public comment. So anyone who's here and would like to address the council is welcome to do so at that time. Um we get to that point, you'll just line up at the podium up front here. Um, and our city attorney will read some rules, and we'll be happy to hear from members of the public at that time. So, with that, I would like to call up the administration to the podium to give a brief overview of our coming fiscal year budget. Good afternoon, council. Good afternoon. I'm excited to present the City of Chattanooga's FY27 budget proposal to you today. Um this is intended as as the chair said a high-level overview in the coming days and weeks. We'll kind of get into the the nuts and bolts of everything and really dig in and look forward to that discussion as as we move forward. Uh, I'd also like to take a second uh at the top to thank the departments and kind of recognize the department or the the work they've put in. Again, we're gonna spend a couple weeks doing this. They've been working on this for the last four months, putting this information together, coming up with the budget. Um, and so I appreciate all the departments putting in the work and then especially our budget and finance staff for the work that they've put in uh into this. So with that, we will get started. Uh this budget continues uh the work and the mission laid out in Mary Kelly's one Chattanooga plan. Um a couple highlights just at the top. Um, this budget includes a three percent COA for sworn and civilians, so citywide for all of our employees uh to keep our pay competitive uh and help us to continue to retain uh the great employees that we have. This budget also uh includes no change to the property tax rate that we set last year, so that would remain at the 1930. And perhaps most importantly, it is structurally balanced, which is in keeping with the policies that we just passed uh in the last couple months. Now the budget is based on kind of our revenue number. So you can see here the total revenue number is 393 million,980,000, so just a hair under 394 uh broken out into the buckets you see there with roughly 86% of it made up of property tax and sales tax. Uh that breakdown is similar to prior years, it's uh similar to how most of all municipalities of state of Cennessee are funded. So uh no no large changes there. This next chart is kind of a graphical representation of of the slide we just saw, so you can see uh well over 75% of the pie is related to sales tax and property taxes.