The Budget and Finance Committee met on September 22, 2026, at 1:00 p.m. to discuss three major agenda items: identification of peer cities, a proposed budget amendment, and an ordinance to cap property tax increases. No public comments were heard. The committee decided to continue deliberations at a follow-up meeting on September 29, 2026.
Committee meeting to order. We are at one o'clock. Anderson, do you know if this meeting is being streamed for it? Is it green up there or is it great to see? Without objections, the meeting will be minutes to stand as proof. And we are going to be able to do that. And on time. I do have 10 minutes at the very end for other business and or uh wrapping up. And I do feel like at the end of this meeting, uh there's probably going to be some remaining questions that we have, and I do have uh this room scheduled for next Tuesday, the 29th, and I have reserved the room for one to three. So I've got a feeling we're not going to be able to cover everything at length today. So uh hopefully what we can do is get everything today out on the table. Uh that way you can uh get questions on the table or perhaps email and then we can do a little bit thorough more thorough uh discussion on the 29th of one to three. So uh the first item that we're going to tackle is identify peer cities. Uh I did send the link uh of Dr. Acuff's report uh to the council, and hopefully everybody has that, and what I wanted to do today is sort of get out on the floor your thoughts or ideas for peer cities that we can use uh here for uh whatever we need to identify um you know coming down the road. So I'm gonna open the floor up for any discussion uh for our peer cities, and everybody I guess has the report and link uh the peer cities that Dr. Ocuff listed in his report. Uh there is one question. Dr. Acuff, go ahead and sure come over and join us. Um Dr. Acuff is here. Um I don't want to presume is at the table. Yeah, uh I thought I had it more, which one where they were, but um on the peer cities that you did list uh and and a question came to me page 41. Um a question did come to me of these peer cities, uh were there any that operated their uh sewer system like we do? They have a municipal sewer system, or were any of these um uh a utility operated sewer system? Yes, I know we we just spoke recently you know about about that question. Yeah, so I would say I would have to go back and dig to give you definitive answer. I mean, certainly, you know, I would say anecdotally most of them do is just how to classify them. You know, are they um you know, like you said, do they operate as enterprise funds? Do they operate as a component unit? Is it a special district? I guess like you know, what are those parameters around how a how a sewer operates? I guess so the the short answer is I'll have to get back to you on on the utilities. Okay, um, I guess you know to make it more complicated, which is my goal, I'm just kidding. Um is is there interest in other utilities or other functions of the city, I guess, beyond sewer or uh public transit authority or EPP, you know, because the other component units, I guess, that make up the city of Chattanooga. Um would be the goal, would it be the goal to identify those that have similar, I guess, component units, um, or is it really just a function of wastewater? Is anybody have any thoughts on that as far as that? And I was only approached and asked about uh maybe making sure that our uh peer cities had wastewater uh very similar to what that what our component is. Um any thoughts or my initial thought would be that question. Um that when we look at metrics like full-time employees, for example, or spending per capita, the closer we can get to apples to apples with regard to things like I mean, wastewater is a huge spend within our city budget, though it is an enterprise fund. Um that that will ease questions in the future. Um, for example, what we talked with with the 911 center where we have a lot more full-time employees than Knoxville does. Why do we have more? You know, that's that's a that immediately becomes a question. So that I'd like you to think about that if you could please. Because you know, EPB is a utility, but we don't employ they're not on our books as full-time employees. Yeah, so the so the goal would be to include all of those component units. Well, that our the things that fall under our budget. Because we're still when we're doing when we have a full-time equivalent C all the folks in those enterprise funds count under us.