The Chesapeake City Council held a regular meeting on June 10, 2025, at 6:30 PM in the City Hall Council Chamber. The meeting included a work session earlier at 5:00 PM on FY 2026 budget amendments. The council approved a consent agenda, adopted numerous budget amendments for the schools and city, and heard public comments. All votes were 9-0.
Want to welcome everyone to our June tenth, twenty twenty-five council work session. Uh Mr. Manager, you want to introduce our topics? Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Uh, this is the meeting every year where we go through the final amendments and technical corrections uh for the operating and capital budgets, and I'll turn it over to budget uh director Jonathan Hobbs. All right, thank you, Chris, and uh good evening, uh, Mayor West, Vice Mayor D. Uh, as Chris said, I am here this afternoon this evening to go through the uh final amendments to the city and school's budget as well as some technical corrections to the city operating budget and CIP. Uh later this evening on your formal agenda, uh, you will have four separate uh items uh to consider relative to these requests. So we're gonna start with the school operating budget and the final amendments to the school operating budget. Uh so the reason that we are bringing these amendments at this time is there was the city council adopted the uh operating budget and capital improvement program on May thirteenth. Uh, due to the timing of the adoption of the state budget, uh, the schools, the school board did not have time to act uh based on the final adopted budget from the state. They took action on May nineteenth, and these are the requests of the school board, and they are requesting that City Council appropriate these funds as part of the final FY26 budget. And please keep in mind that all of these amendments are in the school's operating fund. We have not finalized revenue projections as things continue to move throughout the process. So we place this amount each year, whatever it is, in a city manager reserve. And then when the school board comes back and reconciles their final budget, they request to have this funding allocated. So that's what's occurring here. So in this amendment, we are reducing that reserve by $51,000. And then the next items are how they will be expending that allocation and the $10.35 million from the state. First is $400,000 for human resources initiatives. Next is the largest amendment is $4.8 million for an additional 1% salary increase for school employees. Then there's an amendment for $1.3 million for common planning time for elementary schools. Next is just over $400,000 for the schools to add five administrative specialist positions. The next amendment is just over $430,000, and this is to add five general classroom teacher positions. Next is $483,000 for the modern classroom project. The next item actually has a companion within the city amendments, and that's $164,000. The schools would like to add one additional school resource deputy as well as a vehicle for that deputy. And you will see that show up again in the amendments on the city side, an amendment to the Sheriff's Department's budget. Next is about $228,000 for security equipment, a million dollars for elementary school security vestibules, a million dollars for infrastructure support, and finally $117,000 for the financial wellness program. So that concludes the amendments requested by the school board to the school's budget. Next, we'll move to the city operating budget and look at final amendments. And typically what these amendments include are items that when we prepared the budget, we were did not have knowledge of. These are things that came in basically the last quarter of the fiscal year. And when we bring the amended budget to you, when we go from the city manager's proposed budget to the budget we asked you to adopt and adopt in May, we do not like to include what I would consider more staff-driven changes. We only try to include the changes that city council has asked that we make to the city manager's proposed budget. So that is that's why these are being requested at this time. So I'll go through these. And again, the change here are those benefit costs associated with it being a full-time position, things like retirement and health insurance. Next is a decrease in the position complement. We are eliminating an eighth of a position within the human resources department. We actually have a quarter of a position. It's an executive mentor position that we're reallocating one eighth of it to a mental health counselor position, and then we are eliminating the other eighth of a position that remains. So a reallocation of an eighth of a position and then the elimination, but the net is a decrease in the budget for human resources. Next is an increase in the position complement by 12.5 FTEs and expenditures in the voter registrar's office. This is a result of, and we've had several items come to council over the last several months that are result of position audits and auditing our position control system. This is another thing that we discovered through those audits. Due to the increase in staffing required for elections, as you all know, the state has mandated that uh polls be open longer periods of time over the past several years. We've gone from kind of election day to election season. Uh so we certainly need the FTE authority within the registrar's office to uh staff the polling sites.