The Chesapeake City Council held a work session at 5:00 PM and a regular meeting at 6:30 PM on April 28, 2026, in the City Hall Council Chamber. The work session focused on the FY2027 Operating Budget and Capital Improvement Program, including potential personal property tax rate reductions and outstanding funding decisions. The regular meeting included public hearings on the budget ordinances, approval of consent and regular agenda items, citizen comments, appointments, and a closed session for litigation. Vice Mayor Ritter was excused.
Want to welcome everyone to our April twenty eighth, twenty twenty six city council work session. Mr. Manager. Thank you, Ms. Mayor. We want to close out the uh budget uh discussions uh today. Um, want to go through the available funding. So as you recall, um, City Manager's budget was presented about a month ago. Um, we've had a series of work sessions to go through some different alternatives and to address some issues raised by uh members of council. So we want to talk about after all of those amendments to the city manager's proposed budget what's the available funding left on the bottom line. Some pending issues and requests that still remain unaddressed. I try to get some straw polls so we can see if we can have concurrence there. If you recall last uh meeting, Councilmember Whitaker asked about some scenarios for possible reductions on personal property tax rate. Um so we've run some numbers there. Um then we have some final recommendations and then certainly um discussion of questions, all towards um hopefully being able to resolve outstanding issues today so that we're prepared on the first meeting in May to have a budget that's ready for adoption. So our current balance if you take the city manager's proposed budget and all of the things council through straw polls has has agreed to, what we're left at is um with an available balance of 234, um677 dollars. And so you'll see on this chart um kind of what's happened on on the bottom line of the budget. We left council about a half a million dollars capacity. And if you recall, we left a reserve for impacts of the General Assembly that were unknown at the time of preparing the budget, so a million dollars to address um uh those issues. And then over the course of the last several um uh meetings, work sessions, um, council members have requested that we add some things back in. So um first up was some shift safety officers. We had um uh one in the proposed budget. There are three shifts. So funding this would allow us to have a shift safety officer for all three shifts in the fire department. Um additional support for Stepping Stone. The number one requested the team for Stepping Stone was an additional staff member to help serve as the liaison between the team, the the facility, and um uh Castanabolis, the folks that are um staffing up the facility overnight. Um Councilmember Um Smith uh requested um the Fun Fridays events, so things to do, especially during the summertime for youth in the community. We talked a little bit about um um council members uh Smith and um Whittaker had uh discussed an idea about um redevelopment in and around the lanes, and we talked about some of the public safety issues there, some of the redevelopment opportunities. Um we had put an additional cost of 200,000 on that to take a look at some development scenarios. Council did ask us to meet with some potential developers that have already expressed interest and to drive that number down a little bit so we have the capacity to to do that, but we do recommend um proceeding with that project. The summer youth employment program, um 100,000 could certainly accommodate the 20 youth that we think would be good to start that program with, and um we are compiling um information for council. This is a small supplement to a larger thing that's out there that that a variety of groups do with youth employment. Um then if you recall um we had um an item in the budget to shift uh responsibility for the cost of radios to user departments. So parks, um the public works, our different operational departments. Schools is a big user of those radios, and so to shift those costs right now, the city is paying for all of them. Some departments like parks have decided to turn their radios in. They're they're not gonna use them. Um schools is still considering their options, and so given that they had a short amount of time to consider their options, we're recommending um delaying that decision by a year. And so again, that leaves an available balance of almost 235,000. Before I get into the straw poll, I just want to give you another update on collective bargaining. So as we uh discussed at the last meeting, the um the governor had uh um rejected uh many elements of the General Assembly's proposal. The governor's umendments were favorable to local governments. The General Assembly at this point seems disinclined to consider the governor's amendments and has sent that back to the governor. So uh long story short, we do not know what's going to happen with this. And so we still probably need to keep some capacity reserve to be able to address short-term impacts will be staffing on things like legal services and labor relations. Long term, this will be a you know very considerable impact to the city's budget. We just don't know when that will hit. So we will continue to monitor, but our request is that um as you know, every year in June, we bring you what we call technical amendments and then final amendments based on the the adopted state budget. So we recommend addressing this with the June amendments. I do want to say something about the June amendments.