With a presentation of the city's fiscal year 2027 budget, which was just approved by council last month.

So I have a few quick slides to discuss some key highlights of this year's budget, and at the end, I'll be more than happy to answer any questions that any of you may have.

Also joining me today is assistant city manager Al Battle.

So between the two of us, I'm sure we'll be able to answer any questions.

So

to jump right in, as required by state law, our fiscal year 2027 budget remains a balanced budget.

Across the organization, the only increase in staffing was as a result of the addition of nine full-time fire medics, which was negotiated as part of our most recent collective bargaining unit with the city's fire union.

Our primary focus this upcoming year will be the continued alignment of our city's work plan, which provides for the execution of existing operating and capital projects that are approved within the city's budget, as well as the maintenance of our employee pay structure, which remains competitive at the 75th percentile across comparative public organizations.

So

as we look ahead to some of our key initiatives in the upcoming year, we're pleased to continue advancement of what we're calling our downtown urban renaissance, which includes several key redevelopment projects, including construction of both the new Ballard Hotel

as

well as Osceola apartments on the bluff directly adjacent to Coachman Park.

Furthermore, Pinellas County continues to advance a call for development to solicit interest for 17 county properties as part of their transition to a central government campus in mid-county.

Several key street renovation projects are also either upcoming or underway in design to improve pedestrian and vehicular traffic while also making improvement to utility infrastructure throughout the downtown core.

Some examples of this are the Fort Harrison Reconstruction and Osceola Roadway Improvement Projects.

And also speaking of utility projects, we're excited to highlight improvements to both our water and sewer infrastructure that remains underway, such as our planned facility consolidation for wastewater and automated meter reading

projects.

And so finally, lastly, I'll just highlight as the city continues to prepare for possible changes to our budget in the upcoming year.

As you all know, upcoming property tax reform is on the general ballot next month, and as staff, our role remains committed to forecasting the potential impacts associated with what that could be in preparation of the ultimate outcome.

Quick disclosure as staff, we are not allowed or permitted to advocate on either stance of that, but our role remains to provide factual information and education to the public.

So across all funds, the city's fiscal year 2027 budget totals just over $800 million and is further broken out by fund type on this slide.

To provide you all with a brief overview of how millage works, it is the rate at which property taxes are calculated, where one mill equals one dollar for every thousand dollars of taxable property value.

It's a little bit of a mouthful, where your assessed property value is factored into that.

Assessed property value is your properties value that the county's property assesses it at, and then taxable value is your assessed value minus any exemptions that you may be eligible eligible for.

The city's millage rate for fiscal year 2027 is 5.8773 mills and represents only the city's portion of your property tax bill.

Other taxing authorities establish their own millage rate for their services, such as the school board, the juvenile welfare juvenile welfare board, and for Clearwater residents, the city's total share of this bill is approximately 30%.

For fiscal year 2027, the city council approved what's called a rollback rate, which is the millage rate that would be necessary to provide the same level of property tax revenue as received in the prior year.

And this lesser figure is also as a result of increases and adjusted for property values and new construction.

So property taxes aren't the only source of revenue to the city's general fund.

Other sources is listed here include utility tax and franchise fee revenue, user fees, and revenues received from other agencies as

well.

And the next two slides represent a breakdown of our general fund expenditures across major general fund departments, with public safety remaining the largest share of our general fund expenditures, also followed by quality of life programs such as parks and recreation and library services.

In terms of our general fund spending by category, personnel remains the largest share of our expenditures at 62%, which, as I mentioned earlier, also reflects our strategic commitment to funding our employee pay employee pay plan at the 75th percentile across comparative public organizations.

So to briefly discuss what we're hearing from our community, as you all know, we had our first budget community workshop earlier in August called Dollars to Donuts, which was designed to give residents a broad overview of each city service, the level of funding required to provide those services, and to offer key insight into each department's operations and upcoming priorities.

We wanted to hear from the community about what they value and wanted to see that their local government prioritize in upcoming budgets, and which we saw public safety remains a key priority, but also that residents value their quality of life services as well as public infrastructure to be maintained across the board.

So lastly, I just briefly want to highlight some of the information our office makes available to the public as part of our commitment to transparency, which is very important to both our city, our city management, as well as our city council.

As some of you may be aware, our ongoing performance management dashboarding project can be viewed at my clearwater.com/slash data.

General budget information may be viewed at my clearwater.com/slash budget.

And finally, as I mentioned, our role in educating the public as to the potential impacts of upcoming property tax reform.

As part of that, the city has published a informative dashboard that showed potential cuts to services as well as a contingency memorandum provided to council earlier in August.

This information can be viewed at MyClearwater.com slash property taxes.

And at this time, I will be happy to answer any questions from any member of the board, either for myself or the assistant city manager.

I have

a question.

On the pie chart, um, where do the expenditures for affordable housing

uh fall?

Sure.

So uh the city contributes, I believe it's $300,000 a year to um it's categorized as homeless uh improvement programs.

Uh it's dispersed to different agencies that support homeless initiatives and affordable housing initiatives, and that's out of the city's general fund.

Okay.

Thank

you.

So if the amendment passes, is there an amended budget

or

revise new budget?

There would be discussions with the city council as a result of that to uh review what the city forecasted in our contingency memorandum and to see if there's still direction to align with uh what those proposed impacts would be.

In that memorandum, we didn't identify any uh reductions at this time, which could change um to the city's affordable housing and homeless initiative contribution.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.