Good morning.

Welcome to the city council budget work session.

We are now in session, and I would like to have the clerk please roll call the roll.

Councilmember Bailey.

Here.

Councilmember Iverson.

Here.

Councilmember Donaldson.

I'm here.

Councilmember Gold.

Excused.

Councilmember Henjam.

Present.

Councilmember Williams.

Here.

Councilmember Linewever.

Excused.

Councilmember Rainey.

Excused.

Councilmember Misley.

Here.

There we go.

Six members present, three members excused.

I will now turn it over to Sheree McDaniel, the chief financial officer for the city, um, to start our budget work session.

Great.

Thank you so much.

Um, good morning, honorable members of city council.

Thank you so much for being here.

And as we move through the 2026 budget process, and I wanted to uh first just introduce the staff that we have here from the finance department.

We have Carly Coates in the budget office, Cindy McLaughlin, she's the city's grants writer, but is supporting us here today, and Jen Vance grants, I'm sorry, budget manager.

Who taking you back?

Um, so I want to say thank you for them to be here today.

And obviously, we have a lot of other uh city staff here supporting uh through the budget process, and you'll be hearing from a number of them.

I also want to just um thank City Council for the extra time and meetings that we've had through uh this budget process and being able to talk through various subjects at your council lunches.

I really appreciate the time that uh you've allowed for that.

I think uh for me it's been very helpful, and I hope it has for you as well.

And I hope that then as we move through this, we will have you know the backup and context around uh some of those conversations as we move through the budget process.

So thank you for that.

I appreciate it.

So, what are we gonna do today?

Our plan today is we will have um, I will present an overview of the budget.

So I'm gonna be talking about revenue expenditures, grants, special funds to give you a little bit of context and information about the bigger picture and the funds that will be included in the budget that you'll be um asked to appropriate approve and appropriate.

Then we will hear from the police department and the fire department and what they're and then in the afternoon we'll have a break for lunch, and then the afternoon we're gonna hear from parks, recreation, cultural services, and then public works.

And so what we've asked them to do, and you'll see a very similar format for each of these presentations.

They're gonna talk about their department as a whole, uh, all of their funding sources, the positions, what changed from last year to this year, to give you the uh kind of global view of each of those departments, and then kind of what are their priorities coming into 26, what are they going to be able to do in 26 for your information and context as we then move through the approval process.

And we'll talk about uh what happens after today as we move through as well, which is today we have um, I'm sorry, I'm gonna back up a little bit.

I wanted to give a little bit of information on the budget development process as a whole, so that you just have a little context on you know where are we in the process, what has come before, where do we go from here?

And we start the budget process in about April or May.

And what we're doing in uh the budget office is putting together kind of the guidelines for the department that the departments will follow as we move through the budget process and any expectations that we may have even early in the year as far as what it's gonna look like as we move through the current year and as we start budgeting into the next year.

We do have a capital improvement program, RCIP.

We have a prioritization committee, so all of the departments that have capital projects participate in a committee where they're bringing forward their highest priority capital projects.

Those are getting prioritized.

And then as we have funding available or not, we are able to include the uh include the high priority items through the general fund and then obviously other funding sources, and we're gonna talk about that.

In June, we have the departments tell us what are their uh budget needs for additional funding.

We call those unfunded budget requests, and that is what do they need uh additional budget for, what would they like to have additional budget for, their priorities in each department.

We go through a prioritization process at the end of July with the departments, and so in years uh where we're like 26 where we have less money, it's actually not prioritizing new things, it's prioritizing what's the most important thing to try to either keep or uh try to protect as as we move through a sort of city priorities that we want to impact the least, and the then we have that kind of conversation rather than what can we do with additional money.

We're talking about how do we accommodate less money.

And we have had um starting in July is when we started the meetings with the council and going through into August and September and even um into October, and we then ideally at the end of August, sometimes like this year, beginning of September, we are on the administrative side uh coming to a balance on the budget.

So considering are there any unfunded budget needs that are priorities that we have to fund?

We have a lot of unavoidable expenditures that we have to include insurance um benefit changes, pension changes, and then we come to a balancing, and then we uh had we had the council mayor retreat, and then we start having uh the preview meetings with the city council, and we you know can are communicating obviously with the departments about what's in, what's not in, and then um we lock the budget team in their offices and they prepare the document that you see before you and that you all have.

So getting into it and from the government side, do you have a question from Councilman Bailey?

Sure.

Hi, sure.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate the overview.

And not, I don't want to get us off topic, but just a quick question.

If if we were to look at modifying how we do the budget, looking at budgeting for outcomes, zero-based budgeting, some other approach to this, how would we have to adjust this schedule for next year?

Is it possible?

How hard would it be?

Have we given some thought to it?

Don't need to answer me right now, but um it may be something that I'm at least interested in talking about over the next couple of months before we get to February, March, certainly by April, May.

Sure.

We have a number of times over, I don't know however many years, looked at the concept of the outcome-based budgeting.

And a couple of years ago, we did actually a lot of research to figure out what would that look like, how long does it take, what kind of resources does it take, what would be the involvement from the finance side from the department side, and that is um it's a it's a big effort.

And typically when entities go adopt a budgeting for outcomes, you hire a consultant, and it takes about two years to transition into that.

It's uh part of the couple of reasons why we haven't done it yet, is because it would be expensive to get a consultant, and it's just a pretty heavy lift, which is fine.

Um, you know, I think we're all we're all up for heavy lifts.

It's okay, we do that a lot.

But also the way that our financial system is set up is not conducive to if a true, like if we did a true pure outcome-based budgeting, because then you are actually in your financial system doing it differently, and ours is not set up for that.

And so part of the struggle is figuring out a way that we could do it without the support of a financial system that is set up in a way to support that.

So we would have to figure out a way to do it without the financial system kind of supporting that.

And so there've just been things that it just didn't seem like it was time to do it.

We do a little bit of a I'm gonna call it a modified zero-based budgeting.

And although we do kind of start from last year's budget, we do uh try to request and uh have the departments look at all of their budget line items and when departments are in need of something.

Our first question is kind of well, can you figure that out within your own budget?

Like how can you support that if it's a priority to you?

How can you modify what you're already budgeting in a way that would support that?

And so having them look at their budget very closely every year.

And although we don't collect documentation uh like a pure zero-based budgeting, where we have uh have them delineate all of what goes into every single line item.

We do uh a little bit, that's why I'm calling modified, try to have them be examining very closely every year what exactly it is that they're budgeting in each line and how they can move that around to accommodate what they feel is important in that year.

Yeah, thank you.

I I uh I I just want to be sure that we we don't sit around and keep doing things the way we're doing them just because it's hard or because it takes a while.

If we can start now to solve the problems that we might have, I ideally the economy turns around and everything's great for the next couple of years and it's and it's easy, but I I think we need to look very carefully at how we do these things to make sure that we're we have good rigorous processes for doing the prioritization of of functions of personnel, um, all those things are are things that we need to look at, and you do to some extent.

I I know that we've talked about that, you know, um in the past.

So I I just I for one want to look at this a little bit more closely and and make sure that um we're all going, you know, working together on a process that makes the most sense for the city.

Thank you.

Councilman Hinchum.

Thank you.

Um thank you, Tom, for bringing that up.

And I I have uh talked about this actually, I think pretty much since I've started.

So I from my perspective, um uh as long as there's enough um, you know, enough people on council and in alignment with the administration to really explore and put the resources into making because it it is uh clearly very resource-intensive money, time systems, structures, ways of thinking, culture.

I mean, it's a significant change.

And I think it's very possible, and I agree we should not just keep you know talking about it, but it would require, and one suggestion would be you know, maybe when this budget is done and everybody's had a rest over the holiday or whatever in early January, we could have a bit of an exploratory uh meeting to really look at exactly like what would it take?

Let's take some of that research you've done.

Um let's look at the numbers, let's look at, you know, uh what the priorities are of the administration leadership and this council and see if there's enough um energy to make it happen and desire.

Thank you, Sheree.

And and you do, I know you absolutely all of you prioritize and very much so.

I I know you are doing that.

Thanks.

Councilman Donaldson?

Yeah, thanks, madam president.

Share uh in in different conversations, we've talked about this uh division between council approving a budget, but the the mayor has the authority to direct different apartments in their work um to change to an entirely different way of creating the budget and have have finance do it in an entirely different way.

I don't know, you might not be comfortable answering this, but would that be a decision by the mayor?

He might take the advice of counsel, but it's not a decision that council can make.

That would be my understanding.

Okay, and that's what off the top of my head, I think that's the way it would have to go too.

So council can prefer it to be done a certain way, but that's a decision, just like we might prefer through the fire department and do something differently, but really that direction comes from the mayor.

And I, you know, I just think it's important that we remember that.

Councilman Bailey.

No, I I agree.

This is something that's completely in the mayor's purview, but I think that as an out in our role, we should be able to look at this and make a recommendation and just reiterate very publicly that I, for one, and I think it's really the sense of the council as a whole that we want to work together with the administration to to do what's best.

And that's all I'm suggesting, not that we can impose something on the mayor.

We don't want to necessarily tie their hands.

I personally don't want to be down in the weeds to do these things, but I do want to make sure that we're asking the questions that we need to ask and looking at the things that we need to look at to be sure that the decisions that we make are the best ones.

And you know, not to suggest that I have any you know great new ideas that I'm just one of the new guys here, but I'm I'm asking the question, I'm putting it out there that uh there are at least some of us.

Thank you, Nancy, that uh are are interested in in being a more active part of this thing.

And uh, you know, yeah, I'm ready to hit the ground running in January if uh if you guys will let us let us be part of it.

So thanks.

Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you.

Um, and so as we on uh government side, the thing that we have to do to start the budget process is to figure out what is the revenue available.

So this is a graph indicating the general fund.

We're looking at general fund now only, and the revenue sources.

Sales tax is uh for 2026, 59% of the general fund revenue budget, property tax at 6%, other financing sources, which are things like interest earnings, uh utility surplus at 14%, and then we kind of have this all other bucket at 20%.

A little more information on the general fund revenue by category.

Again, uh the sales and use tax is of course the largest piece.

The 2025 budget was uh set at 261.5 million.

The 2026 budget is at 251.7 million.

So the sales tax forecast from budget to budget is a decrease of 9.8 million.

Property tax is a decrease of 2 million.

Again, this is uh, and I have a slide on it that will talk through more about why that is.

And then we have other changes for a total in the general fund revenue total decreasing from 25 budget to 26 budget of 11 million.

And as you know, the 2025 budget, we have taken steps mid-year because revenue was coming in less than that, and so we took steps to have expenditures come in less than that as well, so that we're not impacting our general fund reserve account.

We're having a uh balancing out those expenditures with the available revenue so that we can accommodate it in the current year and not use reserves.

So a little more on the sales tax and uh the trying to display here what has happened during 2025 and how that compares to 2026.

So in 2025, the blue bar is the sales tax budget.

That's the 261 point five million that we originally set at this time last year for our budget for sales tax in 25.

As we know, um, we've had a lot of conversations about it.

The 2025 end of year estimate now is 247.7 million.

So we've decreased that um by obviously quite a bit.

So then as we're moving into 2026, I just wanted to visually try to represent the changes in a way to demonstrate that the from blue bar to blue bar, which is the budget to budget, that's where we see the 9.7 million dollar decrease when we're speaking budget to budget.

But in 2025, we have an end of year estimate of 247.

So when we look from that value to the 2026 budget number, it is an increase, and that's where we have that increase of the 1.4% for that, and I'm calling it ongoing revenue.

We do have an additional 500,000 that I'm planning in sales tax um that we had some discussion about uh that it impacts the revenue budget in 26 by 0.2 percent.

So putting those two together, it's a four million dollar change from the current end of year estimate for this year to the 2026 budget for sales tax.

So that is a net change of 1.6% in total.

I have a question from Councilman Risley.

Thank you, Madam President.

More of a comment or statement, Share.

And you and I have talked about this before, so what I'm gonna say won't come as a as a surprise to you at all.

But I I do have ongoing concern about the idea of projecting an increase uh from the actual 2025 revenue amount to a uh an increase in 2026.

Um part of my ongoing concern around that stems from conversations that I'm having with uh folks in the community, business owners.

I was having a conversation just the other day with a uh restaurant owner downtown who is um very concerned that their revenue has been uh down 15% this year, and they're not projecting that it's gonna get better next year, and that's not just one example.

There are many similar examples, and then combine that with I think the uncertainty around uh what's happening at a national and global level.

Um I just again want to express on the record my concern about uh an increased uh budgeted amount from the 2025 actual.

Uh and I would personally I would rather see us hold a flat number.

And again, I understand what the implications are if we do that.

I know that that means uh you know it could cause some uh consternation for the administration.

Um but knowing that this is just a budget and that you are not spending these dollars day one in January.

Again, I would rather take a much more conservative approach and look at a flat budget.

Thank you.

I also did uh, and just for and we've talked about this as well, a little bit of information as I try to do research because the way that we forecast the revenue is we do have software that is uh forecasting software, but that's a piece of it, but also then we have to put into uh that forecast kind of what are we seeing in our environment.

And so um, as you mentioned, council member Risley, we're seeing impacts certainly in this year, which is why we took the steps in this year to modify our spending because of seeing that sales tax not coming in like we thought it would, which is obviously uh a result of what those businesses are seeing.

They have fewer sales, they're down by uh quite a bit on their revenue, and that you know, the city is also down on the revenue from what we were anticipating.

I do so the other part that we do is we try to put in some, I'm gonna call it professional judgment and look around at various sources of information on economic forecasting.

So I did bring a couple, I'll just walk through them.

As um, so you know, these and I will say this is uh making it difficult, it makes it difficult in these kind of years because there is uncertainty, and I think that that's then what provides uh this level of do we budget increase, not budget increase, how much, and how do we look forward?

It is an estimate, as you've indicated, it's a budget, it's a plan.

But the things that we were looking at when we went ahead and felt comfortable to put in a 1.4% increase.

And I just uh, and I even looked actually this morning because I wanted to have the most recent information.

Because when we initially put forward the 1.4%, that was in about I'm gonna say August, end of August.

And because that was the information that we had at the time that we needed in order to move forward and say, okay, we have to stop our numbers, we have to come to a balance.

So a couple of those things um just for contextual information that we can add to the uh information is looking at Bloomberg.

And again, uh what I'm gonna be talking about are national um indicators, and though we may either lag or not follow national exactly, I think it provides some good context.

Bloomberg provides an estimate of consumer spending.

And looking at you know 20 uh 25, they do have it low, but for 2026, they do forecast it out, and they have it by quarter, but it starts with 1.5% increase, and this is a same quarter of the prior year, so quarter to quarter comparisons for quarter one of 26, a 1.5% increase in consumer spending, and by the end of 26 and quarter four, 1.9.

Uh, so I I don't think I calculated the average, but anyway, I think that that would average out at slightly above a 1.4.

Then even just today I did look at this September 2025, pretty recently, the congressional budget office provides an economic forecast.

Current view of the economy from 2025 to 2028 is the title of the report.

And they do provide, and this is GDP, which is not exactly consumer spending, but from what I've been able to research, consumer spending is about makes up about 70% of GDP.

And for 2026, um, and this is an annual average, they have it at 2.2% growth from 25 to 26.

Then I also did look at um the University of Michigan.

There's a research seminar in quantitative economics by the uh University of Michigan, and this report is called the U.S.

Economic Outlook for 25 to 26, and this is dated um actually November 21st of 24.

So this is a year old.

But what this provides, the forecast for 25 and 26, and it provides an um, and again, this is GDP growth, provides 2.2 percent, and it indicates that um as personal income tax cuts kick in, overpowering the negative growth impacts of deportations and the tariffs that likely take effect in early 2026.

So obviously those are at a national level, it's not the local, um, which is also certainly a factor when we look at that, but that's what provided some background and um justification for something even lower than that, which is the 1.4%.

And Shrey, that was previous to the government shutdown.

Yes.

So we probably should take that too in account when I think the stats were one out of eight people in Colorado Springs aren't working based on that alone.

That's quite a few people.

And I have a question from Councilman Rainey.

And I think he was like question, if that's okay.

Oh, yes.

So Shrey, I appreciate all of that.

Um however, again, another touch point for me is the Pikes Peak Regional Building Department, which I recognize has a completely different um base, if you will.

It's not driven by sales tax, but obviously a lot of our sales tax revenue is driven by construction.

And so when PPRBD projects flat revenue for their um budget, again, that's a benchmark for me that maybe we ought to be looking at a flat budget for us as well.

Again, tying construction to sales tax revenue.

Thank you.

So um I'm gonna piggyback on what uh council member Risley just mentioned and uh take it a step further.

One of my concerns moving forward is with a lot of uncertainty next year.

Um is there a plan or a contingency in place to adjust fire accordingly?

Here's my reason why.

I asked a question a couple of days ago about how often do we do review on budgets?

And what the answer for me was an unsatisfactory answer, but I get it.

I I understand kind of where we're at.

Uh with that being said, or we plan on doing potentially uh being a little bit more studious and doing a quarterly touch point because when I look at and I hear all the different organizations that you're getting data points from.

We're currently, I mean, we don't know what's gonna happen with the current shutdown and if there's gonna be a signed CR, and oftentimes we'll see another CR signed in February, and as we go down these roads, if that's gonna have a trickle-down effect to local economy, then we need to adjust fire.

And do we have a plan or a contingency on when and how to adjust fire instead of waiting until the end of the summer, and then now we're making massive adjustments to our entire city budget.

I think that we have a couple of contingencies or a um actions that we could take if um certainly and the the shutdown, and I don't know if any if there's any other information, but we don't know how long that might go.

And so I'm anticipating good morning that historically, right?

And I know uh that doesn't history doesn't uh you know mean that that's what's gonna happen in the future, but historically those shutdowns have not uh lasted, and I don't know how long, more than weeks or months, whatever the case may be.

And so I anticipate that the most impact we'll see will likely be in this year.

And but the levers that we have obviously are we can impact our spending, which is similar to what we did this year.

This year was a much larger change in what the revenue was, and therefore what we asked the departments to underspend.

We also, and I have a slide uh based on some prior questions about our fund balance and what does the fund balance look like.

So obviously we have the opportunity as a rainy day fund and as sort of you know emergent type of funding that we would be able to, if we needed to be able to use part of those reserves because we have a healthy fund balance right now, which was very intentional and very intentional by the council and by the administration to have a healthy fund balance.

So that is another um way that we could address any revenue changes that we might see as we move into 2026.

Okay, thanks.

And I'll go ahead and take the opportunity since um we're talking about the sales tax and whether or not 1.4% is too much or if we need it flat.

As we move through today, this session and and the communications that we're having with the council really provides the council with what we hope is the information needed to be well educated on what's in the budget, as well as if there are questions, like this is the time.

Today is the time because what we're gonna be doing next in a couple of weeks, we're gonna have you're gonna hear from the public, we'll have an official uh public input session specifically for the budget.

That's in two weeks, and then not quite, and then two weeks from today, we'll have a markup session.

And that really is the council's opportunity to indicate to me to the administration, I'd like to see these um different things in the budget.

Certainly, if there are those things that were are already on your mind, I think that it'd be great to have those conversations before we get to the markup.

But if not, then the markup session is really council's opportunity to say I want to see something different in the budget than what is in there currently.

So today um I encourage you to get your questions answered.

This is the time.

And obviously, you can be speaking with department directors between now and then, as um you do throughout the year, I know.

So this isn't the only opportunity, but really this is a great time before two weeks from now.

Because when we have the markup session, that's the point where any changes to the budget need to get made.

And once we leave that meeting, that's what we will base the budget ordinance on.

Any decisions at that meeting.

So this is the time.

Ask all the questions, please um try to be as familiar as we can with the budget, what's in there, what's not in there, what you're uncomfortable with, and then because then at the markup session, we would be determining okay, what's the way forward on that so that you can feel comfortable with the budget that we would be adopting for 2026?

Thank you for clarifying that.

That is important.

Yes, thank you.

Um are you finished with your questions, Councilman Rainey?

Um, Councilman Donaldson, do you have a question?

Um Yeah, well, it's it's pretty much a statement, but I just what I want to say is that uh uh our chief financial officer has uh explained how she's arrived at this estimate for uh sales and use tax, including Bloomberg estimates for for next year.

And um I'm satisfied with that, and I will I will accept that uh that estimate.

Um, only one person can drive the car, and then it can't be 10 of us.

And so uh, you know, the mayor will be um is responsible for for uh the the finance office operations and if this is wildly uh out of bounds and we'll know that next year, if it's flat, uh it's a four million dollar difference, and I think we can make those adjustments next year as we did this year.

Um but to be clear, this is your best estimate, correct?

That's correct.

Using the software, using other things to uh fine-tune the estimate.

You believe this is correct.

Um the future, and uh, you know, I can support this.

And the last comment I'll make is just from uh you know, financial standpoint looking at the money we have available, the money we have in reserves, which I'm gonna talk about.

Part of the balance that we try to strike is putting the money to the highest and best use.

And so um, certainly uh as a conservative, it could be flat.

But then it feels like we're leaving for me, it feels like we're leaving a little bit of money on the table, potentially, obviously.

We don't know it is an estimate, but what is the highest and best use of those funds and with the needs of the city, the needs of public safety, the needs of the uh public works department, to then say, okay.

We know we're talking about three and a half million, four million between flat and 1.4%, and looking at what are the implications of not having that and not using that money, and looking at the reserves and making the highest and best use of those public funds and trying to put them to use.

And even uh at the audit committee where the external auditors presented the results of the 2024 audit, they commented on us making good use of our reserves.

They actually said, you know, we were really happy to see you make use of those reserves because you're starting on that reserve balance, it's above the GFOA recommendation, and so they complimented the city on making good use of those reserves.

Now, I'm not suggesting we don't have that included in the 2026 budget, but I'm gonna talk about the fund balance, and I think we're doing quite well.

And so that is something that taking that into account in do we put the 1.4 in so we have another three and a half million to fund the departments or not.

And so that's also sort of the balance that we we all, and I we you administration making um kind of looking at those public funds and how do we make the best use of them.

So okay.

So um this is what's included the 251 uh point eight million is what is included in the document that we have currently before us, and if any changes were to be made to that, we could do that at the markup.

Property tax revenue um obviously is another one that we keep a very close eye on.

So I just have uh the chart that displays in 2024.

We collected uh 28 million.

We provided a property tax credit, which is basically we temporarily lower our approved mill levy so that we are collecting less revenue, intentionally collecting less revenue, which then um provides some relief to our the property owners, and we do that to stay under the TABER property tax limit.

So TABER, we have a calculation that encompasses all eligible revenue, but there's also specifically you apply the TABER calculation and the growth rate to property tax specifically, and it's really the only revenue that we apply specifically to TABER.

The other Tabor calculation is just kind of all eligible TABE revenue.

And so what we did was we did provide a mill levy credit of 0.7 mils to stay under that property tax limit, the Tabor limit.

However, um, due to a number of state uh ballot initiatives that went through not ballot, I apologize, initiatives that were passed by the state legislature.

They uh did also pass legislation that lowered the what you pay taxes on with your house.

So there were some you know exemptions and other uh uh measures that they put into place.

They had uh criteria on if an entity was eligible, the state would provide an amount of backfill for those property taxes.

The city was not eligible for that because our assessed value grew greater than what their cutoff was.

So we were not expecting any backfill, but it turns out we ended up getting some of that backfill.

And so that kicked us over the 2024 Tabor cap for property tax.

So what we're doing, and I have it displayed in the gray bar on 2024, it's about $3 million.

So what we're doing in 2026 is providing a property tax mill levy credit to refund that $3 million that was collected in excess in 2024.

Also have an additional mill levy credit to keep the 2026 property tax revenue under the cap.

So in total, we're providing a 1.27 mills worth of property tax credit, which totals for 2026 11.4 million.

Moving to the expenditure side of the equation, we have here a pie chart that displays the expenditures for the general fund by category.

So this is by uh we we categorize typically sales.

I'm sorry, geez, I'm still on revenue.

I apologize.

Salary benefit and pensions is category operating, what we call capital outlay, and then general fund CIP or projects.

In 2026, our salary benefit and pension category across the entire general funds up 72% of our expenditure expenditures in the general fund.

A little bit more detail on that.

Is there a question?

I think Councilman Hinchum.

Uh I know there have been some modif slight modifications, Share, but in the budget book, salary benefits and pensions is 74.2%.

Okay, thank you.

We will update this.

Okay.

Thank you.

So the book is more I would trust the book.

Over this slide.

Okay.

Yes, I would trust the book.

Okay.

I apologize.

I'm not sure where we may have.

Um let me see if the figure is the same.

317, 57.

Yeah, the figure, the dollar figure is the same.

Okay.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you.

Then looking at how those categories compare to the 2025 budget, and I will just say this is the original 2025 budget.

This does not account for the reductions that were taken mid-year.

The over the 2025 budgeted expenditures were 438.3 million in 2026, they're 427.3 million, which is 11 million less, uh, which exactly corresponds obviously to the change in the revenue.

We are changing the revenue, uh changing the expenditures accordingly.

Okay, I'm on my third uh cup of coffee, so apparently I need a little more.

Which is probably why I'm having the problems.

It might be too much.

Okay.

So then I did want to talk a little bit about the fund balance.

And again, this is general fund.

And uh, so I'm gonna use some words interchangeably.

We call it the fund balance because uh in financial terms, what we're talking about is the unrestricted fund balance, also unreserved fund balance, or we just call it the reserves.

And when we say the reserves, what we're talking about uh sort of with financial words is the unrestricted fund balance in the general fund.

So when I those terms are all kind of used interchangeably, and it's whether you're being, you know, technical GFOA or GASB compliant with the words you're using.

Um I'm trying to make my accountants proud, or when we talk about it in generally we just talk about the general fund reserve account because that is the money that is available for either appropriation or available for use in an emergency, or if we have uh I don't know what some uh something comes up, we have to do an emergency road project, we could come back and we could do a supplemental appropriation with the city council to approve an expenditure out of the reserve funding that's available.

So that's what that's what we're um speaking to when we say reserves or fund balance.

In 2022, uh we had available balance in the reserves of 94 million, and then that equates to 22.4% of the next year's budget.

So I want to just explain a little bit on what that indicator means.

What this is, what we're talking about is okay, when we end 2022 and we look at the 2023 budget, the amount of fund balance covers 22% of the next year's expenditures.

So that's just our measure, and that is uh GASB uh generally accepted accounting gap, generally accepted accounting principal, and GFOA, the government finance officers association.

This is what governments use as a measure of financial health, is how much of your next year's expenditures could you cover with your reserves.

So in governmental side, unlike you know, utilities or a business, we don't typically talk about days of cash on hand.

What we talk about is the percent of reserves that are available and how much of your expenditure budget could those cover.

Can you tell us how many days on hand that would be though?

Um, I can certainly calculate that and get that back to you.

No rush.

Okay.

Then when we ended 2023, we had 21% reserves, which is about 90 million coming into 24, that changed very little.

Uh, but the percentage also very little, if you round, it's the 21% as we ended 2024.

That is our most recent actual amount coming into 2025.

I do now take into account what we're estimating as end-of-year revenue and end of year expenditures.

And as a percent of the 2026 expenditure budget, that is 19.8%.

The government finance officers association or GFOA, that is the uh institution we look to for financial best practices.

They indicate very generally that it's about three months worth of expenditures that you should be able to cover, which is 16.67%.

So we are uh three percent above that GFOA stated best practice estimated.

This is an estimate, of course, at the 19.8 percent.

So that's part of um as we move into 2026.

If we were in a situation where revenue weren't covering uh was not coming into budget, the available fund balance is one place we could look to.

We don't like to do that.

Administration doesn't like to do it, council, I believe, doesn't like to do it, but it is an available mechanism for if revenue is not coming into budget, we could look to the fund balance to cover that deficit.

We don't tend to do that.

For example, in 2025, we chose to modify expenditures so we could accommodate the revenue, the um revenue coming in under budget so that we would specifically not impact our fund balance.

Shri, I have a question from our auditor.

Morning, Sheree, how are you?

Morning, Natalie.

Doing a great job.

Um lots to get through today.

So I appreciate the conversation on the fund balance here and your note of the GFOA of the, I think it's 16.7%, that's their standard.

Um back in 2013, the GFOA partnered with the city of Clar Springs, and I'm not sure if you were in your role or in the finance team, but in that study, what they looked at was some of the risks that were really germane to the city of Color Springs.

And I'm wondering in looking through that report, does it make sense for maybe the two of us to partner together next year to really hone in this new fund balance?

When I did a little bit of looking at that point, what they were forecasting, I believe, was somewhere around 25%, just because of the relevant risks at the time of 2013.

It seems just kind of questioning your thoughts on maybe does it make sense to look at really specifically the role and the model of Colorado Springs and what we're dealing with.

Yeah, thank you.

Um I'd be very happy to.

And I will comment um I was around, I was not in this role in 2013, but I was in the budget office, and we did partner with GFOA to do a specific study on the uh city of Colorado Springs.

And one of the reasons, and I, you know, Natalie will check me that it was higher than what the GFOA sort of general recommendation was because at the time we were facing litigation regarding transit and the contracted bus drivers.

And we did end up with litigation that we had to pay out subsequent to that, because that was part of why it was a larger percentage, was because we had that litigation that was outstanding, and we did end up paying that litigation for the transit um contract.

So it is uh what they recommend is specific to what you're facing at the time.

So we no longer have that litigation.

Obviously, we have other litigation things that come up, but I don't think anything quite so large as that transit litigation that played into that.

Natalie has a follow-up comment.

I I agree with you.

I think that's what I found is it's a lot of it is based on litigation, but we are obviously in a society of litigation.

And so does it make sense to take that more global view and help put um council's mind to ease on you know a little more firmer view.

So that was just my suggestion of something to look at.

And I'm uh actually very happy to do that if it gives council the um information or comfort about what that should be, because I do think that um having a very healthy fund balance is a great idea, but I also think that there are times when you would want to make use of that money, and again, that goes back to what is the highest and best use of our taxpayers' funds, and having um a fund balance that is beyond what is necessary, means you're not putting taxpayer funds to work, and you're not providing services that they provided those tax dollars for, and so that's the balance.

So it's a balance and it's uh consideration, and so that's just one of the things that as the governing body and um on the administrative side that we try to factor in is how much is how much is enough, and and and that's uh that's a you know question that we can uh certainly try to get more drilled down, and we don't have to look to the financial um agency that provides best practices for the entire nation.

We can look at what specifically is for Colorado Springs, and if that will give council comfort, then I'm of course very happy to do that.

I think to your point, one-time use is very appropriate, but salaries is a little scary.

Um, we have a question from Councilman Donaldson.

J just a thought, and and rather than looking back at something that was done in 13 and then trying to do Kentucky windage off of that as to what should our fund balance be now.

Um perhaps if we really want to go down that road, we have another study done on our current circumstances rather than I like my analogy of Kentucky windage.

If anyone knows what that is, I don't know what that is.

You don't know what that is.

Okay.

Okay.

Bailey does.

Okay.

Remember, I am from Colorado, so I'm not okay.

I also did want to just point out, and I think that um President Crow Iverson did we had a very a comment on what in 2024 we budgeted, we planned for the use of the fund balance, and we budgeted 10 million dollars use of the fund balance.

And so I just wanted to point out that from 23 to 24, we did not have to draw from the fund balance.

We had anticipated, I believe that the fund balance would come down to, if I remember correctly, somewhere around 17%.

But because of the measures that we implemented in 2024 when we saw that the revenue wasn't quite coming in to budget, we went ahead and took those expenditure savings measures.

And so what resulted is more savings than revenue coming in under budget.

So we overcompensated basically, and we did not even have to uh make any use of that fund balance.

So that's great news and goes to uh I think just commenting on the fiscal stewardship that we have as we that you have as governing the city, and we have is administrating the city.

So um that's great news.

I'm gonna move a little bit into the components of the 2026 expenditure budget.

There were components I mentioned that were those must do things that we felt like were critical.

Either they were discretionary, but we felt like we had to do it, and then there are also some components that we actually just had to do.

So I want to talk a little bit about civilian compensation to start with.

We have three components of pay.

One is market movement, and that has to do with as our HR department surveys across other similar agencies.

How much is that whole kind of salary structure moving?

So that's what we call market movement is kind of everything is changing.

What does that look like?

And for 2026, the city did not fund any market movement.

So that one component of pay is not funding.

There's no money for that.

We also have pay for performance, and this is the component of pay that's contingent on when we get to the end of the year, we do our performance evaluations, you have to have a certain rating or more, and that is then a pay for performance piece of the structure.

We are also not funding that.

The third component is the pay progression.

And what this component entails is on a person's anniversary date of being in their position.

If they are below the market average for that position, we allow them a small movement toward that market average.

This is very, very commonly in most cases, people who are newer to the organization or newer to the position because we most often hire under that market average when we bring people into positions, they are not at the market average.

We bring them in as something lower.

But what we want to do is try to in sort of I think the ideal is a five-year time frame, move help move them toward that market average because that market average is what everyone else is paying for that job.

So we don't want to leave employees sitting much below or far below that market average, because then we're not being competitive for that classification, and we want to be able to provide a little bit of incentive to those employees and start moving them toward that market average so that we can retain those employees and be um competitive in our in our pay for that particular classification.

So we did feel like in 2026, um, in conversations with our HR department that really, if we were gonna fund anything in compensation for civilians, really to have just anything in that pay progression would be uh the most desirable.

So, but instead of four percent, we decided we couldn't afford that.

Now we're saying up to two percent.

So this requires um this eligible employees are below that market average, and they have to have a of course a satisfactory performance uh rating as well, and then they would get up to two percent.

Councilman Rainey has a question.

Um Madam President, I didn't know.

Did Don't you know?

No, he didn't, he just took his name off.

Thank you.

All right.

Um, I guess I have a question for you, but it might be more in your lane.

Um because of that strategy, how does it play into retention?

Are we doing pretty well with retaining people that way?

There's a lot of governments out there, uh a lot of cities to be exact that don't go by that model.

They try to be at market average or even above to bring in exceptional talent so they can maintain that talent.

It sounds like we're coming in low in hopes of growing talent, and oftentimes what happens is people get enticed to go elsewhere because of that.

So this will be the first time that we don't have.

Oh, I'm sorry, uh, Myra Romero, Chief Human Resources and Risk Officer.

Thank you for that.

Um we this is the first time that we don't have um at least two of the pay mechanisms in place, as Share is mentioning, and so that's why it was so important for us to keep the pay progression component, at least partially.

Um we are a little bit nervous that we are gonna have trouble attracting and then retaining uh employees here at this organization.

Uh, and it is something that we are concerned about, and that is why we're uh wanting to keep the pay progression component at the very least.

Is there now you're you're stating that of course your concern right now uh going into 2026?

Uh, are you prepared for worst case scenario?

We have not had any trouble thus far.

Um, and we have already started stating things like we have the furloughs, um, and I think it is the job market that we're seeing right now because we have a lot of people who have already been laid off, um, and so the job market is kind of slowing down, so we are still getting um good talent, a good talent pool.

Um, but I I think we are concerned for next year, and I think that is the job market that we're seeing right now.

Okay, thank you.

Any other questions?

Okay.

And as we put the budget together, you know, these are the things that uh we spend time discussing and weighing because in 204 and five, even though we saw we don't have a lot of money for new things or additional when we were talking to the departments and talking with our RHR department, we really did prioritize employee compensation just for that very reason.

How do we keep the people that we've already trained that already know the job?

And how do we attract people into the positions that are critical to operating the city?

And so we've had we have these conversations, extended conversations about that, because this is part of what we're trying to balance with the amount of available revenue, what are the priorities, and we're trying to do this balancing act of how much can we afford to put into compensation and what are the ramifications of not putting more and what are the risks that we're taking on by doing that?

But really coming into 2026, because we have this, you know, uh we had to factor in this adjustment to the sales tax.

Then how do we what can we afford and how how much do we have to put in to try to minimize the risk of employee turnover and the you know failed recruitments?

And HR does a really brilliant job on trying to guide us and help us get to that right balance, and then as we move through the year, when we have recruitments, if we have failed recruitments, we have a position that's failed twice on a recruitment, then they immediately step in and start trying to figure out why is that and are there adjustments that we can make that we can still be within budget, be within the salary schedule, but how do we modify that so that we can then have a successful recruitment?

So they do a lot of that.

Thank you.

Okay.

You know, the sworn have different steps that they have that it's a bit unique from the civilians, but for the sworn, we also are not including market movement.

However, we are including step progressions, and so this is when the sworn um personnel go from, for example, a police officer four to a police officer three or two.

That is about it is an average of 1.3% increase.

So for the fire, that cost is 662,000, and for police it's 1.5 million.

The reason it's a lot more for police is because we have recently added new positions, and so as those positions start moving through those step progressions, that takes more funding because we have more people starting out at the bottom and moving their way through the rings for benefits.

The city did have uh benefit cost increases.

They were about 6.2% increase in the cost of the benefits.

However, because we were not providing compensation changes, either pay for performance or market increases for employees, we determined that the city would pay for that entire medical cost increase, and that we would not pass it on to the employees, and I think that's really important because to throw a medical premium increase on an employee when they're not getting a compensation increase, really I think uh would contribute even more to that employee turnover or dissatisfaction with the employees.

So this city did fund the 2.4 million to cover the medical cost increases.

Councilman Donaldson.

Yeah, thanks.

Shrey, could you just go back to the previous slide?

I just wanted to jot down a couple numbers there.

So helping voice 662.5 million.

Okay, thank you.

Of course.

Councilman Rainey.

Thank you, Madam President.

Because you were diligent enough to make sure that you capture, you know, that increased cost and medical.

There was conversations, especially with state legislation about workers comp and then how that was going to impact employees.

Was that calculated into this?

Did the legislation pass that we were worried about?

Sorry, can uh Myra Romero, Chief Human Resources and Risk Officer, can you expand on that a little bit?

Yeah.

So there was legislation about workers' comp and how that now was going to be passed back down to, I guess you say local municipalities to cover that for employees now.

So now employees have the option of going and using, I guess, municipality or city level provided medical are going out on their own and getting their own type of uh medical coverage.

Um was that calculated into this?

If if we're talking about the same bill, I think that doesn't come into effect until 2028.

Is that bill 1300?

Does that sound right?

It's not 1300, but I know what you're referring to.

I have to go back and take uh and get the actual bill number, but I wanted to make sure that we weren't gonna be caught off guard or blindsided by any added potential added costs in 26 going into 27.

But I'll I'll get that information for you.

Okay, yeah.

And the city is um self-insured for workers' compensation, but one of the bills I know that was in the legislature that we were tracking very closely was the state restricting who you could kind of contract with for workers' compensation.

And so um we'll get more information and and we can provide that to you on the and I'll gotta written down.

I'll try to track it also.

Okay, great, thank you.

So then looking at that in uh sort of the overall changes to the general fund expenditure budget, those compensation strategies for civilian with the up to two percent on the pay progression and the step increases for sworn, that all totals about and I'm gonna question my number because I'm gonna skip the first line.

I apologize.

The and then we did have um those medical changes.

We had changes in both sworn and civilian pension.

We have those health care changes all totaling eight and a half million.

We had uh contracts, other unavoidable and insurance changes of three negative three and a half million.

We had the departmental reductions that we've implemented of the 12.9 million, and then we had that net change in one-time expenditures of 3.4.

And you'll remember we had about uh 3.2 million budgeted draw previously, and so that's we'll talk about that.

That's going away, and then we have one-time expenditures also going away.

So the general fund expenditure change, as we've mentioned, is the 11 million less than the prior year.

And I'm sorry, I'm gonna look at my notes really quickly here for a moment.

Okay.

Okay.

Then I wanted to talk about uh the all funds.

So we're gonna we were zoomed in on the general fund.

Now we're gonna zoom out a little bit and look at our all funds.

The general fund again budgeted for 2026 is 427.3 million, which makes up 47% of our all funds total.

The other components of our all funds is our special revenue funds, which I'm going to um talk a little bit about, which are things like our public safety sales tax fund, our TOPS fund, our two C roadway maintenance fund.

That makes up 19% of our all funds total.

Our enterprise funds total 181.5 million.

Again, this does not include utilities, it is the other enterprise funds of the city, make up 20% of the all funds total, and then our grants fund, which is 125 million, so 13 almost 14% of our all funds total is uh made up of grants.

So we can see that the special revenue fund and the grants fund in particular are significant funding sources for our city and how the money that we use to operate as a city as a whole.

We already talked a bit about the general fund.

We're gonna talk a little bit about the special revenue funds and the grant funds.

So we'll get into that.

Special revenue funds, these are the expenditure budgets.

So the ones that I think we talk most about and really have an impact on the funding available for the departments and how the total amount of money that they have available to them to provide the services to our community.

We have our conservation trust fund, TOPS, lodging and auto rental, LART, our two C roadway, and our public safety sales tax fund.

So those largest ones are public safety sales tax fund and our two C roadway maintenance fund really are really important funding sources that provide the ability for our departments to provide services to the community.

They're really important in what we do.

Also, we put on here the Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority or PPRTA.

And we put this on here because it is a significant funding source for the city.

It's really important for what we're able to do in providing uh transportation related services to the community.

And in 2026, it's almost 116 million dollars.

So it is a significant source of funding that we are able to use to provide transportation related services.

We have it asterisk here and separated because this council, the city does not approve that budget or appropriate those funds.

Those are appropriated by the PPRTA authority, the board there, and but we do show it because it is a significant source of funding to the city.

With the PPRTA and PSST in those ballot measures, they had levels of effort.

And so what that means is it is stated in those ballot measures that the general fund must still spend a certain amount of money or a percent of money on either transportation related items in the case of PPRTA or on public safety in the case of PSST.

And so I just wanted to show you this is on the left hand side the PPRTA transportation maintenance of effort.

The blue is the required amount for PPRTA, it's a dollar amount.

So for the transportation related spending, the general fund requirement is to spend at least 18.3 million.

In the 2026 budget, we're spending 34 million.

For PPRTA transit, it has its own level of effort.

The requirement is the general fund spends 5.7 million on trans on um sorry, transit related services, and in the 2026 budget, we're spending 9 million.

I have a question from Councilman Inch.

Thank you.

Um, Sheree, we clearly have no problem meeting level of effort in these special taxes.

Can you just talk about I guess what that sort of means?

I mean I'm just trying to understand, given that it's clearly so easy to meet that level of effort.

Is there is there other meaning that comes with that?

And I will also give um some context in the Great Recession back in 08, 910, we actually were not able to meet the transit PPRTA maintenance of effort.

And that was you know, felt significant.

Uh it was significant for the city and for PPRTA.

But when we started to come out of that, we one of our main priorities was to again meet that level of effort for transit.

And I'm just gonna cover public safety really quickly, and then we can talk about that sort of what why do we keep bringing this up and why is it important?

The PSST level of effort is stated as a percent of the general fund expenditures to be spent on public safety.

The minimum percentage is 47.65.

What we're spending in 2026 is 57%.

And why this matters is that when we took those ballot measures to our community to the voters, it was really the promise, it was a promise that the city made that we would not supplant general fund money.

So if we received that funding from our taxpayers, we would not say, okay, thanks.

Then we're just going to use that to fund transportation or public safety, and we'll take what we were currently spending and spend it on something else.

So this was really the voters' way of being assured that the city would not just divert the current funding into something else, and that we would still maintain our level of spending on those priorities.

Because these are top priorities of the city, then it is the case that we will be exceeding these because that is what we put our money toward.

These are our top priorities, transportation, public safety.

And so we will be putting funding toward those priorities.

What this would guarantee is that we still have a minimum percentage on public safety and a minimum dollar amount on transportation related and transit-related infrastructure and spending.

So it really is just an agreement that the government is meeting the promise of those ballot initiatives and the funding that the taxpayers have entrusted to us.

This is just demonstrating that we are holding up our side.

We are providing that we are still spending that dollar amount and the percentage for public services.

Thank you.

Councilman Donaldson.

Yeah, thanks, um, Madam President.

And sure, it might also be worth pointing out that uh that percentage will increase with inflation or cost of living.

Um those fixed dollar amounts are from I've forgotten the years for 2C, PPRTA, but but those dollar amounts haven't changed, council member.

2017 17, so eight years later, that dollar amount, you know, 5.7 doesn't go quite as far as it did in uh well, we're spending more, but that's an important difference.

So if we do something like this in the future, if you want it to adjust upward, the uh minimum uh percentage seems to be uh a way to do that.

Do you agree with that?

Yes.

Okay.

Thanks.

That's a very short answer.

Yes, the percentage I think captures um as you move through time, keeping the percentage is yeah, keeping up with general just increases in your budget in your revenue, and making sure you have the same portion of funding going toward the the um item in question, for example, PSST, the dollar amount as revenue grows as expenses grow, then right, that starts to stale a little bit.

Thank you.

Okay, so moving from our special funds to our oh, oops, a daisy.

Let me see if I can get it back.

Well, that's funny.

Okay, I'm gonna have uh more discussion on this one because I'm only providing part of the information on the slide.

I apologize for that.

It printed um fine, but it's not displaying.

What this is is a grants overview.

The large blue piece of the pie, this is our grants anticipated grants in 2026 by department.

The large blue piece is public works at 60 percent of anticipated grants in 2026.

This is pretty standard.

Um, public works is uh generally the largest receiver of grants, and that is because they're applying for grants for large capital uh public works projects, bridges, roads, intersections.

The next uh one, it does have a label here in the red is airport at 22%, and then we have them kind of scattered around between finance fire, housing and homeless response, which is the 4%, and that is much of the HUD funding, so CDBG, home hope, OEM parks is the green piece appropriately 4%, and police is 5% in blue.

I apologize for the display.

Then moving on to just another way of looking at our all funds total, but this is by department.

And I will say for this one, we are including PPRTA so that we can have that perspective about how much funding is by department, and that largely goes into public works.

So as we look at our all funds spending, so this is general fund, PPRTA funds, 2C2 funds, all of that put together.

Public Works has the largest portion at 33% of the all funds total.

So they are administering and overseeing 33% of all funds.

Looks like we have this other kind of all other departments grouped together, is the next largest piece of the pie.

Police has 16.4% of that all funds total.

Parks has almost 6%, and then we have airport and fire at 10% of all funds total.

Moving into personnel summary, we did have a lot of changes in personnel coming into 2026.

This is the I'm back now to the general fund only.

This is general fund only positions by department.

This is a representation of all authorized positions.

We do for 2026 have positions that are unfunded, but are still authorized.

So it is the authorized positions that are included in this grant in this graph.

For 2026 in the general fund, this graph and the total of the 2,0036.75 authorized positions, 53.25 of those are unfunded, but still authorized.

Then breaking that down by department.

Now this is changes in authorized position count.

This does not include unfunded positions.

And we have quite a number of changes in the general fund for 2026 because we were decreasing the number of authorized positions in the general fund by 37.

For all the other funds, there were also changes in each of those funds.

So this includes some of our enterprises, airport, development review enterprise, also the grant related positions and housing and homelessness response that went up by one because we transferred it from the general fund to a grants fund, workers' compensation fund, OEM parks, and their TOPS fund, PSST grants.

So we had a number of changes across all of those other funds for a total decrease of 9.5 positions, authorized positions.

Okay.

Sorry, can I ask where municipal court is back here?

So municipal court is four.

Decrease of four.

Decrease of four.

Okay.

Moving to our capital improvements program.

So this is those very large projects that are across the city.

Our CIP program has many different funding sources.

So the PPRTA again, as we referenced previously, is a very large funder of our capital improvement program.

They fund 38% of that.

Our 2C2 program funds almost 25% of that.

And then enterprises as a whole make up the next largest piece at about 20.

Well, those three make up the largest pieces, the enterprises at 26% for capital improvement funding.

You'll notice one of the tags sort of on the top right hand side is the general funds contribution to the capital improvement program.

You can see that it is at 4.3 million.

Looking at what that is in particular.

So again, zeroing back down on the general fund.

Oops, no, I'm sorry.

This is looking at, I'm sorry, I'm gonna go back one slide.

I'm sorry for scrolling.

This is a view of the grants that is by funding source.

So how we get the money.

This one is a view of all funds, capital projects by type.

So now we're looking at is it funding a road project?

Is it funding a facility improvement?

Is it funding a stormwater improvement?

So what we're looking at here is by type project by type for all fund CIP far and away.

You can see roads and bridges are the largest component of our capital improvement program at 61%.

We have infrastructure at 12% stormwater at six facilities at a I think I might have an error on that percentage again.

But the all funds total again that we're spending on capital improvement programs across the entire city is almost 302 million.

Now looking at the general fund specifically, what does that $4 million of general fund contribution to the capital improvement program?

What does that fund?

And it is largely technology at 67%.

This is an ongoing uh we did a lease purchase for some of our IT infrastructure.

So that is largely a financial obligation paying for that IT infrastructure.

Um we have other infrastructure at 775, some facility improvements, and then we have um road and bridge funding of 300,000 specific to the general fund.

That concludes my overview.

And it will be in the evening.

That's a work session day for you all as well.

The public hearing on the budget will begin at 5 30 p.m.

and is scheduled to run until 7.

Then that next Wednesday.

You know what?

Yep, I'm sorry.

The next Wednesday, October 29th, is when we have our markup session.

So that'll be the time again when we bring forward any uh changes that council would like to see to the 2026 budget.

The way that we do that is we will collect information facilitated by council president and staff to have any items that any of the council members would like to propose as changes to the budget.

We will collect that, and then what we'll do on that work session day is we'll have that up on the screen kind of in a spreadsheet format.

We'll have each of those items that each council member would like to discuss.

We'll facilitate a discussion, and if there is a majority of council that would like to see that change, we will put that in the approved column, and that will create then the 2026 budget.

So the document that you have before you is part A.

Those changes at that work session meeting and what is agreed to by the majority of council is part B.

And together those will create the 2026 final budget, and then we will create the budget ordinance with those components and bring that forward.

We bring that forward at the November 10th and the November 25th council meetings, the regular meetings, we vote twice on the budget.

It's an ordinance, so we'll vote twice, and once we have uh if we have approval at that um for the those two votes, that is then finalized, and we've created the 2026 budget.

What are we doing the rest of today?

We are going to um so we're at 10:30.

We will have a break.

We'll go ahead and take a break for 10 or 15 minutes, and then what we'll do the yet this morning is here from our police department and fire department.

They will present their budgets to you.

We will break for lunch.

We will be bringing in sandwiches, and then in the afternoon, we will hear from parks, recreation, and cultural services, and public works.

Councilman Hinjam.

Uh yeah, I just wanted to say, um, Madam President, I'd be fine with a five-minute break if just because we're really running behind, um, just to stay on track myself.

I was gonna actually do 10 instead of the 15, so I'll meet you in the middle with 10.

Sounds good.

Thank you very much.

Oh, that's fun.

We have a

We have a well, we went over our time.

Sorry.

You'll make it up, I'm certain.

I will.

Well, that that kind of depends on the questions, I suppose.

But yes, I will do my best.

I say this all the time when they ask how long.

Well, that depends on us.

The question, just all right.

Well, welcome, Chief Asquiz.

Well, uh, thank you, uh, President uh Croyverson, uh, Pro Tem Risley, and all council members.

Chief uh Adrian Vasquez with police department.

Uh thanks for the time today.

Um I will try to really spend some uh see if we okay.

There we go.

I'm gonna try to um spend a lot of my time uh today explaining numbers uh because our numbers have changed uh uh a little bit through uh the briefings that you've been getting, whether it be at uh you know the uh uh two or three different briefings that I've given you earlier this year, they've changed quite a bit as we've gone through this.

And this first chat uh chart up here, this first slide up here really kind of resonates with that.

If you were to add all of these numbers up, you would see um that those can those numbers come up to uh 1257, I believe it's or 127, uh 1215 total up here, but but uh I've been talking about our authorized strength being eight thirty eight uh thirty-nine with sworn and uh three hundred and ninety-eight point five in civilians, and obviously that that doesn't uh math doesn't add up.

So I want to spend a little bit of time about how we came to those numbers.

So through the course of the budget reductions, we ended up looking at best ways for us to come to our reductions.

Um we ended up doing two RIFs uh in our crime lab.

And the reason we did those two lifts, they were riffs, they were uh crime uh chemists.

They were they were basically our chemists.

We found that what our chemists we had already been looking at in the end of program for that because what we found was that our chemists were primarily doing drug testing at time of trial.

CBI was able to really pick that up, and really the the the position itself or the work that they were doing was really not something that we couldn't do without, especially as we were going through these budget crunches.

So we did end up roofing uh two of our chemists.

We also uh you've probably heard a lot about the uh consolidation of our facilities and fleet.

The police department had mostly already consolidated fleet with city.

The only thing that we had were two drivers, which are kind of important positions.

Drivers don't sound like great uh really important positions, they're moving vehicles around, but with a huge fleet uh across an entire city, um, they are something that were relatively important to us.

So we ended up moving those two positions uh over to uh to fleet.

But because one of the positions was what it wasn't technically vacant, but there was somebody that hadn't been in the position for a little bit.

We ended up doing one riff in that position and moving one of those positions over to fleet.

Um we also consolidated our facilities uh personnel so that 4.75 people were working specifically on police buildings, uh, ended up moving over in a consolidation move for uh to the city for for uh a total of 5.75 people, for 4.75 in facilities and then one driver.

So that uh brought us down to 389.75 on our books.

What you'll see um as you look through the numbers, you'll notice that um our civilian positions um are a little bit different than the city is carrying.

And the reason for that is because 13.75 of our civilian positions are frozen.

So, in other words, we're not able to hire them through this entire process until we get the money back in uh our budget to be able to hire those positions.

Our point was that we really do need those positions at some point in time.

I don't want to get rid of them off the books totally um and have to do FTEs when we need to hire them back, but we don't want, we know we're not gonna pay for them.

But we don't want, we know we're not going to pay for them.

We know that we're not budgeted for them.

And so we've taken them from a city perspective, a budgetary perspective, off the books, and they're sort of just sitting there in a void for when we can.

And that brings us to three 839 authorized in our sworn, 376 in our civilian positions, which totals the numbers that you're seeing on our side on this slide right here of uh 1215.

Okay.

I thought there was a question.

I'm sorry, I don't see a name.

Oh, I I didn't.

I'm sorry, I thought I did.

No problem.

Go ahead.

Okay.

Um so I'm just trying to uh go back to positions that are not on the books and the unfunded.

Um when I look at the in page 60, starting on page six, well, it's on page 60 of the summary of major general unfunded operating requests.

The total in police is five, six, seven, eight positions.

So I'm I know so I know you have sworn officers sworn, excuse me, um, authorized strength.

And I know at some point you're going to talk to us about where those budget dollars are for what we're sworn for or authorized for, but don't have.

Then there's what you just mentioned, and then there's this eight in this.

I'm just trying to understand all of those.

Chief Basquez?

Yes.

If I may, it might be helpful.

What you're looking at, um, Councilmember Henjam is kind of a summary of what we call unfunded budget requests, correct?

It's major general fund unfunded operating requests.

Okay, which is a total of 60 FTE overall.

Okay.

And then there's another total that I was just asking Carrie about it's like 102 point something or other.

Uh-huh.

So yeah, just help me understand all the different categories.

The in the expenditure overview, the summary of the unfunded budget requests is created earlier in the process than when we had to have the reductions.

So what Chief Asquez is covering really is in the bucket of what changed from 25 to 26 and having those reductions and shifts in the personnel.

Those unfunded budget requests really are sort of a bucket off to the side that is beyond what the changes are from 25 to 26, because those reductions are not necessarily captured there.

They would be captured in another table that is the impacts of the budget reductions.

So we have two different summaries in that section.

One is going to be impacts of reductions for 2026.

And then there's going to be a table that is unfunded budget requests.

So we kind of have the 2026 budget.

Then we have the impacts of the reductions that were taken to get to the 2026 budget, which is one table.

And then we have a whole other table of just what the heck never got funded in the first place.

And that I believe is the table that you're referencing.

Okay.

I'm not tracking, but I don't want to slow us down.

So I'll just check it with you later.

Yes.

Keep going.

Okay.

Um this slide um shows our all funds position history.

Do you have a question from Councilman Rainey?

I'm sorry.

Oh, excuse me.

Uh Chief, you mentioned the is it two uh I don't want to call them chemists, but chemists.

Um they were a part of the crime lab.

Correct.

Are those just gonna go as unfunded positions, or are those positions are totally those are those are uh RIFT, so they are uh gone.

Is there any second third order effects to those positions being gone, you know, in regards to processing, I don't know, crime kits, labs, no that's where I was talking about proceedings, whatever have you.

No, sir.

The the the work that they were primarily doing.

So uh they if if we seize drugs, we do a presumptive field test.

So out and you you test it out in the field, which is good enough to establish probable cause for an arrest.

However, it's not good enough.

It's not a good enough test to go to trial.

So what was happening, we had really excluded all other work that chemists were doing because of other functions.

What was happening is the DA's office would be set to go to trial on a drug case, they would ask for a qualitative test to be done by a chemist.

So that would come back to our chemists, they would do the test, and that would be the test required for a trial, a higher level of testing.

CBI, we've we've done a lot of work with CBI to ensure that they can handle those uh types of testing.

We don't think there's gonna be any uh issue with that.

Okay, thank you.

Councilman Lineweber.

Well, I'm I'm a little concerned about this.

Um but uh I'm your last statement there might give me some hope, but uh in two weeks, we're gonna be talking about streamlining um camping violations and other types of things, which I would only think would increase those kinds of citations and so forth around that.

Will we be able to support that?

I I feel pretty confident in um our conversations with CBI, the relative number that actually go to trial versus getting dealt in court, the ones that we actually have to do that kind of testing is really relatively low compared to the arrests and the presumptive tests that we're doing out in the field.

Um CBI uh has made us feel very comfortable in the numbers, even if there's an increase.

Um we generally it's not that you know, it may take a a week extra to do something with CBI making up a number there, but really it's just getting that test result to the DA's office for trial.

I don't think there's gonna be any issues with that.

Okay.

I hope so.

Councilman Hingem.

Yeah, thank you.

Um really this is also kind of a little bit bigger picture, but it goes to that uh summary of major general fund unfunded operating requests.

Okay.

So in that there's eight positions in PD, but in and so I know we have again, we have authorized strength that we know we're not gonna be able to, you know, hire in 2026.

In fire, there's 46, 40, well, 47 positions that essentially, as I understand it, kind of fit the same, you know, like to support city growth for sworn personnel, the fire department would like six.

So it's like their version of authorized strength, maybe.

Um, but why is it captured here?

I I just don't understand why we're not capturing those positions in the same way.

I'm maybe not sure capturing the positions that are authorized strength currently in the 26th budget.

I guess it's think well, it's thinking about maybe we just treat police and fire differently in that we have authorized strength.

We know we're not gonna be able to meet it in 26, so there's a budget dollars that if we were magically able to have those folks hired, would have to come from somewhere from this budget.

And then in fire, we have I'm I'm gonna call it maybe in when Randy gets up, he can talk about this.

But we have he has six sworn officers that he thinks are necessary to um support the growth of the city, um, but are not funded at all.

So it's not like we don't have an authorized strength for fire.

I guess is kind of what I'm saying.

There's there's a number of positions in fire that are here and requested, were not funded.

And so the um chart that you're looking at, the unfunded budget requests, those are things that the all of the departments brought forward as if we had a lot more money, these are the things that we would want to include in the budget.

That list is when we put together the 2026 budget, we said, yep, thank you.

Those are all the things that you would like to have in your budget.

Those are not funded anywhere, and they're not up for consideration at this time.

What we're trying to do with that particular chart is have it be as a uh mechanism for the council and the public to see that these are all the things that if we had more money, these departments would want to include in the budget.

They are not included in the budget, they are not included in authorized strength, they are not included in authorized positions in any way.

That is simply a table to communicate, these are all the things that the departments feel would be appropriate to serve the needs of the city.

At uh yes, at a at a platinum level, let's call it.

Well, or yeah, and that and that's why I was hesitating because I think that in some cases it would be like as the city grows in order to provide the same level of service, we would need to add these people.

But as this those are not included anywhere, and those are not up for consideration.

That's just information that we provide because we in recognition of the fact that given the budget that we have, the revenue that we have, those things are not able to be included in the budget.

So those is just like this is the backlog of what the departments feel like they would need to serve the city in the way that they think would be appropriate.

Okay, and that's 102.5 and those have not gone through prioritization, they have not gone through any um consideration for funding in this budget.

Okay, I got it.

And so okay.

Thank you.

I think similarly, like I I would request X, like if we were at 839 and we were button up against 839, I might say, no, okay, now we need 845 or whatever.

Um fire was generally more uh staffed or fully staffed.

We've not been close to that.

Right.

Although we know we've heard you say 1100 is what we really should be having.

I would love to have that.

I don't think we're gonna get there.

All right, keep going.

Yes.

Um, so this uh slide is our all funds slide, um, and it's just covering um from 2024 actual, the 2025 amended, and then the um uh all position all funds position history, and then the 2026 all funds position for uh for PD.

Um I mentioned we would be at 1215.75.

One of the things of note here that you'll see uh on the right side under 2026, the far right side, you have sworn at 829, and you you know, we've just talked about sworn actually being at 839 for our authorized strength.

The reason that that number is different than the 839 is because 10 of our positions uh are paid for by the airport enterprise.

So this is funding for general fund PSST and uh grants.

10 of the positions wouldn't fall under that funding because airport pays for them.

That's why that number is at 829 and not 839 as an authorized strength, if that makes sense.

Um, this slide shows um a lot of movement that had to happen because as Shere, when she was talking about the different funding mechanisms, she talked about uh public safety sales tax or PSST.

Certain uh positions cannot be paid for in PSTT PSST funds, and so we saw a little bit of movement back and forth at times, and then we ended up changing positions.

So we transferred a civilian FT uh to PSST.

That's just a movement of uh of money basically.

We transferred uh police officers from the airport.

So we used to have 13 officers paid for by the airport enterprise because TSA no longer supported bomb dogs out at the airport.

We ended up taking the three bomb dogs we had, those positions, moving them back to our general fund positions because we had we always have vacancies and officers anyway, and utilize our bomb, our regional explosive unit bomb dogs for any operations that we need out at the airport.

So instead of having three dedicated only to the airport, we have our bomb dogs that can move out there at the appropriate times and are utilized in other ways.

Um we also eliminated a photo enforcement technician, it looks like that's one photo enforcement technician.

What happened there is that uh when we were going into our speed safety uh camera program, utilities wanted a van and a uh uh an operator for that position for utilities uh road work, for example.

They opted out of that, so we initially got the position technically and then moved it back off of our books.

Um we ended up uh I ended up creating a civilian deputy chief position, which is director Edwards uh as a necessary move to oversee as as our department is getting bigger and the city is getting bigger.

I felt we needed that position.

Uh transfer civilian FD to support service and fleet.

I talked about the total number of those uh at 6.75, with one of those being a RIF and then unfunded positions.

Uh I talked about 13.75 under unfunded positions broken up between general fund and PSST.

So those are positions that were just not funding at some point in time uh when it's appropriate from a budgetary perspective.

I I would want to hire those back.

All right, this slide is an all funds history covering uh grants, PSST, and general fund.

It's an overview of our our uh positions or I'm sorry of our funding.

In general fund, we have 146 uh.5 million dollars, PSST at 27.5 million, and our grants take up about six million dollars of all our all funds at 179.9 million dollars for the 2026 budget.

So technically you are seeing an increase in the police budget when we're talking about uh decreases that we've had to make.

Uh and that increase from 173.5 or 0.6 up there in 2025.

Um nincent of these funds are attributed to our salary and benefits, with 8% being operating expenditures.

So if you think about all of the the police department being the largest uh department within the city from a personnel perspective, that makes uh absolute sense.

Um but we have to look at our 14.6 million dollar operating expense, and that's where we're really having to look at our ability to affect um our our decreases in the in the budget.

Um, and so we're being really cautionary about doing uh those kinds of things.

In 2026, the total funding again is 179 uh 983250.

Our general fund um takes up 82 percent of that at 146 and a half million, our PSST is 15% of that at 27 and a half million, and then our grants encompass close to six million dollars or three percent of our overall funds.

This is doing what Sharay slide did, and uh not showing you everything that's on this slide.

I'm assuming you you're seeing what I see up there.

So I'll try to explain this a little bit better.

Let me pull my slide up here.

So this really is a more detailed breakdown.

The the dark blue uh that you're seeing uh to the left of the screen, that's our patrol uh funding by function.

So 40% of our budget uh goes to patrol.

Uh right next to it in the green uh is a specialized enforcement function, which is 9% of our budget at 15 million to 23.

The yellow uh is our metro division.

That's where a lot of our specialized units that you hear me talk about, our motor vehicle theft unit, our narcotics unit, all of those things that are very proactive units, are in that yellow uh uh area at 8%.

Uh included in there is our is our uh client crime lab next.

Investigations in the gray areas at 8%.

Um this is where we differentiate the types of investigations.

This is where our persons' crimes are, like homicide, uh, our adult sex assault, our domestic violence units, so all persons' types of crimes are being investigated uh at 8% of our budget.

Records and ID uh is uh to the right of that at 2%.

CommCenter is at 5% at uh nearly $9 million, impound lot uh is 1% uh along with evidence at 1%, and then support and management services is the red uh triangle up there at 24% of our overall budget.

Nancy, is your name still up or do you have another question?

Okay.

So in this slide, um, really it is just uh another explanation of of um our budget changes.

Um I talked about the $6.2 million increase for step increases, or I think Sharay actually did.

So we have our step increases for our sworn going from a P4 to P3 to P2 to P1, and then our civilians um getting um their increases.

We initially needed to come up with around $6.6 million in reductions to offset the costs.

Um you've heard me talk a little bit about this in other presentations, but 1.5 million of that reduction was in vehicle replacements.

That actually ended up being a savings over uh for city fleet because that's where the consolidation happens uh from our vehicle fleet.

Um so the the majority of it is uh that 1.5 million dollars is a a city savings.

Um we also ended up doing other types of cuts.

For example, uh you've heard me talk about our overtime.

I think that is of most interest to a lot of you.

We're really scrutinizing our overtime, and we are having great savings in that area.

But one of the the thing that I won't allow uh to be impacted are uh officer safety type of of issues.

So uh if we have people calling us sick, we have a minimum of staffing allowance.

We will always hire those officers back to ensure we have the right number of officers on the street to provide a safe environment for our officers and our our citizens.

Um but where we are taking those overtime uh cuts are, for example, in community engagement.

We're not doing as much community engagement as we were.

We're also having our supervisors out on the street scrutinize things, for example, uh a case report that should be done that night, may end up having to wait for the next day for the officer to come in.

Where I'm concerned about those kind of impacts is when we're doing those simple little little things, that means an officer isn't out on the street.

Rather than them spending the time after shift on overtime, we're bringing them in and holding them before they go out on the street.

We got to really be cautious about doing those kinds of things because we want as many officers out answering calls for service at any given time.

So the deputy chiefs and the commanders, especially those patrol commanders are really looking at how we're scrutinizing our overtime and our operating costs to make sure that we're not impacting call response times and officer safety and then uh eventually community safety.

The last slide that I have is really talking about department priorities.

Um I wanted to spend a little bit of time on staffing technology and alternative fees, and then the balancing public safety and community sense of safety is really more, I guess, of a philosophical philosophical conversation I wanted to have.

But when we talk about staffing, you've heard me say 839 is our number, but you've also seen slides from me in previous uh uh presentations where we're talking about comparisons to other cities across the nation, comparisons to cities here uh in the state, and where we eventually wanna be, and and council member henjam mentioned I've I've said a thousand officers is somewhere that we wanna be.

Staffing is really always gonna be my number one priority because we've got to both balance on our sworn and civilian side our product to the community and being very victim-centric, victim focused.

And if we don't have enough crime scene techs, if we don't have enough uh evidence technicians, enough records and ID folks on top of the sworn to investigate and to do uh patrol response, then that stuff is gonna be impacted.

So I'm always watching uh with my staff staffing levels and where we need to be on both sworn and civilian side.

Technology is huge, bridging that gap between our ability to hire fast enough to get to the types of calls I know our community wants.

I know our community wants more uh traffic enforcement.

So we're doing really good in that area.

Our tickets are increasing.

I got another briefing this morning on uh crime stats, and and we just keep getting better and better, but we're at a number right now at a fee perspective from technology that I think we're gonna be really good, and we're gonna implement those technologies like Axon I've talked to you about, um, that uh records management all the way up to CAD technology that's really gonna save time for our officers with these body worn cameras and all the drone as a first responder and all those programs.

Technology truly is one of my priorities uh for this organization because we've seen the benefit in it.

And so as we move forward in, you know, really past 2026, because I think Axon will go into effect.

Uh, all the stuff that I've talked about will go into effect uh probably in January.

Um we still have to watch emerging technology in ways that are going to benefit us because we're not going to be able to get our staffing up at a speed that I think we need to.

Um, alternative fees are things um I believe Sharay maybe has mentioned a couple of them to you, but I think what we're what what my point uh here is that we're always looking for different ways that we could bring funding in.

Um we've looked at um fee structures for records and alarms to address places that we might be behind not charging.

Um I know that the staff that is looking at this has really done comparisons to other fee collections across the state.

We don't want to certainly be any higher than what it what is appropriate, but we also want to make sure that we're at least close to what other cities our size are collecting.

And I can tell you right now the initial findings are that we're much lower.

So I think we can make up some fee collection by by doing those assessments and bringing those recommendations uh uh over.

Um the um records fees, the uh alarm ordinance fees are some examples of those fee collections.

But um one of the other ones that we'll bring to council, it will require counsel or ordinance change.

Um we're doing the the studies on it right now, uh talking to the city attorney's office, but would be to do a police technology service charge.

And so what that would look like for uh uh criminal arrests, which are gonna be misdemeanor or or or lesser arrests in in city, as well as other types of citations and traffic that are not part of the parking enterprise.

Um, there would be a public safety technology fee attached to each of those tickets.

If we can come to a consensus on what that looks like, um, that could be a uh type of fee that comes back to mandatory technology that we have to use.

For example, there are criminal or there are statutes that came out of uh reporting for uh Senate Bill 217 that mandate we report in particular ways, and technology has to be used to be able to do that.

We use technology for so many things right now, um, even the ability to write a ticket, have them sign on the phone, and it immediately upload into the court systems, for example.

Uh all of that becomes really important from a technology perspective.

We really have to do that in many cases and should be doing it in other cases.

So that's an example of how we might um uh look at uh a revenue source for uh technology.

And lastly, we're looking at a city towing um uh option.

Right now we have a tremendous amount of vehicles that are towed down to our NPOM lot and are in our care as a result of non-evidentiary toes.

So you might have something, a vehicle that uh gets abandoned in a traffic lane.

There's nothing criminal about it, but we can't just leave it there and nobody's there.

That happens quite often.

That has to get stuck get towed to a safe environment to our impound lot, and there are fees that that we end up eating because we've got to do things with those vehicles like towing costs, for example.

We can try to recoup those at a later time.

What we're wanting to do now is only tow vehicles of evidentiary value to our impound lot.

Everything else would be moved if it's non-evidential, it would be moved into this sort of rotation tow process.

That would save us a bunch of money.

It's not costing uh our citizens uh something that we wouldn't be charging, but basically, if it's non-evidentiary, that they would end up having to pay the tow fees and things like that.

We would not eat that cost.

So things like that are trying to be innovated by the staff.

Um, those are presentations that we'll bring to you at the appropriate times.

Uh really, this is just a uh uh a notification as a priority for me that we do find these uh ways to be more um efficient in how we're doing business.

And then lastly, balancing public safety and community sense of safety.

The reason I want to talk about this is because I think one of the biggest conversations I have in the community are really not necessarily about criminal activity when it comes to sexual assaults, when it comes to homicides, when it comes to shootings.

It is very much around programs like our homelessness issues, uh clean and safe programs, those kinds of things.

And when we think about those kinds of things solely from a police perspective, we we evaluate while we've we've we've just had that a 15-year-old last night or yesterday afternoon that conducted all of those uh criminal activities that I sent you.

That's really a priority in our mind as a police department.

We're like, well, that's that's public danger.

But we have to balance those things, those real high volume public danger uh responses to safety and community sense of safety.

So the balancing act that the police department plays is how much time we spend on things like clean and safe and the homelessness, very important programs versus what we're doing out in response to um calls for service that are priority ones and twos that have people in danger.

Um so we do spend a lot of time, and I really philosophically wanted you to be aware that the police department understands the importance of the sense of safety in a community like this, and trying to balance that out.

I I think we do a good job.

We'll continue really watching that and making sure uh that we're paying great attention to those areas also.

And that is all I have for you today, but I'm happy to answer any additional questions.

Councilman Rainey.

Thank you, Madam President.

Can we go back to slide 36?

There's a couple of data points I wanted to take the gander at the delay of police academy.

Um are you expecting any significant delays?

I know we talked at the last graduation, and what the next graduation is expected what, February of next year or March of next year?

February, March.

February.

Yes, so yes, February.

Okay.

Is there any delays that you are expecting in 2026?

So our intent uh in 2026 and 27 2027 was to have three academies in each of those years.

We still plan on having and tend to have uh three full academies hiring as many people as uh we can in any academy.

Um but by delaying the 2026 academies by a two-month time frame, it saved us a significant amount of money because you're delaying that pay uh for two months for each of those academies.

So the the officers will be on the streets two months later than we expected, but we intend to hire just as many officers in 26 and 27 as we did before implementing those delays.

So they will be on the streets within the calendar year.

Um, the third academy wouldn't be right because it's starting out to 2020, 27.

Yeah.

So you still have the six-month academy fit and then they go out to the streets, uh, that none of that changes.

Those time time frames don't change in how much time they're on the academy and then how many how much time they're in PTO on the streets.

Um, but there will be a delay in starting them, if that makes sense.

Okay.

I two cut two other questions.

One about technology.

So, of course, we had a lot of conversation about uh drones and of course uh acts on uh with the body camps.

Have you done a deep dive into other technologies that are out there that can help benefit the department where you can get more bodies, yeah, I guess on the streets, uh patrolling or doing whatever you need them to do.

Is there any other technologies that you've targeted that you would like to get after?

So we've done a lot of work on the technology piece of this.

At when we think about Axon in and of itself, for example, Axon provides so many things uh that we I think in the time frame that we're talking about through 26 and 27.

I think we're implementing so many technologies in that time frame.

We wouldn't really be able to take any more on that than Axon and some of the other things that we're doing, uh like the grappler and those kinds of uh uh operating functions.

Um, but we are constantly emerge uh watching emergent emergent technology.

Our drone is a first responder program.

If we can grow that to the size that we want to grow it, which is going to be somewhere around 20 drones positioned throughout the entire city, just a technology like that's gonna be huge.

Um so yes, we are.

We have a whole list of technologies that we're just waiting for the right time to even implement.

We're just so inundated with technology improvements right now, it may take a minute for us to get to those.

Okay.

And the last question I have when you talk about fees, all you know, looking at other ways to, I guess, increase revenue through varying fees.

Uh you mentioned uh impound lot.

Is there associated fees with that, especially doing discovery?

So the impound lot right, so where we're going is that uh the evidentiary items.

So let's say you have a vehicular homicide, that vehicle will end up being towed down there and it will be held as evidence.

So it's being held just like any evidence item.

I don't know of the very specific uh costs associated.

Do you guys know?

I don't know the specific cost.

There is a cost associated with that, right?

Um the rest of them we're wanting to completely move out of impound because we end up incurring a cost in towing that we may try to get back from a citizen at some point in time.

Um, but there is you know staffing levels that that uh are necessary when we're taking in that many more vehicles as an example.

Uh we know that if we end up going down to just evidentiary tows, we won't need nearly the staffing out there, but we do know we need them in regular evidence so we can repurpose those staff to make ourselves more efficient in other areas.

Um but we could get you a a uh cost uh for uh non-evidentary tows if you'd like to have that.

I would love to do that.

Absolutely.

Sure.

Councilman Donaldson.

Yeah, thanks, Madam President.

And perhaps you'll have a thought about this, um, Chief.

But I appreciate the I think it was a previous slide and then had your kind of the philosophy on there, the four, maybe it's a slide.

There you go.

Balancing public safety and community sense of safety.

And I totally understand what you're saying, and you sent a good example of that this morning, genuine uh safety risk, some of these very dangerous.

But I I don't think, and this isn't necessarily only the police department's uh problem, but I don't think we can underestimate how homeless on the street, panhandlers at intersections affect the uh sense uh of disorder and chaos, which it presents to citizens and their unhappiness with the city when they see that on a daily basis, and it gives them a sense that it's pointless.

They pay their taxes and and we just seem to be impotent to do anything about this.

And so I don't put that, you know, solely on the police department's shoulders.

I think we have to figure that out.

But I think we um downplay that at a at a huge risk of again uh losing the confidence of our citizens because it's they don't they don't they don't they don't know when they walk by that guy who's talking to himself if he's gonna pull a knife out or not.

So I don't know if you have uh any comment on that, but I appreciate there's a big distinction between the genuinely dangerous every time guy like you sent us this morning.

No, I I I agree, and I guess maybe that's that is really the point I was trying to get across by this bullet is it these are the types of things, you know, road rage incidents or the things that are affecting our community.

You know, traffic affects everybody.

I've said this many times.

I don't care if you're a four-year-old driving in the car, you're affected by traffic in some way, but our drivers are um seeing a lot of road rate in incidents, so getting more uh efficient uh at uh staffing, or maybe it's through things like um speed safety cameras that we affect traffic in different ways.

But homelessness issues are one of the things that that again we hear about just as much, probably.

And that is because our community um that if you're if you're engaged, if you're walking down the street and somebody's in a mental crisis, you don't know what's gonna happen in that moment in time.

That's the sense of safety.

Nothing may happen.

They may just be walking down the street and that's what they do every day, and they're in mental crisis.

Well, we got to figure all of that out, and and that isn't just the police department, but it is our our role to make sure we're paying attention to it to the extent we can to provide the sense of security uh so that so that our our community thrives.

Okay, thanks.

Councilman Hingem.

Yeah, thank you.

Um so Chief, we have 743 authorized sworn strength.

Is that correct?

Yeah, 839 is 839.

Okay.

So where so total sworn in the budget?

Is that the same?

So as authorized, I mean, does total sworn is a subset of the 835?

So 839 is where we can hire to.

Um when we think about um, and and Shere will fact check me here, but when we think about our academies for next year and how we might fund those or how we would budget for them, rather.

We don't budget, let's say we assume 40 people for 40 recruits for each academy.

We're gonna do three, so that's 120 uh recruits through the year.

We don't budget at the beginning of the year for 120 recruits.

We budget for 40 at a start date of March 3rd, let's say.

So that so you know, January 1 to March 3rd would be no funds uh uh um set aside for those.

March 1st, we would figure out how many we actually got, 32, and but we're budgeted for 40 at that point in time, and then the next academy in July, uh, we would budget for 40 starting in July, not before that point in time.

I hope I'm answering your question.

You are you are those dollars though, albeit that they're um what's the word I'm looking for?

Like dedicated, they're not yeah, they're dedicated, right?

I mean, and it's not the full amount for a full position for the whole budget, but it's in the budget.

Those those are in the budget.

So let's say by the end of the year, you you don't actually do the 40, 40, 40, even though it's budgeted appropriately for for the whole year.

What happens to that money?

So if we ended up with 32 per academy, and so that would be 24, let's just say for for numbers that we didn't end up hiring, then Share would end up using utilizing.

I'll let you answer that because I think you're gonna pull that money and you we would utilize it for other things.

Right.

That would show up as salary savings in the PD budget.

So if instead of 40 in an academy, they hired 30 in an academy, then that would show up as 10 positions worth of salary savings by the end of the year.

And that dollar amount would depend on when the academy started and when those dollars were actually budgeted to be spent.

So I'm gonna make it up in June.

They anticipated 40 recruits, but they only had 30.

Then from June to the end of the year would be the dollar amount of savings for those 10 positions.

So it's it's kind of I know this probably isn't the right term earmarked, but it's noted as that savings that we we're not spending that money.

We now know that.

Where does it ultimately go at the end of the year?

Does it get spent across the city in other ways?

Like what happens with those actual dollars that are budgeted, but not spent, but not spent.

But not spent.

But not spent.

Um particularly in the salary and benefit category.

If there are gonna um throughout the year, we know we're gonna have those salary savings.

A couple of things can happen.

If the police department decided that they had uh critical budget need that they did not, they were not able to get into the budget because of the uh funding restrictions, they could come to finance and request that those salary savings be used on uh evidence freezer, evidence evidence freezer, it goes out freezer.

And we need a freezer tomorrow.

So it gets used to fill a critical need.

Could could be used it could be used with authorization.

And of course, it does have to be one-time expenditures.

If they don't come forward and request those savings, what that does then is create budgetary savings for overall for the general fund at the end of the year, and then that just shows up as expenditures that were under budget, so expenditure savings, and that would flow to the reserve account.

Okay, so it's still it's still marked in PD as a category, but at the end of the year, well, this would be true for any department that has that.

Their actual spend would be less than what was budgeted.

Okay.

And it to the reservoir.

So do you have at the end of a year any kind of report that shows like maybe a not just for PD, but for every department, those savings that you end up having, and either if they got um designated elsewhere or designated and spent, we know what that is and how much then actually ends up in the reserve.

Yes.

We do, okay.

Yes, absolutely.

And that's called your um I'm gonna your annual comprehensive financial report.

That's in the annual.

And also we just have those available actual throughout the year.

But of course, it would be when we ended a year and did all the reconciliations and the work that we do in accounting to finalize the uh you know, reports and reporting, then we would have, for example, in 2024, we have reports that show exactly how much each department was budgeted and how much they spent.

Okay.

And if magically at the by over the course of 2026, uh, Chief, like you had hundreds of people coming and applying for an academy and you were able to get to 839.

Yes.

Can only dream, where would we find that money to cover?

So the reason that we budget for for 40 is because that's the amount when we have two academies going at any given time, that's the amount that um we can handle uh given our current facility and all the stuff uh that I've talked about before.

Um so that would be the max that we can we can hire per a clap per class.

Uh that's what we budgeted for.

If we were able to get more than that, we probably couldn't get them through in our current uh you know, the the way we're we're positioned right now anyway.

But we are budgeted in the right.

I apologize.

Yeah, no, go ahead.

But I think maybe I'm gonna go a little step further if somehow we were able to handle as many people through the academy as applied, and we had um so many applicants and we could handle them in an academy by magic.

What you're I believe what you're trying to identify is that if we were to suddenly in 2026 be able to hire and train enough people that we filled all of the authorized positions, where would we get that money?

Yes.

What would happen is we would be in coordinate finance would be in coordination with the police department.

They would be saying, hey, by magic, we're able to um recruit train and fill all of these positions so we don't have enough money.

We would together come back to the city council and ask for a supplemental appropriation by the council so that we would be able to put additional budget authorized into the PD budget to handle that.

Okay and yeah, and then at that time we would identify where is that funding coming from.

I'll get my magic wand ready.

Do that's what I'm actually doing, do it.

Okay, thank you.

That's very helpful.

Thank you.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good morning.

Pro Tim Risley and Council members.

Randy Royal, Fire Chief.

And I'm whoa.

Dogs.

Why didn't you get that?

Uh I was interacting with the dog earlier and then and uh he was liking my dog sent on me, so maybe there was a connection there.

I don't know.

But Madam President.

Yes.

But could I just point out dogs are usually a good judge of character?

Yeah.

I don't know.

I think we should be very careful as we go forward.

Yeah, that's trouble.

All right.

Well, I'm gonna take you through just like Chief Esquez did our uh slides here and in information.

So starting with um our organization organizational chart.

Um see if that coming up.

Oh, there we go.

So uh overview of our organizational chart.

You'll see that bottom left box is our biggest number, which is our firefighters to cover our 25 stations and our 33 heavy apparatus, obviously the bulk of our uh day-to-day work.

And then uh the other one I want to point out is in the middle is the support services.

That number has dropped uh about nine to nine to ten.

And this is due to the movement uh fleet and facilities from the fire department over to uh city fleet and facilities.

Uh unlike uh the police department, our fleet was actually still being managed within our department up until this this movement.

So or at the beginning of the year is when it'll fully change.

So there is uh six uh members of our fleet, uh an analyst, the head of the shop supervisor, and then mechanics, and then three from our facilities that we physically moved over to City Fleet and facilities.

Three of those uh folks were RIFT in the general RIF.

So those savings went over there.

All right, next slide.

Next slide is our position history.

And with this, if you look at uh 2025, we're at sitting at 626.

So this shows those nine I just talked about, the reduction there to get us down to 617, and then we did rift uh one of our PSST employees, which was our recruiter, and uh giving us a total of 10.

And then we also have uh three other basically vacancies that we're holding open.

One that was in uh DFM, and then two that aren't bacon yet but are going to 2B by the end of the year, which are tied to our CMED units, and they are actually our floaters uh to help cover sick vacation, those type things with CMED.

And so those will continue into 2026, uh, but a total of 10 uh filled positions.

Okay, and then position changes.

Uh this is basically shows you the movement of the the funds, and again, that top line tied to fleet and facilities.

Some of this was movement to get positions that were in the general fund over into PSST and then move some PSST funds over the general fund to get the 10 losses that we have for the fire department under general fund.

So that's why you see those numbers.

Um and then the one civilian unfunded is the one that was speaking about in uh DFM at this point.

Um with the CMED units, uh, like I said, we the two there uh anticipate to leave before the end of the year.

Uh we're gonna still run five units in um 2026, and sick vacation will work internally to cover those as needed.

Okay, next one is our total funding.

So our total budget is almost 109 million dollars.

And as you can see with this, the bulk of that is our is general fund, about 80, 80 million of it.

And uh then the next biggest uh piece of that pie is almost 25 million is comes from public safety sales tax.

And I can tell you this this funding, which came just after shortly after 9-11 occurred, uh has made a huge difference in us being able to stay where we are today.

We built about I think five stations out of that.

Uh did get some apparatus out of that, but it is pretty it's maxed out at this point.

Um in this uh last year, the the uh labor costs, so it does pay for our firefighters that are working in those stations and some other uh uh of our staff in general, and they are paid out of that bucket.

And so just kind of paint you a picture.

If one of our firefighters is working at station 19, they're getting paid out of the public safety sales tax.

If they bid into station one, uh RHR phys physically uh moves them uh to the general fund out of station one, and then vice versa.

In this uh last year the the uh labor costs so it does pay for our firefighters that are working in those stations and some other uh uh of our staff in general and they are paid out of that bucket and so just kind of paint you a picture if one of our firefighters is working at station 19 they're getting paid out of the public safety sales tax if they bid into station one uh our hr ph physically uh moves them uh to the general fund out of station one and then vice versa so it's just two different buckets but we have to keep track of where that those dollars are coming from so when we look at the PSST uh those salary costs went up about 800,000 and um the the uh drop or the actual target for PSST dropped about 600,000 so there's about 200,000 in there that we had to draw from non-labor so our operating costs and I'll that comes I'll talk more about that in a minute.

The other thing with PSST is um it is maxed out like I said on uh capital infrastructure and so that is one of our concerns going forward is is the addition of more stations that we need in the future and not having that funding to to be able to move forward to that.

Chief of a question on the PSST is the majority of your PST on capital or because with P police now it's on salary which yeah ours ours is almost all salary now as well now but you need more for capital is what you're saying.

Absolutely and do you have an idea of where those stations are or a map a heat map or something not no rush but just an idea.

Yeah say that again like at some point can you give me like where you need those stations or the or the capital specifically yeah so there's there right now there's there's if if I had the funds we're talking about having the funds if I had the funds today we would have started two more stations this year.

One of those would be around highway 94 and 24 where like Reagan Ranch and all that is going on and then one would be up in the northern banning Lewis area.

The next two which I'd like to be starting next year would be up in Perkeron which is north of Woodman and Markshuffle if you haven't been out there it's it's booming.

Right.

And the other one would be a little further south of the Stetson mark markshuffle area in Banning Lewis that's where our four are needed so mainly in councilman rainy's district with some impact on on council councilwoman gold and councilman uh Bailey they're the ones that are really impacted about it.

So when you say stations in capital you also need to put your apparatus in them or do you have to move those around so they also have to be full they have to slapped with apparatus and all the stuff bills and whistles that go in them as well right yeah so out of those four stations uh two of those would be double company mean we need an engine and a truck in those stations and yes so uh right now to purchase an engine is almost a million dollars nine hundred thousand purchase a truck is closing in between one point six and heading toward two million dollars um the other issue with that I think I shared with with y'all at one point is that if I open those two stations today uh the engines the station if it took year and a half to two years which is what we would hope um station 24 took longer than that the engines would show up right when we needed them the truck would be two years later so that's one of the things we're dealing with is trying to project this out and have the the right timing.

Okay not for this conversation but another one with PSSC tax can you put that down on paper for me and then the capital costs the engine costs and then the staffing costs.

Yes.

So we have an idea of what that looks like.

Absolutely thank you.

Okay so let's see um in that 109 uh million 95% of that is uh salary and benefits for us so we only have five percent that's non-labor so that's a really small uh area to deal with especially when we have changes like we've been seeing uh 2025 our annual uh this is for operations um our annual uh operation or no this is across the board sorry about that uh non-labor budget was about 4.9 million and in 2026 it's gone down to 3.5 so we've had a a drop of about 1.4 million in our non-labor uh dollars and that's about 28% reduction there if you look on here grants is a 3.3 million uh the bulk of this is in wildfire mitigation they're anticipating about 2.2 million more next year coming in not more but coming in to their their grant funds and then our division of community public health is anticipating uh anticipating about 600 000 uh coming in and then the last uh slice on there uh wildland mitigation that 878000 you see is what we are drawing off the uh fund that was uh voted in as a taper refund it was twenty I don't know if you all remember this is 20 million dollars that was dedicated to wildfire mitigation so the citizens voted on that that's to cover about a 20 year period and each year we draw out of that that's where that 878000 comes from question councilman henjam yeah actually I know we have council members who sit on that boy I'm in trouble um it's okay uh so is is it approximately about that much you can spend every year to get to the end when you get to the end are you kind of shooting for yes so it's it's it's it's kind of adjusted each year to to draw down and a range and we have uh uh we look at it year to year and uh um yeah five a five percent drawdown is what we can do and that is to maintain that over the 20 years now

Yeah, actually, I know we have council members who sit on that boy.

I'm in trouble.

Um, it's okay.

Uh so is is it approximately about that much you can spend every year to get to the end when you get to the end, are you kind of shooting for yes?

So it's it's it's it's kind of adjusted each year to to draw down and a range, and we have uh uh we look at it year to year, and uh um yeah, five five percent drawdown is is what we can do, and that is to maintain that over the 20 years.

Now, to the credit of our wildfire mitigation uh team and the advisory board that's involved with it, they actively go after big grant dollars, and so we do millions more work each year.

Uh that's just a catalyst to help us get there.

All right, next slide.

So this is our all funds history.

And again, if you look at this, in 2025, our budget is around one uh 114 million, and now about 108.9, 109 million.

So I need to clarify this a little bit.

So there it shows a drop of about 5.3 million.

Um to let you know, there's uh about um 3.5 of this is tied to reduction in in grant dollars that you're seeing there.

2.9 of that was last year.

We were able, and thankfully, uh to get a $2.9 uh million dollar AFG grant, which is American Fire Grant.

That is what we use to test all of our uh sworn staff for cancer and heart problems.

Um that was a huge success.

We ended up finding, you know, I can't say this is successful, but we're glad we found these folks.

About 16 plus that had significant cancers and heart disease.

The good thing about it is uh they were found at low levels, like stage one, and um I think about half of them ended up having surgeries uh to help in their situation, but they all look like they're gonna have good in outcomes.

Um that being said, we don't have that 2.9 this year.

So that's why that that comes out of the that budget number.

Uh the other is uh 1.9 in that figure was uh funds that we had for station 24 and 25, and that was to complete those projects.

Uh 25s is pretty much all done.

24 is we're still working out the the final bugs, but that money was in there, which obviously going into uh 26 we don't need for those particular stations.

So that 1.9 is you don't see that in our budget again.

Councilman Hingum.

Thank you.

Randy, um, yeah, it sounds that that's I can't get past the what you just shared about the grant funds and what it found um for early detection.

And that grant money went away.

Do you see that grant money being feasible again?

And I I would think this would be something, if not, you would want funded ongoing and what kind of cost would that be.

Yeah, so we we uh we've been talking as far as we can obviously we can go out and we do have some opportunity to get some other grant dollars relative to the the health and well-being.

Um I would at some point, as the fire troops would actually like to be able to test our folks like once every three years.

That overall testing, uh, even though that number is bigger, but uh overall testing would probably end up costing us about 150 to 160,000 dollars a year.

Um Myra's not here anymore, but I I I talked to my Romero, some about that, uh, because on the the health occup uh occupational health and and risk management side, that's the place where investing that 150, 160,000 uh could help us weigh in the long run because you take one of those people, and if they didn't yeah, if they didn't follow up.

If you're saving lives and keeping people well, I mean that's yeah, lives are the most important thing, but dollars too.

You take one of those folks and they get up to stage three, stage four, you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars that we're spending on one person.

Yeah, so we we are uh trying to work on that and get those those.

And then what's the interplay between just that screening and then the program we passed a couple of years ago at the state?

So yes, thank you all for uh uh voting that in.

So that what she's talking about is the uh Colorado State uh Cancer and Health Trust.

And what that does is it comes along these individuals that are going out and getting surgeries and having uh medical costs and things like that, and basically keeps them from having out-of-pocket costs uh tied to what they're going through.

And um we're really appreciative of of that uh being there.

So yeah.

Thank you.

Uh so if uh with these dollars as well, about 2.7 million upswing in our budget was due to the increased uh uh compensation and benefits that um Shore A talked about, plus the increase in contract costs.

So those dollars are in there.

And then um on the the decrease side, uh about 0.9 million, which was the fleet uh facilities transfer.

So that went down, went over to the fleet budget.

Um we're having about a 500 million dollar decrease due to the furloughs, attritions, and rifts that we've uh that have taken place.

And then um we did get uh 1.7 million back into our budget, which was a recovery from our 2024 2.5 million dollar uh reduction that we took.

And so uh we um we were able to bring that back into our budget.

So part of what we lost in 2024 was moved back in.

Um more questions tied to that one.

Okay.

Uh next one is funding by function.

So obviously the big blue slice is off fire operations, almost 90 million of our uh of our overall cost, and again, the bulk of our salary and labor for our firefighters out there.

Only 1.3 of that 90, almost 90 million is again non-labor.

So that's getting equipment, getting supplies, and uh the day-to-day needs for operations.

On the uh upper right medical division is about three and a half million, a little over that.

That's where we do all of our training uh and preparation for our firefighters, paramedic schools, EMT, uh CPR, uh, and any of the uh procedures that we do all comes out of there as as well as quality assurance.

Uh next one is uh Cummun Public Health, which is about 1.3 million, and uh 12 of those individuals are in the general fund.

So there's another about uh 11 or 12 in that division that are funded through grants and outside of the department.

I can I can say on on uh with the community in public health, uh that's a really good investment uh for the impact that they have on the streets on a daily basis because they do free up our uh heavy apparatus to be able to respond to critical calls and less wear and tear on those big vehicles, and these these folks mainly go out in SUVs and and do that work.

Um let's see.

Next one is the supports uh support and management.

That number still has six hundred and twenty thousand dollars in that is is uh non-labour that is moving over to um fleet, so that's that'll be a uh uh change in there.

We're working through that because some of those dollars do go toward apparatus and apparatus repair, but tied into our our budget there was also working on ladders and hose and things like that that won't go over to fleet.

We'll continue to do that, do that internally.

So that's some of the numbers we're working through.

Um overall in the uh this section here of the 87 million fire ops, uh we went went from about 2.3 million in uh non-labor down to 1.3.

So that's about a 43% drop in our non-labor dollars in ops.

Overall for CSFD and all of our different divisions um went from about 5.8 down to 3.5, so reduction of about 39 percent in non-labor costs.

All right, uh budget changes.

And on this slide, if you looked at the first three, that was that 2.7 million I talked about that came into our budget, mainly tied to uh increases in step pay and uh costs and benefits and contracts.

And then the next line there uh, which is the 1.7 is the money I talked about being moved back into our budget from the reduction from 2024.

And then the next uh four are uh the reductions of the attrition furloughs of uh 500k.

And then the following line is our training academy.

So 1.6 uh reduction there for our training academy, 1.1 of that is the academy itself, and then about 0.5 is due to salary and uh savings from the vacancies tied to the to that as well.

Councilman Hincham.

Uh thank you.

Uh that one, of course, is very concerning, and we've talked about it.

But um, I'm just noting on page 195 of the budget book, um, Chief, it's not listed as a significant change versus 2025, and I think it deserves to be in there.

Um it may not have been viewed as a change in the budget, but I think pulling an academy out deserves to be in the budget.

Yeah, we can make we can make that um addition.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Any questions on that?

So sorry.

Thank you, Madam President.

Um I I share the same uh sentiment as my uh colleague there.

Um and I I guess Chief, I really will love to understand removing that academy, while I understand that you're definitely doing your best to be a great steward and and save us money.

While I understand that you're definitely doing your best to be a great steward and and save us money.

Um kind of like what I asked uh police chief earlier.

What's the second and third order effect of not having that academy?

Yeah, so it is it is tough.

I totally agree with you.

Um it's not none of the choices were easy or fun.

Um, I do appreciate that the mayor and and Share and her staff really worked hard to keep us responding out the door and uh keeping response times where they need to be.

Uh, but that's this is this is a tough one.

And and we're kind of we're looking at it as uh an area that we we're hoping we can absorb as we go through next year.

I can say that it's not sustainable in the future, right?

Uh we would have to get the training academy dollars back in 2027 and more likely end up having to do two academies in 2027.

Now uh part of this is a moving target.

We we estimate out what our attrition is going to be.

Um we are sitting pretty uh healthy with our sworn number, but it is we know it's gonna continue to go down.

Um we're expecting probably by the end of the year, uh not this year, but next year, to be down about 22 to maybe 30 have open sworn positions.

Um so there's an impact of that because at some point we'll have to be filling spots with overtime, and it's a balance of that.

So um we are uh we are taking a risk with it.

Uh it's a calculated risk.

Um, but as I shared, when we're looking at our total 109 uh million dollar budget, only 5% is non-labor, we don't have a lot of room and a lot of choices of things we can pull.

And so that's why we're in that position.

Is there any options on uh I don't know, right now, guessing a full academy as you got here estimated as 1.6.

Is there any options of doing uh maybe a smaller academy?

Absolutely, yeah.

And we are we're gonna we've staff and I have already talked about that.

We're gonna be watching numbers, especially the first quarter.

You know, our hope is you know, sales tax starts coming up and and things look better and and and we can um you know move in that direction.

But um but internally, if uh if we have the opportunity, and what it will mean is pulling some funds from other areas within our department.

But we've talked about having a smaller academy than normal, say like 10 to 12 people, which would help us out.

Uh if we need to do that, we could do that in late spring uh and beginning of summer and still have some you know positive impact to that.

Okay.

So we are having those discussions.

Okay.

As I mentioned, just like my uh colleague, uh that that one concerns me the most.

And uh, if we gotta figure out a way to make it happen, I would rather we figure out a way to make it happen.

So I appreciate that.

Thank you.

Councilman Risley.

Thank you, Madam President.

Um Chief, thanks for being here today.

How many on any given year?

How many um folks do you hire from other fire services as opposed to just having to recruit?

Well, so we always have a recruitment process.

Uh what I would say is in any of our academies, so we have one right now that started with 28.

We're down to 23.

They're gonna come out next week, which will help us out.

Um probably about a third of those come from other departments, and then we have about a third that come from have like military background and all that, but they come from other departments to to us.

So although I think we all agree having an academy is a really important uh thing, as you said, going forward from a sustainability standpoint, and certainly makes sense, but it it's not as if you can't go hire folks from other services without an academy, right?

Well, no, because um so even like somebody comes into our academy uh with 15 years of experience from another department, they go through the full academy.

And the reason is is there are um certain procedures and uh ways of doing business that differ from department to department, and we have to make sure that all of our firefighters are on the same page when they go out the door.

And so um now we have done lateral academies in the past, which are shorter ones based, like say for drivers, and we try to draw drivers from other departments and then uh give them a shorter academy uh because it's more focused.

Um but those haven't worked out well because typically we've ended a getting up getting people that were leaving other departments for other reasons, and then they left us too.

So we have we haven't done one of those for a few years.

It is an option um and does cost less, but they're it hasn't been proven to work very well.

Okay, thanks for clarifying.

The other thing that I just want to underscore is uh comments that were just made that although we're not budgeting for an academy in this year, that doesn't mean that you know I'm pessimistic about the future of of the economy next year, but let's say I'm wrong, and let's say that the numbers are better than we're projecting and thinking, doesn't mean you can't have an academy.

Right.

Yeah we're we're we're we're having those internal discussions we're going to be watching it and and what what it would mean is just a sh again a shifting of more of our priorities to you know if if that becomes the highest priority to to do that academy then we have to shift every other things and it's still difficult but yeah but it doesn't mean we're not going to have yeah absolutely no chance of having one just not likely at this point thanks so councilman lineweber um tra uh hatch actually uh I wanted to ask no um uh you know I can are our yeah other positions for dogs but anyway no um so this retention piece is kind of um a thing um uh and we talked about it a lot with the police department and they clearly the police department has a lot higher degree of stress and other issues and we're seeing that we've we lose police to other cities and towns and stuff like that um um and we've heard about that but I haven't heard much about that within the fire I know I know you know to have the opportunity to work for an international famous right how famous is he internationally I mean that's that alone helps with recruitment for sure um but uh give me a sense are we are we compass is our compensation um you know you know I haven't heard things like we're 10% less than the front range or no it's and are we losing people because of pay are we losing you know I haven't heard that from a fire perspective.

I'll say um yeah we have had that in the past and recent here recently we haven't had a lot of people but we do have occasionally people leaving to go to other departments um I would say that is a consideration for both police and fire uh moving forward because um I know of other departments in the state that are getting raises and our people hear that and they go hmm you know hmm and and and consider that and um I'm not seeing you know we're not seeing a mass egg exodus uh I think we have I know we have a really good department but I also know that that comes into play when people are thinking about you know other options and uh and and I think we we have to keep aware of how we how we even out with other departments across the state well that that plays into our conversation about the the whole um um having the training thing um postponed for a year um to some extent I think we're less a little bit less exposed in the fire department than we are in the police department for that um is that would you say generally that what might be yeah well I I think some of the things so we we've had uh we we we have seen over the last um maybe three to four years a pretty um obvious drop in the number of people coming to apply for us I change I think that's a lot uh change in just um the culture out there in general um I would say for PD it's it's it's gotten way better and they've done a good job of really working on trying to get their numbers up there but they had a few years there where lots of people did not want to be a police officer because of just the natural culture in the increase in violence and the things that they were having to deal with you know that that was really tough on them.

And I share share this is that you know unfortunately when PD shows up even if it's you getting pulled over for going 40 miles over the speed limit somebody's not somebody's not oh it's for you okay uh somebody's not happy with them right even though they're trying to do they're doing the right thing and they're working hard to provide good service there seems to always be somebody pissed off at them.

Well we have the luxury of pretty much every time we go on scene people are really happy to see us because either their house is on fire they're about to deliver a baby or somebody's dying in their family and and um that's again just uh a difference in the two organizations but um you know obviously we we weigh support them because the the work they're doing every day is really important and they're working hard to serve so yeah well I just wanted to get a sense for that because the the training academy piece is is the piece I think that we're all the most sensitive about yeah we just don't want to get behind on that yeah and I and I I agree with you and and again like I said it's it's very hard when we have such a small non-labor budget compared to what we have to pay to you know to keep our people here um we just don't have a lot of wheel room yeah and we and we know we have lots of other needs as well going into the future so thank you.

Um we just don't have a lot of wheel room.

Yeah.

And we and we know we have lots of other needs as well going into the future.

So thank you.

Um and we have councilman Donaldson, but before that, can you give me, I'm not trying to rush you, but gauge on just so I can tell staff.

Just two pages.

Okay, two pages.

Okay, councilman Donaldson.

Yeah, thanks, madam president.

Um Chief, did you did you say that the training academy would be about 1.4?

It's uh it's the academy itself is 1.1, and then you see the numbers 1.6, and that has to do with with salary savings and and benefits and stuff like that from not having bodies in place.

Does that make sense?

So as as as people attract out, there's salary savings there.

Okay.

And in since we're not filling those, that that money's sitting there.

So that's part of that.

Okay.

I would just point out that the uh recreational marijuana sales tax money is I believe about projected at 1.4.

And uh, you know, that's a decision that uh council will make in cooperation with uh with the mayor as to what we use that on.

So if this is really the highest uh priority for council, there are there's a solution to that.

So there.

That's one for you.

Thank you.

Um as far as the rest of this uh slide here, uh if you go down to the last two lines, that's uh the project funding I talked about for the fire stations and then um transfers of positions for fleet and facility, et cetera.

So I think that one covers that page pretty well.

All right, last uh last page, fire priorities.

Um so our priorities uh keeping up with city growth, adding infrastructure apparatus.

This really plays into that need to um when you're talking about stations and you ask the question about stations right here.

I was gonna mention we need two to four uh as we speak today.

And um our apparatus, uh we we did last year to meet our reductions, we gave back about 150,000, which is almost one engine uh that we didn't purchase last year to meet our our needs for last year.

Um we have that money for our um apparatus uh purchasing fund is just over a million dollars.

We have that going into next year's budget.

But uh when you talked about unfunded needs, that's one of the requests we've had out there for the last couple of years is really we need to increase that by three times to get it up to a yearly basis that we can buy the engine and trucks that we need based on the increase in costs.

But our overall need to get our apparatus up to where it needs to be is about $15 million.

So that's that's out there.

Uh we want to keep working toward trying to figure out the funding for both stations and apparatus.

When we talk about adding stations, and that goes to the next line staffing, uh, and this goes back to your uh the authorized number um is we are sitting at 516.

Uh those four stations would drive probably about another hundred sworn, uh, both uh line staff and support staff, and probably another 30 civilians.

We are down about 40 uh or so civilians.

The bulk of those are in uh the division of the fire marshal, about like nine inspectors, for instance.

Um in our community, we have 27,000 over 27,000 commercial buildings.

And we our goal, just like we have response times, DFM has uh timelines to get in every building every three years.

Uh last year we did 4500, so that's nowhere close to making that three-year uh hit on that.

The problem with that is the longer it goes, people start blocking doors, people start putting in hazardous materials where they shouldn't be not maintaining springler systems, and we have more fire impact.

So um that's where the bulk of those civilians come from.

And then the other biggest part of that is from our uh trying to get our uh grant funded folks in in uh CPH into general fund.

Uh those the work that they are doing out there, which is the next line, advancing the tiered response model uh has a significant impact.

About 30% of our overall call volume, they're pulling off of our heavy apparatus, which keeps them available for those critical calls, but it also takes less wear and tear on those vehicles, which so you have an SUV compared to uh uh million dollar engine.

Uh it really helps us out there as far as maintenance costs and repairs on those uh those.

If we did not have our um our tier response units and our C Med units today, I can tell you I'd be standing up here asking for at least one more infill station to add to those four because of the call volume, and then we'd probably be asking for another engine to run out of station one because of the call volume downtown.

Um before we had these programs really going, station one was starting to run for on the engine 25 calls a day.

uh million dollar engine uh it it really helps us out there as far as maintenance costs and repairs on those uh those if we did not have our um our tier response units and our c med units today i can tell you i'd be standing up here asking for at least one more infill station to add to those four because of the call volume and then we'd probably be asking for another engine to run out of station one because of the call volume downtown um before we had these programs really go on station one was starting to run for on the engine 25 calls a day when you're running 25 calls a day you don't sleep you don't eat you don't get time to train and you get more injuries and sick sick calls uh because that's just too much so thankfully our tier response has been impacting that but we still need help going forward in the future because geography plays a part in our increasing call volume plays a part councilman henjam yeah uh chief uh looking at those priorities it's it's very future focused but realistically like understanding what you wish you were building in stations this year with trucks being ordered and the next year um what's the big swag number if you will um to address capital and um equipment and people if in five years let's say I don't know what the right number is but in the near future where we are prepared to meet those needs as a city from a fire perspective.

Well I off the top of my head that'd be that'd be tough.

I uh you know if you look over um 15 years I I would say in five years probably we're looking at maybe 200 million yeah you know at least to get to where we need to be with with station bills apparatus hiring people and those type of things spread out over the future here yeah so what's keeping you up at night that yeah so yeah I just yeah you know the city's growing our call volume's going up um the not building stations and getting our folks out there and it's similar with PD they they're talking about the the number of police officers they need to cover our city it all impacts response times and we we see our you know our goals is a minute 90% of the time and we see that number dropping off.

Those stations on the east side what's happening right now so stations uh 15 21 17 7s eights uh are all running from basically academy and powers corridors out east of markshovel on calls so when they run out there obviously that increases our response times well then what happens is the ripple effect is the next call comes in to their district and then others in the central part of the city are now running to Academy and powers to cover those calls.

So it's just it's it's the effect of our growth in our and our population increase and and we have to try to keep up with it.

Well just to highlight fire in particular for a moment I know we're talking about the 26th budget um but I think we have to talk about the next five 10 15 years and with what we have now projected there's no way we're gonna meet that I I just don't see how we're gonna do it.

I don't see us growing our way out of it.

I don't see um you know the sales tax spending changing enough to address those kinds of needs and um unless you can tell me differently police may be uh slight different but in terms of the capital expenditures that are needed your department um is unique I think I mean public works has a lot of you know other um PPRTA funds I mean there's other grants i we have to start focusing on this and so I guess what conversations are you having with the administration and what conversations do we need to be having with you as the council who can refer things to a ballot or who can whose responsibility it is to be addressing revenue.

Well I appreciate that question and I I think you know I um I I have had conversations I think I've shared with with uh you all as well is that going back to that public safety sales tax it's maxed out right and so as your fire chief I'm saying we we actually I think need to go back and look at doing something similar again whether it's that or some other kind of change but we're not going to be able to do it under our existing budget both for police and fire to keep up with with what's coming and what's already here um it's gonna take something outside of our budget to get there.

Yeah.

Well I did hear our president asking for some PSST figures.

So I'm sure you'll be getting right on that.

Yeah we'll absolutely absolutely get you that information.

And another and another question before we go to councilman Donaldson um with the statewide WUI requirements if we were to adopt all of them or opt in you said you're already short an inspection and some of that from what I understand would require you to have more inspection.

It that that'll drive that.

Um, but absolutely, because it is tied to um inspecting partials and and making sure they meet the code.

So that's just another added.

Absolutely.

Um okay.

Well, I don't see councilman Donaldson.

Are you still councilman Rainey?

Just one quick question before we finish up.

On page 206 of the budget, there's a uh project vehicle and apparatus replacements at roughly about one million dollars.

Do you do you already have the apparatus that you're using that targeted number for, or is it for next year?

Yes.

Um no, we we uh so well that'll go toward um we were able to to do a purchase.

We got two two engines and a truck being built right now.

And Chris, correct me if I'm wrong.

Um but uh being built right now, some of that money is going toward the payment of of those.

Um, but again, we're planning for future ones that we need.

And so that million plus a little bit plus of that is in our budget and has been every year uh for quite a while, but costs have gone up and it's not there to you know can't meet sustaining sustainability into the future.

So literally that allocation that's on the books right now is literally just like a down payment or continue layaway payment on a truck that you're currently building.

Right.

It is.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, okay.

Um and then uh let's see, wildfire response as our next priority.

Obviously, that's one of our biggest threats to our community, and we continue to work hard at that.

Um doing great work with that, both on the operational side.

Uh, we have some uh new uh detection systems that are going to be coming for our wooy, and then our mitigation efforts there are really uh going to town on the especially the west side of town.

Um health and wellness.

I spoke to that with our count cancer and and heart screenings, and we're continuing to do uh uh priorities in that area as well.

Um I threw in the next section on uh ongoing community collaborations.

I just want you all to be aware um we really appreciate the support of our community, but some of our innovative programs, and I'll speak about whole blood to start with, uh, did not come out of our budget.

It came out of uh in this case, the Memorial Health Foundation really stepped up and provided uh the money stuff for us to get that going.

And um that one program uh the last number I saw, there's at least 80 people in our community today.

We've been doing it for a little bit over a year, year and year and a half almost.

80 people in our community today that would not have walked out of the hospital without that happening, and um uh giving them the whole blood.

So we're we continue to work with our uh with those funders to keep that going.

The next three on there, um, we have a fire foundation that's head uh led by uh Matt Powell's name, and there's a lot of group of our community members that are on that, but they've been proactively really working hard to provide us with funding for specific things really tied to technology uh out there that will improve our service.

So the next three things uh you see on there, just last week or over a week ago, they um basically wrote us a check for about 100,000 to help uh put some of this in place.

Uh the Quake technology is is thermal imaging, but it's tied to your your helmet.

We're only getting we're gonna get three of these units and put them on our busiest truck companies.

They will increase the the amount of time or the speed that we have to rescue people out of uh houses because walking into a smoke held house where you can't see your hand in front of your face.

When you flip this window down, I can see all of you sitting there, I can see the windows, I can see the doors, and just speeds things up.

Uh eventually we'd love to get one of those on every one of our apparatus.

Uh this is again being funded by the fire foundation.

The drone program, which I know you're familiar with, they uh and Elfamar helps out with this one, uh, provide us a 21,000 doll to get a larger drone that can do a payload and a smaller drone for training.

Uh and just as with PD, we're using the heck out of that, and it's really making a difference out there.

The last one is a new one.

This is called heads up CPR, but it's a new way to do CPR.

There's a couple of uh pieces of equipment that go with it that are actually pretty cheap in the long run.

Uh, there's only one department in the nation that's doing this right now.

A lot of hospitals are doing it, but it's it's a different way to do CPR where you elevate the chest, and then the devices, what they do is expand the chest to increase the inner thoracic pressure, and thus um gets more oxygen and aided blood to the heart and the brain.

What they're seeing with that is a 51% increase in cardiac arrest saves on the medical side, which is huge.

So we're excited about being able to implement those.

Uh, we'll let you know when we get get them out on the street.

That we're starting with five engines with that equipment.

And the again, the fire foundation is is really excited about helping us uh fund that.

The last one I want to mention is uh Cubano, uh uh Renee Mondajar, who has this Cubano golf tournament.

Uh, they just gave us a check last week for a hundred and twenty thousand dollars they raised in that uh golf tournament this year that is going into our fire foundation and will help us get more of this equipment.

So um I I wanted to share that just in the fact that even with lean budgets, we're trying to be innovative and in and get things done out there.

Uh, our community is stepping up and helping us out with that.

I think that's all I got, unless you have other questions.

I don't see me at this time, but thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, we have to be back um posted on our agenda at one o'clock.

So that is at your discretion.

Oh, it's at our display.

So we can start whenever you determine.

Okay.

Then it's twelve twenty-six.

Let's start at one thirty, so everybody has an hour to catch up on emails and lunch.

Okay, that sounds great.

I'll let the afternoon sessions know.

If you want to do forty-five minutes, that's fine.

We start at one.

I I'd really appreciate it.

Are you good with that?

Are you good with that?

I know you have somewhere to go.

Yeah.

Okay, so they're gonna move stuff around.

We'll start at one.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We're running.

We're a little behind the one o'clock brand, but thank you and welcome.

Well, good afternoon.

Britt Haley, the director of the City of Colorado Springs Parks Recreation and Cultural Services Department.

Happy to be here today.

So I don't know that we need to go over the rest of the agenda, so I'll just jump right into my presentation.

So here we just have the quick organizational chart that gives you an idea of kind of the weird breadth of things that we do in the parks department.

And you will see, I think what's kind of interesting here is we've got enterprise operations that affect the budget in their own business way, but are completely separate, separated from kind of the more controversial things, which I think are mainly but not exclusively a general fund conversation.

You'll see the design and development division uh is a smaller division, and of course, our largest, as you might expect, is parks maintenance and operations for all of the facilities and properties that we are responsible for.

And then recreation administration is the next largest with all of the activities, programming and services side of our operations.

So just a quick, you can kind of see the the general sizes of each thing.

Cultural services is a little bit different than most cities, and I do want to take a moment to recognize those 32 and a half staff for that one.

That is the Pioneers Museum, Garden of the Gods, the archaeology program, uh those sorts of activities that we have captured there, and also the interpretive services at North Schleyen Canyon Park, Helen Hunt Falls, and the Starzmore Visitor and Nature Center.

So I want to talk a little bit about positions as we look at 2024 versus 2025 as amended, and then are going forward into 2026.

And I think the biggest change that you will see there is in the grants box at the very top of 2024.

We treated the Harrison School District 2 contract as a grant because it really operated just like a grant.

And so there is a reduction in positions that you notice from 275.25 to 244.

And uh a large number of those are that grant uh being terminated by the Harrison School District too.

Right up a quest question from Councilman Hingeman.

Thanks, Madam President.

So um that Harrison School um grant was a huge that was a huge part of Meadows Park, was it not?

Well, uh, we can get into more information about Meadows Park Community Center.

It affected that the capacity of all of the rec services to provide the programming.

Okay.

With these 25 and a quarter positions eliminated.

Okay.

And I'll just briefly state that Harrison School District would have teams go to their sites and provide before and after school programming at the school sites.

And then in the off time, which would be summertime, or breaks for school breaks, we would do break camps and summer camps, and that's where you would see the impact at the various community centers.

Okay.

And and do you happen to know, Britt, just that was Harrison School District uh two.

But do you know if there are other any other uh organizations that are picking up some of that slack just given that there's such a need for before and after school programs?

Yes, there is a provider that did come in, pick up a lot of that opportunity, and we lost a lot of our child care licensed staff to that so that they could keep working, which I absolutely support.

But it also impacted our capacity to provide the programs in the summer and during break camps because we couldn't maintain the ratio of licensed staff to child.

Okay, thanks.

So you'll see those 25 and a quarter, and then uh you will also see uh smaller impacts uh as you look across 25 to 26.

In uh 2026, I want to focus on the general fund.

We don't uh we we transferred a half a position from TOPS into general fund, and the reason we did that is TOPS had been paying for half of a budget and finance position, a spread across a couple people who assist them as we were changing budget staff, getting the TOPS budget going and doing our biennial audit.

So we needed that help at the time.

We realized that we do not need it for 2026 because we're up and running in terms of budget and finance, and so that is that transfer.

And then we eliminated nine and a half full-time employees as part of our 2026 budget reductions.

Seven and a half of those were associated with Meadows Park Community Center, just to get back to your other point.

So uh let's talk a little bit about the those position changes as I had started to do.

In cultural services, we are actually adding one full-time employee.

And the way that we're doing that is a halftime person for Rockledge Ranch to be an admin assistant.

Rockledge Ranch is providing so much more programming with Anna Cross taking over operations there.

It's just revitalized the activity at Rockledge Ranch.

And so that is definitely something that we need to do.

And then we also made some adjustments in the Pioneers Museum to get to the other half.

So that's one person uh worth of change.

And then on the maintenance side, we did um receive a full-time maintenance position for Greyhawk Park because we will be uh opening that park soon.

I'm very excited about that.

And then there were some adjustments uh also made for an analyst and asset supervisor positions for 2020.

Oh, those were 2025.

That's going back in time.

But now looking at 2026, that that's where we shifted the half of a person uh back to general fund from TOPS payment.

That's where we did the staff reductions for a total of nine and a half positions, seven and a half were Meadows Park, and then two others uh in addition to that.

And then we have unfunded positions, and you'll see that on the bottom of this chart.

So those are essentially vacant positions, and one of them is a maintenance technician for parks operations and maintenance.

One of them is the former administrator of the uh Deerfield Hills Community Center, Jody Darrington retired, and so we're keeping that vacant for the savings.

And then Jordan Romero was an employee over at Deerfield Hills as well, who took a position elsewhere, and so that position is also remaining vacant in our proposed 2026 budget.

So now I kind of want to look at the total funding.

And the one thing that might strike you about this is number one that on the slide, all of the letters are over each other, so you can't see anything about how that's how that's uh that pie is cut up.

But the other thing that's striking, and it's partly a strength of the parks recreation and cultural services department is the many different types of funding that contribute to what gives us the capacity to provide the services and activities that we do.

And so let me uh go over those for you in the gray.

So that's kind of a large uh piece.

There's 34%, it's 22 million ninety-nine thousand and some dollars.

That's the enterprise operations of uh the parks recreation cultural services department.

So you can see that's a sizable, sizable chunk.

And because our enterprises are doing really excellent job, and it's particularly Pike's Peak, America's Mountain.

Uh, that for 2026 is seeing an increase in terms of the amount of revenue dollars that we anticipate the will be available.

So that's a bright spot.

Uh then if you go uh kind of counterclockwise on that pie, you will see a blue part of the pie that is a general fund itself, and that is about 17.1 million or 26% of our budget.

So that is a general fund component that we will probably focus on a little bit more in today's discussion.

Going around the circle of counterclockwise, the brighter green or the lighter green is our TOPS program.

That represents 13% of the budget and eight million dollars.

8 million 98,000.

Now remember that in TOPS, we do not try to appropriate all of the revenue that we anticipate for a year because we want to hold back for a supplemental appropriation, open space acquisition dollars.

So you might typically expect to see about 13 million coming in in terms of revenue from TOPS, but we're only asking to appropriate 8 million ninety-eight thousand for this year.

And we'll talk about what some of that activity will involve.

The next one is kind of a brownish color up on your pie, and that is conservation trust fund dollars.

Those are lottery dollars that are allocated based on a per capita basis from playing the lottery tickets.

So go ahead and do that at Christmas and for all your friends because it always helps parks, recreation, cultural services.

That comprises 10% of our budget, and that's $6,166,000 and some dollars.

Then the next one, it look looks a little bit like a dark purple is special districts.

Those would be the special improvement maintenance districts component of our budget, 7%, and 4.4 million.

I have a question from Councilman Rainey.

Thank you, Madam President.

I just want to make sure on page 322 of the budget packet.

Um you already kind of hit on a general fund and then the conservation trust fund.

Um the capital improvements uh been zeroed out.

That was a part of your savings, correct?

I just want to make sure I capture that correctly.

So you're looking at general funds CIP?

Correct.

That for 2026, we are not proposing any general fund.

And the same thing for the uh conservation trust fund, nothing there either.

That is correct.

That is correct.

We're kind of holding our cards, trying to finish up pro projects that we already have appropriated, which I'll talk a bit more about in the TOPS program, but that is true.

So the special improvement maintenance districts at 4.4 million, then the next uh part of the pie is a darker green, that's our grants component at 4.8 million.

That's about 7% of our funding.

Next is a tiny sliver, it looks red to me up on your pie.

That is our gift trusts, where people sometimes endow or provide a gift that is for a very specific purpose that it's about 1% of our budget for 2026.

And then finally, we have uh one called other funds, capital improvement projects, and that's 1.2 million, and that is about 2% of the budget.

So we'll talk a little bit about what some of those projects will entail.

About three more slides in with other funds.

So looking at the history here of all funds, um, you're looking at you know 56.2 million in 2024, 64.1 in 2025's amended budget, and then 2026 at 64.6, and you might ask yourself the question well, how is it that we're actually more when we've been talking so much about all the cuts in the parks, recreation, and cultural services department.

And what I want to point out there is that there is a $3.46 million increase in the enterprises, which is that gray block in the center.

And so they the enterprise funds are doing wonderfully in 2026, and that is explains where there's an increase overall in the stack of the different kinds of funding.

There's also 1.12 million dollar increase in other funds, which is the yellow piece, and we'll talk about that in a minute for a total increase of 4.94 million across all the different funds, and of course, of course, those exclude the increases all for all of the other um parks, recreation, cultural services funds that we are decreasing.

We are decreasing those by um 4.08 million.

So let's get on to how we're doing that.

Let's look at the divisions real quick, at least this time you can see uh the designations next to the pie charts, so you can see how each division is funded across our budget.

So I won't read each of those to you, but what I would like to point out to you is that when you look at the 2026 budget, the total for all the non-enterprises, so anything that's not an enterprise is a reduction of 2,909,178.

And then when you get to the enterprises, you know, they are contributing funds, and so they're gonna at the end of the day will be above by 557,000 and some dollars.

But we are also looking at positions changing significantly, and I talked to you about that.

The total number of positions that are uh not in the 2026 budget is 34.75.

So recognizing that there's some uh capital improvement projects in 2026, we really kind of have to shift our game a little bit, recognizing that revenues are coming in flat.

And so you'll notice that on this slide there's enterprise funds uh for uh a lot of really great capital improvement projects.

We have about 4.177 million uh funded for uh Pikes Peak America's Mountain.

And part of that is uh from the FEMA agency.

We had a first tornadoes uh hit the mountain.

We also had all of the avalanches, and so we do have some funding for FEMA projects that are underway right now.

We also have received money for the halfway picnic grounds outdoor play space, and that's 425,000.

We are working on an underground storage tank project, which you know we fuel a lot of vehicles up there, and our underground storage tanks need a uh reworking, and so $750,000 for that, and then paving two miles of the highway, two million dollars.

That's a lot of money going into kind of the the key thing that Pikes Peak America's Mountain provides is that highway up to the Summit Visitor Center.

So we took Thanks.

Um does the enterprise the enterprise doesn't pay for that paving?

Yes, it does.

So this is in the 52% of all the capital improvement funding that is broken down in that enterprise.

In that enterprise 52%.

So as long as I'm talking then at some point, whether it's this slide or another, if you can talk to me about where funds might be possible for even doing minor minor improvements within the Cragmore neighborhood to follow up on that community meeting.

All right.

I will see.

I will tell you that the the bad news about losing general fund dollars or reducing our budget to meet our balanced budget requirements is that there isn't a lot of capacity in 2026 for those sorts of things.

But there is good news on the horizon for the Cragmore parks.

And so one of the things that's good news is that because our community meeting was so well attended, and the division of mining reclamation and safety staff was there to see how much the community appreciates their parks.

I believe that they were convinced the very next week to agree to fund a grant for $700,000 to do mining uh reclamation related analyses and remediation at Portal Park.

Unfortunately, that grant does not become available to us until 2027.

And so that means we've got some planning work to do with that.

And I will tell you that I'm currently working on a plan for Flanagan Park, but I don't have anything that I can release at this time.

Okay.

Okay.

But there aren't any 2026 dollars we can allocate for those projects just now.

All right, so enterprise projects are almost exclusively uh Pikes Peak America's Mountain as I look at the different funding.

So that's all on the gray is the Pikes Peak America's Mountain.

In the other funds, the yellow CIP, which is uh that is Pikes Peak Regional Transportation Authority, and that is some trail work that we are doing.

So 1,221,000.

So thank you to PPRTA for the capacity to keep moving forward on trails.

We also have parkland dedication ordinance funding at the amount that really is for uh more of the appraisals and the regular real estate work that we would do, and then uh just a teensy bit of money associated with interest on the ball fields fund.

Uh we've used the ball fields fund in the past to help provide the synthetic turf that makes for our sports complexes, and this we're just building that fund back at this point.

And then tops, tops, of course, bright green over there, 32% of our capital improvement projects.

And this is um gonna represent 2.53 million of work that we can do in 2026 on the following projects.

Uh the Fishers Canyon open space trails and trailheads out of the trails category.

Uh we have a component, and then out of the open space category, we have an improved uh component.

So in trails, about $650,000 for Fishers, and then Fishers Canyon Roadway and Trailhead Improvements from the Open Space Category in $1,250,000.

And you'll remember that we got a reimbursement grant from Great Outdoors Colorado associated with the purchase of the property.

And so, or I'm sorry, we got a grant associated with that property, and so that is being returned into Fisher's Canyon open space for trail improvements and trailhead.

So those are kind of the big big projects.

La Ferrey Trail gets about $150,000.

And then we also have just the open space acquisition fund component for real estate appraisals and you know the phase one environmentals and all the work you need to do in order to be able to complete an acquisition.

So 2026 is looking pretty good in tops just because we have dollars to allocated and we can continue those trail projects that have been previously appropriated as well.

So let's look at the budget changes just a little bit here.

Now we're on the operating side instead of the capital side.

So we're looking at across the different funds, you know, we have kind of the net change to fund our existing positions.

You see that at the top, CIP, or I'm sorry, CTF is under just a little bit.

And I'll have to ask for help on why that one is under.

Is it because we have fewer positions?

Calculations came from budget because they were adjustments based on current position where they were in the square.

All right, so there are three components to that, but in conservation trust, we are also trying to be careful because conservation trust dollars, a lot like general fund dollars are being projected to be under what they were previously by a million dollars, and so we are just being extra cautious uh on conservation trust.

You'll see uh the pay progressions that were talked about earlier today across the the entire city, the contractual increases for our medical benefits, contractual obligations across those three.

And then the removal of temporary budget reductions.

So you remember in what is it 2023, we did budget reductions, and those mainly in the parks department affected the parks maintenance and operations section.

We moved some mowing expenses over to Conservation Trust, and we concluded the Manitou Incline Attendant Program.

And those were the budget reductions that we used in order to hit this number of almost $600,000.

And because that is now being placed in the budget to be then taken back out of the budget because it's no longer temporary.

It's we are accepting that that is a permanent situation.

That is why that line is reflected there.

And then I'm sorry, do we um do we staff or we have historically staffed the incline as it with an attendant?

There was a short period of time uh from 2020 until 2022 when COVID funding was able to fund the incline, the Manitou Incline attendance, and then we attempted to continue to fund them with conservation trust dollars, but we're unable to keep doing that as we needed to make those reductions.

And so that's the place where we reduced previously that is now being considered Colorado Springs City Park.

It is a city trail, and so we own a component of it.

This Colorado Springs Utilities owns the component because they have their water line, and then the United States Forest Service owns the upper third.

And so, yes, we were providing staffing, but that was a cut that we made previously that is now uh for captured, captured in the budget.

Thanks.

So now does that mean the same for maintenance?

Not for maintenance, correct?

No, we still perform maintenance on the Manitou Incline, and it needs it, of course, with all the rains that have happened this year.

We are actively working on that now.

We also have a 501c3 group called the Friends of the Manitou Incline.

They have significant funding.

Uh, they're a great partner, and that's kind of how we get those things done.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, of course.

So you can see the uh other reductions with unfunded vacant positions that I alluded to previously, the position elimination, the decrease of 1.392 uh for operating budget reductions.

You see Meadows Park Community Center closure in there, and then also the uh net decrease in operating and capital outlay.

And really, you know, the I guess that the total picture is that from general fund for budget reductions all in, we ended up reducing 3.177 million.

So getting then to department impacts as we sue them.

Uh it's important to tell the whole story of these budget reductions that I I just uh started to talk about.

Recreation services and administration and design and development all reduced staff and operating costs.

We closed the one community center, and unfortunately, and this just breaks my heart as much as all the others, we had to eliminate the aquatics facility maintenance repair funding, which included not only money that we were holding for Portal Parks pool in order to evaluate how we could bring it back, but also Wilson Ranch Parks pool.

And so we had to, you know, Kim and I were just ferreting it away, hoping, hoping, hoping that we could get enough money to repair and replaster that existing pool.

And too bad this year we just really can't meet our budget reductions without giving that up.

So that is you know where that is.

So for a total in that section of parks, recreation and cultural services of 1.64 million.

In parks maintenance and operations, we also reduced service levels related to our turf maintenance, portable restrooms, and security, and then damaged equipment.

So there will be some question in 2026, depending on what happens in terms of damaged equipment and damage to the portable restrooms.

I won't send you any more pictures then, Brett.

No more pictures, please.

We have a strange texting relationship.

But I will say I will say that we've also had some good pictures of the replacement units.

And then overall across the department, we are doing all the things that probably every other department looks at.

We are um reducing our seasonal staff.

We are not doing trainings unless it's required for a certification that is necessary in order to do our professional work.

We are limiting travel to really inside you know the city area, maybe up to Denver if I feel like we can do that, and then no more stand-up desks or other office furniture.

Uh so and that's across all of the different divisions in order to get us to another 200,000 in savings.

And then an interesting one is in the cultural services division.

There is a nonprofit arm that supports the the Pioneers Museum that agreed to release an extra hundred thousand dollars of revenue to get us to our reduction amount or the amount of money that we need to save in order to balance our budget in 2026.

So I'm really grateful for that additional revenue.

So the grand total again is 3.177,907.

$3,177,000 970.

So let's talk about the priorities of the department 2026.

We are you know in the middle of completing an update to our park system master plan with input from our community, and that's really helping to guide our department for the next 10 to 15 years.

So we will be uh continuing that and concluding it.

We do get to build the new trails and trailheads within Bloggit Open Space and Fishers Canyon Open Space.

We do get to support the efforts of the Keep It Clean and Safe Program within our parks and open spaces, as well as along our trail corridors, and that is very significant.

And of course, we will continue to provide safe park spaces, accessible recreational opportunities, unique cultural amenities, and let's not forget the economic vitality that our parks, our recreation and our cultural resources do provide back to the city.

So at this point, the only other slide that I have is a comparison of our different uh community centers.

I'm happy to talk about that, or we can talk about any of the other questions that might have arisen.

Thank you so much for the time.

All right, it looks like uh we are can you just review so I don't have to do the math?

What is that three million and what?

Yes, let me go back to that.

Okay, so it is 3,177,970.

It's quite a contribution.

And it's a reality of having a balanced budget.

Yeah, thank you for recognizing that I don't see any others.

All right, well, thank you so much.

Thank you, Brett.

We appreciate it.

The schedule has a break, but do you just want to power through since we just had a break?

That's fine.

I hate to make that for an appointment, but all right.

Well, Rich.

You're up.

No break for you.

Okay.

There's a lot of pens up here.

How did you know?

There's like 20 pens up there.

This is happening.

All right.

Good afternoon, President Croberson.

Good afternoon, members of City Council.

My name is Richard Mullady at the public works director of the city of Colorado Springs, and I'm here to talk about the public works budget for 2026.

And please stop me at any time if you have a question, and I'll just walk through the slides and uh give you some information and answer any questions that you have.

The first slide is just a picture of our organizational chart and the organizational makeup.

And so I just wanted I think I I've met with a most of council members, and and I think uh many of you know what's involved in public works, but I'll just quickly cover it so we know.

So we have city engineering, uh we have traffic engineering, we have the parking enterprise, uh, we have transit Mount Mr.

Mount Metro Transit, we have the stormwater enterprise, and then we have operations and maintenance, and within operations and maintenance, we have forestry uh also code enforcement and uh the quality of life teams.

So just wanted to uh make sure that we have what we're looking at.

So for this year we had 419 and three-quarter uh FTE heading into 2026.

Um we're actually going to talk about about five positions that were uh five filled positions that were eliminated, but two of those are within Mount Metro Transit, so they're they're grant funded positions.

But you can see um on the general side there was a reduction of three uh FTE, and so we're headed into 2026 with 416 and three-quarter FTE.

Um you can look um, you know, the the vast majority of that are in the general fund.

However, there are significant amount of uh positions that are within the enterprises of the of the public works uh department.

Um this is the summary of the of the position change that I wanted to go through uh uh just to let you know how we uh approach this year and how we achieve some of the reductions in our budget.

So you can see that in in uh for 2026, we are eliminating um those three positions in the general fund side, and then there are the two fill positions that were in the in Mountain Metro transit uh that are represented on the on the other on the grant side because they're grant funded.

So that's a permanent reduction of five fill positions, and then we have a number of general fund positions and one grant position again in Mountain Metro that will remain unfunded.

Um you can see there's a almost like 10 and three-quarter in operations and maintenance, one in traffic and one in Mountain Metro.

And if if you would like, I do have a I can talk about what those positions are uh specifically in operations maintenance, but I can tell you as we go through the presentation um what our priorities are and how we'll address those unfilled positions.

Oh it's not just you.

Okay.

I was like that is not what it looked like on my screen.

Okay.

Well, thankfully I have it.

Um the bad news is I left my glasses in my office.

And so let's see.

Are yours like readers?

No.

Oh, oh, thank you, Lan.

Okay.

Okay, so uh we'll just kind of quickly go around it real quick.

And much like Britt, actually, I thought she had a really uh wonderful comment, which is um just like uh parks, a significant uh amount of the funding for public works is actually outside of the general fund.

And so that's a there's a positive and a negative to that.

So PPRT is the largest chunk on the left-hand side, which is purple.

It's about 114 million, it's 31%.

The top are our grant projects, and those are uh um you know grants that we will believe we may be getting.

That's 74 million dollars, it's about 20 percent.

And you'll see, I think in the change, by the way, one of the largest changes we have from our budget is a reduction in grant funding.

We'll see that on the next slide.

Um, the stormwater prize is in gray, it's about 31 and a half million dollars.

Parking enterprise is just to the right of that, and kind of the I guess it's dark blue.

And that's 17.5 million, although a significant amount of that is actually bringing some money out of savings to some capital projects.

Rich on the general fund, you said 53 Yes, ma'am.

Wait, two in our in our book it says 524217.

Is that 2026?

This is yeah, uh 50 53.2 is 2026.

General fund.

General fund.

Okay, because the book, the budget book on 436 says 52 to 42, 417.

I just the general fund portion includes the general fund and general fund CIP.

The CIP added.

Okay, so I didn't.

But thank you for that communication.

Now it adds up.

I'm glad you said I was I would have got that, but it would take me a lot longer than like.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you, Shari.

Okay, so here it is graphically, maybe a little easier to see.

And I I think you know you can see that there was a large, rather large reduction above and beyond what we're talking about, really, in the sense of the of the general fund, but just in total budget, and that's mainly because of grant projects.

We had a uh a large grant that we had hoped to get through the Stormware Enterprise, I think was close to 35 million dollars.

We probably will eventually get that grant, but it's not gonna be for a number of years.

So that's the reduction in that that you would see there.

So this is our our breakout by uh divisions.

Um I'm not sure there's much we can point out there.

We kind of look looked around it, but you can see how how city engineering has the largest line share of that.

And that's mainly because of uh PPRTA funding, which the PPRTA projects are delivered through uh through city engineering.

And of course, operations and maintenance, that's where 2C lives.

So you can see those budgets are relatively uh large, although um the general fund specifically is a different story.

Okay, I wanted to uh quickly just look through the CIP, and I think there's our there's the million and ten thousand dollars.

There it is.

Yep, and I can tell you what that is actually.

700,000 of that is uh signal uh fees that are collected from development from uh developers to do signal improvement projects, and then um there's uh 310,000 dollars that's um in city engineering, and that has to do with uh um also I think some fees that are collected.

Um there may be one question that's the bike fund.

We got that question actually last year.

Someone was like, what in the heck is the bike fund?

And that's uh a sales tax on every bike that's sold, it's four dollars, and that's been around.

I think this is the mid-80s.

Travis might I think it's the mid-80s.

So it's kind of weird, it always pops up.

So I mean, I can tell you what we do with that.

We uh, you know, uh Todd and the city traffic engineer uses that to mainly uh do uh safety improvement projects and things, you know, sometimes some bike lanes, painting, things like that.

So that's if you're looking at that, that's a little odd.

And then of course the one million dollars out of the general fund, which is uh which is important.

Okay, so here's the budget change going into uh 2026.

Um we can see that there's some uh increases uh for pay progressions and um contractual obligations like medical and other obligations.

Um can I stop you?

Absolutely.

Sorry back backing up one.

Um I don't want a long conversation about bikes.

Um the bike people don't seem to be here, so I can say this without getting kicked under the table.

Um I'm neutral.

85, you know, 85,000 do that pay for all the uh uh the bike lanes taking away real traffic lanes, the road diet.

Road, yeah, whatever we want to call it.

Yeah, um it can we see is there someplace I can see what bike improvements or bike expenditures there are compared to $85,000 in revenue specifically from the users of those amenities that our city provides.

We could certainly do that.

I will tell you, and I'd be mean I'd I'd be happy to to put something to the other.

We have some put together.

A little difficult because the improvements for like bike lanes are a lot tied to capital projects, 2C projects.

So in the past, we have tried to say, okay, how much is specifically spent on bikes?

Um, you know, it gets a little uh messy because if you do a large roadway project, how much of the cost of the mobilization and all that, but we can certainly do that.

I can tell you that obviously um $85,000 is not not a terrible amount of money when you talk about capital improvement projects, which are usually in the millions or tens of millions.

Yeah, no need to do any work to find out just as long as we're thinking about it.

I don't have it.

And at some point, you know, four dollars on a you know, thousand dollar bike, or how many how much do we spend on these e-bikes now?

Um, you know, if if we want to start funding some of that, maybe we kick that fee up a little bit as well.

Yes, sir.

And I certainly would be happy to.

I mean, obviously, if you would like it with additional information, we would we will find it.

Okay, so uh as we're moving through this chart, we can see that um you know, there are there are some there are planned furloughs, we know that across the city, those are those are embedded in those savings numbers.

Um unfunded vacant positions.

I I went through those.

That's the that's the total value of those unfunded positions, which is a little bit over a million dollars.

Um the the elimination of positions, um, you can see that was uh just under 350,000.

And then um decreases due to operating budget reductions.

That again is just uh un uh you know uh mainly because mainly in transit, and we can talk about that if you'd like to, but transit, we were um able to uh reduce transit's budget by about 1.2 million dollars through a combination of carryover, one-time carryover, reduction of positions, and some reductions and and cost saving measures uh embedded in the way that they operate.

I will say that when you get to the bottom line, it looks like a total reduction of 738,000.

However, the key to the public works budget was the reduction in the capital budget, which is at the bottom.

There's a little note.

I think a lot of us have heard about that of the 3.9 million.

A lot of that has to do with um, and Gail's this is not here, but um Gail who did amazing work going through the enormous amounts of of capital projects that we do and really finding alternative ways to fund matching.

Um, and so that is really how we were able to achieve that $3.9 million reduction in the general side without cutting projects.

Councilman Rainey.

Uh thank you, Madam President.

Um just educate me again.

Uh the 1.6 million for the removal of temporary budget reductions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do you want me to try to address it, Rich?

Yeah, that'd be helpful.

Better.

Okay.

Yeah.

Um every department's narrative.

And what we are reflecting with that line item is that in 2024, which then got carried into 25, we did have budget reductions, but we had put them in one or two lines that just kind of had a negative expenditure amount.

So we were fully funding positions and we were fully funding the line items, but we were saying, hey, public works.

You need to manage your budget to come in 1.6 million dollars less than your budget is 1.6 million dollars less.

So you have to figure out how to do that.

Coming into 2026, what we did is said we're not gonna have that one kind of budget reduction account with a negative expenditure.

We're gonna zero that out.

So you have to distribute it across your entire budget.

So by that plus 1.6 is zeroing out that line, and what you see for the all the rest of those is basically where they put where they actually took all of those reductions to get now to the bottom line, which is in most cases actually um uh more of a reduction because we had to add budget reductions for 26.

So we took the 24.

We just said we're zeroing that line out.

You have to accommodate those reductions plus a little bit more, but you have to accommodate in all your different areas.

So what this is doing is just saying we zeroed that line out, and then all of those other delineations on the screen are where they actually then accommodated in programs or you know, lines where they accommodated those reductions.

Okay, thank you.

So it's just kind of um uh a math thing.

Got it.

Okay.

Yeah.

And I could just tell you we met that it's really one point that 1.6 million dollar cut cut, if you will.

Uh it's more of a state, you know, forced reduction or however you want to call you wanna call.

We mainly achieved that through uh keeping positions unfilled.

And so, you know, we had something uh close to 36 unfilled positions, mainly in operations and maintenance.

And so that's why if you look back, um and one of the things I I really wanted to point out was if I can just do it now.

If you look back at the slide a few slides ago, we had a number of positions that are gonna remain unfunded.

I think it was um 10.75 in operations and maintenance.

There's 36 in 25.

So even though there's a number of unfunded positions operated, maybe that we're gonna continue to be unfunded.

We are putting a lot more uh meat back in OM, which is really tied to you know, one of our strategic goals and the strategic goal of the mayor, which is maintaining our infrastructure.

So I think that's that's kind of embedded in the numbers.

You don't really see it until you see it.

So was that helpful?

Okay.

Well, I just it was the next slide.

So uh the last slide is just I just wanted to talk quickly about our priorities and um uh public works and and the leadership of public works.

We we really came together and and uh focus on what our priorities were going to be coming into this budget season.

And and I and we I we've really met those priorities um through a lot of hard work, and here they are.

So it's minimize impacts on staff uh to the greatest extent possible.

Um certainly we've had some impacts and they've been difficult, but I you know we've tried to minute minimize that.

Uh provide the resources necessary to plow streets, fill potholes, maintain our roads and bridges and stormware infrastructure, and that's what I just spoke of, which is really saying, hey, um, let's make sure that that operations of maintenance and Corey and his team have the ability to provide the services that our residents really look you know are expecting.

Um preserve the ability to deliver capital projects.

We really achieve that.

I mean, we had a number of uh, like I mentioned earlier, we're able to uh uh find different ways to fund the match dollars for our capital projects, so we're not actually canceling any of our capital projects, we're funding them different ways through that work, and that is critical because we're a very large growing city, and we certainly need the capital projects and the transportation projects that we that we have planned out, and then preserve the the current levels of service with Mount uh uh specifically Mountain Metro, but also uh stormwater enterprise and parking.

Um, and then provide the resources need to keep our city clean and our urban forestry healthy.

So those were our priorities.

I I think we've really um met those, or we will be able to meet those with the budget that we have, and with that I'll take any more questions.

Yeah, thanks, Madam President.

Um this is sort of it's a sort of a related question.

If there's damage to uh fencing along a stormwater uh infrastructure, like up on union near Union Meadows open space, homeless are cutting holes through the fence, so their life is more convenient as they traverse the uh ditch.

Who does that go to?

Yeah.

It's a good question.

It depends on the property ownership.

I tell you there's it's it's there's no it's not there's no norm.

A lot of times, uh sometimes it could be the residence fence, a lot of times it will actually be the C it's just between the union boulevard, then there's a sidewalk, then there's the stormwater ditch.

It's probably us then.

Okay.

Yeah.

I'll I'll send you a whole lot of it.

It's probably used with photographs.

Okay.

Because I think we own union channel.

I I'm I'm relatively sure.

Oh, Aaron Powers is calling me right now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

She's probably watching this in the microphone.

She probably is watching this, has the answer.

But beyond that, I I think I had another question, but I just want to say I can't uh express my appreciation enough for what you guys do, especially that gentleman sitting right there, or a head of operations and maintenance.

You do uh with the resources you have, you do an incredible job of being responsive to citizens and uh putting out little fires while you're trying to look into the future and do the big things in the future.

So very much appreciated.

Uh kind of the maybe the unsung heroes of the big departments, police, fire, uh, public works, you know, you I can't say thank you enough.

You know, you I can't say thank you enough.

I think we're lucky with the folks we have uh in that department.

So thank you.

Thank you so much.

Certainly not, it's certainly not me.

It's the people that work in public works.

So you get a little bit of the credit.

Uh I don't know.

Thank you.

All right, thank you so much.

That's it.

Thank you.

You can have a pin.

If you'd like to take a pin, there's an extra pin for you.

That's your parting gifts.

A lot of pin.

That's your parting gift is a pin.

You won't have to buy them for your department now.

Thanks.

Thank you so much, council, um, for participating in the budget work session.

I do just have a couple of things as we wrap up, um, a little bit more on expectations and things that um we're gonna be requesting of you as we move into the markup session.

I did want to say on the markup session, again, it is on October 29th.

We will be requesting council input on potential changes that you uh may want to discuss on that day.

We'll probably be asking for that and we'll coordinate um with staff probably on the Friday before, so the 24th.

That is though before your public input session.

So if we could, because the input session is so close to the work uh to the markup session, if we could get the ones that you already have in mind on that Friday, and then if anything changes or ads or whatever as a result of the public input session, we can certainly get that on Tuesday and just incorporate it.

But what we like to do is go ahead and have all of uh any proposed changes that the council may be thinking and what uh we often bring some administrative changes as well, and we'll go ahead and load up that spreadsheet so that we're ready to go and we can get all of that consolidated in time for that meeting.

Also, I just want to say that you know, I ideally what would happen at that markup session would be that anything that um a council member doesn't like in the budget, wants to see different in the budget, we would be bringing forward those items and having that conversation so that at the end of the day, we would create a budget that could be approved by each of you.

And so, really, as if there are things in there that are not um desirable, other things you want to see, that really um would be the time that we would create then a result where it could be supported.

I'm gonna and the other thing I'll say is as we have those changes, and what we'll request of you is if you wanted to add funding.

So if I'm a council member and I want to say, oh gosh, the finance department needs another hundred dollars, then I could say, you know, finance increase by a hundred dollars, but I would also then need to identify where is that gonna come from.

So I it would you know be helpful if each ad had the offset of where we would take that funding from or each decrease so that we come out balanced in the end, because that's what we're gonna have to do.

We're still gonna have to maintain a balanced budget.

So we if any ads, where would that be funded from?

Where would we pull the money around?

Because we have to sort of be rearranging the money within the amount of resources we have available.

Um Bailey has a question.

Okay, thank you.

Is what I'm not I'm not seeing here a time when we're get to talk about airport, some of those other things that are even significantly bigger than parks.

Um they're big chunks of this that we're not seeing in the same level of detail.

Is are we okay with that?

And um, I will indicate the detail is provided at the same level in the budget document.

However, uh we don't typically bring them to the work session to have them present because typically the general fund is the fund over which we have the most discretion, and so the one that we like to move around the most, as we're, for example, the airport has very specific revenue sources, and then you know very kind of structured way in which we have to spend it.

And we can absolutely have them come and present, and we can uh do that for any of the enterprises or any other portion of the budget that you would like to see.

We can certainly do that.

We can add it to a lunch.

Sure.

We're we're little apples and apples and oranges here, and you know, some of the you know fairly small apples we're focusing a lot of attention on, and there's some bigger oranges that we're not looking at at all.

And that's because those small apples on ourselves to be more controversial.

What's that?

Oh sometimes the small apples tend to be more uh draw more attention.

Yes.

We can add the enterprises to uh lunch.

Sure.

We'll start adding those to those as well.

For coming up in the next, yeah.

I I would I would be for the airport.

I just I just don't want to um lose sight of those other big things if they're all part of the budget.

Yes, the funds come from a different place.

We may not have as much say, but at the same time, we've had lots of questions about the airport and and sure and things.

So that's just one that was an easy example because I had when I had the slide up at the big piece of the pie versus a small piece of the pie better than apples and oranges, better analogy.

Should have used that.

We'll schedule them with you.

That sounds great.

Yeah, absolutely.

That'd be great.

Thank you.

Um the other thing I uh two more things.

One thing I wanted to also just make council aware of when we have the budget markup session, because that's the session where we're uh making final changes to the general fund budget, which then we create the budget ordinance based on those decisions.

That meeting is acts as the sort of introduct the work session where we introduce the item.

So typically on a normal council agenda, when we're bringing forward an item, we would bring it to a work session to talk about it, and then it would come later at a regular meeting for your vote.

Because of the timeline with those budget items, and when we have the markup session, that will serve as sort of the the work session introduction of those budget items, and we will have them attached to that work uh to the markup session meeting.

But because we don't have council's final decision on the budget ordinance in particular, we can't have that come because it would be the two days before the markup session.

So the markup session will act as sort of that work session introduction.

And the things that then that will kind of act as the mark the work session introduction will be of course the budget ordinance, which we will not have the sample of, but we will have final numbers as we come out of that markup session.

We have the salary schedule, which the city council um adopts by ordinance as well.

That salary schedule is the exact same one that's in the budget document, so there are no changes to that, but we're required to have council approve that by ordinance, as well as the mill levy certification.

And we've talked a little bit about what that mill levy um is going to look like for the city mill levy.

The other items that the council will approve as part of this uh budget process is the mill levies for the special improvement maintenance districts, those fall under parks, but mentioned them uh briefly.

They have property assessments attached to them.

Those uh the rate of that property tax does not change, so it's the same rate, Malevi rate, and the budget the dollars are approved in the main budget ordinance.

So we'll have um all of that kind of all packaged up and ready to go at that markup session, and then those will flow from the markup session to the first regular meeting in November, which is the 10th because it's a combined meeting.

Okay.

Then we did talk about the and um Chief Vasquez also mentioned the proposed new public safety technology surcharge that we're proposing, as well as the change in the alarm registration fee.

Both of those items are approved by city council, and we will be bringing those forward to the work session on the 27th, so that we can introduce those on that meeting, and then they will flow with the budget items to the two meetings in November for hopefully approval.

So I just wanted to make sure we got all those looped together.

And with that, um, I just want to say I really appreciate your participation and the time provided to review the budget and um have the conversation and ask the questions.

I appreciate it very much.

And I look forward to uh gaining anything that any proposed changes that the council may desire for the budget.

And if I don't see you before markup session, I'll see you then.

Well, thank you.

I will see you before then.

Thanks for all the work you've done in the extra sessions you've done at lunch.

It's been very, very helpful and I know appreciated by y'all.

Um and I know that's a lot more work than usual, but we really do appreciate the extra information.

Thank you.

I really appreciated those as well.

I really appreciate the time that you've provided so that we can have those sessions.

Thanks.

Excellent.

Okay.

Okay.

You're out early.

Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you.