City Council Budget Work Session: General Fund Overview - July 14, 2025
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City Council Budget Work Session: General Fund Overview - July 14, 2025
Mayor Buffaloe called the FY26 Budget Work Session to order at approximately 2:00 PM on Monday, July 14, 2025, in the Council Chamber at City Hall. Six council members were present. Finance Director Matthew Lue led the presentation on the General Fund budget, with support from staff including Economist Deep Debnath, Budget Officer Andrea Greer, Budget Analyst Meganne Montesinos, and Assistant Finance Director Jim McDonald. The session was the first of three budget work sessions; the next will cover enterprise funds (Wednesday) and a recap (Saturday). The meeting adjourned at approximately 3:42 PM.
Discussion Items
- Budget Philosophies: Staff contrasted municipal fund accounting with state/federal 'use it or lose it' budgeting. Unspent funds remain in the fund balance for future use. Councilor Foster asked about multi-year over-budgeting; Director Lue responded that they have tightened budgets and used excess reserves for one-time purchases (e.g., $5 million for vehicles).
- General Fund Overview: The General Fund's expenditures increased 29% (from $105M to $136M) from FY23 to FY26, while revenue increased 19%, largely due to ARPA funding and the class/comp study that added ~$10M in annual expenses. The FY26 budget is projected to exceed revenue by ~$3.5 million, using reserves above target; the FY25 shortfall is estimated at under $1 million.
- Revenue Sources: Sales and use tax together constitute ~30% of General Fund revenue; adding property and other local taxes brings local taxes to ~50%. Use tax is coming in above budget, offsetting weaker sales tax. Marijuana tax is forecast at just over $600,000 for FY26, down from prior years. Cigarette, telecommunications, and cable TV taxes are declining. Union Electric and Boone Electric gross receipts (PILOT-like) are expected to rebound.
- Public Improvement Fund (PIF) Transfer: The proposed FY26 budget includes halting the transfer of 2% of the 1% General Fund sales tax to the Public Improvement Fund, redirecting that revenue (about $1 million) to the General Fund. Council members requested examples of past PIF projects and historical data for Saturday's session. Staff noted this will be evaluated on a year-by-year basis.
- Expenditure Priorities: Personnel services account for 70% of General Fund expenses (~$96 million). The largest departmental allocations are Police, Fire, Public Works (streets/sidewalks), and Public Health. Staff highlighted that outside public safety, many departments are partially funded by other sources (e.g., transportation sales tax, grants).
- Intragovernmental and Other Fees: The General Fund recovers costs via General & Administrative (G&A) fees ($14 million of $16.5 million intragovernmental revenue), Public Communications fees, and Facilities fees. Examples include Law, Finance, HR, and City Manager services billed to enterprise funds, as well as creative services and custodial services. Council asked for detailed calculation examples.
- Public Health Impacts: Director Rebecca Roesslet reported funding cuts: the Community Health Worker program will end September 30, 2025; the building remodel project is on hold (~$500K); school-based flu vaccines are discontinued for the first time since 2009; HIV prevention funding was temporarily suspended but reinstated; public health emergency preparedness funding was cut to 50%. Vaccination rates in schools have declined from ~7,500 to ~4,700 over two years.
- Police/Parks/Airport Changes: Four park ranger and two airport safety officer positions will become sworn police officer positions under a specialized assignment model. This aligns with Post-certification supervision requirements and addresses staffing challenges. The change carries a modest cost increase (under $12,000 per position).
- New FTEs: Proposed new positions include two Divert social services positions (Public Health), one code enforcement specialist (Housing & Neighborhood Services), and six police department positions (two sworn airport officers, two civilian internal affairs investigators, one civilian criminal investigations investigator, one property evidence technician). Council noted this totals nine new FTEs, though the minutes state '8 new FTEs'—a discrepancy noted.
- Budget Schedule: The first read of the budget is scheduled for August 2, 2025. Staff will provide requested follow-up data on Saturday, including historical staffing/vacancy trends, PIF project examples, fee calculation breakdowns, outsourced service costs, and NDI request versus approval comparisons.
Key Outcomes
- No formal votes were taken; this was a work session to educate council and gather input.
- Staff will compile requested information for the Saturday recap session, including:
- Staffing and vacancy data (FY22/23 vs FY25/26), retention, and class/comp impacts.
- Public Improvement Fund program/project examples.
- Breakdown of G&A, Public Communications, and Facilities fee calculations.
- Sales, use, and marijuana tax historical comparison.
- Outsourced versus in-house service costs (e.g., vehicle maintenance, contractual services).
- List of approved vs requested New Decision Items (NDIs).
- The next budget work session on enterprise funds is scheduled for Wednesday, with a recap on Saturday morning.
Meeting Transcript
It is a work session, and so I do not bang the gavel for work sessions. I know it's here and everything. Just teasing me. Uh good afternoon. Uh this is our first of three budget work sessions uh for fiscal year 26 for the city of Columbia. I believe today's presentation is on our general fund. As a reminder, we're doing three of these. Today's is over the general fund. Uh on Wednesday, we'll do one over our enterprise funds, and then on Saturday morning, regretfully agreed to do a Saturday morning one. Uh, we'll be doing uh kind of the recap of all of the conversations had. So thank you all for being here. I see a lot of city staff. Thank you all. Sorry about Saturday. And I'll kick this over to Matthew Lou or DeKarlin. I don't know. Whoever. DeKarlin, you want to go first? Sure. And so ideally what we like to do is we're trying to be a little bit more community of exactly what's in our budget, how our budget is situated, and how our budget is established. So it's part of the conversation of really getting people to understand our budget process. So we'll start off with the general fund discussion. Wednesday we'll talk about our enterprise, and then we'll get back on Saturday to kind of talk about I know Saturday budget meetings a little much, but that's okay. It'll allow us to better understand our budget, understand our budget process, understand our budget priorities. So we're all moving on the same direction. And so with that, I'll let Matt Lou talk about our general fund. So we wanted to make this more of a conversation with you all to get your input on things within the budget, even though the general fund is well, you you'll see as we go along. Um so we we will have some educational pieces along with uh the actual budget uh for the general fund. So one to kind of start off with our budget philosophies. Uh and this is something that that we get a lot and that we try to explain to people as well. Um state and fed budget philosophies sort of give municipalities uh um wouldn't say a bad name, but they give us a rep kind of mix us in that same bag. And uh one of the issues is that in the state and the Fed, they have a use it or lose it type of uh budgeting that they do. So at the end of the at the end of the year, end of the fiscal year, it it lends itself to spending sprees uh to purchase items to to basically use up that budget because if they don't, they will lose that money. That is something that we do not do. We don't take part in that type of uh budgeting. Everything within our budget is budgeted within a fund. And so at the end of the year, if those if that money is not spent within that fund, it goes back into the sp into the fund to be spent for another fiscal year. And so it's it's not a use it or lose it, it's a use it. Uh if you don't use it now and you can use it later more of that type of mentality. Betsy has a question. Yes. Yes. So how many years? I mean, this sounds like what you're doing is you're rolling forward funds to the next year, which is fine within reason. But at what point do you look at that and say, I guess we over budgeted a lot for the last five years, and now we have an extra million in that account. I mean, do you then not what do you do with that then? So that's that's something that we've been looking at. And so when I got here, we really had that issue when we had that uh $50 million above the required reserve. And so what we've done is did better of tightening those budgets, only putting in the budget what we expect to spend, and then we're trying to get to a place where when we need to spend more money, we come with amendments uh to make those budgets actually match. Uh so this is something that we had issues with in the past, but I think we're doing we've done a lot better uh job at that.
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