On this Saturday morning July 19th, 2025.

This is our third in our fiscal year 26 budget work session.

All funds as well as uh probably answering some of the questions that were asked at our previous two work sessions.

So I'm assuming I'm kicking it over to Finance Director Matthew Liu.

I I'm sorry, I didn't have the slides pulled up, but morning everyone.

Um we do have uh a little bit more of an agenda today.

So uh what we'll do first is we'll go through uh some population which will lead into our trends for sales tax and use tax.

Uh we'll have a little education and fund discussions.

Um then we'll go into the actual fiscal year 26 budget, and then uh finally we'll get into some of the questions that that you all asked.

So some of the contractual services, uh personnel, things like that, and then follow uh end it with water and light and the requested information on the uh rates and the changes that may occur.

So I'll walk I'll walk you guys through some of this uh population assumption and some sales tax, how that information goes to the sales tax as well as some of our other assumption on our revenue forecast based on population.

Uh we put the graph from actual originally I think more than 100 years.

And you can and then the table shows uh last 10 years of data which we opt in from the ACS American Community Survey, uh Census Bureau.

Uh in short, we are seeing on an average around 1.17% annual growth in population, and that's kind of our key assumption when we go to the property tax on and other revenue um assumptions.

Yeah, um I think it's very important to look at how fast uh Columbia has grown.

And this is just in the past 10 years where we've increased our population by almost 15,000 residents.

And so that's something that we need to keep in mind as we start to look towards the future at how fast we're growing in the the amenities and different things we need within our community and this is also kind of kind of uh showing how the population is spread out by age and this uh and on the on the left side we have by uh kind of another way of showing and as we all expected college towns are median population is between that age of the age of 20 to 24 and more female than male.

Matthew, before you go on, um something that um not the uh the previous slide if you would um we're over here um for this one something I think that would be useful, and I don't think it's in our slides this morning, um, would be to look at um also like our staffing levels to correspond with these population growth.

Um and I think especially by in DeCarlin, we've talked about this before, by different department as well, like the police department, streets department.

I mean, like all of that.

That I think that would be an interesting information for us.

So we have most of that information available in our uh community trend manual.

So there is some stats on policing.

Uh it gets a little bit further into the the community and and how we're built.

Okay, perfect.

Thank you.

And we will release that uh document probably at the end of this month.

Yeah, yeah.

And so we'll we'll present it at a council meeting.

Okay, thank you.

We'll make sure to highlight that part then we'll get to the thank you.

Okay, sales and use tax.

So here are breakdown of sales and use tax by share and by fund.

One thing I did want to point out is what we discussed last time is that public improvement fund.

And so in the past few years, what we've done is we've took two percent of that general fund sales tax and put it towards public improvement.

And so this year what we're proposing is not to do that and keeping the one percent whole within the general fund.

So I got a few more slides we can go over to kind of show you what that looks like for the public improvement fund.

So here's a proposed uh budget for the public improvement fund.

Uh as you can see, there's still around a million dollars uh estimated that we'll bring in in revenue and only about 300,000 in expenses.

Uh we should have a pretty good fund balance uh within that account as well.

And so we'll just monitor it as we go along uh to see if we will need to bring that money back or if something comes uh something comes up within a community where we need to bring that funding back into this fund.

Yeah, Valerie.

Or perhaps during a different budget talk, what the um expenses are, the total expenditures is that part of our CIP discussion?

Uh no, so I believe we have Oh, I'm looking okay.

So um these are the projects that are currently in.

I'm not sure.

Uh is this for 25 or is this for 26?

Okay.

These are these are so your uh what uh what is in that budget is the public arts maintenance uh for 25,000 dollars a year.

Uh the stormwater best management practices or BMP maintenance for 170.

I believe those are annual appropriations that go towards uh both of those.

And then uh usually streets has something to do with the development fees, and so what's in there for fiscal year 26 is uh Fairview and Chapel Hill intersection improvements.

Yeah, Don, you had a question.

Oh, I do.

Um I apologize.

Can we back up two slides?

Yes.

Okay.

Proposed uh sales tax rate, you've got zero.

And then if you go forward one slide, you're showing that we're going to be putting or proposed revenue of $900,000.