Speaker numbers apply only to this recording. Names come from transcript evidence. “Possibly” marks uncertain attribution.
Chair Banks convened the Finance Committee hearing on October 7, 2026, to discuss the city's 2026 operating budget status, the administration's mid-year financial and sustainability report, the 2026 Capital Budget overview, and related legislation. Council President Harden provided extensive opening remarks criticizing the administration's lack of transparency and recurring use of short-term fixes, while administration officials presented progress on expenditure reductions and projected a year-end surplus. The hearing also featured presentations from the city auditor on revenue trends and upcoming bond sale, and two pieces of legislation aimed at improving budgeting for police and fire overtime and restricting the use of the Income Tax Set-Aside (ITSA) fund. Public comments addressed neighborhood service concerns and staffing capacity.
I will call this Finance Committee hearing to order. Thank you all for joining us today. Before I begin, I would like to thank my colleagues, our administration partners, and the auditor for joining us this morning. This hearing is a convening of the Finance and Governance Committee to discuss various financial topics, including the status of the city's 2026 operating budget, the administration's mid year financial and sustainability report that was provided to Council, as well as a snapshot of the 2026 Capital Budget and other uh topics that we will discuss. So, unlike some of the other hearings that folks are typically used to at Council where it's just one thing that we're focused on, uh it will be a kind of finance committee uh orama, if you will, today. So thank you all for being here with us. Uh, we will start off with a presentation from our Department of Finance and Management, followed by presentations from uh our auditor, uh, council, and a second capital budget uh focused presentation from our Department of Finance uh in that order. After the presentation and QA, we will go to the public comment and closing remarks. Um, with that, before I move into it, because I know we're going to be here a while. Are there any opening remarks from my colleagues? Council President. Thank you, Chair Banks, and uh thank you for your leadership as we navigate these complicated issues. I also want to uh shout out, and I know you will to uh your team and uh Mr. J.P. Dorval, uh, who has uh been an amazing uh to work with and in your leadership as you uh picked a crazy day for your last day at council. Um talking about budgets and finance can make people's eyes glaze over. So I just want to provide a reminder of how we got here today. All year, council has been concerned about the budget in our final hearing of the mayor's proposed budget in February, we use the word unserious. We believe that there were significant unanswered questions about whether that budget was sustainable. We raised concerns about the assumptions being made, the gaps that could emerge, and whether the city was making the difficult decisions necessary to remain financially stable. And I said that I was only comfortable passing the budget if the administration agreed to form with us a citywide financial sustainability committee to help make the hard decisions together to bring balance to this budget. The administration backed out of that commitment, instead inviting just one member to participate in some internal meetings that they were having, and not including either our previous or current city auditor. And my understanding that those meetings ended this past summer. Around that time, the administration sent to council ordinances to authorize up to 1.2 billion dollars in debt to pay for projects from last summer's capital budget. But what we heard from the city auditor and from our city's consultant, the firm PFM Financial Advisors, was tremendous concern that the city could face a credit downgrade if we issued that much debt. So instead, we referred those ordinances back to committee. Council next held a hearing on the budget on June 18, when at the time police and fire had nearly used up all of their overtime for the year, and we were looking at a deficit of at least 15 million dollars. That hearing didn't provide a lot of answers, but at the time they promised a report by the end of July with their plans. Council sent a letter outlining what we'd want to learn from that plan. We asked questions such as what are the tangible and achievable actions you will take to identify $15.5 million in savings, which was the size of the deficit at that time. We asked about major expenses that have been deferred or offloaded to other funding sources or reductions in external grants and contracts. We asked how the administration planned to approach the capital budget in a way that would both protect our credit rating and avoid unreasonable increases to Columbus water and power rates for our customers. But the report, which came a month late on August 24th, didn't answer any of those questions. Instead, it offered vague information that lacked specificity. It also didn't align with earlier information the administration had provided about how it would plan to settle the deficit through a combination of two strategies. First, taking advantage of State Bureau worker compensation rebate to cities that would happen this year, which is akin to uh winning a lottery ticket. And second, pulling the rest out of the income tax set-aside fund or it's uh, which is our short-term reserves fund that we use to pay for debt services. This not only hurts our credit rating, but it reduces the size of subsequent capital budgets. And while the administration continued to insist that there were no genuine issues, we saw the cancellation of a decade-long planned courthouse. Meanwhile, staff across departments tell council that when there's not someone from the mayor's office or finance in the meeting, that they don't have any clarity or insight into what's going on on their own budgets. They tell us the hiring freeze implemented to say money is being very selectively and loosely applied, and they urge us to keep asking questions. So now we sit here on the cusp of the third quarter review. Council is eager to understand the current state of the deficit.