The meeting of the Cook County Independent Revenue Forecasting Commission will now come to order.

I will now call the role.

Chair.

Here.

Commissioner Dabala here.

Commissioner Mayerman.

Here.

Commissioner Phelan.

Here.

Chair, you have a quorum.

Good evening, everyone, and welcome to our meeting of the Independent Revenue Forecasting Commission.

And my first is Chair.

It's nice to be here with all of you tonight.

Before reviewing tonight's agenda items, I wish to recognize the hard work and collective efforts of everyone in this room, the Bureau of Finance Team and the dynamic commissioners.

Thank you for everything you do.

Today we're going to discuss some potential recommendations of the IRFC, which will not be finalized until August.

Additionally, we will provide quarterly updates, which include updates on ARPA sustainability.

We are also going to go through some exploratory scenarios, assessing methods to grow existing revenues.

And we can get started with the meeting.

The first item on the agenda is the approval of the minutes from the meeting of June 30th, 2026.

Chair, we need a motion to approve the minutes to proceed.

Is there a motion to approve the minutes?

Yes.

Is there a second?

Okay.

Okay.

The motion to approve has been moved by Commissioner Phelan and second by Commissioner Merriman.

All of those in favor signify by saying yay.

All of those opposed signify by saying nay.

Chair, uh the A's have it.

And I'm sorry, and the meeting minutes will be filed with the Cook County Secretary of the Board.

The next item on the agenda is a presentation from the team covering quarterly updates, the county sales tax, and the preliminary IRFC recommendations.

Thank you, Angela.

So we'll have some updates this evening on some of our deliverables as they relate to the uh principles of the IRC here and recommendations of this body, which we'll get into on the next slide.

So regarding um the impact of um OBA, the OPA provisions on the Health Enterprise Fund.

Uh we recently analyzed the past uh budget from the state.

Uh there wasn't uh a lot of information in there that would change any guidance as far as forecasting goes for the health fund.

So, you know, we'll be continuing to monitor uh any information that comes down to the state continuing to work, uh partner with our friends at the hospital.

Um is that the state is continuing to fund the health benefit for immigrant seniors, their budget, uh, which we have built in.

Uh we have reflected that in our uh June forecast.

Um, ARPA sustainability.

Um the county is currently fine-tuning its allocation strategy for the ARPA reserves, which it had set up a couple years ago.

Um, and then revenue growth options, which we'll dive into on the next couple of slides.

So uh this year, the team we conducted an analysis of county tax revenues, uh identifying reasons for uh slower declining growth in some revenues, understanding uh why they're stagnant, uh, and we shared some updates at the January and April meetings uh on our findings.

Um back to slides here, we'll walk through some uh exploratory scenarios uh what modifications would look like to uh existing taxes in the county's budget.

Okay, so as Angela noted, um we'll be going through some um of the county's revenue sources in this section, uh exploring some scenarios, what different modifications and the estimated revenue impacts would potentially look like, as well as providing some background into our methodologies to estimate these impacts.

Um, and so the first revenue uh here that we looked at is sales tax, seeing what a potential modification would look like uh in the county sales tax.

So the this the county's current sales tax rate is 1.75%.

And so we have a scenario of here of what that would look like if it were to increase a quarter percent to 2%.

Um so to estimate uh what the revenue impact would be from this modification, uh, and we'll also be talking about this the sales tax a bit more uh in the presentation.

Uh, but we use our current sales tax model, which is a regression model that is used to predict the sales tax base.

Uh we adjusted the tax rate to 2% uh effective January 1, 2027, uh, which would be right now the earliest that the county would be able to implement that change uh per per state uh uh uh statute.

Um so this January 1 effective date would mean that the county would begin seeing an impact from the modification in April of 2027, uh, which accounts for the lag from when the state uh who administers the tax for us collects it uh and eventually disperses it to the county.

Uh a key assumption in this modification is no change in the purchasing behavior of consumers uh from this potential rate increase.

Uh and so the projected revenue impact from this modification here uh is that we're estimating uh fiscal year 2027 would be approximately 141 million dollars higher from the from the current uh projection of the the prior forecasts of the sales tax.

Uh, but then the impact would be about 220 to 230 million in 2028 and into the out years.

So this full year impact of 24 million, it's about 14% higher uh than the uh forecaster projections for 2028 and to the out years.

Um the um the sales tax rate is gonna go up, or maybe I think it might have gone up today.

Right.

It uh yeah, yeah.