Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The City Council of Coppell, Texas, met for a Budget Work Session on Tuesday, August 4, 2026, from 6:00 PM to 8:17 PM. The meeting was called to order by Mayor Wes Mays with all eight council members present. City Manager Mike Land and Director of Strategic Financial Engagement Kim Tiehen led a comprehensive review of the proposed Fiscal Year 2026-2027 budget, covering final certified property values, the proposed tax rate, adjustments to multiple funds, and critical discussions on service organization funding and operational cuts.
Good evening, everybody. Today is Tuesday, August 4th, 2026, and we're here for the budget work session of the City Council. We do have a quorum present. So I'm calling the meeting to order. Item number two on our agenda is citizens' appearance. We did not have anybody signed up to speak. So we'll skip over that. I do make my service social. But we do have brownies for reserve. There will be an opportunity to have an additional citizens' appearance at the end of the this night's session. Item number three is an introduction from Mr. Langer. An introduction. All right. So this evening, everything we're going to be talking about, and everything we've talked about these past few months and for the next several years is about implementing basically a community capacity action plan. You've heard us refer to it in different ways over the last couple of years. And this is just a reminder about our responsibility. Our responsibility not just to spend less, it is to preserve the community's capacity to thrive while adapting to long-term physical fiscal realities. Right? So that's what we've been talking about for the last several years. And this year you get to see some of that more in motion than you have in the previous years, even though in the previous years we've made reductions in our expenditures. Tonight is focused on certified values as provided by the Dallas County Appraisal District and the resulting proposed tax rate. The context is required in the City of Capell's charter that we submit a balanced budget for the 2027 fiscal year, and we'll be doing that tomorrow evening. I looked down to that row because that's the row that actually submits it. All right. Since 2017, I would say our budget story has been consistently pointing to a future that believes the state legislature will continue to ratchet down property tax revenues and severely restrict local government investments in its own community. With that understanding, the organization with the support of the city council has been planning for and implementing strategies that have slowed the growth of expenditures and set aside funds securing a solid foundation for decision making now and going forward. Our community, through various feedback opportunities, has told us that they continue that the continued investment in the city's infrastructure is the number one priority and should be reflected as such in building our budget. We recognize that a budget to some reflect a point in time in the present document. And importantly, for our collective efforts, the city council and staff specifically. We have used the budget as a piece of comp a piece of a complex puzzle whose framework is built around our five-year forecasting efforts. So our five-year forecasting efforts are extremely important to our success and have been in this community since the 1990s. These efforts, as previously described, for the last several years start with the council's direction based on what we know. Limitation on revenues by the state from all sources won't keep up with inflation and influence uh with influence inflation influenced expenditures now and going forward. So what were those assumptions? The assumptions were that Rule 334 regarding sales tax sourcing is in effect, using the 3.499 increase in previous years property tax revenue, strategic use of general funds and fund balance, and we have some of that uh going on this year as well for one-time expenses, maintaining the commitment to COPL's workforce status to the council's selected benchmark cities, and our expenditure strategies, which we've said over and over again. Reorganizing roles as vacancies occur, leveraging technology to handle routine tasks, reevaluating vendor services and contracts, and thoughtfully stopping activities that bring limited value to the community. We are having candid conversations today so that the decisions made by council today lessen the potential of difficult discussions in the future. Because of the five-year financial forecast and corresponding discipline in the budgeting and implementation process, the city council has created tremendous financial flexibility going forward. The council has successfully followed a plan that clearly delineates the difference between funding ongoing maintenance and operations and one-time expenditures. And council will hear tonight, final certified values, and a summary of previously provided directions from council on what is included in the final recommended budget that will be submitted tomorrow. I close with this question prior to turning it over to Kim for her presentation. What kind of conversations do you want to have today versus being forced to have in developing the 2030 budget during the summer of 2029? And with that, I turn it over to Council. Thank you. And thank you, Mayor and Council. So this evening, I am going to share with you some changes and the information provided to you prior to this meeting.