Okay, it's 6 30 on Tuesday, November the 18th.

I will call this ways and means committee meeting to order.

If you please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands.

One nation under God, indivisible, liberty, and justice for all.

City Clerk, can you please take roll?

Alderman Zavist.

Alderman Morrison.

Oh, he's excused, right?

Excuse.

Alderman Ballas.

Here.

Alder Person now.

Here.

Alderman Hall.

Here.

Alderman Maybe.

Here.

Alderman Sebin.

Alder Roman Jadala.

I'm thinking in route, but we'll find out.

And Mayor Shipley.

Here.

Here.

Okay, everyone.

Do you have enough?

You can't.

Very good.

Next item on our agenda is public comments slash reports.

Anyone care to uh speak before the ways and means committee?

Or does anyone have a report?

Okay.

Good.

So we're moving on to move new business then, uh, which will be the discussion of the proposed 2026 budget.

Um Mr.

Simpson has provided us uh with that budget along with uh his traditional uh transmittal memo as well as several other attachments.

Um I guess Mr.

Simpson, can you just kind of give us a real quick update on the new software that we're using and just how has that worked um and how will it help us uh going forward?

Sure.

Well um I so the software using is something called ClearGov.

And uh major credit goes to our finance officer Sarah Fleming for taking the lead and implementing it.

Uh I know it was a massive undertaking.

Uh we started to look into implementation over the summer.

Personnel budget building, uh building out the template for all these things.

You know, it was a multi-month long process, uh, and she did a great job.

So the nice thing is uh this is gonna save us a lot of time internally in preparing the budget in the future because all of this structure now exists on a perpetual basis going forward.

Uh probably the uh best aspect from my perspective is it replaces the spreadsheet Excel based system that we had in the past, which wasn't really a system, it was just a bunch of interconnected spreadsheets.

And if you hit the wrong number and changed a formula, or if you added a column or hit a column and you forgot that you hit a column in a prior year, we were you you would you would always have to chase down why um your columns didn't add up or why one sheet disagreed with another sheet.

So it was kind of a nightmare just in terms of making sure that all the numbers were accurate.

And now with this cloud-based system, as long as you type in the number correctly, it's correct everywhere else it appears in the budget document.

So uh aside from the time savings and just the reliability aspect, uh what this also helps us with is the overall budget presentation, which you're seeing the proposed draft budget version uh of the clear gov work product tonight, but the final budget document is something that will be much more robust as you're accustomed to seeing with our traditional annual budget document.

I think beneficially it's going to be very friendly to use on the website and easy for anyone that wants to to really dig into the budget through the website for an average user.

It's queryable, you can run tables and charts and all sorts of things.

So that's going to be a bonus for transparency above and beyond some of the operational advantages it provides.

Very good.

Um, somehow you you managed to uh make those nightmare spreadsheets in the past work, at least we we assume you did.

So yeah, as far as the the report that we have here today, I think it actually um seems easier to understand and read.

Um although I I did make some suggestions on you know fonts and important things like that.

But I'm sure we'll get that worked out.

Um, so I I think we'll kind of do this as we've done in the past and really just kind of go page by page uh through the budget, and uh when I get to a page that uh you have a question on, um, just hit your light or throw something at me and uh we'll stop.