The City of Dayton held its annual year-end finance committee briefing on February 5, 2026. City Manager, Budget Director Abby Patel Jones, and other officials presented the financial results for the general fund, aviation, and water departments for fiscal year 2025. The meeting covered revenue and expenditure performance, economic indicators, and future outlooks. Key highlights included a general fund surplus of $4.8 million, positive performance in non-airline revenue at the airport, and stable water and sanitary fund results.
Afternoon, commissioners. This is our annual, our year-end finance committee briefing. I believe we are are we also we also have our enterprise departments that will be um reporting out as well. So we'll start with general fund, then we'll go to aviation and then we'll go to water. We'll kick it over to Abby Patel Jones, our budget director to uh take it from here. Thank you, City Manager. Um, before started, um, I want to quickly introduce Roma Yango. Um, Roma is joining me today, and um, she will present the revenue slides. Um, she has joined management budget team recently, and so this is our first time presenting the information. We'll be nice, we'll be nice in that case. All right, we'll get started. Um, so this is the general fund statement. Uh, the top section of statement shows our 10 revenue categories, and the bottom section shows the expenditures. Starting with the revenue, overall revenues that you can see in the top right hand corner. Um, revenues went up 1.9% or $4.3 million compared to 2024. Um, while it's more of a modest growth than what we saw coming out of the pandemic years, you remember 21, 22, and 24, um, we saw quite large growth. Um, this is still a positive results, especially given the fact that we are seeing a decline in our larger source, which is income tax by 6.7 million dollars. Today we'll walk through several of the highlighted care categories, which are more visible in your printed version than on the screen here. Um those highlighted categories, we will go more into detail in just a little bit. Um, however, um, I do want to mention that eight of the 10 categories have increased year over year in the revenue section. The biggest gains are coming from property and other taxes, EMS fees, fines and forbids, and other revenue. Um, on the property tax side, I do want to mention that we are seeing that 10.7% increase. Um, that is primarily related to the millage change that took effect in 2025. So you may recall our 10 mil of property tax is into two. Um 4.5 mil prior to 2025 went to the general fund and 5.5 mil went to the bond retirement. Starting in 2025, the split is even where 5 mil is going towards general fund. And that's why we're seeing that big increase of 10.7% or almost $900,000 year over year. Another category that's worth calling out is the local government fund, which you can see has increased nearly 650% year over year. Um, this is largely due to the fact that we have met primary obligations that are set forth by the state related to the traffic enforcement camera revenue. The funding has essentially normalized in 2025. So 2025 reflects a full year of regular collections after traffic enforcement camera revenue has been reduced. The 4.3 million dollar growth is largely tied to the photo enforcement revenue, which is essentially recorded twice in the general fund. One is in the fines and forfeits category, and second, it's in the revenue category. If you recall, um, earlier this year we did the final transfer of $3.7 million from the photo enforcement fund that came over into the general fund, and that is recorded in the other revenue category. While fines and forfeits category reflects the revenue collected from traffic enforcement, which is now recorded directly into the general fund. We made this accounting shift to offset the reduction in the local government fund by posting the traffic enforcement camera revenue directly into the general fund. There is essentially no net impact to the general fund. Um and that's what we were trying to achieve. If we hadn't done that, um, we would have seen the reduction in the local government fund for the revenue collected from traffic number program, but we would not have seen the revenue collected from photo enforcement into the general fund. So this allows us to make that reduction pretty much even. Year over year, personnel cost increased by 4.8% or $7.3 million. And this is mostly due to the wage inflation and more field positions. But they are still tracking in line with the final budget with a budget variance of 0.5%. But even with that, we've got $4.5 million under budget or about 8.8% budget variance. So when you put it all together, sources exceeded uses by $4.8 million. This means we didn't have to utilize the use of cash reserve as we had planned, and we maintained flexibility to support future capital needs, equipment, and any other potential economic uncertainty that we may experience going into the next year. For context, I did want to point out that if you back out the photo enforcement transfer, we would have ended the year with $1 million positive. Really, that photo enforcement revenue that was transferred from the old photo enforcement fund is really driving most of that $4.8 million increase. Okay, now we'll dive deeper into our larger income tax net collection for income tax in 2025 increased by 6.7 million or 4.1 million dollars from 2024. However, one over made relatively stable.