All right, we are back on DCTV.

Welcome to our finance audit and budget committee.

Uh chair by myself, Commissioner Ted Teary.

And joined by committee members, Commissioner Michelle Long Spears and Commissioner Shekara Johnson.

And we have a about an hour today, committee members.

Let's jump right in.

We'll do our meeting minutes from the August 11th Fab meeting, item 1282.

Open the floor for a motion.

Move to approve.

Second.

All right.

All in favor, is you can say aye.

Aye.

Chair vote side.

Motion carries.

All right.

We did a couple discussion items on the agenda.

We did hear from Mr.

Calvin Hicks, who actually isn't able to make it this uh afternoon, so we'll skip that one.

Um let's invite a TJ, budget director extraordinaire to present on the mid-year budget adjustments preliminary timeline discussion.

We're having the meeting about the meeting before the meeting.

Take it away.

Right.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

So uh what I have is just a short presentation just to kind of tee up where we are at this point in the budget year.

Um so some of this uh is gonna look pretty familiar because it's it's recycling some slides from our uh millage rate discussions.

We have the uh clicker for the slides.

Oh yes, DC TV.

There we go.

They'll click for you in the meantime.

All right.

So uh the first two slides are just showing the tax digest trend.

Um so again, these these were straight from the the presentations we did at during the millage rate um adoption.

So you can see, especially on the second one, that the total change in the last two years has been significantly lower than what it had been as the average going back to 2018.

So we're in a very flat tax digest environment where we're not seeing the revenue group growth that we've seen in recent years due to the tax digest.

So even with the backdrop of the the increase to the millage rate, we still don't have a lot of additional revenue this year that we've had in past years when millage rates or the tax digest has come in higher than anticipated.

And then um third slide is showing our fund balance.

And uh what you'll see there is the the green bars, that is our unrestricted fund balance, and then the blue bars are our e-host reserve.

Um and you can see going 2017, we were at eight eighty-one million dollars.

Uh we got all the way up to about 169 million in 2022, not including the e host reserve.

Um the last few years we've we've tailed off a bit where we're now um basically flat from where we were last year at 119 million dollars versus 118.6 million in last year's.

Uh what we have done though is we've been able to uh distribute the e-host reserve, so that's no longer part of our fund balance, so that won't be showing up there.

And hopefully we have positioned ourselves where we'll be able to start building back that fund balance in future years.

Um but just right now at this point of the year, we're not um you know at a point where we feel like we have a lot of you know disposable income, if you will.

Um to go to to other things outside you know coming out of the the operating budget.

Um then the next slide is just talking about some of the items we're looking for for FY27.

Uh the big one at the top is our paying class study implementation.

We don't have any final numbers from that, um, but we do expect that to have a pretty hefty price tag on it.

Um also up below that is we haven't had cost of living adjustments for the last two years.

Um we're also looking to continue please hiring as well as annualization of the fire compensation increases.

Um I think as everyone knows, fuel prices and utilities are going up.

Uh we're looking for funding for capital improvements.

Health insurance is kind of an unknown at this point, what that will do as well as pension and if we want to go to uh enriching the pension plan, that's gonna be additional costs as well.

So all this is just to say we have you know a kind of a laundry list of things that we're looking to do, and we're gonna have to figure out a way that we can accomplish all these things within the confines of what we're able to get through uh revenue growth from the tax digest.

Um one thing I will mention here is that we've gone through a lot of our old capital items to try to find any money that we're able to repurpose, and we should have an agenda item on the next uh go-round of some of the findings from that, um, which will free up some money for other capital needs, um, which we prefer to use that over any of the operating funding for you know any capital needs at this point until we're able to finalize our five year capital plan.

So and finally, uh, this is just a tentative calendar for what we see the FY27 budget process to look like.

Um so we're trying to kick off that process really now.

Uh actually, as we've been in here today, I've sent out uh an email to departments that we're having a training on Thursday.

Um the official kickoff will probably be a little bit later than that, just as we're trying to finish up some of our preparation internally in the budget office.