The governance and intergovernmental relations committee of Denver City Council.

Thanks for joining us for the discussion.

The governance and intergovernmental relations committee starts now.

Everyone, it is Tuesday, November 18.

This is the uh governance committee of Denver City Council.

I'm Amanda Sawyer.

I have the honor of representing the residents of District 5 and chairing this committee.

Uh, we've got an action item and then a uh council conversation happening today.

So before we get started with those, we are going to do a round of introductions, and I'm gonna start to my left.

Thank you.

Amanda Sanderbone, right West Denver District 1.

Uh, good morning, Darren Watson, fine, district nine.

Good morning, Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver District 4.

Uh good morning, Paul Cashman, South Denver District 6.

Good morning, Serena Konsalski.

When are you council members at large?

Carvin Flynn, Southwest Denver's District 2.

Stacy Gilmore, District 11.

Fantastic.

Thank you.

Well, we are gonna start um with 2518, 91 and 92 today, uh, which are our annual appropriations.

Um, so I'm gonna turn it over to the Department of Finance.

Take it away, Justin.

Introduce yourselves, please.

Thank you, uh, Chair Sawyer, Vice Chair Cashman, members of city council.

My name is Justin Sykes.

I have the privilege of serving as the director of the city's budget and management office, and we are grateful to be here this morning at the governance committee to present on the year-end supplemental appropriation requests.

This is something that around this time of year we typically do uh to ensure that agencies are able to stay within budget.

The specific council actions that we are presenting on, uh, there are two.

The first is to rescind about $13.9 million dollars from the general fund contingency budget, reappropriate that amount into six different other appropriations, and then also to supplementally appropriate two general government SRFs adding budget to those funds.

There's a section second action item to supplementally appropriate five million dollars for the Denver Arts and Venues Special Revenue Fund.

To start, I want to begin with the city's financial outlook.

In the current year 2025, we are tracking about 60 million dollars less in revenues than we had predicted a year ago.

Much of that is due to sales and use taxes being lower than we had projected, due to the tariffs and economic uncertainty that we've seen over the last nearly year, and to offset that projected lower amount of revenues uh than the amount we built our 2025 budget based on.

There are three main strategies for the current year.

There are the furloughs and the hiring freeze, which were announced back in May.

Additionally, that third strategy would be to preserve some of our general fund contingency budget in the 2026 budget book for 2025.

We reference a target savings amount of 35 million dollars.

Given where we are at so far this year, I believe we are on target to meet that $35 million savings amount from these three strategies.

Year to date in the general fund, we've saved about six and a half million dollars from furloughs.

The target there is 10 million, and for the citywide furlough next week, Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, we will save approximately two million dollars more.

The second strategy is the hiring freeze, for which we've saved a little under six million dollars year to date, even though that hiring freeze has now been lifted following the approval of the 2026 budget.

Uh, it's still gonna take some time to actually hire people into those positions that are now moving forward.

And so we believe we will save another million dollars or so uh between now and the end of the year uh or early next year, when many of those positions will begin to be filled.

Finally, if the supplemental appropriation request out of the general fund were to be approved, we would still have a little over 20 million dollars available in contingency combined.

Those three amounts add up to uh just under 38 million dollars, so above that $35 million dollar savings target that we had provided in the 2026 budget book for the current year.

Just as a quick reminder, the purpose of general fund contingency uh is to meet unmet uh needs to cover unexpected events.

It's something that by charter is required to be set each budget at 2% of estimated general fund expenditures for the 2025 budget.

There is $34,551,000 in general fund contingency, and we have not tapped into general fund contingency at all yet this year.

If the supplemental appropriation request were to be approved, we would use about 13.9 million of that uh 34.55 million, which would leave about 20.6 million dollars remaining.

This is a historical look back at how much we have spent out of general fund contingency going back to 2018.

You can see that in 2024 last year, we spent all but about a million dollars from general fund contingency, and a big reason for that was early on in the year last year.

We went to supplemental for 10 million dollars for the newcomer response, and then in September went to supplemental for $8 million to support the temporary rental and utility assistance program for TRUAM.

In 2023, we spent essentially all of contingency through several rounds of supplementals, and that year as well, use contingency to support the newcomer response.

Here is a listing of those six proposed general fund supplemental appropriations for 2025.

You can see the agency, a description of the reason for that proposed supplemental appropriation, and then the proposed dollar amount.

Uh is the highest, and so I'm grateful to have Chief Thomas and the Department of Safety's Chief Financial Officer, Shine Cummings here at the table as well to speak to that.

Uh and with that, I will turn it over to Chine to share more about the proposed police department supplement.

Thank you, Justin, and good morning, everyone.

Um Shinee Cummings Chief Financial Officer for Department of Public Safety.