Mayor, we are now recording.

Thank you.

Good evening.

And we will now call to order the March 5th special meeting of the Edmonds City Council.

We have one item of business, which is a presentation on the Mount Lake Terrace Fiscal Sustainability Task Force results as a little bit of context.

Mont Lake Terrace recently partnered with Baker Tilly.

They are a global financial advisory firm.

And they were contracted to help analyze the city's current financial situation and then create a vision on how to generate a plan for overcoming their current challenges and then build a long-term financial stability.

So given that there's more than a few similarities of financial realities between Edmonds and Mount Lake Terrace, Council President Dash had thought that it might be good if council members that felt good that council members might actually appreciate and benefit from hearing directly from the Baker Tilly project consultants and find out more about their process, how they managed it, and how they also worked with a task force.

And so we made that request and they quite graciously uh offered to participate in tonight's meeting.

So that's what this is all about.

Um, they uh will do a brief presentation, and then we will open it up uh to questions um from council members.

Uh the meeting is scheduled just as an FYI to keep your eye on the clock.

Obviously, you can extend if council wishes to, uh, but the meeting was scheduled till six o'clock.

And I believe we have Matt, Steve, and Michael with us, and they can uh go into further introductions and um start their presentation whenever they are ready.

Gentlemen.

Great, great.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor.

Appreciate it.

Um like the the mayor said, my name is Matt Bubnis.

I'm with Baker Tilly, a director of Baker Tilly.

I have um two of my colleagues joining me this evening.

Um, apologies for the scheduling change.

Our colleague Andy Bellnip is dealing with some uh family medical issues and uh wasn't able to attend tonight.

Uh, but um on some level, it's it's almost best because we have the two folks who worked with Mount Lake Terrace uh who are with us presenting tonight.

Um, Steve Toller, um, who's uh in the process of an extended retirement uh from Baker Tilly uh as of late last year and is graciously uh helping us with some of the transition.

And then we have Michael Perkins with us as well, um, who is a senior manager on our practice and uh was on the ground and doing a lot of the community engagement with Mount Lake Terrace too.

Um so what I plan I'm doing this evening is spending the first couple of minutes.

I'll walk through our methodology and approach um in terms of fiscal sustainability planning.

Uh then I will turn it over to Michael and Steve, and they will walk through further uh more of a case study on Mount Lake Terrace specifically, uh, so you get a better sense as to how uh not only the fiscal sustainability plan worked with them, but also their uh task force that was designed and was integral uh to that process as well.

So uh let me uh start my presentation here and try to share my screen.

Uh one second, sorry.

Lose so many screens here when I do this.

So where's the share?

There we go.

Sorry, we're used to teams on our end, so I don't uh always remember where the buttons are.

So there we go.

So all right, hopefully everybody can see my screen.

We can.

Good, very good.

Just want to make sure, otherwise, you get too far down the road and no one sees what you're talking about.

So uh so for forecast action, that's how we talk more about fiscal sustainability planning.

So um, let me advance the slide here.

There we go.

Um, so just kind of a quick overview in terms of what fiscal sustainability planning is.

It's really a system and a process um in terms of bringing pieces together of the financial management strategic planning processes and other processes you likely already have in place or items that you have in place, and how do we really help facilitate better decision making uh in terms of overall financial resiliency for an organization, city, town, county, school district, or otherwise, in terms of being more proactive in terms of decision making as opposed to being reactive, which can be the case a lot of the times with budget-related decisions or financial related decisions, trying to avoid uh getting to the edge of the proverbial cliff and staring that down.

What can you do and what can you have in terms of much better decision making uh well in advance of that?

Um, so really this graphic kind of helps describe that a little bit in terms of initially what we would do in terms of fiscal sustainability planning, all of it is foundationally grounded in a long-term financial forecast.

We want to talk more about how we establish clear financial goals too.

That's really going to drive the decision making process and engagement process as a part of this.

Things like your reserve levels in terms of how much you want to maintain in terms of fund balance in terms of maintaining a cushion uh in terms of unforeseen events, and then looking at prioritizing spending as well.

What's coming down the road in terms of things like salary increases, maybe bringing new pieces of infrastructure online, new pieces of equipment online that are needed or might be new, new uh to the budget and needed to be funded.

And then looking at things like revenue opportunities as well, and then what can we do to engage the stakeholders, which is really a key aspect of this uh in terms of understanding what the community wants, needs, desires, et cetera, uh, and the like.

And then the big thing here, and we talk a lot about um financial forecasting or fiscal sustainability plan in terms of avoiding the shelf.

You know, the last thing we want to do is uh a document like this or a process like this to be put on that shelf, collect dust and somebody wondering four or five years as to why nothing was done with that and blow the dust off it and and go from there.

So uh so what can we do in order to help instigate those next steps that need to be taken from the plan?

Um, so again, just real high level in terms of financial forecasting.

It's a tool, right?

Like I just said, in terms of avoiding the shelf, we want it to be useful.