Ms.

Prime, I think we're ready.

Yes, sir.

Good evening.

This is a special meeting of the El Paso City Council for Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026.

It is 7 31 p.m.

Mayor Johnson is present and presiding in council chambers along with Mayor Pro Tem Chavez, Representative Nino, Representative Limon, and Representative Canales.

Item number one is presentation and discussion on the fiscal year 2025-2026 third quarter financial report.

Okay, is there a motion?

Hang on, Miss Prime.

There's no action on this answer.

Robert.

Good evening.

Good evening, Mayor and City Council.

Take your time, please.

Yes, sir.

Why is everyone laughing?

We all had dinner all right.

I told the mayor I had a bag of chips.

I'm good for another person.

That's all I had to do.

Take your time, Robert.

All right.

So this item is the third quarter financial report.

So this is coming our current fiscal year from the start of September through the end of May.

So the first nine months of this current fiscal year.

So overall, um, pretty much everything is trending as expected.

So overall revenue right now is 29.2 million higher than FY 2025 again for that time period that I mentioned, that first nine months, or about 5.8%.

A lot of that is being driven by property tax and sales tax, primarily sales tax, which will I'll show you a few slides here in just a minute on how well sales taxes are performing on the expenditure side right now, overall increase of 20 million or about 5.1%.

Again, and a big drive of that, as you will see, is our biggest cost driver is going to be in the form of our salaries, benefits, and taxes for our city employees, as well as some contractual items we had in the budget for this current fiscal year.

So key takeaway is on this slide here.

So overall revenue and expenses, you'll see overall revenue right now projected at on that far right-hand column, 625.3 million, slightly under budget, expenses at 625.1 again, um, under budget by about 600,000.

So as you look to those projections, though, I think the important thing to point out is that that's less than about a tenth of a percent difference from projections, yeah, projections to the uh budgeted amount for both revenues and expenses.

Um, but again, the key takeaway here is that you all, as you look at the bottom of the slide, is that when you adopted the budget last year, and you've heard us talk a lot about this, you adopted a budget with a use of fund balance plugged in of $3.25 million into the budget for this year.

Um, so I'll have to report that included in this of what you're seeing today in this projection is no use of fund balance and a slight surplus of about $185,000.

So again, revenues performing pretty much on target expenditures.

We've been able to hold the line, but um again, right now projecting when we finish this fiscal year with uh right now about 185,000 surplus.

So you'll see our overall starting fund balance, and this is total, restricted and unrestricted fund balance will remain um in that 154 million dollar amount.

As we look to revenue comparison by categories here, you will see again um similar format that we've used for the last couple of years.

So in the blue there, this is the current fiscal year, and then you get on the far right-hand side there, those two columns comparisons to the prior fiscal year.

Just to provide some uh comparison data, overall property um taxes you'll see at 98.8 percent compared to prior year at 99.4, so slightly down, but again, pretty much in line with what we expect to see this time of year.

Um, if I draw your attention to that bottom line, total revenue for this current fiscal year at 85.2 compared to last year at 84.1, and the two big drivers of that are going to be in the sales tax category and the operating transfer is in.

So sales taxes you'll see right now, we're at 113.2 million again, September through May, about 77% of the total budgeted amount.

Uh, compared to last year at this time, we were at 105 million or at about 74.9 million.

So sales tax is really performing extremely well, and I'll again I'll show you those slides here in just a minute.

On the operating transfers in one of the things that's helping that particular category down at the bottom, you'll see again those percentages 73% so far this year compared to 62 last year.

International bridges, so international bridges transfer to the general fund is up about 17% so far for the first nine months compared to last year.

So one of the fee increases that was built into the FY26 budget was the increase in the empty cargo, that 50 cents.

So that's really helping come in a little bit more than we expected, and so that's helping again the overall revenue for this year.

As we look to the projections for these categories, you'll see some pluses and minuses, but at the end of the day, and we'll have a little bit of discussion about this when we get to not only the expenditures for this current fiscal year, but when we get into looking at FY 2027, you'll see some pluses and minuses.

So some categories are projected to be over budget on the revenues, so collecting more than we expected, and you'll see some, unfortunately, right now are projected to come in lower than what we budgeted.

So, but if you look to overall again at that bottom line right now, we're projecting again 625.3 million or to come in around 457,000 under under budget for this year.

Sales tax again right now, we're projecting about four million dollars over what we budgeted.

Uh franchise fees, unfortunately, are again very very difficult to project out, and right now we are projecting to be about 3.1 million dollars under on that franchise fees category.

One of the big drivers of that of that is uh Paso Electric.

Um so far they're about uh 1.2 million down compared to where they were in the prior fiscal year.

Uh time order, our telecommunications franchise uh fee built in there continues to decline.

But with that, we've incorporated that into the FY2027 budget.

Again, we continue to make those auto corrections to bring those more down in line with what we're seeing as far as actual collections.

If you go down to the again, the very bottom of the operating transfers in, aside from the bridges, you'll see again overall projected 1.89 million.