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.

However, this is where we have our use of fund balance plugged in as well.

So that 3.25 million use of fund balance is plugged into the budget, and so you'll see again that looks like it's under, but it's actually performing better than expected.

So again, overall takeaway here is that revenue is performing pretty much right in line with the budget.

I won't spend a whole lot of time going through these, but I do provide you all two graphs for each of the different categories.

And so on the left-hand side, you'll see comparisons to the prior fiscal year for each of those quarters, and on the right-hand side, you'll see the percentage of the budget or the actual collected.

So for property taxes, again, the red portion that's the second quarter, it's pretty much a the dominant quarter that we have.

That's when sales tax is primarily paid, and the second quarter.

Uh, you'll see so far again for this current fiscal year, we're up about 22.3 million dollars overall compared to the prior year.

Sales taxes, uh, one of the points here that I'll point out is that if you look from FY24 to 25 on that left-hand graph, from FY24 to 25, that's about a 3.6 million dollar increase.

So, again, positive growth in sales tax is always encouraging.

You all know that it's the second largest source of revenue for the general fund.

But if you look to FY25 to FY26, that 105.4 million up to 113.3 million, that's a 7.9 million dollar increase.

So 7.9 million dollar increase compared to 3.6 last year, more than double what we saw in the prior year.

So again, sales tax is performing extremely well so far this fiscal year.

And we showed you all this when we did your your budget briefings, but you all asked at the last quarterly update to get some more information on really what's driving our our sales tax growth, and it's really two things so far for this fiscal year.

One of them is a not so good thing, and the other one is a really good thing.

So, one of them is that retail trade category up at the very top, you'll see overall increase from FY25 to FY26 of about 2.4 million.

However, FY25 includes a negative adjustment amount from a company that was paying sales taxes that to the city of El Paso that should not have been paid to the city of El Paso.

So the state does audits not only on El Paso but all throughout the state, and essentially, this company was remitting sales tax that did not belong to the city, and so when they did this audit, it gets remitted back to the company, but then gets remained back to where it belongs.

So it's a negative adjustment in that fiscal year.

So it makes FY26 look a little bit better than it really was or than it really is so far this current fiscal year, but we still have positive growth in that retail trade category.

The other one that's really helping this current fiscal year is the utility category.

So it's about eight or nine rows down.

So far for this fiscal year, we're at 4.5 million.

It's about a $2.5 million increase in that particular category in the utilities.

That's all El Paso Electric.

So I'll pass the electric is significant in the investing in all of the infrastructure and the substations that they're investing.

So all of that investment that they're making has a direct correlation on the sales tax revenue that we're collecting here in the city of El Paso.

So, and I should have pointed out that this data here is through March.

So remember, we have that two month lag of real time information on the actual collection amount.

This detailed information is actually a three-month lag, and so we only have through March so far with this detailed information.

Franchise fees here again, you'll see pretty much flat on the left-hand side there.

We're at 40.1 million compared to 38.8.

So we've collected a little bit more compared to the prior fiscal year, but because we had assumed a little bit more on the collections on the franchise fee revenue categories.

Right now we're projecting again for them to come in a little bit under budget.

But I will say that we will not see the impact of the rate increases that took effect for Paso Electric and El Paso Water until we get our next quarterly payment.

And so these franchise payments that you'll see here are reflected only through March.

So these are paid quarterly.

So the April, May, and June quarterly payment that we get, it's 45 days after the end of the quarter, so we don't get that until middle of August.

So revenue projections, particularly for sales tax and franchise fee, very very important categories, but very, very difficult to project out because it's not just the 12 months in the next fiscal year, it's really the remaining five months that we have in the current fiscal year plus the 12 months in the coming fiscal year as well.

But I will say again, and you all saw that uh during the presentation we did back at the end of May, we did bring those uh franchise fee revenues down to be more in line with what we're seeing so far in this fiscal year.

Uh, the remaining categories pretty flat, not a whole lot of growth in our charges for services, which is primarily our ambulance service revenue, fines and forfeitures again are pretty flat revenue sources.

Well, about 5.4 million this year compared to 5.6 last year.

Licenses and permits again it's kind of fluctuated throughout this year so far.

We've seen some positive in the last couple of months, get us back to a little bit above where we were in the prior fiscal year.

Our rents and other has a decrease compared to the prior year.

You'll see a 7.2 million this year compared to 8.3 million last year.

You all may remember when we adopted the budget for FY26.

So back last year, we did a decrease in what we transfer from our capital improvement department for project manager costs related to capital projects.

So we charge their time to capital projects and we transfer that to the general fund as a source of revenue.

We did some changes on how we do that calculation, and so that had an impact on the budget, and you'll see that reflected here in the actual revenues.

The bridge transfer is I mentioned as well, and so again, you'll see that comparison FY24 to 25, only about a six hundred thousand dollar increase.

But from FY25 to 26, you'll see that 2.1 million dollar increase.

So again, international bridges continues to perform really well in the collections that we're receiving through pedestrians and our vehicle crossings.

On the expenditure side, overall, you'll see again same similar format.

You'll see overall expenditures through end of May 415.5 million compared to the prior year at 395.3.

And so again, overall expenditures we've spent about 66.4%, which is pretty much right in line with where we should be through the third quarter.

Um, and FY2025, we're at 65.2 percent.

As we look to the expenditures by category on the actual projections.

One of the things I'll point out here is one.

I mentioned it right now on the revenue side, but and you're gonna hear me say this a couple of times, particularly not only in this presentation, but in the next one as well, is that the budget office puts a lot of work into developing the budget, working very, very closely with city departments.

But we're never gonna be 100% accurate.

Never will we be 100% accurate.

But what we do is we use all of the data that we have.

We use all of the historical information we have, we use upcoming contracts that are expiring.

We put together all the position data, we put together essentially an estimate, a forecast when we develop the budget.

So you'll see personal services right now.

We're actually projecting to be slightly over budget on personal services.

That's the salaries, benefits, and wages for our city employees.

And so one of the big drivers of that is the fire department.

So the fire department right now is projecting to be over budget, but we utilize savings or uh projected savings in these other categories to help offset that.

And so it's really managing the entire budget.

Yes, closely monitoring each of the different categories and the accounts and working very closely with the departments, but it really is about managing the entire budget as a whole.

So as I mentioned, if you look to the bottom line there, you'll see again total expenditures right now.

We are projected when we finish this fiscal year to be under budget by six hundred and forty-three thousand three hundred and ninety-four dollars.

So still projecting to be overall under budget with all of these different categories.

So again, similar format that I showed you all on the revenue side.

So personal services here.

Again, you'll see this is the big driver every year, no surprise here.

You'll see from FY25 to FY2026 about a $15 million increase.

You'll remember when I started, I said we had a $20 million increase overall compared to last year.

This is 15 million out of that 20 million.

So again, we know that our workforce is the largest cost driver that we have.

The other big one, contractual services, which you all have heard us talk about this year and last year.

We've seen some IT contracts with significant increases.

That public safety P25 radio uh maintenance contract for next year is impacting us.

We had similar increases for some other contracts in our IT department.

So you'll see this particular category up from 38.3 up to 41.9 million.

Materials and supplies, uh, about a $600,000 increase.

And so one of the big things in this particular category is fuel.

We've seen about a $340,000 increase so far in the price of fuel.

Fortunately, we've seen that price come down a little bit in the last couple of weeks, but fuel prices have been a little bit higher this year than they were compared to to last year.

On operating expenditures, again, this one right now is at about an $800,000 increase compared to the prior year.

And this category is everything from property insurance, liability insurance, utilities, communications, and you'll see again about an eight hundred thousand dollar increase compared to the prior year.

Our transfers out, so this is the amount that we transfer out for animal services and the paygo.

Uh, pretty flat.

I will say, though, that we do hold on to actually doing those transfers of moving the cash out of the general fund.

Canal is asked a lot of the questions about the transfers.

So we transfer out of the general fund into our internal capital project fund for the vehicles and the street projects and all of those other projects went into the paygo.

And the reason why we do that is because we can generate investment interest for the general fund by holding on to that cash until the very end of the fiscal year.

So at the end of the fiscal year, we'll do all of those transfers to actually move the cash into those funds, but it helps with the investment interest revenue for the general fund.

So again, as I started and as I will finish this presentation again, projected overall surplus.

So again, surplus of about 185,000 projected when we finish this fiscal year.

Again, very encouraging that we'll be able to preserve our fund balance at the end of this fiscal year.

Again, no actions being requested.

We will continue to monitor over the next couple of months until we close out this fiscal year.

Again, nothing dramatic that really stood out as far as needing to make adjustments to the FY2027 budget.

So again, as I mentioned, the key takeaways here is again a projected surplus for FY2026.

Did you guys see that?

He looks at his watch.

Okay.

Uh Representative Chavez.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you, Robert.

Wow.

I think your presentations are one of the ones I enjoy the most.

I love it.

I always say the numbers don't lie.

And I really appreciate the fact that you're always keeping us on track and accountable.

I think that's that's really important and transparent, right?

Making sure that the public also knows uh what we know, so that we're all on the same page.

So going back to slide number nine, when you talk about sales tax, I wanted to give you an update because last time you presented this, or we were talking about this subject.

I asked about the Amazon distribution center in my district that was opening, and I asked if the sales tax revenue generated from that distribution center if it would stay in El Paso.

And I believe you told me that it would stay in El Paso so long as the end user was in El Paso.

Correct.

So I went to the ribbon cutting and I asked who they will be distributing to, and right now it's a hundred percent El Paso in the future, and I'm not sure at what point in the future they they might consider distributing in to customers in New Mexico, but I'm very happy to know that at least in regards to that um business in my district, we will be increasing our sales tax revenue.

So update on that.

Yeah, it's important.

I'm asking because this is I'm super hyper focused on getting our sales tax assigned.

And it is Amazon Prime days, so it is prime day today.

Everybody in district one.

I had a list and I forgot.

Order order one item.

You know, the higher ups were there from Amazon.

They had flown in from who knows where, and I I got into this whole conversation about our sales tax revenue.

And they were like, yes, it's it's all possible.

So I would I was very excited about that.

And I hadn't had the opportunity to share with you.

So it's exciting.

Um slide, okay, yes.

The last one that you talked about, uh, our um fund balance.

Could you just quickly go over where we started and where we are and where we're projected to be?

Bless you.

Bless you.

So the amount you'll see here, the 154.27 million up at the top, starting fund balance, that's total.

So that's restricted and unrestricted.

So of that, because it's broken down into different categories.

So we started the fiscal year with 28.9 million and are restricted.

So that's the cash reserve.

We're required to have 5% of the prior year budget in that restricted amount, and the committed we had 96.9 million assigned 3.25, which is the use of fund balance and the unassigned 25.3.

So the 154.3 million we started with 28.9 million of that was restricted, and so the rest is essentially unrestricted.

Um, so as you may recall, one of the things that we talked about during the budget process is that restricted requirement that we maintain in the restricted uh fund balance in our cash reserves, that 5% of the prior year budget.

So we know our budget's been going up every year, so that means that requirement amount goes up every year.

So at the end of the fiscal year right now, we're expecting it's about 1.1 million to come from the unrestricted and move into the restricted category.

So again, because we have to fulfill that 5% requirement.

However, the number of days will go down slightly, but not as much as we were originally with that 3.25 originally anticipating.

So again, overall maintaining the overall fund balance at the 154 million.

The unrestricted will come down slightly, but again, pretty close to what it is when we started this fiscal year.

Okay, so in terms of our rainy day fund, how many days do we have in that?

We started the year with seventy-three, and right now we're expected to finish at 70, maybe a little bit higher, but 70 days.

And so again, that's accounting for because the unrestricted is gonna go down, the restricted goes up, and also that's because the budget grows, and so that amount is gonna continue to increase every year.

So representative Assad made a really good point about that.

So we'll look at that potential charter change in the future, looking at how what we want to include as far as that calculation or that requirement.

And once we adopt uh the budget in August, will we start off with those 70 days as well, or will there be any adjustments needed to be made?

It will all depend on how we actually finish the fiscal year, and so what you're seeing here is projections.

We don't anticipate the numbers being dramatically different, but we'll come back probably in early December and show you all where we actually finish the fiscal year, so we'll know at that point in time uh where we actually finish.

I again I don't anticipate too much fluctuation, so we're probably gonna be somewhere close to what you're seeing here today.

Okay, thank you, Robert.

I appreciate it.

Any additional questions for Robert?

You sure he has plenty of time.

Thank you, Mayor.

Good job.

Thank you, Mayor.

All right, we got a couple questions here.

Representative?

No.

Anyone else?

Robert, good presentation.

Thank you.

I have one more.

One more, yep.

And for the record, representatives Acevedo Rochatrejo and Fierro join the meeting at 7 34, 7 37, 7 32, and 7 34 respectively.

We could touch that.

Would you like me to read item two?

Please.

This is a presentation discussion and action on the second round of FY2026-2027 budget workshops.

Robert, you back up?

Yes, sir.

So before I start, one not only thanking everybody that's here, all the departments, but the IT people in the back that are doing everything behind the scenes.

I just want to say thank you because nobody really sees and appreciates what they do.

IT used to be one of my departments no longer, but I like how they cut to the room so everybody could they could see everybody apply.

Okay, so this presentation is going to cover several items, and so uh I'll make sure to go through each of them pretty thoroughly because there's key information from each of the different sections we're going to cover.

So one we'll do a recap on what we discussed on May 27th and 28th.

Um the second part of the presentation will give you a little bit of uh feedback of what we heard from the community meetings that Ms.

Mack and I did, as well as through the budget simulator, and then we will go through what the council's motion was when we ended on May 28th, and then we'll finish with a request that we received to go through the mayor and council's budget, and then we'll talk about next steps of what's still to come forward.

One of the things that's not included in this presentation, we pushed to get it done.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to get it done, so we'll have to bring that back at a later date.

Was the fee study that we're working on?

Unfortunately, that is not finished or finalized yet.

We don't have a date yet.

We're pushing to try to get that for the July sixth meeting.

So that is still something that we're working on.

So Ms.

Mac's been pushing us to get that done.

Uh I believe parks is almost done.

The uh planning inspections department right now is still kind of finalizing their the reports, and so that is something that we still owe you all.

So we'll bring that back and as well.

We will also bring an update from each of the department that do have changes to their fees already built into the budget.

And so we've got we provided you all the red line fee schedule as well as some narrative on the slides on what was changing for each of those departments, but each of the departments will present that as well at a future council date.

So timeline, you all have seen this a few times.

The next key dates after this is July 25th.

Again, we'll get our certified values.

We will come and present that information to you all on August the third, as well as do an introduction of the tax rate on that day as well.

That's an important day that August 3rd, because that sets forth the requirement for different publications we're required to do for public hearings on the budget and the tax rate, and then we're required again to do that public hearing on August 17th on the tax rate, and then the budget will be adopted on the 18th of August.

Just a recap on what you all heard on May 27th, and I won't spend a whole lot of time going through these because you all have heard that multiple times, but again, I I think it's important to touch on some of the key points.

So the community meetings, although not, I mean, some of the attendances were a little bit low, but for the most part, if it's really good opportunity.

Anytime we can go out and really present and show what the challenges are in front of the the city, it really does serve an excellent purpose and that I think really really good feedback this year from the people that did attend.

And so, again, really focusing on the existing programs, not looking to add anything new, no new programs, not expanding anything.

It's really focusing on what we have, the long-term financial sustainability, which we know the situation that a lot of other entities are facing right now.

Just showed you all where we're expected to finish our fiscal year, and again, keeping that long-term financial sustainability in mind because we don't know what next year is going to bring, let alone next month or next week.

And so again, it's important that we position ourselves as best we can.

You all saw this information presented to you all as well.

So all of the different departments presented, you got to hear their programs and how they aligned to the strategic plan that you all adopted back in February.

What we're facing.

So again, this was presented back at the overview presentation we did on May 27th.

Again, so it's the double whammy, it's the loss of revenue from property tax exemptions and taking out that one-time revenue through the fund balance use, as well as increasing costs for a variety of things, whether it's fixed costs or different contractual obligations.

So we have the election in November, which is not free, that's 1.5 million in the budget for next year that we did not have in the current year.

I talked a little bit about that IT contract for the public safety radio system.

That increases over three million dollars.

We were able to uh fortunately use some RPA dollars to help offset some of that impact.

The debt service, so we did have a actually did issue debt back on June 4th, I believe.

That's 70 million dollars.

We also did the refunding.

I'll talk about the refunding here in just a minute, but we did issue 70 million dollars for the community progress projects, which were approved by the voters back in 2022.

So that does have an impact on the tax rate for FY2027, and we ended up shifting almost 37 positions from police and fire into the general fund that was coming from grant funding and other restricted funding that was used in FY26.

We have the wage increases built in only for our public safety but our civilians as well.

We talked about animal services, and you heard during public comment this morning, a comment about animal services.

We do have that 1.5 million dollar increase from the general fund plugged in, and then utilities as well.

So you'll see these sort of fixed cost and contractual increases that we have built into the budget for next year, which are really impacting the impact or having an impact on the tax rate.

So, what have we done?

We have these challenges of the impact on the available revenue as well as the increase in these different costs.

So we talked a lot about what we did of looking at our vacancies, essentially unfunding or deleting three-quarters of the available vacant positions.

The most important thing, which again, we just talked about it on the last item was the use of fund balance.

So the budget for FY2027 does not include any use of fund balance, and so again, that's something we've been pushing for using recurring revenues to fund ongoing costs and not having to rely upon fund balance to balance the budget.

The debt refunding.

So when I presented to you all back in April, that refunding opportunity that we had showed you all we're expecting net present value savings of about 13 million.

When we priced those bonds, it came in better than we expected.

So we actually ended up saving about 15.7 million instead of that 13.

But with that, though, it's important to note, and you'll see the my parentheses there, total growth savings of 17 million.

That savings doesn't at all reflect in one year.

And so we structure it in multiple years.

So we structured about 1.9 million in FY 2027.

So we're able to keep our debt service tax rate flat, and then a majority of that savings we structured into FY 2028 and 2029.

So that again, long-term sort of outlook because we do have additional debt issuances planned for FY2028-29.

We still have over 400 million dollars of bonds to issue over the next few years for public safety and for community progress.

So by structuring it that way, it helps minimize the impact on the debt service rate for the next three years.

Again, I mentioned about using the federal funding, and then the budget office.

So I think people were surprised when we did these community meetings and we explained to them what the budget office does and how we're doing the budget development process.

They really do work very closely with each of the departments.

They're reviewing not only during the budget process time, but all throughout the year, they're reviewing budgets to actuals and looking at how departments are spending.

Are they spending more than they expected?

Are they spending less?

And can we make some reallocations as we move into the next fiscal year?

So a lot of that work has already happened, and we'll talk about the council motion on May 28th and here in a minute.

But a lot of that work takes place all throughout the year, not just during the budget process.

One of the things that we did as well, again, working very close with Chupus CS was we adjusted down the police cadets, and so we know if we're shooting for 40, we're lucky to get 30.

And so we don't want to be overly optimistic and say that we're gonna get more than we expect, but we're still on target and still following what we showed you all for next year to have a net increase of 23.

And so I believe we're still projecting about 100 graduates, and FY2027, again, the safer and the cops grant again for both police and fire.

Again, that's going to help offset some of the impact.

Those are again three-year grants, and so that does help over the next three years.

The I talked a little bit about the fees, again, we'll bring that presentation back at a future council meeting.

One of the things we didn't talk a whole lot about, but that we did do with the budget for FY2027 is we reduced our salary reserve.

So we do have an amount in addition to the contingency that we budget, and so that salary reserve can cover a variety of things.

But particularly what it covers is sick leave payout.

So we have employees who leave all throughout the year.

So when employees leave the city, their built-up sick leave, they can cash out and they actually get paid out for their sick leave.

So on average, in the last couple of years, on average, it's about 791,000 to the general fund that we're paying on vacation payout.

We never know who's going to leave, we never know when they're going to leave, we don't know how much they're gonna get paid out, but we do know that that occurs.

And so in the FY26 budget, we budgeted 958,000.

We lowered that for next year down to 500,000.

So that doesn't even fully cover again what we've seen in the last couple of years, but we did again in order to balance the budget in order to try to identify as much savings as we can.

We did lower that salary reserve for next year.

We talked about this again overall, and this was again a slide that we used, and so we explained during these community meetings that the 1.4 billion dollar amount that people hear is not all unrestricted, that 53% of that amount or $750 million is actually restricted for specific purposes, and it's about 47% of that $655 million for next year that is in that general fund category where we have the most flexibility to be able to allocate those dollars for city services.

So having that breakdown was very helpful and really just an education opportunity for the public that attended those meetings.

We showed this slide as well, and so we showed the breakdown on the left-hand side.

This is very eye-opening as well.

And so when you hear us talk about property taxes on the right hand side, 328 million dollars does not even fully cover our two largest city departments police and fire, which comes in at 371 million.

A lot of people weren't aware of that, and so when they saw this, you're gonna see when I get to the budget simulator, people were listening, people were paying attention during these community meetings that we did.

We talked about again, I mentioned this already, our largest cost drivers are workforce about 71% again, and so those costs will continue to go up.

And not only through our collective writing agreements with police and fire, but also through again the push to get to that living wage, and so we do have that minimum wage increase built in for next year, or at least a 2.5% increase for our civilian employees.

I provided this.

We didn't show going back this far during that May 27th presentation, but I provided it here because somebody asked or made a comment about it during one of the meetings during the community meetings, and so looking at where we were at the peak.

Going back to 2022, the city was almost at 91 cents on the tax rate, and with what's built in for next year, we're just gonna be just a little bit over 78 cents, so still about a 12 cent reduction from where we were at the peak.

Again, some of that's due to the increase in the property values, but again, overall, still about 12 cents lower than where we were at the peak.

This slide we spent a lot of time again during those community meetings explaining the impact on what is being recommended, and so this takes into account from this slide, it takes into account the change in the tax rate and the change in the average value home, and so with what's recommended again that with the tax rate and what that change in the average value home those that have the homestead exemption it's about a hundred and five dollar increase or on the monthly average about $8.78.

So then we did also include the two lines below the over 65 and disabled and the disabled veteran exemptions because those provide additional tax relief or lowers the tax burden for these particular groups and so for the over 65 and disabled exemptions which is 41% of our total homesteads it's almost 58,000 homes that have that exemption it's a 48,000 or 4500 reduction on the value of your home and then that's what you pay taxes on.

So their impact would be just under $95 or $7.91 cents.

And then on the disabled veteran again their exemptions based on their disability ranking but on average their overall annual impact is only $7.81 cents or 65 cents a month which is just under 28 thousand homes that have that disabled veteran exemption.

So 28,000 homes have that disabled veteran which is about 20% of our total homesteads.

So we talked a lot about this the impact from the business person property exemption.

Again this was approved by the voters back in November that increased the exemption amount from 2500 up to 12500 resulted in a loss of property tax revenue of about 7.2 million we talked about this one.

So this one is is it's really eye-opening when you look at it this way so that this is the state program so the state I mentioned during that meeting in May that the state has a program called the local governments disproportionately impacted by disabled veterans exemption.

Problem is is that the state only allocates currently 9.5 million for the entire state to this program and so there's a process you submit your reimbursement you'll see we've requested over the last three years it's increased from 6.7 up to 11.5 this past March want to point out though that that requested amount is not the full impact and this is only for 100% disabled veterans to be 100% disabled veterans.

That is not the full impact of our 100% disabled veterans.

The full impact for FY2026 is over 17 million dollars but the state and their formula and the way the calculation is done is you take that 17 million and you subtract one percent of your general fund amount for that fiscal year and then that's the amount that you get to submit for reimbursement we're gonna do some research to figure out why they do that reduction of the 1% doesn't make any sense but we have a very smart legislative team that we're working with to try to get the state to allocate more dollars towards this program because as you can see a requested amount is going up but the amount we're getting from the state is going down so it has an impact on the available property tax revenue that we have to be able to fund city services and so this is something again going back to that long term financial sustainability is that we have I mentioned 28,000 total homesteads that have the disabled veteran exemption we have about 12,000 that are in the 70 to 100% so they're very close to moving into that fully disabled which means they pay no property taxes.

So as we're looking to the future of the available revenue that we have for property taxes this is something that we're closely monitoring and we're really going to make a we did it the last session but we'll see what we can do to be even more aggressive about getting the state to allocate more dollars towards this particular program.

So this slide shows you the impact from just three items so I showed you that 105 impact amount if you take the impact of the laws from the business personal property tax exemption just the additional the additional increase from the disabled veteran exemption so not the full amount the change from last year to to this year and then you add in the impact from issuing that debt amount it's $65 dollars out of that $105 dollars so over 60% of it is from these three items alone.

So again, that's how I started.

It's it's a loss of revenue, and then it's increasing cost.

And so these particular items you'll see again that business person property disabled veterans, that's 11 million dollars less revenue, and then the impact from the debt service was about five million dollars in the budget for next year.

So the next section is the the feedback we've received, and so again, just talking a little bit about again our budget process changes this year, which we did quite a few, and so not only presenting the information sooner, which we're at June 23rd, and so typically we wouldn't have even started this discussion until two weeks from now.

So we've already had quite a bit of discussion.

We've already done eight community meetings, so we've done a lot in the last several weeks.

Well ahead of where we've done uh in the past.

We did again those eight community meetings with Mac and myself from June 1st to June 11th, and then we did launch that budget simulator tool, which was a learning experience for everybody.

So the key themes by pillars from what we heard, really no surprises, and and what we will do is Sasha and Donowski, he has sent you all a link to a SharePoint site.

We'll add a summary of everything that they because they took notes during each of those meetings, and they did a really good job of summarizing all the feedback that we got from those meetings.

So we'll supply or give that to you all, as well as the budget similar as well.

The comments that we got from the budget simulator, and we'll send an email out with the link to that again.

That SharePoint again, so you have access to go through and read all of that.

But it was really more of an educational opportunity for the public to really just ask questions of the city manager or myself.

Um so a lot of questions about economic incentives and how that works, a lot of discussion about public safety and what are we doing to make sure we're keeping our police officers and firefighters, a lot of discussion about streets and what we're doing with the available funding for street projects, quality of life, which we're gonna talk a little bit about on the budget similarity here in just a minute, but the quality of life again uh people pointed to specific amenities in their particular area, animal services was a big topic of discussion.

Obviously, property taxes and affordability was probably at the top of the list that came up at just about every meeting, and then a lot of it was what is the city doing to collect the money that's owed to them.

I think I heard that at every meeting I did, I'm sure Ms.

Mac probably did as well.

So it was a good opportunity, and we had a little bit of discussion with the hotel occupancy tax item, and so I explained that process and what we're doing, and it made and then people started shaking their heads, okay.

Now it makes sense.

I understand.

So it was again a good opportunity to educate during these meetings.

So moving into the budget simulator tool.

So as I mentioned, it was a good learning experience.

So this is the first year we've used this type of tool, and we're gonna have our after action meeting here very very soon because there's obviously things that we've learned along the way and what we can do better for next year.

We did not get I wouldn't say particip low participation, but the actual submission was very, very low.

We only received 74 submissions.

So in order to submit, you had to finish the job, you had to balance the budget.

So there was only 74 submissions that accomplished that.

There's about 1400 total page views, so about 1400 people went on the system and started using it, but didn't actually finish the exercise.

So you see a breakdown here by district and then by age rank, by demographic.

On this slide, it's a little hard to see on the slide, but key takeaway on this slide I was actually very, very surprised.

So as I mentioned, only about 74 submissions.

There were 24 submissions on property taxes, so 24 adjustments related to property taxes.

And you may or may not be very surprised that of those 24 adjustments that people made to property taxes, 15 out of the 24 actually increased property taxes, and only nine decreased property taxes.

So again, this isn't a scientific survey, it's and there's a lot of flaws with it.

We learned that, but particularly with the dollar amount of adjustments that people were making.

But if you just look at the number of adjustments that were made to these categories, there is some information that you can take away from not only the revenues but on the expenditure side as well, which I'll show here in just a minute.

But that that property tax slide or item was very surprising.

That again, 15 out of the 24 actually increased property taxes, and then on the fees, because again, I we can assume it's more than likely the people who attended the community meetings are the ones that participated and did their submissions, that there were 19 adjustments to increase the permitting fees, and 14 adjustments to increase the park fees.

So again, people were listening, and that was the study that we're doing on the fees for next year's budget.

On the expenditure side, again, this is comparing what they started with.

So that's the blue portion, and the orange portion is take into account the adjustments that were made on the dollar amounts.

So the dollar amounts, and this is one of the things that we learned.

It's hard to take those adjustments and put some weight behind it because we had some submissions who wanted to decrease.

Sorry, Chief.

Wanted to decrease the police department by 154 minutes.

Basically, wanted a zero fund the police department.

Well, so that skews it's it skews a lot of the data, and so what we've been looking at is the number of adjustments, and so not clicks because it takes if you want onto the system and you have to click a lot of times to either add or decrease any particular category, but looking at the total number of adjustments, and so the takeaways from this was police was by far and away on the adjustment side, the one that most people wanted to decrease was the police department.

Unfortunately, even if we wanted to, we can't because the state does not allow you to defund the police.

You can't have a lower police department general fund budget from one year to the next.

So we we would never do that because we love police and fire.

But and so that was one of the things that we learned, right?

And so we need to we need to figure out a way to put some of those.

We and we did a lot of controls on this on the app, but there's some things that we need to work on in the future.

But so that's one.

The other thing that you may be surprised, and so it's again a little hard to see.

But as you go through this, one of the things that we saw was several of these categories.

People actually wanted to put more dollars towards, and so animal services was one of them, community development was one of them, parks was one of them, um, park facilities was one of them where they actually identified that they wanted based on the number of adjustments, right?

And so there was more positive adjustments and there were negatives.

That's so that's how I'm taking away that information, and so it really does speak to balancing the budget is very difficult because it comes down to what is it that you want to decrease.

And so you know, we joked during the community meetings you get to be city manager, you get to play city council and figure out what you're gonna do to balance the budget.

Unfortunately, some people I don't think took it very seriously and just you know picked and chose what they what they decreased by amounts that don't make a whole lot of sense.

But I mean, if we take away, as I mentioned, some of those adjustments, there was some good information that we were able to take away from this, and we will share as I mentioned.

There were some comments.

I believe there's about 40 comments or so that people did leave open-ended comments.

We'll uh compile that and we'll provide that to you as well.

On to the next section.

So, the council's motion for a May 28th asks us to conduct this review.

Again, basically go back and do a double check.

Is there any additional savings that we can take from these three particular categories?

So, looking at our outside contracts, professional services and materials and supplies.

Again, I talked a little bit about this already, and so it was a good exercise.

The budget office did do that, worked with all of the departments, but a lot of that work had already been done, quite frankly.

And so, looking at when we developed the budget, they did a lot of that review doing the line by line.

Sachel did a fantastic job this year.

I mean, he actually had department submit all of the contracts, everything that's in those accounts that makes up those amounts, and so we've got a lot of detailed information that we've not had easy to accessible in the past, and so we can review.

One of the challenging things with this review is that we have unknown things that are gonna happen next year, and so really trying to focus on how we're gonna present this is not easy, it's challenging because as I mentioned, six hundred and fifty-five million dollars is the total budget, but you have thousands of accounts and thousands of things that are gonna occur that you can't account for, you can't expect, or things you can't expect, and you may be wrong.

So, for example, contracts.

We have contracts that expire all the time, and so I'll give you an example.

Library has a janitorial contract that's about to get awarded, it's a new contract.

When they built the budget, they built in a little bit of an increase based on what they thought was gonna happen.

That may or may not be enough to cover what the actual award amount is going to be in next fiscal year.

So then, should departments be penalized because they didn't add enough into the budget.

So those type of things we need to try to account for.

So that's one situation.

The police and fire departments.

I'm never going to tell police chief or fire chief, no, you can't have an academy, or no, you can't.

I'm sorry, Chief Collins, you're projected to be able to budget.

I'm going to put a stop to what you're doing.

No, we find a way to work with them.

We utilize other savings within their department, or we know that we're going to have additional savings in another department to help offset.

So it really is about managing the complexity of the entire budget and not just focusing on one account.

So that being said, also, in these three particular categories, again, we did already identify these are just the accounts that we actually have a decrease in, and so there's some other reductions that we incorporated as well, but just in the accounts that have reductions, about 337,000, almost 338,000 that was already built in to these particular categories as far as reductions.

So from FY26 to FY27.

And again, the departments are fantastic.

I mean, they were more than willing to actually agree with the budget office when the budget office say, listen, we're looking at your budget actuals comparison, and we think we can lower this account.

They worked very, very well with the budget office, and we're able to are willing to make those adjustments.

So the next couple of slides again, I won't go into all of this, but again, most of the departments are here if you've got particular questions.

But pretty much every department does not only during the budget process but throughout the year, whether they're looking at new contracts or how they operate, they're always looking to see how they can do more with less.

So the IT department's been looking at how they utilize these multi-year negotiations to basically lock in those prices, the type of alternatives that are available as far as technology, and so they do that all throughout the year.

And the police chief meets with all of his regional commands to identify their needs in the coming fiscal year.

The fire department heavy use of technology and how they use drones, looking at how they do in-house maintenance to really help offset some of these cost increases.

The grants is a big piece again of how they're leveraging federal or state funding to help offset some of their impacts, our streets and maintenance department, how they utilize those co-ops and then bulk purchases and really trying to standardize the type of equipment or vehicles that we're buying.

If you can standardize that, you can help hopefully cut down on some of those costs and not have 20 different types of vehicles where you're having to buy 20 different types of parts.

So really focusing on that, and then again, really focusing on making sure that we've got the staff to be able to take care of the vehicles and equipment that we currently have.

So breaking down those three categories that you all asked us to look at again, materials and supplies, professional con professional services, and outside contracts equates to about 78.7 million, 12% again of the overall FY27 budget.

On the right-hand side, that's basically a majority of it.

And so as you look down that list, the biggest portion of that is going to be in the IT contracts.

It's almost 20 million dollars out of the 78.7 million dollar total.

And again, that's the hundred and I think I cut 167 different contracts that are listed on that schedule on the IT contracts that we have for next year, and then you have other things.

The central appraisal district.

Next year we have 7.3 million dollars budgeted for what the city has to pay the central appraisal district for the appraisal services that they provide the city.

That's a fixed cost.

We have to pay the appraisal district.

Security janitorial, you'll see that that's a large amount, 7.1 million dollars total for those two.

I will say, going back to what I just said about things change and we don't always know what's gonna happen.

I don't know they may.

I don't think that they factored in though because we won't know what the amounts are going to be.

We had the items on the regular agenda this morning to terminate that contract for the armored car services.

That armored car services rolls up into that security contracts account.

We have the temporary contract in place, so we know what that cost is, but we're gonna rebid that and we're gonna get a new contract.

We don't know what that new contract cost is going to come in at.

So those departments that had those contracts terminated this morning may face a situation where we're gonna have to hopefully identify some savings in other accounts, and so, as I mentioned, we're not 100% accurate, but we utilize all of the information that we have available to default the budget.

Um, you can see the list here again.

I mentioned the election, a lot of it you're gonna see on these next couple of slides here.

Just trying to break it down and really just to provide you all some more content and the public of really what what's in these categories and what's in these different accounts.

So, again, this is the total general fund budget.

You'll see the pink portion there, that's the three categories at 78 million.

And again, really just to highlight that a majority of the budget that 71% is in that top line, and the salaries and benefits.

But as you look to these three categories, again, here's the breakout.

So, largest portions in outside contracts, followed by materials and supplies and professional services.

And so, what we provided you all was a breakdown by department, and then we're gonna go through and kind of show you some examples of what's in each of these categories.

So, as I mentioned, if you take IT, police and fire, that's over 50% of this total amount that we reviewed, over 50%, just in those three departments.

And so, IT technology is an area that we've had a lot of discussions and how they do the reviews.

The IT department does they're reviewing the number of licenses to try to reduce where we can.

Police and fire, a lot of that we'll cover here in just a minute, but a lot of that is uniforms and the health care provider services, their background checks, the drug screening, all of those different things.

Non-departmental, the majority of that is that appraisal services that I mentioned, and again, we're gonna go through these here in just a minute.

But professional services, again, a lot of this is again, it's exactly that.

It's professional services.

Majority of this particular category is going to be for that appraisal services and that management consulting and health care related expenses.

So, what's that management and health care?

I'll show you, or the management consulting, I'll show you here in just a minute.

This is a breakdown by department because we also wanted to show you again a reminder on the variances.

So, what's driving the increase for next year?

Um, so that non-departmental that 234,000 that's the increase in the appraisal district amount we have to pay next year on the fire department.

You'll see that 282,000 increase there.

So, overall increase of 632,000.

And these are some of those major account types.

So, out of that 13.6 million in this category, 7.3 is just for appraisal services, so more than half of this category.

That management consulting services account, 2.6 million, 2.5 of that is the city's portion for the Linube operating cost.

That's a contractual agreement that we have with the community foundation.

That's the city's portion of the operating cost.

Healthcare provider services is 2.3 million out of this category, and you'll see again a lot of that is for our public safety departments for those pre-employment and annual physicals and drug screenings.

Outside contracts, again, this is about 60% of the total amount, and again, the largest expenditure out of this category is gonna be an IT.

You'll see almost 20 million dollars out of the 48 million in this category, and they had the largest increase of that 2.3 million, and again, you'll see the largest increase in police and streets and maintenance, a decrease in parking recreation.

Thank you, Pablo.

City clerk, 1.5 million dollar increase for the election, and then all of the other city departments about 675,000.

So out of that 6.2 million dollar increase, again, a large majority of that's in those IT contracts and the election for this November.

Provide you some more information on what's in these categories or what is in this category.

Again, 20 million roughly for those IT contracts, uh, janitorial security contracts is in this category over seven million, our billing and collection contracts, so ambulance transport billing and our property tax delinquent collections over three million, and then uh public assets maintenance.

That's a lot of street contracts that they have for basically everything that they do on a daily basis, whether it's lane striping, uh wall maintenance, which you all know through those CR requests, you run into calls every day where something needs to be fixed, whether it's a wall, a knockdown street light, and so they utilize this account to help fund those purchases.

So this outside contracts account, a little bit more information.

Again, a lot of it is uh police department contracts, so they do have a contract for piston prisoner transport services.

We talked about the emergency health network contract that they have as part of the CIT.

That 1.2 million dollars, just one of the expenditures out of this category because IT has contractual costs in multiple categories in this review.

The materials and supplies again is only about 20% of the total review that we did.

Again, an increase of about 800,000.

And you see again, police and fire have an increase there, 482,000 library.

We increased the library allocation for next year by 100,000 for more publications and books for their accreditation.

So again, overall, about a hundred thousand dollar increase from the prior year, and you can see examples of what's included in these categories.

So a lot of land maintenance supplies, fire and police, clinical type supplies, uniforms and apparel for most of our public safety positions, 1.7 million dollars for library books and publications, and then finally wanted to show you all because I started with the third quarter presentation of showing you the projections.

So this shows you the last full fiscal year or current fiscal year in the next year.

So we budgeted in FY 2026, 71.1 million in these categories, and right now we're projecting to come in at 69.8.

So you could say about 98 percent roughly is going to be spent.

So we talk a lot about when we do revenue projections.

We tend to want to be not too conservative, but we also don't want to be too optimistic.

We kind of want to be right in the middle.

This is the position I'd rather be in, as opposed to not having enough to be able to do the services that we need to do and being over budget.

So having a little bit of cushion to be able to do those things that happen throughout the year that we may not anticipate to be able to absorb contractual increases that may occur throughout the year, provides us a little bit of flexibility with this coming fiscal year.

So additionally, for the coming fiscal year as well.

So again, I know a lot of the emphasis has been on what are we doing, right?

How are we trying to stay ahead?

How are we trying to manage all of the challenges that are coming our way?

You all approved us doing that, procurement assessment, which is underway.

We'll do that.

We're also going to utilize our consultant that we utilize.

We have a healthcare consultant to look at our benefits in health care.

We did have some discussion about that this year, but we didn't feel that the time was right, and we want to make sure that if we are going to do changes for employee benefits or incentives or anything to that, that we have a full discussion with our employees and that we don't just bring it on them at the last minute.

Talked a little bit about the state legislative session.

This is just one example.

There's a couple of other things that we're working on as well.

The project finance zone was an item that you all approved as part of the legislative agenda, and a few other things, and then always looking at how we can identify new revenues.

So we've terminated multiple tax increment reinvestment zones and transportation reinvestment zones over the last several years.

We'll continue to review those current uh tax increment finance zones that we have for potential uh elimination or termination.

So, all that being said, so we did the review.

Budget office worked very closely with all the departments.

So of the review of going back and looking at budget actuals and what they felt the departments could take, we identified about 243,000 of potential adjustments.

That being said, as I mentioned, this doesn't account for a lot of those unknowns.

And so while we identified this as potential adjustments, I can't stand here and say that I would definitely positively recommend taking those adjustments because water may come in higher next year than what parks imagined.

I mentioned the issue with the library.

Unfortunately, we just don't know everything.

So having a little bit of flexibility in the budget, as I mentioned, we've already done a review as part of the development of the budget.

We were able to reduce multiple accounts, right?

Really attempting to write size them to the budget.

And I know the discussion was obviously we saw the and we'll go through the council budget requests or adjustments of wanting to look more, I guess, citywide and more operational efficiency type review, which is a much larger discussion than what this motion was.

Again, this was back on May 28th, so it's been just a short amount of time that we've had to do this review.

Additionally, though, when we went back and we were really trying to focus and try to identify additional efficiencies and additional funding, we do have one time revenue available to us through the American Rescue Plan Act, our ARPA funding.

We used some of it last year, but we do still have right now about 430,000 in investment interest that we've already accumulated.

Don't anticipate that amount becoming much larger because we've spent pretty much all of our ARPA funding, so we're not generating much investment interest anymore.

But we do have available to us that $430,000 that we could allocate to to our project.

And so one of the things that we heard just a little while ago from Nicole, the welcome center.

We know is something that we've heard a lot about.

We have two council adjustments that refer to the welcome center, and so I believe that they were working to identify how much this could fund.

The original amount that they had identified, I think was six hundred thousand was the number that was thrown out a while back.

The request or the amount that we got from community development as far as the funding needed was about 750,000.

But this 430,000 could go a long way, not only for a few months, but then also we already have as was mentioned, we've already utilized ARPA for this project, and so there's some limitations in how we can utilize the ARPA funding, and so this would tie really nicely into again if that were to uh again the decision of city council we could allocate it towards lease funding.

I believe that they estimated about seven months that this could fund, and then trying to identify how they could come up with the gap going forward to get this the welcome center funded.

So on the last section here, sorry, second to the last section, we've got this, and then the mayor and council budget.

So we did get nine council budget adjustments again, those are submitted on June 12th and 15th.

We're still pending some information on two of them, but we would ask, because there's some of these that are asking for additional funding or for review, some direction so that we know what the council's desire is.

So these are the list of the nine, and they're a little bit small, but you all have had access to these on that Monday.com through that link, so you all have access to be able to view these.

Um you'll see just the brief description of what these items are towards the end of the presentation after the last slide or the last couple of slides.

Actually, list out the full description of what these items are.

So we have a couple from district one, a few from district two, one from district seven, and one from district eight.

Um, as I mentioned, some of them we have dollar amounts for, some of them we do not.

So the first one there, the operational and efficiency review, looking at consultants and some different items there.

No cost because uh the item specifically states to do it in-house, but that would require substantial staff time to be able to do that item.

Uh the Mary Francis Keysling item that master plan, a couple of different amounts that we've talked about, but uh Yvette and her team are here.

If there's a question on that one, I believe that the first phase was about 1.8 million, or for the first portion of that, but the overall project is much larger.

Uh, the community center in district one is something that we'll speak with Pablo and the team because that may or I'm not sure if it is.

I don't know, Mac mentioned as part of the parks master plan that's underway, so that may be an opportunity.

The Northwestern Drive in Northern Pass traffic signal improvements, and we're estimating that at 750,000.

Community funding for the opportunity again, the welcome center.

You'll see that on district two and district eight.

We requested for the welcome center.

Um, district two requested some additional funding for staffing on on the council budget, and then representative Lamona District 7 looking at wanting to reduce the council salaries, and so we'll have some discussion.

We'll send another item in addition to the things I've already mentioned.

So city attorney has provided us a letter or an opinion since we're saying that the council cannot take action to reduce your salaries.

That was set by the voters, the voters approved that at the city start city charter amendment that was approved by the voters.

So your actual salaries cannot be reduced, but you can collect your paycheck and donate if you choose to donate your that portion of your salary.

Yes, ma'am.

And so you'll see there's no dollar amount for that as well.

And then some solar street lights for memorial park from District 2 as well, which we listed it at 40,000.

And we need to update that because now we believe that it's going to be about 120,000 for those solar lights.

So I'll go to the next section so you all can think about this, and we can have some discussion about how we want to take action or not take action.

But those were the nine council budget adjustments that we did receive.

As we look to the mayor and council, I need to find you see the overall change in the budget here, increase of about 234,000.

I'm just looking for the actual salary changes because I don't remember.

So the city representative's salaries are going from $63,183 up to $72,800.

The mayor's salary is going from $94,774 up to 109200.

And again, that's based on what the voters approved during that review.

And so again, City Council cannot take action to reduce that amount.

So that's what again is what's driving that variance amount is incorporating those salary changes into the budget for next year.

Yes, ma'am.

Representative.

Yes.

So Robert, um, you gave us the budget uh salary increase is a proposed.

What percentage is that salary increase?

15.2%.

15.2%.

And other years it's been minus one, it's been 15 point something.

It fluctuates.

So we know what next year's is going to be, and I think next year's is about a 600 increase, which is much less, and I don't have the percentage in front of me, but it's a much smaller increase that the mayor council will receive next year.

So again, that fluctuates.

Yeah, this unfortunately, but this is just one of the years where based on that index it's a 15% increase.

And I'm I'm really concerned because when you were talking about our hourly employees got a 2.5%, that was on page 12.

You know, you were that's where you were stating that wrote that down, and then we come to this page, page 52, and we're looking at a 15.22 percent.

Um, I'm hoping that my colleagues will come to reason and fully understand how outrageous that salary increase, and that we would certainly take um a much lower scale than that, and then going through the attorney's office.

How we can make a return on that fund, but it's it's criminal that is a city representative or a mayor, we would be looking at a 15.22 increase in our salaries.

You can visit with me, I'll show you how to give it all away.

I agree, mayor, and I think I've done the vast majority of mine as well.

But I think it would be nice if our whole group, as what's good for one is good for all, that this would be a good incentive to give back to our community.

And I I value that I saw that when Mayor Leeser did it without um fanfare, and it was really good for the community, and so I do follow that as well.

No photo ops.

Thank you.

So that is the end of the presentation.

I'd be happy to answer any questions, and so uh as I mentioned, we posted this for action if the council would like to take action or give some direction.

Um I believe the biggest thing that we would like to have some decision about it or these adjustments because some of these do involve adding additional funds that are not identified, and you'll see the funding source identification was one-time revenue, which to me is fund balance, and so represent Canales.

Thank you, Mayor.

You teed that one up, Robert.

Can we go to slide 48, please?

Back to it's another potential source of one-time revenue.

Um, that is the 430,000 dollars in investment interests uh from ARPA.

Um both district two uh and I requested significantly more than that, uh close to double that amount for sustainment of the welcome center.

Um the which is the the kind of single intake facility and triage facility for for homelessness.

Pardon me, I'm losing my voice.

Um because that was already an ARPA funded program, I think it makes a lot of sense to continue the use of that ARPA investment interest to fund that program.

Um, obviously it doesn't fund it 100%.

I think there are opportunities out there potentially for additional uh either grant funding or other uh cooperation through partnerships with with other local entities who might be able to help us sustain that um obviously not forever, but um at least for a year and while we up uh identify other opportunities for for taking care of uh that that specific need.

Um again 430,000 would not fund the operation to the level that it exists right now, but I think it would help us to sustain for several months while while seeking out those other sources, and so um I'd move that we uh use that one time uh one time available funding from the American Rescue Plan Act investment interest revenue, the amount of four hundred thirty thousand dollars to uh fund at least partial sustainment of the welcome center.

There was a motion and a second question.

Okay, represent Nino.

Thank you, Mayor.

Ms.

Mack, I don't know if Nicole's still here.

I know that she mentioned during the presentation during the regular meeting that there was a transition plan when I talked about the welcome center.

Um can we kind of touch a little bit into that to see what that plan might be if that's okay if I make it some.

And the only reason I I think it's extremely important to fund the welcome center.

I just want to ensure that, you know, there's opportunities to just ensure that there's other essential services that we could, you know, fund as well if there's already a plan for that or not.

I don't know.

Um additionally, what can ARPA funds be used for?

I think I would like to also understand what that what it could potentially be used for, not just for one specific expenditure, right?

So maybe we could get clarification on that.

So this particular source it is ARPA investment interest, however, the benefit of this is that it's flexible.

You can use it basically for anything.

There's no restrictions, the ARPA regulations do not apply to the use of the investment interest.

So there is flexibility with those funds.

Okay.

Thank you for that.

And if if you may quote, just so I could get background on what on the transition plan.

Yeah, the transition plan, and if there was a plan to continue services or starting August August 1st, it should we not identify funding?

August 1st will be the last day that we will operate the welcome center, and that's ran by the opportunity center.

Um the last day will be August 1st.

The plan is that we would notify agencies in the Alpasa helps and and all of the the collaborative that work together on homelessness initiatives, they'd be notified starting July 1st that we will be scaling operations down so that August 1st, everyone understands that that welcome center won't be accepting clients.

Okay, and so just to put that in perspective, think of the welcome center as a triage room for you to get a hospital bed.

And so what it does is it serves about 50 per uh people per day.

50 people are in there and they're waiting to get their bed from another shelter, and so that's how it it operates.

So um what the transition plan addresses is that we'll just start working with the surrounding agencies that accept those beds.

They just we won't have a hospital triage room for them at the time.

They will wait until they get the bed open.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

So the Al Paso helps partners will be notified starting July 1st.

And then the like I mentioned earlier, the partnerships already exist.

Everyone, you know, in this collaborative want to work to ensure the positive part is that if we do have to scale down the operations or shut the welcome center down at on August 1st, we have the framework.

We know we can if we identify funding in the future, we already know how to get things rolling and and start this program again.

It was born during COVID when there people were asked to shelter in a place that they didn't have shelter in.

And so this is adapted over time to meet the needs of our community now.

If we have to scale back, we're we're prepared to, and then if we find additional funding later, then we have the framework ready to go.

We have the playbook.

No, this is great.

And I know that we had a conversation about that.

I know that when I met with Robert last week or when when I saw him, I talked about how we could possibly figure out funding for the welcome center.

I didn't submit any request specifically because my initial request was to try to find cost savings and identify what is it that we could potentially, you know, ensure that we provide other essential services such as now you said that currently the welcome center provides services for about 50 people one night, per day.

Okay.

Now, in regards to 430,000 of the investment interest with the ARPA, about approximately, do you know how much that would that's about seven months?

Seven months, but that gives us time to identify since this is ARPA, this is this program was funded by ARPA, and that it's the fund account that we had allocated for them is exhausting.

The benefit there is that we already have the reporting mechanisms in place.

We have we understand how to issue federal funding, and we know how to ensure that it's compliant.

Okay.

So we don't have that that deadline does not apply to that investment interest as well.

So flexibility plus you have that extended time as well.

Okay.

Now essentially we're still gonna continue trying to find means of how to get additional funding to essentially extend it or even not have to use that funding in case we get some sort of grant or some sort of funding that gives it that opportunity to further expand the program.

Certainly, the the goal would be to find additional grant funding uh separate and aside from the general fund um and and continue the welcome center, whether it it's through this initiative through its location or in a future um in a future sense.

Okay.

Now, Robert, quick question for you in regards to the additional 243,000 of operating efficiencies.

Currently is that savings for essentially what council wishes to use it for, or what are we for slide 48?

I'm trying to understand the 430,000 of the ARPA, and then the additional two hundred and forty of operating efficiencies.

It's an additional amount that the departments identified that they could take if the council took action for them to take those reductions.

But as I mentioned, it really does cut that line line of working with them what you have.

It basically provides them very limited flexibility to address things that happen, particularly with I mean both of them, but products and recreation we know things happen all throughout the year that they're facing that they didn't expect or anticipate, always having to make adjustments.

Budget transfers happen all throughout the year where they're having to use money from one account to help offset something on another account.

So that this would really limit their flexibility to be able to address in the given year.

That being said, again, as we did the review, just like we did when we started the budget process, we do a budget actuals, and just based on that, we did identify that based on your historical spending, you could make this reduction for these two departments.

Okay, and I'm grateful for all the work that has taken into account, right?

And I think that you know, families are struggling overall.

Families don't get to decide if there's inflation, even if it's three-point inflation index.

They don't get to say, oh, well, that's the cost.

Now they have to start finding where to reduce our expenditures.

And I think that's extremely important for us to think about any expenditure that we do that we think about it.

Like if it's our own money.

Even if it's not specifically in this budget, I think that it'll be good practice to continue finding the best cost on anything.

And I know OMB has been meeting with all the department heads and looking at all those options as well, which I'm very grateful for.

But I just wanted to get that clarification and see what the transition plan and and just get the whole picture so I could understand on this vote.

Thank you.

So the technology contracts is probably the biggest area.

And so I mean I know there's some limitations with that.

Obviously, we need to have access to all of the systems and all of the different things that we utilize as far as technology, but you'll see that 20 million dollars that we have, and this is an area that every year for the last three or four years now goes up two to three million dollars every year as we're renewing contracts or something's being added, something new.

So that's an area of the technology piece is something that I in my opinion that we need to continue to look at.

Okay.

I have no other questions for that.

Representative Chavez.

Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Robert.

I have questions on your presentation, but I'm gonna speak right now about the item that's um up right now for vote.

Um, and it's my questions are more for Nicole and Miss Mac.

Thank you, Nicole.

Can you walk back?

I I was uh very happy to get a briefing from you recently, and I was very impressed by one of your slides, which indicated a 20% decrease in grant funding in the last few years, and how you and your department have had to be very resilient and creative in finding ways to operate even with that decrease.

Um we had a long conversation about that.

I'm I'm very supportive of the welcome center of the heart initiative and and other things that the community is doing, but I do know that they've they came and presented and we talked about the their operating costs being around 60 to 80,000.

The last time we had a budget discussion, we went we asked the the city staff, Ms.

Mac and your staff to find budget savings.

Um where I'm going with this is how do how do we know that the welcome center is operating as efficiently as possible uh before committing to sustaining their operations at that level specifically?

How do we know that anecdotally I can speak from managing a nonprofit myself?

The resources are finite.

The the the money that you get is the money that you get, and I would say that when we allocate, I I know that when we allocate those dollars, those con in the contract it's written not to exceed a certain amount, and so we manage the contracts based off of that language.

So if the direction today were to take that that ARPA interest, the contract would be written in a way that it wouldn't exceed so that we don't go over that amount.

Nicole, can you speak a little bit about how we structured that contract?

How you're tracking and holding them accountable for the spending and what our internal controls are against those contracts.

Right.

Um so we have a come an in-house compliance team that reviews um all of our contracts.

So if they say they're gonna serve 60 people, we ensure that we get the information for those 60 people.

Everything that they say that they're going to do it's reflected in the contract, and then we go in and do a monitoring to ensure that they're they're conducting that.

Um the second piece that I I want to um kind of talk to is the when we write the contracts, we have them tell us what they're going to do.

What our nonprofits have done consistently and time and time again is when there are fluctuations or things that happen that we can't account for, they absorb those things because they want to be good partners for the city.

For example, when we do those hard initiatives or when we did the the outreach initiatives, that's a big strain on their resources that they weren't planning for, but they did it anyway.

And another thing too, when the migrant crisis happened, they can't utilize the federal funds to you know to work um and and pay for for migrants, but in this case, all of our nonprofits absorb those costs outside of the federal funding and and showed up for us in in those ways.

Had you uh previously identified what this 430,000 dollars could be of use for your specific department for?

It would go 100% to serve the welcome center.

We wouldn't take any admin.

Typically we do a 15% admin on on our um, my question is it like was so was this your intention the whole time because Representative Canales proposed it right now, or was this what you were planning to do initially with the money anyway?

It wasn't offered to her, so a conversation I had with Robert as they were going through their review, we were looking at what was being submitted by council, and so it just happened to be that because this program was ARPA funded, we know what it's a discussion with you all because it is aligned to one of the nine items that was requested by council.

Okay, so it was listed there with the intent of it going to the welcome center.

Yes, and one more comment that I want to make is everything is on a reimbursement basis.

That's what I just understood.

I I just proposed it.

No, I know, but it Ms.

Back made it seemed like they had identified it for that specific reason.

No, I asked a question like that today, right?

Okay.

So we had the presentation, and we've been looking at you know all the requests that were there trying to get all the numbers ready for you all today to look at how we might be able to cover some of these programs, and so because that program had previously been funded by ARPA, I asked a question um this morning.

How many months could it cover just to know and we didn't bring it as a presentation to you all?

We don't know where the rest of the dollars are gonna come from.

We wanted to make sure we put that out there for you all because it would be something if you're asking us to look at one-time funding, this would be the type of funding that we will look at because I would rather not look at um you know fund balance for any of the items that are listed.

And I understand that I just I'm trying to get like a sense of Nicole's needs with her department specifically because of the conversation we had in my office, the decrease in her budget in the last few years, and because we have this interest earned.

I'm just wondering if there was a need that you'd identified that on work that you're doing specifically aside from the welcome center that you could use this fund for.

This money for the the money would go to the welcome center.

We can take any admin, and I want to touch on the controls piece that that uh Miss Mac wanted me to talk to you about.

We do everything on a re 100% reimbursement basis, so they upfront the money and then they prove their expenses and then we verify, and that's what gets audited um on a yearly basis.

Okay.

The welcome center was also her only item.

I think for her budget request too.

Yes, so when departments can tell us what their needs are beyond the scope of their budget.

So this was, I think it was like six or six hundred thousand when you spend it.

Okay.

And everyone will tell you if I had six hundred thousand in my budget, I would have made it happen.

Thank you.

Is that it, representative?

Okay, representative Nino.

Thank you, Mayor.

Ms.

Mack or Robert, have all ARPA funding expenditures been exhausted, have are they all accounted for?

They're all accounted for.

They have not all been spent, and so we are now meeting weekly to keep up with the departments to make sure that every dollar, every cent is spent prior to the deadline.

Are we expected to fully exhausted?

Do you know?

It's a fantastic question.

So at this point, yes.

But like I said, we're meeting weekly to begin to identify where we may run into issues where we may not be able to spend.

So we may be able to identify additional funding, but I don't hold me to that yet.

Okay.

I I would like to know.

I mean it doesn't have to be right now, right?

But maybe in an in a briefing or when I meet with Ms.

Mack, I want to know the balance of the ARPA funds that we have, what's it's currently um allocated for just so I could get a better idea.

I know that we talked about it previously, but I can't.

I send it to the entire council.

We'll send it out to everybody.

Okay.

Mayor I have no other question.

Representative.

Thank you, Mayor.

Robert, the cost for the federal lobbyist, is that in the legislative uh department or where is that funding?

It's multiple departments.

So I believe that airport bridges, airport, and economic development are also assisting to pay for that.

So they all sort of um there's the same so the full impact isn't on the general fund.

In in the budget, does there still exist a six thousand dollar allocation per district?

For travel, yes.

For travel, yes, ma'am okay.

And but if we have a federal lobbyist now, I think that that lobbyist or lobbyist group would be most capable of doing the lobbying for the city.

And so with that in mind, if we look at that at six thousand dollars, that's forty-eight thousand dollars savings that we could have.

And so potentially, um I'd like to make a motion that we reallocate that travel budget of forty-eight thousand dollars and move it over into the welcome center.

It will be a little bit, it'll put us almost at $500,000.

That's my motion, Mayor.

Okay.

There's a motion.

Is there a second?

Second.

Okay.

There's a motion and second.

Any discussion on this item?

So is that an amendment to the original motion?

That's just an allocation of a different funding source.

Okay.

Oh well, but we we still have a motion.

Yeah, we have a you do have you do have a motion right now on the floor that was made by Representative.

Canalis.

So I'll come back.

Okay, I'll come back.

Think about it, everybody.

Representative uh Sabero.

Thank you, Mayor.

Um, overall the 430,000 that has been identified from ARPA, I think would go a really long way for this.

And with the meeting kind of shifting from yesterday to today, um, I I think just scheduling wise, it didn't work for John Martin to be here, but I know the last conversation that I had with him, he was gonna bring a one-pager to to council just to kind of identify how um the welcome center really helps the city in many different ways, especially when it comes to budget costs.

So if you look at police, they would probably be spending a little bit more without the welcome center in place because they're gonna have to be transporting people that you know um you get into recidivism, then you get into the the county and the hospital and how long um some people might be in the hospital, and that goes back to the taxpayers.

So the the advantages of having the welcome center really outweigh a lot of budgetary um reasons in in the sense that we're gonna have to pay for this in one way or another through other city departments that might be affected.

And so I think that's what's really important to consider here, and I know that nonprofits are are always doing what they can with shoestring budgets.

And like Nicole said earlier.

I think that's that's really important to note.

If they had seven hundred seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars the year before, and now there's potentially four hundred and thirty thousand, they're going to do what they can with that.

And at the same time, Mr.

Martin also shared that there's other funding that they're looking at to sustain it, but just ending this in August, which is a month and a half from now, would really kill them, and this would give them some runway to get to the next source of funding.

What that will hopefully come in.

So I just wanted to throw that in there based on the motion at hand, and then I have overall comments on the presentation, so I'll come in a little later.

Okay.

Representative uh Rocha.

Thank you, Mayor.

Ms.

Mac was was the exercise when we were putting in budget requests to offset the cost of what we were requesting.

Was that not the expectation?

Yes, ma'am, it was.

So where is this additional money from the welcome center coming from?

So there was a category pull down that you could choose one-time funding as a source, so that wasn't a write-in.

So that was they followed the instructions in terms of the cost, but then council has to decide whether you want to identify those funding sources and utilize them a couple of items that are listed, I would consider capital.

Of course, we don't have capital funds for those, and so we would need to figure out how council would like to approach those additional dollars for those items.

That wasn't a requirement for each of us to go through that exercise at the time of the expense, to identify that funding source, right?

So in some cases, similar similar to the budget simulation, right?

Where we're taking from this fund in order to fund this.

Yes, ma'am.

That was not part of our requirement.

That was the intention of how we wanted to approach this.

That's what I understood.

And so I know that um there are people, you know, colleagues on this on this dais that will probably vote no on the budget.

And I understand that, you know, that is that is our absolute right to be able to do that.

However, I understood the assignment as when we come in and we say we want a certain amount to come in or to fund a certain project, that we should also come and say we are going to be taking it from a certain fund.

That's how I understood the project, and that's how I understood what the what the what the actual public was supposed to do as well was to provide that that information, and so with that said, you know, I I can definitely understand how some of us may um vote against the budget, and that that's definitely our right, and that's fine.

However, I think as a champion of fiscal responsibility, I think we also need to make that that determination that we continue that throughout the year and not ask for any additional funds in in any of the projects that we support.

That's just my personal opinion, but I personally feel like that was the was the intention of the budget request this year.

That's what I understood.

Is to say that we were coming with a budget request and this was it, and we were supposed to provide the additional fund of where that funding was supposed to come from.

Thank you, Miss Mac.

Representative Trajo.

Thank you, Mayor.

Robert, uh question on slide 16 and the state program.

You had mentioned that there's a one percent that goes back to the general fund, or you submit for reimbursement, and that this was uh, you know, I think uh legislative affairs has gone to try to see if any if that can be increased now that we have a lobbyist, is that something that has been is in the in the agenda to do that?

Yes, and so we're actually in the process of going after a new state lobbyists as well.

So once they come on board, we'll engage them as well to help.

So to be clear, it's not one percent that comes into the general fund.

Essentially, what the state does with their calculation on their worksheet is they reduce the amount that we're able to, or the amount that we're impacted by.

So, for example, in the most recent year in FY26, it was 17 million dollars, and the state's formula is you take that 17 million dollars, you might as well subtract one percent of your general fund budget, and then so in this case about six million dollars, and then that's the amount that you get to request.

Why the state asked you to reduce your requests from the impact amount?

I don't have an answer.

And so we'll do some research to figure that out.

But really, the simple solution is the state just needs to allocate more money to the programs.

So obviously, we know the city's right now requesting more than what the state has allocated for the entire state.

So thank you.

Representative Canales.

After the vote, okay, Ms.

Bryan.

There's a motion and a second.

Yes, Mayor.

The motion was made by Representative Canales, seconded by Representative Acevedo, and this is to allocate one-time funding of $430,000 from ARPA investment interest revenue for the welcome center.

On that motion, call for the vote.

And the voting session.

Okay, Representative Canales.

Thank you, Mayor.

Um, this is uh again related to the budget.

Different topic than the welcome center, and council, I'll deliver this to you momentarily by email.

Um the animal shelter advisory committee separately, this this is not necessarily a message exactly for me.

The animal shelter advisory committee met last week, Wednesday, June 10th to a week and a half ago, um, and voted unanimously to uh make a recommendation to the council regarding the budget and directed uh myself and test as the chair and tests Passero is the vice chair to deliver a message to the council on the budget, and so I'll read that into the record if I can, and then I'm not making any particular motion or request with regard to the budget today, but just uh making the council aware of this and putting it in the public record.

Um so again, I'm I'm the the messenger as the chair, but this is a message from the committee.

Uh, members of the Al Paso City Council.

We write to you today as chair and vice chair of the city's El Paso and City of El Paso's animal shelter advisory committee ASAC at the committee's meeting on Wednesday, June 10th, 2026.

The members voted unanimously to approve agenda item number four, which reads as follows discussion and action on a recommendation to the city council that additional funding for free public spay neuter programming be included in the city budget.

Expanding the availability of public spay neuter services is a topic that has consistently been among the ASAC's top priorities.

Doing so has been a recommendation made to the city council in the ASAC's last two annual reports.

The committee feels that the city budget in development for fiscal year 2027 should contain additional funding for spay neuter services, and we believe there's an opportunity to deploy that funding more efficiently to ensure maximum benefit to the public.

Over the course of the Borderland Rescue Fund's separate work with Greater Good Charities on the pet pantries programming, the city's support of which we're immensely grateful for.

We have been connected with their veterinary program, through which the organization deploys high volume, low-cost spay neuter clinics to cities around the country and around the world.

Greater good charities has expressed the desire to bring these services to El Paso in the near future, as soon as early 2027.

We recently received communication from Dr.

Ruth Parkin, executive vice president of veterinary services at Greater Good Charities.

Dr.

Parkin provided an estimated budget for large spay neuter events in Al Paso, targeting 1,000 plus surgeries per event at a cost of 119,000 to 128,000 dollars per event.

The price tag may sound large on its face, but the value for the number of surgeries is aligned with what Al Paso Animal Services pays per surgery for its own spayathon events, and they would be able to achieve significantly higher volume, potentially serving both owned pets and trap neuter return animals.

As directed by the vote of the animal shelter advisory committee, we formally request that the city council consider adding funding for these services to the city budget for fiscal year 2027.

This is a significant opportunity to increase available services.

We are available to answer any questions you may have.

Sincerely, Chris Canales, Chair and Tess Passero, Vice Chair of the Animal Shelter Advisory Committee.

So we and copied our uh Ms.

Mac, uh Deputy City City Manager Richard Bristol, uh deputy city manager uh Robert Cortinas and uh Michael Walksman of Animal Services.

So we'll transmit that letter as well.

Um, but just wanted to make sure the council was aware of the request coming from the Animal Shelter Advisory Committee.

And again, that was a unanimous vote by the committee.

Okay.

And that's all, Mayor.

Thank you.

Representative Chavez.

Thank you, Mayor.

Are we speaking on the presentation now?

Is that right?

Okay.

Um, the motion, I believe.

I don't think it was a motion.

She has to bring it back.

Um, I'd like to speak on my request on efficiencies.

Um, and I know I brought it up during my budget review with you and Miss Mac.

Um, and I don't know if in your presentation, Robert, you've identified specifically consultants per department, or if maybe you've already done the exercise independently of that, but um I I know that there are a lot of consultants that are very much needed.

I think I've spoken on this before in the past because consultants bring expertise to the table that sometimes either we don't have or are needed to kind of get that outside view for other reasons.

But uh I initially had this idea because in the city of Austin, and I know I shared an article with you and I spoke about it with uh Miss Mac and you during our budget review, that the city of Austin uh during an audit um they it was reported that they have spent 279 million dollars on consulting services within two fiscal years, and the audit determined that some of these consultants uh didn't have uh clear KPIs deliverables for the city, and the consultants that they had also hired many times didn't really provide a service that couldn't be done in-house, right?

And that is why I have this uh budget request.

I don't know what the cost would be.

I don't necessarily think that we could even maybe probably conduct it between now and when we adopt the budget in August, but I do definitely want to put it on the record that this is something that's in the back of my mind.

I think I'm not sure if every single department has consultants that they hire, but I I have known and we voted actually on some on the dais for several departments.

Like I said, I do think that they're important in some cases for for the reasons I've already stated, but I also believe that we need to uh really take a deep dive into this practice and make sure that there isn't something that we're not being very diligent about in both hiring these consultants, ensuring that they're actually delivering a service that we can't do in-house, and ensuring that we are holding them accountable to the work that they should they should be providing us.

Um, it it's very easy to to call, you know, uh, or to say that that you are going to provide a service, a consulting service, but uh again, I in our efforts to be fiscally responsible and try to find savings, and because of this article that I read and this audit that that found this in Austin specifically, I I have to bring it up, and I and I do want to make sure that that we um we keep that in mind as a council that there might be an opportunity here for some savings.

Thank you.

We had some discussion about that, and so going forward, definitely.

We've been talking about implementing a process to identify that up front to have basically standardized or have a process in place to identify the purpose, the expected result, or the deliverable from hiring that consultant, so that going forward.

I mean, I think we can have more discussions about what that looks like about going back and looking at what we have currently in place.

I mean, I think for the most part, I want to say they're one-offs.

I mean, there's things that come up occasionally where we'll utilize a consultant.

Obviously, CID uses for a wide range, not necessarily consultants, but it's a part of getting their job done delivering the project in that particular example.

And our thinking on this item was, you know, Austin is basically hiring outside consultants to come in and do operational efficiency, and you know, of course, I don't believe that the intent of the item is to make further investments to do this analysis.

I see the item says here that you know you wanted to deliver it within 120 days.

I certainly think that with existing staffing, these type of management reports would typically come out of our office of management and budget.

I think it could be done over a year, it can be done, you know, in phases, which is something that Robert and I talked about.

Um, but I certainly couldn't engage that team until we got through the full budget process, and that probably won't be until October there.

I mean it's a small team, um, and and then we could figure out you know how we do it in phases, and maybe it's not every department.

I would say because most of what you're considering here is very much focused on a general fund that we start there, and then we can look at the other departments who you know have um funding sources as well that are tied to this.

Do we have a dollar amount that we know that we're paying for consultants for outside consultants as a city?

Like the audit in Austin determined it was two seventy-nine million over the period of two fiscal years.

I'm assuming it's I think it would matter how you define outside consultant.

So is it a consultant that's helping provide a service that we have to do?

So, for example, arbitrage calculations in the controller's office.

We don't do that in house, it's a very technical calculation that needs to be done.

We hire a consultant to help do that arbitrage calculation.

So I think we'd have to first define or come up with some agreement on how you defining outside consultant.

That work has to be done.

We're required to do it annually.

That's just one example that I can think of.

I mean, I'm sure there's there's gonna be plenty of examples like that where departments are using them for a specialized purpose.

I think I think it's worth the exercise, maybe even identifying the different categories, and then starting from there.

Um, but uh, but I'll speak to you further about it, Miss Mike.

If it takes future council action, I'll bring it back.

Thank you.

Representative Lemo.

Thank you, Mayor.

Let me begin first of all by um totally agreeing with representative Rocha regarding this exercise that we did here, that it was specifically to submit budget adjustments, but to do the process by finding the fundings for it.

The one adjustment that I did, it's become obvious that this council cannot make a recommendation or determination on that.

I did notice when I reviewed this was that there were two representatives who submitted funding for or sustainment of the welcome center.

Um I truly truly believe in it, and so therefore, I think now that's the time.

I'd like to make a motion that we do a reallocation of the travel budget that was instituted last year of six thousand dollars per district, totaling 48,000 dollars, that that money be redirected to support the welcome center.

Okay.

There's a motion.

Is there a second?

Second.

Okay, Ms.

Bryan.

Yes, Mayor, the motion was made by Representative Limon.

Seconded by Representative Granales, and this is to reallocate 48,000 of travel funds from $6,000 per district to support the welcome center.

So to reallocate $6,000 of the travel budget in each district totaling $48,000 to support the welcome center.

On that motion, call for the vote.

And the voting session.

And that motion fails.

Three to five representatives Nino Limon Canales Votinai.

Representative Chavez Acevedo Rocha Trejo and Piero Votini.

The motion failed.

Okay.

Representative.

Thank you, Mayor.

And I think that was good intent.

And the the reason that I didn't support it is that next year is going to be a very important legislative session here in Texas.

And the team has been doing an incredible job, and we have been kind of discussing how we can get out there to testify on important city issues.

And so I think that budget's going to be just really important.

So I just wanted to throw that out there on the previous motion.

Robert, I I have a few questions.

We posted it last week.

Did you?

Okay.

I need to look through it.

I'm I'm running low on time.

I basically looked at every vacancy that every department had.

Basically started from there.

So basically we're going to take everything.

And then we made the departments basically tell us, oh no, no, you can't take that one because I'm I'm about to hire next week.

Okay.

So we started essentially backtracking from there.

But the starting point was basically to look at every vacant position.

And with that, that helped us balance the budget to just eliminate those, not carry them over.

So we're in the process right now.

The budget office is right now working with them.

So we've used two words is either unfund or delete.

Okay.

Our purpose is to delete as many as possible.

There's no point carrying vacant positions on the stepping table that aren't funded.

Okay.

But there are situations where department needs some flexibility just on position titles to keep those on the on the staffing table.

But they're in the process right now of working with each of the departments to identify what can actually be deleted off of the staffing table.

Okay.

And then my notes are all over the place here.

Um I was gonna kind of speak to the council office on slide 53 where you said that in administration we have 286 156 per district, and that's basically for our salaries, right?

For our for the rep and the staff salaries in each office.

Yes, and what percentage would you say is um like insurance and just benefits in general?

How can we calculate that?

Yeah, I don't I don't have it.

I'll have to get that for you.

Okay, I'd appreciate that and this to eighty-six is an increase because of the council salaries going up, right?

Correct.

Okay, and so it's also your staff as well.

So the pay increases we have built in for civilians.

We also built in creases for your staffing as well.

Okay.

Um I kind of wanted to explain the the logic behind the council adjustments that I submitted.

Um, one of them is Memorial Park.

Um I'm a little surprised that it went up, but that was also kind of a big project that took about a year to get the adequate historical lights on the grant side, and what's missing is the copper side, so that's why I submitted this request.

There's a lot of public safety issues that are happening on the copper side.

At one house, there's been a murder a few years ago, and it took about a year to get the person, and it was a pretty horrific murder.

And I think a lot of that contributed to the darkness in that area on the copper side.

So I I understand where we're at budget wise, but I wanted to explain why I was asking for this because there are many public safety concerns that people in that area are having over and over again.

And then on the city council staff salaries and wages, this is something I brought up last year, and it was more in conversation when we were talking through the budget, and then when we had the first budget presentation for this year's budget, I brought this up with Ms.

Mac and Miss Mac said that within the next year we could do some sort of study with HR to understand what other cities are paying their council staffs.

Um just down the street at the county, they're paying a lot more, and I feel like we have a very talented group of people that work for us in the city council offices that I feel that they're severely severely underpaid.

And so when I saw that the council was gonna get such a large raise, and we were gonna have certain council staff members really kind of left behind with this raise.

Some council offices have part-time, some have two full-time, some have one.

Like it just depends on what the rep wants to do, right?

But I think we do have a very qualified group of individuals there with different abilities, and so I kind of made some napkin math on what I thought would be um what salary salaries and wages would be to give everyone a significant raise in the budget, and that's kind of why I put that forward.

Um I do want to try to see if we could um make this a reality this year to kind of hold us over for for next year just because our staffs really do a lot.

So I'm gonna I'm gonna give this a shot and see if we could give each council office $35,000 in their um administration budgets for staff and salaries.

So I I moved to allocate $315,000 to the mayor and city council staff's salaries and wages budget um from all over the place.

From the professional services outside contracts and materials and supplies fund.

And I got this idea how um based on how you illustrated it on page 46 on the presentation.

So that's my motion.

Okay, there's a motion, is there a second?

That motion dies.

Representative uh Lemont.

Thank you, Mayor.

Robert, I just want to confirm you gave us the salaries for mayor and council.

Um I just wanted to highlight representative salary increase is gonna total the increase will be about 12,000.

No, ma'll tell you the salaries, it's going to be how much we did.

$9,617.

$9,000.

$617 for the council representatives.

And to your question, Representative Acevedo.

The Council's budget's primarily all staff.

So 96% of your budget is salaries and benefits.

Representative Canalis.

No, no motion on the floor.

Okay.

Okay.

Sure.

Thank you, Mayor.

Representative.

Thank you, Mayor.

Robert, can you clarify what is the total total dollar amount of funded vacancies that are proposed for deletion for this upcoming fiscal year?

Total amount of savings from the vacancies?

Correct.

The ones that are proposed for deletion?

26.2 million.

26.2 million.

And question for you, how is that reflected in the budget?

I'm trying to understand that.

It's going to be in the salaries and benefit accounts.

And so where they could delete of what's in the preliminary budget that's posted of what you've seen.

There has been some positions that were deleted when we did that.

Put that book together.

Otherwise, essentially what they're doing is either doing lump summetrician or unfunding positions.

And so they're going through the exercise right now.

So let's say our department took a hundred thousand dollars of vacancy savings.

They're going through right now and identifying those specific positions that equate to that $100,000 and either deleting them or making sure they're unfunded to get to that amount.

Okay.

So it's a good opportunity.

So Ms.

Mac has talked a lot about sort of right sizing that staffing table because we heard a lot ever since COVID of having hundreds and hundreds of vacancies.

Well, a lot of them have been unfunded for years, and we've just never deleted them off the staff table.

So this is a good time for us to go to do that now.

Okay.

Well, I'm looking forward to further budget conversations, and seeing where we come to.

So thank you for your all your hard work.

Representative Chavez.

Thank you, Mayor.

Robert, regarding the budget that you presented earlier today.

Are the hot tax for short-term rentals included?

No, extractions?

No.

No.

So when will we have those projections ready?

So I would recommend probably not adjusting the budget.

So what I've mentioned when we all approve that item is we have estimates on what those are going to be, but until we start collecting, we don't know for certain.

So it's better to pilot let a year go by and then we can see what the actual collections are, and then we can make that budget adjustment next year.

If there's something that we desperately need and we see that revenue coming in right away in the first couple of months, we can come back to council and do a budget adjustment if we need to.

But just because it's it's again, we're pretty good at doing estimates, but we're not always 100% accurate.

I would hate to add $4 million of hot use, and then it ends up being two million, just because we have nothing to look back on from short-term rents.

I'd like to request that if you do have those budget adjustments next year that you bring them back to council for discussion prior to making a decision on where to allocate the funding, so that maybe we could revisit some of these budget requests.

And so to be clear also on that that use of hot, so we showed you all that there's restrictions on how the hotel I could tax could be used.

So there are certain categories that it's already allocated to.

Yes.

But absolutely, and so I mean we can come back and show you all what amounts are available for each of the different categories.

Thank you.

That are other extra, you know, revenue that might come from EP water sales or whatever that might be.

Thank you.

Representative, yes, Robert, uh, page 50 or slide 50.

Um, are we done with this now as far as staff time trying to figure out estimated cost and things like that?

Or is that something that's going to continue, or are we done?

Because obviously we don't have money.

2,605,000.

I'd say that we're done for now.

So you all took action on the welcome center, so we'll implement that.

Um but we will come back, as I mentioned, and I started and I showed you all the timeline on August the third.

We will present the certified values that we would receive from the appraisal district.

We will show you how that um certified value compares to what we've estimated.

So essentially right now everything it's built in has been an estimate.

At that point in time, we'll show you is it a plus or a minus on the adjustment side of what we need to make into the budget.

So at that point in time, there may be discussion about revisiting some of these items if there's additional funding from those certified values.

So we're gonna we're gonna continue using staff time to find out these estimated costs.

When that was a that was a process that we had to um submit that information, and now we're putting it back on staff, so we have costs for just about everything.

The only two that we don't is the and we do have an estimate on Mary Francis Keysling, it's just I didn't want to put a number on there and have a different number come about.

So we have an estimate on what that number is on the facility in district one.

Again, our recommendation is let's finish the parks master plan first and then use that as the the guide to determine whether or not additional facilities necessary or needed, but so there will be no additional staff time going into these requests.

Okay, but now these budget adjustments do they become like a priority list or do they is this something that takes preference or how does this work?

Council members can always bring these back up at any any time.

Okay, bring it up, but it's not automatically just because it was on a budget adjustment or a budget request, it's not necessarily going to come up.

No, okay, thank you very much.

Yeah, it would take an action of council.

All right, thank you, Representative Rocha.

Thank you, Mayor.

So right now, Robert, we're sitting at about a two point nine percent uh proposed tax rate increase.

Is that correct?

2.8 cents increase on the tax rate.

Yeah, on the tax rate.

So with the adjustments that we've made tonight or that that passed tonight, where are we closer to that three percent?

No.

No, we've not made any adjustments to impact the general fund, and so the only thing that's been approved is the use of that ARPA investment interest, which is non-general fund, doesn't have any no impact on the tax rate.

And what's the rest of that ARPA ARPA fund balance?

I will send you all the update on all of the programs and where we are at today.

So will that be able to fund any any other items that we have?

At this time, no, but like I said, we're continuing to monitoring, and so we're working very closely with all of the departments that have ARPA allocations to make sure that they're on the right trajectory and that they're going to spend by those deadlines if we get to a point over the next several weeks or maybe uh two months, and we don't want to go too far because we need to have time.

If we need to reallocate, we need to have time to reallocate and get the money spent.

So I can't tell you what that timeline is like.

It's just gonna and so we're meeting weekly.

It's myself, our grant administrator, Sasha, our budget director, and Margarita, and so we're meeting with departments weekly right now.

So we're sitting still at that 2.8 percent um tax rate increase proposed at this time, yes.

Is that correct?

Yes, so there's no increase as a result of any changes that took place tonight.

No, ma'am.

Okay, and but there was no decrease also.

Correct, okay.

Thank you, Robert.

Okay, any uh representative canales.

Thank you, Mayor.

Just to clarify, it's a 2.8 penny cent, not percent, right?

Yeah, not percent rate.

Um, and then the general fund can't have decreased based on our allocation, correct?

Because it's non general fund.

I'm sorry, what was that?

The the the general funds, the tax rate couldn't have changed tonight with a change with an allocation of the ARPA uh investment interest because it's non general fund, correct?

Correct, and the revenue from property taxes goes into the general fund.

Correct.

Okay, yeah, just to so it's clear for anybody watching.

There there is no allocation of that ARPA and interest investment that sorry, it's late.

ARPA investment interest that could have made any change up or down on the uh on the tax rate.

That's is that correct?

Yes, that's correct.

Okay.

Thank you.

Okay.

Representative Nino.

Thank you, Mayor.

So Robert, are you when I asked what the ARPA interest could be used for?

It couldn't have been used to help pay the debt service rate.

Yes, I believe so.

Okay.

So it could have had a potential impact on the tax rate, is that correct?

Sure.

Yeah, and it could have gone to supplement any other expenditure in the general fund, but I will say on the slide when I presented it, and what's indicated on the slide is that that's one time revenue.

And so we're all very clear that once that 430,000 is spent, then obviously we need to identify additional funding for in this case the welcome center.

And so I we were very clear less than that as one time revenue, once it's gone, it's gone, right?

And so if we were to use it for debt service, yes, it would help us in your situation.

It would help, yes, one year, but then the following year you have to make it up because you still have your debt service amount that you have to make.

So like for example, last year we had the TERS which help reduce the debt service rate, which help us decrease the property tax rate that the council adopted, correct?

So we transferred the terms into the general that amount into the general fund.

Correct.

But we helped with the debt service rate, is that correct?

No, no, it came into the general fund.

Okay.

The two million dollars was transferred to the general fund.

Okay.

Okay, thank you.

Representative Chavez.

Mayor I'd like to reconsider my vote on the amendment uh for the ARPA funds.

Okay, thank you.

I'd like to.

Thank you.

Motion and second to reconsider.

There's a motion and a second to reconsider the amendment related to the ARPA funding.

All in favor?

Aye.

Anyone opposed?

No.

No.

Let me let me do a uh roll call.

Representative Chavez?

Aye.

Acevedo?

No.

Rocha?

Repeat the this is to reconsider the motion to.

Thank you.

Trejo.

Nino?

Aye.

Fierro?

Aye.

Limon?

No.

Canales?

Yeah.

The motion does pass to reconsider the motion.

The amendment.

Okay.

Can you do you have that amendment handy, Ms.

Prime, to read it?

Yes.

And so the motion was made by Representative Canales, seconded by Representative Acevedo.

And this is to allocate one-time funding of four hundred and thirty thousand dollars from ARPA investment interest revenue for the welcome center.

Okay.

Call for that vote.

On that motion, called for the vote.

Mayor, there's a tie.

In the voting session.

And that motion fails with the mayor breaking the tie.

Representatives Chavez Rocha Niño Piero voting nay.

Representatives Acevedo Trejo Nemo Canales voting aye.

The motion fails with a mayor breaking the tie by voting nay.

Okay.

Any other questions for Robert?

Thanks.

Okay.

Representative.

So now, what happens with that 430?

It just sits out there for a while until we make a designation for it.

Is that what would happen to it?

So we'll continue monitoring the expenditures out of the entire ARPA funding that we have available.

If there is additional funding, we'll package together and bring forth the recommendation for council's consideration.

And so at this point in time, on Nicole, is it August 1st?

We close down the doors to the welcome center.

Thank you, folks.

Represent Canales.

Thank you, Mayor.

Nicole, do you mind repeating how many people the welcome center serves daily?

On average, the welcome center serves approximately 50 individuals per day.

And so with all over 2,500 individuals have gone through those doors awaiting a shelter bed at some point in time.

And so without the welcome center, on August 2nd, those folks will have no option for the immediate uh immediate shelter.

That's correct.

And those people will be on the street in front of businesses, in front of homes.

There will definitely be a more visible effect.

Okay, thank you.

Representative on you still look.

Any other questions for Robert?

Comment.

Robert, I budget time is always difficult.

I have never gone through something like this before.

All I can say is thank you to you and to Miss Mack for putting this together.

I'm dismayed.

I'm disappointed, broken hearted by this vote today.

It sends a really clear message where our priorities are in this city.

And you work many, many hours to get us to this point.

And to the staff that's here so late in the evening.

Thank you all for being here.

We really appreciate all that you have done.

And I hope that at some point in time this feeling that I'm feeling right now goes away, and then we go back to where we were when we first started off.

You've done a fabulous job, Robert, and answered every question and certainly want to thank you for it.

And Ms.

Mack, thank you very much.

Representative Massaveto.

Yeah, so this is this is kind of wild.

You know, I think there was a short-lived celebration that the welcome center was going to continue operating.

And we I guess what I'm kind of piecing together is some members of council heard you say that we could pay down the debt, and now they're gonna ask you to go spend 430,000 to pay down the debt, which isn't really gonna be a significant debt, right?

So let me that's a point well taken.

So let me just add something out there.

So for every one million dollars of reduction, would equate to about a four dollar decrease on that tax bill that I showed.

So we'd take so in this case 430,000 you just rounded up to half a million, would reduce that 105 increase by two dollars on an average tax bill.

On the average tax bill, average Homewater tax bill.

I'm sure that people would be okay using that money to fund this important operation, especially because now other departments in the city are going to have to show face for this in terms of dollars, and I think that's what's gonna really piss off the people.

It's it's another sad day with this council, honestly.

It's this council is not for the people, and they show it again and again.

That's why we saw what happened last council meeting.

Thank you, Mayor.

Um, yeah, I worry about the impact this has on the police department as well and the role that they have to play in uh you know, their interactions with unhoused people.

Um the welcome center, I think has provided a lot of respite from from that work that the police department has been saddled with for quite a long time.

Um, you know, calls involving unhoused individuals are not easy calls for police officers, and they've told me that again and again.

And so, um, yeah, I worry again, an additional 50 people who they may have to encounter on any given day is is a lot, and I I worry about the impact that we'll have on them, obviously on other departments, parks and recreation, who have to deal with the additional impact.

And so, um, I I just wanted to ask a couple of other clarifying questions, because I think it's important to point out, and we I talked about it in the last budget workshop as well, but uh Robert or uh Nicole perhaps can answer.

I I think you can probably answer Robert.

How much funding do we have for homelessness in the general fund?

No, zero dollars in the general fund for homelessness, and so we have some outside funding that comes from federal and state sources that the city administers and passes through, but our own local taxpayer money, we have zero dollars that go toward homelessness.

That's correct.

Okay, and this would have been a one-time opportunity to fund the program for a short time to sustain a program to fund program for a short time while we looked for alternative funding source.

Um, obviously, still non-general funds, but uh would have at least been a way to tide over that program until some identified source came along.

Um, but we will instead choose to remain with zero dollars for homelessness in our the local portion of our budget.

Is that uh correct?

That's correct.

Okay.

Yeah, again, I I just I I really worry I think we're gonna end up spending this money anyway via the police department and other uh entities that now will have to pick up the slack for this uh for for the loss of this program.

It's really been transformative.

I mean, I remember the situation pre-COVID before the welcome center and have seen how the welcome center transformed like both met an incredible need during the pandemic and then transitioned post-pandemic to you know pick up a lot of uh uh a lot of the uh difficult cases, right?

You know, people who needed immediate shelter.

Um I think importantly, it it's basically the only place where someone with a pet can shelter.

Um it's become the the flexible option uh for meeting immediate needs, and I I just I'm very worried about where we'll be without it.

So I I don't want us to go back to the situation we were in pre-pandemic.

Um that was a lot worse.

And I mean, I just remember district eight uh in particular, but all the districts receiving way more, way more complaints from the public about um their interactions with unhoused people.

So I mean, council buckle up for a lot more complaints.

Representing you, thank you, Mayor.

And the welcome center is an extremely important that we have.

There's still opportunity to even navigate if there's additional funding where we could continue funding the welcome center.

You know, this is the first time that we're having this conversation of seeing the cost savings or the additional say cost or funding that's available to potentially even fund any of the requests that were done by any of the council members.

You know, I met with Nicole, I met with Robert, and I talked about how important it is to fund the welcome center.

I do think that you know we're elected to make very difficult decisions, so I don't think this is the end of the conversation.

I think that again, it's extremely important to fund the welcome center and create strategies of how is it that we do that, right?

We have until August 1st.

We're gonna meet again July 6th and 7th.

We're still gonna have other budget conversations, is that correct?

Right now, the only item that we plan to bring back between now and August 3rd is the fee presentation.

August 3rd.

So August 3rd will be the day we bring certified values from the prison district, and you will be introducing the tax read on that day.

Okay, so currently there is no allocate, there's no motion to allocate these four hundred and thirty thousand dollars to anything.

That's correct.

Correct.

So I would like to make a motion to direct the city manager to come back to the next council meeting.

With a presentation, inviting the opportunity of Homeless Center to give us that presentation that you know Representative Acevelo mentioned as well.

But also to talk about further strategies of how is it that we're gonna continue providing support for the home uh the opportunity center for the welcome center.

Now again, I don't think the conversation ends today.

We're gonna figure out ways to fund this welcome center and provide this important service for our community.

So my motion will be to direct the city manager to come back to the next council meeting.

Because again, we were making a decision that is extremely important, but even in the conversations that we had, I think we have to you know have the opportunity center to come into that presentation as well.

But then there's gonna be other there could be other strategies in the next two weeks that come forward of how do we find more funding to make it even more successful.

So that will be my motion, Mayor.

Okay.

There's a motion, is there a second?

Ms.

Brian, that motion dies.

Representative Acevedo.

I I don't know.

I'm I just continue to be left speechless.

I mean, it's a very easy thing to understand.

I don't think we need another presentation.

And the council voted for it and then took it away an hour later.

And Robert just gave us clarification that it was over two dollars that people would be saving when this is such a big public need.

And so I don't know where we go from here if there's just a sense of regret, if there's backlash, what what it is, but this is completely dysfunctional, and it's it's really sad that this is where we're at as an organization.

All right, any other questions?

Okay, so thank you, the 32 departments that are here this evening.

Thank you, City Council, and I will tell you just because sorry to interrupt you here.

I apologize for interrupting you.

Um, but before we before we adjourn, I do want to make something uh clear to to everyone and the people.

I think that there's plenty of people also online still listening, people that are here in the audience.

I don't think it's correct for anyone to question someone else's integrity on this dais.

I also do not think it's correct for anyone to pose as the one savior of our community.

I think we were all elected respectfully from our districts because we were chosen to represent the people that we um have meetings with, speak with, and are in constant contact with, and people have entrusted us with our voice.

Um, something that I've mentioned many times in my life is that the older I get, the less impulsive I am and the more intentional I become.

Yes, it is very difficult to make decisions sometimes on this dais, but decisions are made out of the information that's been presented to us at the time that we're making them, and to pass judgment on another council member, I think is beneath us.

So I would uh respectfully like to ensure that it doesn't happen again.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you.

And I and I don't disagree.

This is a democracy, and this is how it works.

If one individual doesn't like the way others vote, then I don't know what to say.

I mean, this is eight people that are that are voting, so to start throwing and casting stones at others is is is completely inappropriate.

So with that said, um, thank you, staff for being here this evening.

We really appreciate it.

We appreciate all the work that has gone into the budget, and there's a lot more work to still be done.

But uh we will call it in them, but thank you guys so much.

Mayor, a special shout out to the city TV team that's also been working all day on the cameras is there a motion to adjourn second there's a motion and a second to adjourn the special meeting all in favor anyone opposed and the special city council meeting for Tuesday June twenty third twenty twenty six is adjourned at nine fifty nine p.m thank you council