Good morning.

This is a special meeting of the El Paso City Council for Monday, August 17, 2026.

It is 957 a.m.

Mayor Johnson is present and presiding in Council Chambers along with Mayor Pro Tem Chavez.

Representative Acevedo, Representative Madonado Rocha, Representative Boyatrejo, Representative Nino, alternate Mayor Pro Tem Fedro, Representative Limon, and Representative Canales.

Mayor, we have a quorum.

Okay.

Good morning, Robert.

Good morning.

Mayor and City Council.

I would request that we do item number two first.

Item number two, we will do the presentation, go through essentially a budget recap into where we stand, and then item one will be the public hearing on the tax rate.

Okay, let's do that.

So item two is a public hearing in action on the proposed budget as amended for the city of El Paso filed by the city manager with the city clerk on July 17, 2026, which begins on September 1st, 2026 and ends on August 31st, 2027.

Okay, Robert, you're up.

Good morning again.

Mayor City Council Robert Cortina City Manager's Office.

So this presentation will cover a couple of different items.

As I mentioned, we'll do a recap of the 2027 budget timeline, the development.

We'll talk a little bit about the proposed budget and go through some of the highlights, and then we'll talk about recent actions on the introduction of the tax rate.

So as mentioned, looking at the overall timeline of what we have done so far with this particular budget, actually just looking at different public discussions back on May 27th and 28th, the city manager and myself did the overview, and then you got to hear presentations from each of the different department directors outlining their particular budgets for each of their departments and the things that they were going to achieve with the upcoming budget for 2027.

But this budget actually goes back much further than that.

And so think back to February timeline when we did not only your strategic planning session, but we also did several presentations.

So those presentations were again intended to sort of lay the found foundation and the framework for what we've discussed since then.

Um so as of today, right now we are doing the public hearings on both the budget and the tax rate.

And then tomorrow we will have the adoption of both the budget and the tax rate for council's consideration.

So on item number two, this is the public hearing on the budget as read into the record.

And so with this item, once we get to the end, we will ask that the council does take action.

So the action will be what is on the screen here, and is to postpone the vote until tomorrow, which will be here at City Hall at 10 a.m.

tomorrow.

We did follow the proposed budget on July the 17th, again, in accordance with state law on August the 6th.

We did publish in the El Paso Times and the El Paso Di Audio, which we are not required to do, but we do publish in both in English and Spanish, so that the community is well aware of when these public hearings will be held.

Looking at some of the key challenges, again, just a high-level recap of what we've discussed over the last um three plus months.

Again, this budget for FY 2027 is being driven by a couple of different things.

One of them is loss of taxable value, which we've talked about pretty extensively.

And again, the need to continue funding city operations and different obligations, whether that be from public safety fixed cost or other obligations that we have to fund all of the city services, including our debt service, which uh we'll talk a little bit about here later in the presentation.

Um but again, we still do have several hundred million dollars of outstanding debt to be issued from those voter-approved bond projects back in 2019 and 2022.

As we talked about the budget development again, the tax rate discussion, which we've had over the last several weeks now, and you all introduced the tax rate a couple of weeks ago.

Um, it's important to point out that prior to that introduction of that tax rate, we've done multiple presentations not only to the council, we went out to the community, Ms.

Mack and myself.

We visited each council district and did presentations on the budget, got to hear directly from them, get their feedback.

Um but as the budget was developed, and so as I mentioned, going back to that February timeline, um, the city manager, myself, all of our city departments did look extensively at how we can identify either efficiencies of different adjustments.

And so included in the budget that was presented on May the 27th.

Again, we talked about going back and identifying almost 26 million dollars of savings through eliminating or unfunding almost 400 vacant positions in the organization.

You all approved back in May the refinancing and the issuance of the new debt, but with that refinancing, we were able to generate 17 million dollars of debt service savings over an extended period of time.

So in the FY2027 budget, we do have two million dollars of debt service savings from that refinancing.

Additionally, the city departments we do an extensive review.

The budget office works very closely with the different departments again to ensure that the budgets that are being recommended and developed are based on actual spending.

One of the big things that I want to point out as well is that it's part of the budget process.

Each city department essentially presents a base budget, a flat budget.

So no new programs, no expanded programs, and so if a department wants to recommend or ask for those things, they submit a program request similar to what you all did as part of the process.

So each department submits their department program request.

Those are reviewed.

Most of those do not get approved.

There was maybe one or two that actually did get approved, things that we have to do, but for the most part, those things do not get approved because we don't have the financial resources to be able to fund those things.

So some of those things included public health submitted, a few, I believe, six or seven different requests for different resources for health service programs, our IT department.

You all have seen different presentations from the IT department of the need to continue investing in our infrastructure, replacing computers, ensuring that we're staying up to date with cybersecurity investments that we need to make.

Those requests were not funded, and then the two big ones, which we'll talk a little bit about more because this is really what's going to drive the budget next year, is our public safety departments, our police and fire departments.

So both of those departments have additional requests on top of what is not in the budget for FY 2027.

So the fire department we're working right now to try to identify some additional funding because they do have some different investments that we need to make, some equipment that does need to be replaced, and so we're trying to identify additional resources that we can find to be able to make those purchases one way or another since they are not currently in the budget.