The Fort Smith Board of Directors held a special study session on September 11, 2025, starting at 5:30 p.m. at the Blue Lion, to review the preliminary Fiscal Year 2026 General Fund budget. The meeting was called by Directors George Catsavis, Christina Catsavis, Neal Martin, and Kevin Settle. Acting City Administrator Jeff Dingman and Finance Director Andy (likely Andy) presented the budget overview, revenue projections, expenditure allocations, vacancy trends, and specific requests from the Fire, Parks, and Police departments. The session concluded with a discussion on scheduling further budget study sessions.
Good evening folks. Sorry for the slight delay. We're going to go ahead and get started with the special study session that we have about budget items just as a matter of notification for everyone. This meeting won't conclude no later than 7.30 this evening. So Mr. Dingman, would you please get us started with our agenda for tonight? Thank you, Vice Mayor. This evening, starting with uh review of the budget comparison summary from the general fund. And as we're going through, we have a plethora of paperwork in front of us. Could you please point out to us where we are as we move through each of these items? Certainly, sir. The first thing that I want to talk about, I've got it on the screen, but this is freshly up. I don't have this printed out. Um, but just and we've and you've looked at this before, but you know, we continually keep to update this as we um meet with individual departments and and uh try to trim um projections and and also budgets. And so what we have today shows that uh for our fiscal year twenty-five projected, just look at the bottom line. We've um we've trimmed our budget, I guess deficit our revenues less our expenditures. So we were the amended was at 19.4, and we've got it the projected now to 17 and a half. So we've made some fairly significant progress there. What are we looking at here? This is the general fund. Right, but where is that? We don't have to. I don't have I we just got this updated, but I wanted to kind of show you where we are, and these totals will be reflected in this other handout I have for you. So but anyway, I just wanted to point out. So our if we're looking at our contingency uh reserve percentage, we're estimating twenty-four percent by the end of uh twenty-five. And then we're also you know, are we also working through the twenty-six budget request. And I don't know that we we've updated as much as we can. I think there might be even some more updates. We just haven't gotten them in here yet. But at this point, um we're showing a 10 million dollar uh deficit in 26, showing a 7.7 million dollar fund balance at 12 percent. So Andy, could I ask a quick question? When we buy when we do things that are not tied to departments like water slides or or other purchases that are going to be added, that's coming from the general fund. Where is it categorized on this image on the screen? Non-departmental. It's that last expenditure line item. Okay, thank you. So non-departmental will have things that we do. Um, it'll it'll have things like the water slides typically. We bought the building, uh that you know, that's in that category. Also transfers that we make to other funds like to the lofty contribution fund and the convention. Cabanis land, is that in that too? What's that? The cabanis land, the two million from their non-departmental funds? Yeah, because it wasn't for a particular departmental purpose. It was just a and the property sales happen. Uh will those go back to non-department. Will they go back to the go straight back to the general fund as revenue, yes? Okay, thank you. You you you are you're referencing the cabanas property. That actually closed in 24, right?