Good morning, everyone is five minutes after 10.

I call to order the city council work session for our budget work session on the FY2027 uh budget meeting.

For Tuesday, June 16th.

Uh Jay, you're opening up.

Good morning, everyone.

A good morning.

This is the last city council work session before the city council work session on the one break.

Two summer break.

Uh budget meeting.

I want to thank Tuesday and the departments, the hard work that's been going on.

Good morning.

A good morning council budget process.

This is the last, as we've been talking about, we're staring at a pretty hefty uh budget gap as we move forward.

And uh last week we went through what we call budget blitz where every department uh came and uh offered up their proposed budgets along with potential cuts and additions and those kind of things.

We got we got them all done.

Um, so now the budget group and the city manager's office is we'll be working on trying to put this together and get to a balanced uh budget.

As we mentioned last time, or when we start off, we were looking at about a fifty million dollar uh budget gap.

We're still in that range.

Um, without we we are looking at a lot of different ways to close that uh gap, no final decisions yet, but we have some significant um cuts and changes that we'd be probably offering up in July, we'll get the final appraisal from Durham Appraisal District.

Uh we're hoping that we'll have a positive surprise on the uh on the commercial side on the appraisals like we did last year.

Um this year again, we're not gonna really have a big change or any change.

Uh and if anything, it's gonna be negative on the residential existing residential since those uh properties are not being appraised.

So with that, I will call up uh Brady Kirk to start us with uh our list of different presentations today.

Good morning.

Thank you, Jay.

Thank you all for being here today for this.

So you're gonna hear from a lot of different departments today.

You're gonna hear from uh our environmental services, our water department and transportation and public works, and everything you're hearing about today in today's work session is about rates and fees that are paid by users, uh residents, businesses within the city.

And leading into all that, we're gonna start with an overview of really everything that a typical resident would pay in Fort Worth, just uh for the essential cost for being a someone in the city, and the amounts we're looking at are current amounts only, so any potential increases you hear about later on in the work session are not reflected in these amounts.

So we're really in a key part of the budget process right now, and as we go through this every year, a lot of our focus and balancing and key decisions has to do with the general funds.

So when Jay talks about a big gap that we're trying to close and some challenges there, that's in the general fund, and that naturally gets the most attention, and even within that discussion, we can almost spoil that down sometimes to where it all seems to be about what's gonna happen with property tax and any kind of decision on the tax rate.

And that's fair and justifiable because that's a major cost of being in Fort Worth and affordability.

But when you look at what somebody who lives here has to pay all wrapped up, almost half of those costs are things that come on that monthly utility bill that are other than property tax.

So here on the screen, you're seeing an approximate monthly amount if you added that all up.

And of course, people don't pay their property tax monthly, but if you spread that over 12 months, that's what that would look like.

So out of about 240 dollars overall, someone would need to be paying to the city for city services about 108 of that, 46% or 45% comes from those other costs.

And all cities in Texas are providing the same services, but there could be some difference in how they pass the cost of those along.

I think these easiest example to see of that is that in one of the cities we're gonna look at, there's actually no solid waste charge on the utility bill.

But that doesn't mean that residents are not paying for that, it's probably just covered in the property tax and the sales tax and the general sources like that.

So, what we want to show you today is if you look at cities all across Texas, and then within the Metroplex, how does Fort Worth measure up to what other cities are doing?

And all these combined charges that we're going to look at are these ones that we're including on the screen right here.

So no matter where you are in Texas, if you own a home, you're going to be paying property taxes, or at least vast majority, including every city we're looking at here.

And pretty much everybody is also going to be paying water, wastewater rates on a utility bill, and solid waste fees.

And then some of these other ones might not be universal, but a lot of cities are going to charge a stormwater utility fee.

I think every city we're looking at today includes that.

Most cities are going to have an environmental protection fee.

Sometimes you might see a street maintenance fee, and then one just one city in the peer groups that we're looking at today also includes an EMS fee.

So you could compare Fort Worth to other cities on some different bases.

So the first one would be major cities across Texas, and this is I think the truest way to really build a peer group for Fort Worth.

So major cities, we're saying anything above a population of half of a million residents, and that includes Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, and El Paso.

Then the next one we're going to look at is local cities.

So we're saying that cities that are right around Fort Worth.

So you imagine maybe a person who's gotten a job in Fort Worth or in one of these cities, and they could really live anywhere around here, and they're trying to decide about where they want to be based in order to just put down roots here and live their lives.

And then the last one is what we're calling regional competitors.

So this is still within the metroplex, and it's those larger to mid-sized cities: Plano, Irving, Garland, Frisco, and McKinney's.

So these are a population, all of them right around a quarter of a million residents.

And these are cities that Fort Worth could maybe compete with if it was something like a company headquarters, a major development, maybe even events would be something where Fort Worth would be competing with these cities.

So just like on the first slide, you saw that roughly 240 dollars per month for a typical resident.

We built a comparable amount, an estimated amount for every one of these cities that we're gonna be looking at.

So we're using consistent usage assumptions for water.