Well, good afternoon.

Thank you for coming out on a Saturday afternoon.

So I'm Jay Chapa City Manager, and we're gonna cover the proposed 2027 fiscal budget.

There's a little change from the last presentation.

And Christy Ann, I'm gonna introduce Christian here in a minute.

She's gonna go through the presentation.

But last week on the 11th, you know, under state law, the city's not like the feds where we can do deficit budgeting.

We have to have a balanced budget.

So last week on the 11th, uh staff, myself proposed a balanced budget to the city council across all funds.

And specifically the general fund was the one we're we're having issues with, uh primarily due to property tax valuations or property values and the and the shortfall on the top uh property tax side.

So if you if you think about the city, we're we're basically a conglomerate where we have multiple different businesses all within one organization.

And so when you think about a shortfall on the general fund, the general fund makes up about a third of the city's operating budget.

Overall operating budget is about 3.3 billion dollars.

The general funds about 1.1 billion dollars.

The problem is you can't take money from those other funds to help a fund that's short because the dollars have to stay within those operating funds.

So like the water department, the water utility, water revenues that come in on from ratepayers, has to stay within that business.

Same thing with aviation, same thing with golf, those kind of things.

So when we we talk about that shortfall, and Christiane will go through it, we're really talking about the general fund where the shortfall was.

Um the the change that you're gonna see here is we've been once we presented the budget to the city council, they start providing feedback on the things they like and the things that they don't like, right?

And so in order to balance the general fund budget, you'll see we had a series of reductions in different areas of our operations to try to close that gap.

And the council has voiced um to us that they wanted they didn't like some of the cuts that were in there and some of the reductions of services.

And so as we've been working with them yesterday, we proposed some restore, you know, restoration of some of the of some of those items, and they all pretty much said they were in favor of them.

So we're gonna go the budget has a little bit changed that shows what's being restored as we go through this this presentation.

And as you go along, feel free to raise your hand, we'll get you a mic, because this is being uh streamed online and it's gonna be recorded and put on the city's website.

So if you have a question, raise your hand, we'll we'll give you a mic.

Um and I'm gonna introduce Christianne Simmons.

She is the director of strategic um strategy.

I'm I'm going blank.

It's a Saturday.

Anyway, she's over budget and data analytics and performance for the city.

The budget, she runs a group that puts all this together, puts all the numbers together, and has been working on this for the last several months.

So with no no further ado, here's Christine.

I also don't know what I'm the director of.

Who knows?

Uh thank you, Jay.

So I Christianne Simmons, yes, hello.

Uh director of the Fort Worth Lab is the department.

Um and like Jay mentioned, we do budget data analytics and performance for the city, lots of strategic initiatives.

And I see a couple of my my budget meeting friends here.

So you're gonna get to see like the changes in real time, which is kind of fun.

Uh so thank you for coming on a Saturday afternoon.

Mostly it's just hot outside, so it's nice to be inside.

Um, but we really appreciate your engagement in the process.

Some of you may have participated in bond meetings earlier this year, and maybe you did budget priorities survey, um, all of those different engagement points uh that the city provides.

We love to see your participation and answer your questions along the way.

All right, so um just starting up at high level here, uh, you know, I've done a couple different budgets with the city now, and everyone kind of has its story or its themes that emerge.

Uh and this year, a lot of the theme is around the city's growth, not translating to growth in property tax values and revenue.

So we're in a little bit of a tricky situation with the Terran appraisal district.

Some of you are aware of that situation.

So Tad is we sit in four appraisal districts in the city of Fort Worth, but TAD is our largest.

We get about 92% of our property tax revenue from them.

Uh and a couple of years ago, they uh adopted a reappraisal plan by which they're only reappraising residential property every other year.

And so we knew that and we were planning for that.

So this is like our second year of frozen values with the first reappraisal coming for the next budget year.

So uh we're still frozen right now on the residential side, and we were planning for for that, and that's why we had a budget gap going in.

And we were planning for that, and that's why we had a budget gap going.

We knew we had a budget gap going into the process.

We were telling council about 50 million, 49 to 50 million.

But when we got our certified values from the appraisal district, which happens July 25th, so like after a lot of budget work has been done, the values were much worse than we anticipated, worse than our worst case scenario.

And this is primarily due to not just the reappraisal plan, but also TAD granting sort of historic numbers of protests and a lot of mid-year litigation and value loss from the rolls.