Okay.

Good evening.

Call to order our finance meeting.

We have one item on our agenda.

I do have some prepared remarks.

The purpose tonight, if you remember my email, is to move from a broad discussion towards clear council direction for 2027.

We've always uh we go into the budget season and then afterwards we start uh asking uh the administration.

So my hope is um we are not reopening the strategic plan, and we are not choosing between the administration list and council's list.

The administration has provided three proposed prior areas, each supported by actionable statements.

I suggest that we use those recommendations as our starting framework.

The council survey and our prior workshop are important background, but I do not believe we need to review those materials item by item tonight.

Each member should use them uh to identify where the administration's proposals reflects council's priorities, where uh refinement or an addition may be needed.

For each proposed prior uh priority, I would like us to determine whether we support the overall outcome, which actions deserve emphasis in 2027, what should be modified, added, or deferred, or treated as normal operations, and that has implications uh obviously to our budget uh discussions and uh for 2027.

Our goal is to leave with a limited management set of priorities or with understanding, not three um uh uh yeah, so sorry, scratch that.

Um what I want to do is uh we'll first have the administration's presentation by Miranda, and I think that uh brief clarifying questions so that we understand the meaning, the scope, the timing uh, and the status of the proposed actions.

Um I would ask my colleagues to hold broader questions about alignment priority additions and trade-offs or council policy directions until the full presentation is complete.

This uh will allow us to fully hear and digest the administration's proposal as a whole before beginning our deliberations.

Okay.

Okay, with that, Miranda.

Uh thank you, Chair.

Uh thank you for this opportunity to help align our Gehanna priorities going into the budget season for 2027 with me this evening.

Um, on behalf of the mayor, I'm happy to present uh the administration's priorities uh with Director Schultz and Director Weibensinger as well.

Uh special thank you to Sean Bach, who's behind me and Kelsey Bartholomew, who is probably watching from home if it's not past her bedtime.

Uh they do a lot of work on this plan um and help put these presentations together.

So just uh reset to make sure that we understand how the strategic plan fits into other plans in the budget.

Uh we have our vision values and mission statement.

Um, and we've been talking about these uh for the past year and a half as we've moved on uh and adopted this strategic plan.

I think what's helpful is to look at it.

This is a image from the strategic plan book.

So it uh shows you that the plan is um stems from the vision and values that we receive from the community.

Uh this was a community informed plan that is set in four goals, and then there are uh sixty-five strategies in those four goals.

Uh the the four goals are here, and then so how the plan is uh the yellow is the goals, uh the black underneath it is the objectives, and then there are 65 strategies that fit underneath these items.

As a reminder, the relationship to other planning documents that the city has a strategic plan sits at the top of those plans with then other plans underneath of them, such as the parks and recreation master plan, which was adopted a few years ago, the economic development strategy that was adopted with Argehana, uh capital improvement plan, and other plans that are ongoing.

As Chair Renner shared, the purpose of tonight is to help align the strategic plan with the budget.

Uh, the time is now to do that and not after the budget has been put together or in January after council has adopted the budget.

So you might remember this wheel from the plan book.

This wheel shows the calendar year and shows where we are.

So right now we're in August.

That's that's a combination of the blue and teal together because we are reviewing the strategic plan and getting ready to start the budget process, and then you'll see the capital improvement plan items are um in the yellow color below as well.

Um so next, I'll go over the recommended priorities.

As Chair Reiner said, um, these were distributed to council um last week.

Um so after uh consultation with planning next, um, there are a few options when you're talking about priorities as to how to organize them.

So the plan was laid out in the goal strat uh goal objective and strategy, because that makes sense as a reader.

But when you're implementing the priorities, it makes more sense to have priority categories if that's what you want to call them.

So that's what you'll see here.

Um so the three uh is a reminder this is a 10-year plan, so we cannot do 65 strategies all in one year.

Um so these three after the start stop exercises with the departments, uh conversations with the mayor and executive team, um, these were the priorities that rose to the top um again from our community informed plan.

So there's three main priorities a creekside, a strategy, not just a street, connected service, one call, one answer, quality of place, safe, sustainable, and strong.

And then under each of those priorities are objectives, and then under those objectives are specific strategies that are called out from the plan uh that the administration is recommending that we start budgeting towards in 2027.

Um there are a variety of them, so obviously they won't all be done in one year, but this is where we would start for 27 and continue to build on that um as we move forward.

Um would you like me to read them all, Chair Renner?

Or uh there are many.

There are a lot.

Well, uh, what I was uh uh hoping is is that each bucket, if you will, I can call it a bucket, um, but each global uh priority that you would actually highlight the salient one uh actions and tie it together, all those actionable statements in together in some way.

Sure.

So creekside is strategy, and we've been talking about Creekside a lot from capital improvement projects to the development agreement uh to our residents uh indicating that that is a main priority for them as well.

So creekside is strategy, not just a street.

We've talked about so objective one A is to advance the creekside district as a vibrant area.

We talked before in your workshop how it's not just uh the creekside uh mill, but it's also it's the district as a whole.

We talked about what it means to be a district as a whole, from walkability to the transportation to uh parking to pedestrian safety, streetscape designs, those are all things as the creekside uh district as a whole, not just the main downtown, if you will, one street of the district.