The Gilbert Town Council held a study session on April 21, 2026, to review and discuss the proposed fiscal year 2027 preliminary budget. The presentation, led by Kelly (town budget director), highlighted significant revenue losses, reduced spending, and unmet needs due to the loss of residential rental sales tax revenue. Councilmembers asked clarifying questions about staffing, economic development, credit rating, and service impacts. No public comments were taken.
Kelly presented the fiscal year 2027 preliminary budget, noting a $9 million loss in residential rental sales tax revenue. The general fund, which supports police, fire, parks, and recreation, faces $81 million in total requests, with only $16 million (20%) recommended for funding. Unfunded needs include fire and police positions, vehicles, drones, robots, technology, and facility maintenance. Of 300 requested positions, the budget funds 58 full-time employees (FTEs) and 43 limited-term agreements (LTAs), leaving 200 positions unfunded—77 of which were also requested in fiscal year 2026. Funding all positions would require $35 million. Gilbert remains the leanest workforce in the valley, a position not expected to change.
To balance the budget, the town reduced spending by $2 million, including cuts to employee development, software licenses, park services (movies in the park, Capow events, outdoor expo), pest control, landscape maintenance, tree trimming, police range use (switching to Apache Junction), and fire department public event photos. Additional savings included $4 million from the Advocacy Center Phase 1 budget and $3.3 million in one-time funding from a Heritage District land sale. The budget prioritizes maintaining service levels, protecting employees (competitive pay, benefits, converting LTAs to FTEs), and supporting economic growth.
Capital improvement projects total $2.5 billion, with $1.2 billion carried forward and $500 million in new projects. Highlights include Desert Sky Park Phase 2, Gilbert Regional Park Phase 2, the Advocacy Center and Akateo Bridge (opening fall 2026), the Northwater Treatment Plant (summer 2026), lake maintenance and irrigation replacements (summer 2027), and a splash pad and pickleball courts at Freestone Park (fall 2027). Gilbert does not levy a primary property tax; the secondary property tax rate remains at $0.98 per $100 assessed value for the fourth year, generating $36.6 million. This maintains fund reserves at the 5% policy minimum and provides capacity for transportation bonds in spring 2027.
I think we're ready to get started. I'll call the study session of the council to order in April twenty first, twenty twenty six. Roll call. Mayor Scott Anderson. Here. Vice Mayor Chuck Bongiovanni. Here. Councilmember Bobby Buckley. Here. Council Member Kenny Bucklin. Here. Council Member Young Kaprowski. Here. Council Member Monty Lyons. Here. And Council Member Jim Torgeson. A quorum is present. Thank you. We have one item on the agenda tonight's discussion of the fiscal year twenty twenty-seven preliminary budget. And I think Kelly's going to be doing this. So I'm just going to give you some quick slides and overview of the fiscal twenty twenty-seven budget, and then help answer any questions or get feedback from you. Loss of residential rental is a sales tax, about nine million dollars. You think the town's budget is a large area, so surely that can't be that big of an impact, but in reality. The chart on your left shows all of the revenues that came into Gilbert in 2025. The blue area is what's supported by our sales tax and our income tax area. The others, like the water fund is supported by water fees, wastewater by wastewater fees. They're not impacted by changes to our sales tax or our income tax because they don't use those revenues. So the blue area uses the sales tax and income tax revenues, and the departments along the bottom are the services that are funded through that. Police, fire, parks, and recreation are the largest, and so they receive the largest amount of impact when we lose 20 million dollars. How does Gilbert budget? We have all the departments not just request the needs that they have for the upcoming year, but they do five-year forecasting and have to delineate all of those items of a larger dollar amount or FTEs in the next five years that they believe will be needed. That helps us plan for all of those future needs in the town and provide stability and long range planning. So on top of that, we do the annual budget that starts in this fall of every year, about mid-September, and goes through until the spring. So that gets us to about where we're at today with our study session. There's been a lot of work that's gone into place behind the scenes up until this point, including our zero base budgeting, which we do a third of the organization every year. This year it was our public safety groups and water groups that participated, and they were able to find $2.4 million of savings that we're able to help use to balance the fiscal 27 budget requests as well. In the general fund, where most of our tax revenues are used, that funds are police, fire, parks, recreation, IT, those basic services. There was about 81 million dollars of total requests in the balance budget that we're presenting to you. About 16 million of that is recommended to be funded, so only about 20%. There are real needs that are not funded in this budget. We did the very best to balance and keep continuity of operations as best as possible. So what didn't make the cut? These items are not just nice to have. There's a lot of needs here. And you can see on the screen some of those items. There's fire positions, police positions, parks and rec positions, and a lot of other positions that are not included in the budget. Vehicles and equipment, drones, robots, technology, facility maintenance. Some of these items we can postpone for a year, but they can't be postponed for forever. With that, one of the largest areas where we saw a gap is in our staffing. So there were about 300 positions requested across the entire organization.