Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
City Manager Mike and his team presented the 2027 Recommended Budget, focusing on addressing a structural deficit of $6 million by reducing expenses, reallocating costs, and using $4.6 million in fund balance. The budget totals $317.4 million (1% increase from 2026), with a general fund of $120.8 million. Key reductions include closing City Hall on Fridays, reducing hours at the community pool, shifting senior center activities to the new recreation center, eliminating the Ash Tree program and city calendar, and reducing the housing division with partner-led services. Council discussed the financial outlook, the need for a fire district, and plans for future capital projects.
That's what my guess was. I was already asking just not seeing it here. Is it helpful? Okay. So we can turn on the well, we are going to go ahead and all to order the Monday, October 5th workshop at 4 p.m. Uh, and I do think we have a couple council members that will be um coming in as we are going forward. I know council member Kennedy is on his way. Um, and we do have council member Ballard online. And uh first topic is discussion topics, and that is the 2027 city managers recommended budget. So I will turn it over to Mike. All right, thank you, Mayor, members of council. Appreciate everybody who's here in attendance, uh, both in person and online. I want to also acknowledge all of our directors. Uh we have an exceptional leadership team in the city of Grand Junction and our expanded budget team uh that's in the audience today at the table with me is our CFO Jay Valentine, HR director, uh Shelley Kaske and our budget manager uh Martinez. And we are uh I just want to say going through this process when you know every budget process has its challenges, has its uh you know, where you have demands uh that often outweigh the ability to fund everything, but this one's exceptional based on what we presented to the public and to the city council in at the August 31st workshop, and we talked about our structural deficit. So it's been uh exceptionally challenging working through uh what we need to do in order to have a sustainable financial uh future for the city of Green Junction, and we have to live within our means and we have to adjust our expenses to our revenues, and we have to look at that from an ongoing year-over-year uh perspective and not an annual perspective. The modes of make it work or uh no longer options, and we've had to make sure that we are being incredibly specific about reductions that we make in our budget to balance in 2027 and separate those from reductions that are structural and year over year uh reductions to ensure that we are making progress as we move forward for our community. So that's been our focus. So financial sustainability has been uh the focus on the long term. We're not gonna repeat everything over August 31st, but we'll have we have a few slides uh to uh recap a few of the points that we made on the 31st, but tonight just so everybody is clear on the purpose. Uh tonight we have a complete overview of our of the recommended budget to the city council. Uh that is one of the core responsibilities in my role as CEO and city manager uh for the city is to prepare and present a budget to the city council that is recommended that is uh balanced. We're gonna go over that and hit all the key changes and the highlights, and we'll take our time. We have that's why we started earlier, and we don't have other items on the agenda, a specific discussion items. We have time for QA along the way, so stop me if you have a question. We have our team here to support if we if we if we need further uh detail from from our broader leadership team and budget team. The other purpose of tonight is uh discussion questions and then preparation for our October 26th uh budget workshop, which will be here at the same location at 4 p.m. on