Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The City Council held a workshop on October 26, 2026, to continue detailed review of the proposed 2027 budget, focusing on enterprise funds, internal service funds, capital projects, one-time funding requests, and future steps. Staff from multiple departments presented, and council discussed financial strategies, rate increases, and funding for community partners. Key decisions included support for continuing homeless service RFP funding, approval of funding for Mutual Aid Partners, and direction to postpone a decision on Homeward Bound pending revised request. Council also discussed the need for public engagement on ALPR/flock cameras and approved appointments to the Visit Grand Junction and Planning Commission boards.
Monday, October 26th, and we are going to go ahead and start our workshop. First thing on the agenda is discussion topics, and that's continuation of the 2027 city manager's proposed budget. So we'll turn it over to City Manager then. All right, thank you, members of council. We've had a lot of budget discussions, and we have more to discuss tonight, of course. Before we get started, I want to ask our budget manager. So just let you know what we have in this packet here that you can add to your budget folders. It will also be added to our budget page, our budget development page on WWJ City.org. Yep, thank you, Mike. Um, really, what this is just updated uh same documents this last workshop, just with the changes that we will discuss in the patient here being moving some minus for city manager and keep weather changes are we've put a yellow paper in there so you can put in each section of your binder, really just update as we move along, and then again any changes will be reflected next week in the first range. Thank you. All right, to get started. Uh we've got uh a little bit of help today from our chief financial officer Jay Ballantine will be doing a lot of this presentation tonight, and then Trent Raw, our engineering transportation director will uh provide overviews on capital. We also have uh Matt Martinez, our budget manager uh as well at the table, and then as you can see, we have our full leadership team uh throughout the room, which I appreciate their support, they've been heavily involved in the development of this budget. And so if the city council would like to dive into any areas and ask further questions, uh we can all work together to take those questions. So getting started here on the first uh couple slides, just a little bit of a recap. You know, focused on on our budget principles uh related to our strategic plan. We've we put this proposed budget together at the last workshop on believe that was October 5th. We covered really the whole uh budget proposal and in high level, and then we got detailed in the general fund. Uh, tonight we're gonna get more detailed in the capital and enterprise funds and one-time funding requests, and and then any questions or discussion the council would like to have. Uh, we just a reminder that uh for the public uh throughout this process that uh the city charters requirement of my position as city manager is is to prepare an annual budget. And so I obviously don't do that alone and do that with uh the full team of our leadership and throughout the city, and it's a long it's a multi-month uh we start we get a little break for maybe a month or two, and then we start on the next year uh next year's budget, uh but really get uh into it in depth in the late spring summer time frame up through adoption. We really took a one GJ city approach where we did not just do unilateral reductions at some percentage point, but we we did do proportional strategic reductions and and strategic investments uh throughout the budget working together to address the structural deficit. We've talked quite a bit about previous meetings. We definitely focus on cost recovery, market comparisons, rate studies, financial plans when it comes to some of the rate uh changes that we have uh that we'll cover tonight. And then, of course, the the full process began with department to department presentations on headwinds, tailwinds, uh, some of those bigger pinch points when it comes to operational expenses and needs, and then we broke down into detailed line item reviews with the wider budget team with each department, and then as we uh continue through that, uh we got to the point where we presented on October 5th uh following the August 31 structural deficit overview. If you look at the uh and making sure all along the way that we were aligned with uh the Larissa's city council strategic plan. We we definitely started out with the fact that if we do everything exactly the same in 2027 as in 2026, uh we start out over budget six million dollars. So that that's that was the starting place. When we had one-time requests and position requests, uh, that took us to almost 21 million dollars. Uh but then when we narrow down through the prioritization and all the work