The Grand Rapids City Commission held a budget work session on May 5, 2026, to review strategic priorities and associated budgets. The meeting covered public safety (police, fire, OPA, district court), mobility and vital streets, engaged and connected community, and governmental excellence. Discussions included staffing levels, overtime analysis, new state funding opportunities, and a vacancy on the commission.
Morning. Call this meeting of the city commission to order. Um, this is a compressed agenda today, so um not quite as complex as our usual meetings. Um I'd like to move straight to the roll call, Mr. Clerk. Commissioner Kilgore. Present. Commissioner Knight. Present. Commissioner Asassi. Present. Commissioner Purdue. Present. Good morning. Mayor LeGrand. Present. I haven't seen uh anyone have heard any word from Commissioner Belchuk. I will assume she's running late and not ask for her being excused at this point. We'll just simply hope that she's on her way. Um so uh city manager. Um this is your ship to drive today. Uh we're gonna discuss the budget. All right, thank you, Mayor, and good morning, everyone. Good morning, Commissioner, staff, members of the public. Glad that uh everyone could be here today. I'll do a couple things. One kind of describe this morning. We're gonna have uh four sections of our strategic priorities review the budgets for those sections, and we'll call the presenters up one section at a time. But we will allow questions between each section. So we'll we'll start with public safety. The other thing I wanted to highlight, uh at the end of the briefing, the very end, we do have a slide related to the commission's budget in the vacancy, uh, the cost uh relative or cost savings uh to the vacancy that allow the commission both to discuss that in the fiscal as well as uh operational implications of uh allowing that position to remain vacant. Uh a couple other things. Um wanted to highlight. We did uh our CFO Ms. Claren did send uh some of the responses to questions that you indicated you had interest or asked last week, and you should have received those in your email. And uh some of the questions we did refer to today's session as would be answered in session, but there are written remarks, uh written responses to those questions, and we hope to not only provide it to you, but it should be posted for the public uh shortly. Okay, with that, uh we'll begin today's uh session. And um just a reminder to the public we did present a preliminary fiscal plan last week, and today is the first deep dive into the budget work session, and we'll cover stay safe community. Uh that'll be our first section, and we'll then we'll have a group of staff coming to talk to us about uh vital streets and mobility as long along with the Vital Streets Oversight Commission, and then um we'll cover the last two together. I think we'll take uh engaged and connected and governmental excellence uh together. And we'll continue to have conversation on next week, and we'll um uh cover the last two strategic priorities, economic prosperity, and affordability, health and environment, and also we'll have the uh public hearing on both the tax rate and the um revenue uh fees. Oh, I do want to highlight we also in that response. I know there were some questions about um the fees. Uh we included a little bit more uh summary analysis of those fees and which ones are decreasing, remaining the same, or increasing, and uh a little bit more analytics related to that information. I know some of you asked about it. Okay, um our values remain unchanged, and what I'll do, I'll just give a highlight overview. There, I mean, we have all the experts here this morning that will cover um some of the issues that are in the budget. Thankful for our um interim police chief here who's gonna talk to us about uh some of the things you see before you relative to the investments in uh the police department and our fire chief is here to also do the same. We have our OPA director uh here as well as um I do want to thank uh I can I mentioned this before and thank the courts for uh while we often speak about the general fund subsidy, their budget is actually a decrease from last year's appropriation. So without further ado, I will uh let the police department lead the way and kick us off.