Good evening, everybody.

If you all can take your seats.

Welcome to our June 3rd City Council meeting.

A little different for you, different than usual.

We are going to have a priority session workshop this for the first hour.

And so what we're gonna do is we're gonna let's take a quick roll call.

Councilmember Johnson.

Councilmember Nagginast.

Councilmember Penrose.

Here.

Vice Mayor Reddick.

Here.

Mayor Brownstone.

Here.

Thank you.

How are we gonna do this?

We're gonna have a um quick staff report from our city manager, Matthew.

And then we'll take public comment.

And just so you know, we're only gonna have two minutes per person for public comment because we've got a lot to cover in this hour.

So for those of you who haven't done this before, there'll be a timer.

It'll be set at two minutes.

You'll hear a 30-second warning when you have 30 seconds left, and then a final tone when your time is up.

Okay, so then I'm gonna hand it over to uh city manager Matthew Chittester.

Thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

Thank you.

Council.

Um happy to be before you tonight with this item.

Um I will try to make the presentation as brief as possible so we can hear from the community and get feedback from you.

Um as you know, we go through an extensive process each year in preparation for the budget that includes uh community feedback and input and um updating our strategic plan.

Uh just real quick context.

As you see up here, our strategic plan consists of three elements our strategic elements, which are very high-level outcomes that we try to focus all of our energy around, um, and then annual council priorities, which are are more focused and really help to drive the budget decisions, and then our capital improvement program, which is the projects that we endeavor to undertake each year.

Uh, as part of this process and in past years uh in preparation for this year's budget, we hosted several listening sessions in February and March that included both some general sessions, one in Spanish, uh, one with our faith leaders, and a special meeting with our downtown businesses.

And that allows our council to hear directly from the public about you know what's changed over the last year, what's important, and and where should from the community standpoint um the city be focusing its energy and resources.

Um there, we hosted a priority setting workshop back in March, where the council got to really dig in and talk about its priorities and um start to guide the budgeting process.

Um the normal follow-up from that is of course uh a priorities work plan that the council adopts and then uh staff reports on throughout the year.

Uh this year we're adding an extra step.

Uh we're presenting a draft work plan tonight.

Uh I would say part of it is due to uh the change in council membership and an opportunity to kind of revisit things.

Uh it also has to do with uh kind of where this process has gone gone over the years.

Last year's priority work plan was a full six pages long, it was extremely detailed, and um probably contained some things that are normal, operational things the city does, and and and I think when you when you have too many things on a work plan like that, you start to lose what the priorities are and where the focus really is.

So, what we've done this year is we've really taken a step back, collected the feedback from the council, kind of recategorized that feedback, and um I'll share in a moment how that breaks down and um kind of stripped out the things that are already operational within the city and and really want to just focus on what are the different and and important things that we want to put a special focus on this year.

So, as you can see, last year our high-level priorities, we had five.

Um, this year we've condensed them down to four.

That could change tonight.

That is really up to the council.

This is just staff's attempt to try to distill down that information.

Uh they're in no particular order or priority.

Um, they're just the four areas that seem to kind of categorize the feedback we received.

Um, fiscal sustainability being an important one, economic development and vitality, community health and safety, and housing support.

Um I know this is difficult to read for the audience.

There are copies of this in front of you, council, hard copies.

I've also got copies here at the table in front.

If anybody in the community didn't have a chance to review these online and would look like to look at them with us today.

So what you see on the screen is as good as it's going to get tonight, unless you grab a hard copy.

And you know, some of our revenues have not recovered the way we had hoped.

And costs have obviously escalated as we've seen throughout all sectors due to inflation and some of our contracts with other agencies have increased significantly.

And so we've been operating with a structural deficit the last several years.

Fortunately, we've had a very prudent city council that has really bolstered reserves in the past.

We've also utilized our economic uncertainty reserve to help balance the budget the last couple of years.