Good afternoon and welcome to the Hampton City Council work session.

Um this evening we oh it's afternoon uh clerk is not able to join us today, so uh filling in for hers uh deputy clerk uh Tammy Lee.

And so I'm gonna ask the deputy clerk to call a roll.

Councilman Bowman, present, Vice Mayor Brown, here councilwoman Campbell, present, councilwoman Fairby, present.

Councilwoman Harper, Councilwoman Muggler, Mayor Gray.

All right, here and Councilwoman Muggler and Councilwoman Harper will not be joining us today, both uh taking care of uh business uh that prevents them from being with us for either the meeting.

So with that, I'm going to ask the city manager to uh introduce the first item.

Thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

Um, today is all about budget as we're actively in the budget season.

As council members know, and hopefully the community knows, over the last few weeks we've been conducting our annual I value budget input, giving residents the opportunity to weigh in on their preferences as it relates to uh certain key expenditure items before the community as well as revenue options.

And today we are going to be presenting the results of that uh polling that we did.

I want to stress now, and I'll I'll say at the end of the presentation again that this is preference polling, it's not voting because ultimately it is the uh city council that makes the final decisions on the budget, and the manager makes a recommendation based upon this input, which I very much value, but also other considerations that we must take into account that maybe the public isn't aware of at the time that they're polling.

So this is information, it's very valuable information.

I want to thank all of the people who took time to either come in person or to fill out the online poll and assure you that this input is very much appreciated and will be used in shaping my final budget recommendations, but it does not always equal to an absolute um match because there are some things that I have to take into account.

Um, and we'll talk more about that in two weeks when I present the preview of the actual budget.

Um but for today, we're gonna be sharing first the I value results, and then after that, Mr.

Daughtery will share where we look to be with revenues.

So I'm gonna turn it over to Mary Fugier, who has been heading up our conventions and visitors bureau as well as our marketing and communications office to give you the results.

Good afternoon.

Good afternoon, Mayor Gray, Vice Mayor Brown, members of council, City Manager Bunting, and City Attorney Sid Noor.

I also, as Mary did, I would like to thank everyone who took time to express their opinion and the budget polling process.

Whether they attended in person or online, their input is greatly appreciated.

We conducted a multifaceted campaign with website presence, social media, e-news, and the distribution of approximately 60,000 postcards to Hampton residences.

We combined engagement, the combined engagement included more than 90,000 social media views, more than 3600 uh Thursday, I'm sorry, more than 3600 Thursday, March 5th Facebook live views with more than 125 live comments, 49 in-person participants, and more than 650 online responses.

Excuse me, 12 percent, age 20 to 34, and approximately 30 percent of each age range 35 to 49, 50 to 64, and 65 and over.

Both times the answer no change was the majority response received with a bump of 5% seen at the end of the polling presentation.

We additionally asked whether residents were open to increasing the real estate tax rate to cover the cost of unfunded state mandates in order to maintain current services, and 63% responded no.

Related to stormwater fees, 54% prefer to either continue with previous guidance of increasing the fees by a dollar, or to being more aggressive with fee increases to fund necessary projects.

When polled, 67% support at least a 10% increase in fees.

We saw 32% of those polls supported an 80% city to 20% employee division of cost, and a 52% majority supporting the historical division of cost or higher between city and employees.

Project funding requests that would impact the city operating budget were shared.

We asked participants to rank them in order of importance.

The top ranked operating budget priorities were homeless transition housing for the human services and community services board.

The upgrade of three permanent full-time positions, a full-time lieutenants to captains, and funding for five permanent full-time medic and firefighters for the fire and rescue division.

One permanent full-time paramedic pharmacy technician for the fire and rescue division.

Funding for the sheriff's transition and re-entry program known as STAR Pathway to Success Program, and Small Business Development Center funding for an outside agency.

The projects that ranked highest included improvements to 911 emergency communications platforms.

With the second hearing on May 6th, and the final council vote on May 13th.

Thank you very much for allowing me to present these results.

So, Mr.

Mayor, you know, just to give a concrete example.

Whereas the majority, if you looked at where did you get over 50%, it it really uh took the 50% or more of the population supported two and a half or higher.

This is an example of where I'm not going to be comfortable aligning perfectly with the public input, and that's because we're seeing cities release their budget, Newport News released their budget yesterday as an example with a three and a half percent increase for their employees.

So if we go too much you know lower than what our neighboring localities are, what do you think that does?

I know I'm asking a rhetorical question for council, but for the public, that maybe has our employees look to go to another locality.

So we're gonna need to that's something where I have to keep managerial discretion at least in the manager's recommended budget to be able to say, I understand the public said this, but the public may not have known just as I didn't until they released their budget exactly what every other city was going to do.

But as cities are starting to roll out their budgets, um, some have already released some will be doing over the next two weeks.

I'm hearing that it localities are likely to be in that three and a half percent plus or minus range, and so for us to go to two and a half percent would not be right for our employees.

So I I always want to explain to the public, you know, why we ask.

We really do care, and I think you'll see a lot of alignment, for instance, with those top operating and capital priorities, as well as some of the recommendations we've talked about with fee increases or tax rates, but there will be some areas such as this one where I will just feel compelled to deviate from the public input because I have more knowledge about what's going on than we knew at the time we were asking people to.

So when I do release the budget, we will do a reconciliation of that and show people so that they don't feel like their time or energy is wasted because as we said at the outset, we very much appreciate anyone who takes the time to learn more and to participate.

It helps to give us a stronger community-based budget.

But um, we we will have some changes we need to make along the way.

Okay.

Questions, comments from council members.

Okay.

All right, thank you, Mary.

Oh, sorry, Councilwoman Ferraby.

Oh, thank you.