All right, good morning, everyone.

It is good to see everyone this Monday morning.

It's not ordinary that we meet on a Monday.

But it is a great way to kick off the day, kick off the year and kick off twenty twenty-six for its fiscal planning.

Let me turn it over now to the city manager today is February twenty-fourth, twenty twenty-five.

Thank you, Mayor, Vice Mayor and Commissioners, and to all the members of the public and staff who are attending.

As the mayor indicated, uh, today is the fiscal year, next year, twenty twenty-six uh fiscal kick.

If we could it's the unofficial start to the budget development process for next year.

Um, but it's it's you know, it's really more than that too.

It's an opportunity for us at the beginning of the development cycle to give uh kind of a feel for where we see things.

Um, and then we're very much so want to hear from you in terms of your questions, your perspectives and your thoughts about priorities going forward.

Um last year we were very fortunate to actually um you know and very much appreciate the support of the mayor and the commissioners in in actually accomplishing a decrease in the operating millage.

And if we can pursue all the priorities we've got this year and balance all the cost and revenue issues and still accomplish um a rate increase uh again, that would be you know monumental because it last year it was uh for this current year was the first time it had happened in about a decade and a half.

So we we very much appreciate being able to do that.

Um we'll try to get through the presentation as quickly as we can if we can kind of do that in one chunk and then save as many of the questions and comments for the end.

I think it would help with the flow.

Uh there's a lot of things to look at.

Um obviously conditions right now uh domestically and internationally are a little bit uncertain.

Um things are um some things are kind of being questioned right now.

You can even see a little bit of volatility in the stock market recently and some whispers starting to talk about slowdowns and inflationary concerns.

Um but you know who knows where that goes over the long term.

We've been able to uh over the past decade more than double the value of the tax base of the city, so all of our efforts collectively and being able to encourage that and make that happen with uh the private sector investment and and the public sector improvements have gone a long ways because the cost of running a city, uh a large full service city like this, and trying to meet all the the needs and desires of folks out there and catch up on the capital improvements and the infrastructure work that have been deferred for many decades.

Um and and recover from financial urgency over a decade ago was quite a uh quite a task, but we're in a much better and different place than we were several years ago.

So we'll look at some trends and and look at some of the forecasting.

Of course, when you know the longer out you forecast, the more difficult it is, and and the less um the less accurate it tends to be because there are a lot of variables that'll pop up in the meantime.

In the last couple of years, we've spent a lot of priority on public safety related issues and improvements, as well as storm water, some of the infrastructure improvements, some street lighting, um, those kind of things.

Um obviously we're making some good progress in those areas.

Um this year we want to give some emphasis to the uh what I call uh compliance issue in terms of um now that we're able to start digging down, whether it's in the permitting related issues or other operational issues, we start to drill down into the detailed hour by hour, day-by-day business procedures and practices.

That's where you can really start uh realizing some changes in terms of efficiencies, time, and being able to be more productive and sometimes reduce costs in that same fashion too, because going forward um the uncertainty, speaking of uncertainties at the state when you hear proposals being put forth to uh eliminate property tax.

Well, that would be a bit problematic because uh that's our largest revenue source, uh accounts for almost half of our total revenue.

And uh when you've got two-thirds of your your operating budget that is going dedicated towards public safety with police, fire rescue, beach safety, emergency management, um, and then everything else has to live off of the other third, that would make it extremely difficult to keep the doors open, if not impossible to do certain things.

So I wouldn't use the word disaster, but it would be next to impossible at times with certain things.

So you'd see incredibly diminished service levels and conditions that I don't think a lot of people would like.

That is um the uh having having said that um going forward um we obviously are um are experiencing kind of a renaissance period here in the city of Hollywood over the next couple of years when a lot of the uh the the other capital improvements um get finished and are in the ground, and then when you see what's in the pipeline in terms of the private sector improvements, it's um this city is truly going to find itself in a um in an opportunity and and poise to really launch into a different, a different place than it would have been imagined maybe a decade ago.

Um the other thing that we want to mention and we highlight in this presentation is the the transition with the CRA and where we are with the downtown beach districts, uh the people, the services, and making sure that all of that, uh those enhanced levels of services improvements continue going in the future and being very transparent about where those dollars are and how that's how that's addressed too.

So, with that, I'll I'll stop talking for now, turn it over to our our director, Jonathan Antista, and he'll go on from there.

Thank you.

Thank you, City Manager.

Good morning, everybody, mayor, vice mayor, commissioners, directors, uh, members of the public who are here watching or listening at home.

Welcome to our FY2026 fiscal kickoff.

As the city manager said, this is the start of our of our budget development season, and we're proud to present some variety of information today looking at our past performance from FY2024, looking at where we where the budget stands for FY2025 today, and of course, then looking forward as we start to begin for FY2026.

As part of our our fiscal kickoff, we like to bring in a guest speaker every year.

This year we're pleased to welcome Mark Miller, who is a research director of field research and data intelligence at CBRE.

CBRE is a global leader in commercial real estate and economic services.

They work with the city already with our CMED department providing a variety of data and um consulting services as well as brokerage services.

And we're pleased to welcome them today to provide some information to you all as we get started.

Turn it over to Mark.

Hello.

Um, as he's mentioned, my name is Mark Miller.

I work with CBRE.

I manage the research platform for the state of Florida.

And what we're gonna go through today is kind of just where we are from an economic standpoint in Broward County, some of the trends that we're seeing in commercial real estate, and then some of what we're looking ahead to, whether it be directly related to Broward County or you know, just nationally uh as a whole.

Um we're gonna try to go through this pretty fast.

So I'll probably end up skipping some slides.

But one of the things that was mentioned here was the uncertainty.

And where Brouwer County sits, we're actually in a really good spot.

There is certainly, you know, a lot of uncertainty, geo geopolitical factors, you know, like he was saying, the tax rate for property taxes, but economically, we're in a very good spot and very stable.

So from an employment standpoint, which really kind of drives all aspects of real estate, we are at peak employment.

Now, employment growth has slowed, but unemployment is still below 3%, which is a whole, you know, whole percentage point below the national average.

So from a Brouwer County standpoint, we're really in a good spot, but it's not just employment growth, it's where we're seeing that in employment growth.