Secretary for wall called certification report.

Mayor Scott Bradley.

Mayor President Elizabeth Abraham?

Here.

Deputy Mayor Janae Butler here.

Councilmember place to Scott Smith.

Here.

Councilmember place three, Debbie Ison here.

Councilmember place for Ken Altman.

Here.

Councilmember place five, Kevin Kelly.

Here.

Mayor certified the presence of a form.

Thank you.

All right.

We'll go right into presentations.

Item 3A discussed regarding the debt grants, unless you wanted to do a quick anything.

Yeah, well, I mean, I'll just open it up, but we can roll right into it.

So, you know, good evening.

Um, for all of you community council and our new uh council members.

This is your first budget work session.

Um, so congratulations for making it to this point.

Tonight is intended to be a high-level conversation where we will discuss several components that go into the creation of the FY27 budget.

Tonight is not intended for you to make your final budget decisions, but we do act or direction at every step of the process when we're talking about the budget, so that we know for sure that staff is on the right track.

So by the time we get to August and September, the budget that is before you to vote on, is a budget that you are in agreement, and we are aligned on.

So let's go ahead and jump in.

So this is just an overview of our budget timeline.

As most of you know, our budget year goes from October 1st to September 30th.

But the budget process is a 12-month ever-rolling process.

There is not a month that we are not focused on budget.

It is a living breathing document, as I like to say, so we are always having to make sure we are monitoring our spending, our projections, and making sure that we are where we expect to be at that point in the year.

So, as a reminder though, we are still very much early in the budget process in our development cycle.

This is the point of the process where staff evaluates our long-range operational and infrastructure needs.

So we'll be talking a lot about that tonight.

We'll be discussing our funding capacity and the impacts those decisions, excuse me, those decisions may have on both our maintenance and operations tax rate.

That's our MO, we call it for short.

So if I inadvertently say that M and O stands for maintenance and operations, or our interest in sinking tax rate, that's essentially our debt fund, right?

Our debt tax rate.

So tonight, to be specific, we're going to be talking about debt and grants.

We'll do a brief general fund overview.

We'll talk about a capital maintenance fund, something that we uh are aspiring to in the future.

We'll go over technology, both our current technology needs and then our life, our kind of life cycle and planning for future technology needs, and then we have an update on some staffing.

As you as uh previous council knows, we have talked about staffing already during the budget process once this year.

Uh, but we do have some recommended changes coming to you, so we will touch on that as we wrap up tonight.

So I will begin with debt issuance uh planning.

So our debt issuance planning, it's the long-range financial plans for the community infrastructure needs are evaluated at the start of the budget process.

What this is intended to do, it reflects the adjustments in the project timelines and funding availability.

It allows the council the opportunity to approve our capital needs funding within the upcoming year's INS rate.

We have had a policy here over the last few budget cycles not to increase our INS rate.

We can continue to take debt, and we'll talk to you about how that happens, how you can continue to take on new debt while maintaining that debt tax rate.

We'll talk about that as we go into the presentation.

But that's been kind of the direction from council is you can continue to meet the needs that you have through taking debt if you need to.

However, we want to hold steady where we are on our INS rate.

So this portion of the tax rate, it's it's really determined by the total tax-supported debt service payments.

This excludes utility.

The utility fund has its own debt tax, right?

It its own portion that we pay from the utility fund to cover the debt that we take to do utility projects.

It's also determined by taxable assessed value.

Those are our homes.

We'll get into what our assessed value, our preliminary numbers are later in the presentation.