Oh, okay.

Do I get to start over?

All right.

But anyway, what I want to just share with everybody is that you need your time is up.

Okay.

I'll take any questions.

This is amendment okay.

Thank you for listening.

Moving forward.

Testing one, two.

We're good.

Testing one, two, testing.

So we will move forward.

We're uh we have an agenda today that uh is pretty open forum workshop oriented.

So we are going to begin discussion about amendment three.

I don't want to dwell a lot on uh the impacts.

We know it's going to be significant.

Uh some estimates are that uh the city of Jacksonville will have uh an impact of about uh 25% reduction in ad fullum tax revenue.

So we will start with that as a uh a baseline, and uh we can go through and I would like to develop a series of principles that would guide our analysis of the uh underlying finances.

So there are some principles that would include uh how much uh personnel cost can go up in terms of salaries, a great portion of actual personnel costs are non-controllable, they are uh contractual, they are uh uh an attempt to uh true up, so to speak uh an item called employer provided benefits, which includes our health insurance for uh our city employees, and uh I'm it's explained to me that in the past, in recent years anyway, that the um the employer provided benefit, uh there were uh very limited increases in that, and so as a result, uh the employees didn't have to pay that additional cost, and that was one way of sort of giving them uh uh a backdoor increase in salary that if if they didn't have to pay that increase cost of the benefits, then that would be like money in their pocket.

So there are a number of things along those lines.

The the pension cost uh that uh uh will be uh transitioning for fire and rescue and first response and the police and fire pension that will be transitioning over to the Florida retirement system.

Uh the city general employee pension fund that is staying intact.

Is that correct?

Okay, so they're not transitioning to FRS.

All right.

So let's look at turn in terms of personnel cost.

Uh what is going to be controllable and under under the salary category.

So Colleen has distributed uh some pages that came out of the proposed city budget.

This is from page 12, uh titled overarching items.

So property tax revenue.

Uh the um city council uh voted to reduce millage rate by one-eighth of a mill, and which has an impact of reducing the revenue by 1.1 percent, and then uh the total projected revenue loss for the upcoming fiscal year uh is gonna be 14 million two hundred and ninety-one thousand three hundred and ninety-five dollars.

The uh interest pool, I'm sorry, the investment pool, the interest earnings rate assumptions uh are they're increasing fiscal 27 from 3.02 to 3.5.

That is probably uh a safe uh uh assumption.

It may end up being actually a little bit low.

Uh as we saw the Federal Reserve just increased interest rates yesterday, and the expectation is they will probably increase interest rates two more times before uh probably by springtime.

Personnel cost, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of the personnel costs are in the employer provided benefits category, health insurance, pension plans, et cetera.

The actual salaries of city employees are controlled both contractually and non-contractually.

The firefighters and the police are guaranteed a 5% increase by the contract.

The FOP members under the Department of Corrections under the Sheriff's Office are going to increase by 7%.

All other unions, which are, I guess, all the different unions within the general employees, they negotiate directly.

And my assumption is that the only union that includes is the American, I'm sorry, is the association of state association of federal, state, and county employees.

Is that the only union that represents City of Jacksonville?

Okay.

IBEW.

All right.

Okay.

So thanks so much.

So I would say that one of the overarching principles would be that uh non CBA employees, employees that are not benefiting from a collective bargaining agreement, that their salaries should be capped at 3%.

I looked through some of the, I guess these are subfunds.

If you look at the executive office of the mayor, if you divide the total salaries by the 24 positions in the mayor's office, the projected increase for the fiscal 27 year is uh 10 point 56%, I believe it was.

If you look at the office, the executive office of the sheriff, those employees, they're projected, and I think they're actually losing a couple of positions in the executive office of the sheriff, but still the increase of those employees is going to be over 10%.

I think it's 10.2%, uh, but roughly 10% in both instances.

And then if you get into the different components under the sheriff's office, you have the Department of Corrections, you have the Homeland Security, you have investigations, you have patrol and enforcement, uh, police, I think it's uh professional standards, and I forget the other department under the sheriff's office.

All but one of those departments, the increase is above three percent.

Possibly bailiff.

So uh what I would say is now that the budget doesn't provide enough detail to tell you of those increases how much or how much of the increase is being driven by a collective bargaining agreement as opposed to non-collective bargaining agreements.

So I would say that one of our guiding principles would be that for all city employees other than employees under a collective bargaining agreement, that those salary increases should be held to 3%.

That would include the executive office of the mayor, the executive office of the sheriff, and all of the departments that function under the sheriff.

JFRD, if you looked at it, their increases are uh I think about three and a half or maybe four percent, but again, that that's because they're subject to a collective bargaining agreement.