The City Council of Johns Creek held a work session on July 28, 2025, at 5:00 PM at 11360 Lakefield Drive. The meeting focused on the Fiscal Year 2026 budget, proposed bathroom additions at the Boardwalk at Town Center, next steps for the Cauley Creek Makerspace, and a new Multi-Modal Policy. No formal votes were taken; the council provided direction for staff to refine proposals.
No formal motions or votes were taken during this work session.
Thank you, Mayor recording. Thank you. Would you lead the pledge? Mayor Shermarks. Thank you. Nothing under strategic priorities. The first item under ongoing projects is fiscal year 26 budget discussion. We have assistant City Manager Love here. Not sure what your format will be, Mayor. Okay. Thank you. Good afternoon. Earlier today, you should have gotten an email from me that consolidated some of the initial questions that we've received from the council about the FY26 proposed budget. We're prepared to take additional questions, um, provide clarification on some of those answers, or if there's a particular area of the budget we would like to focus on. And then the goal would be um by the end of the week to turn that back around to you, unless it's something that would cost some additional research, and we would let you know that time frame. Uh Mr. Mayor, I don't know if we want to open it up to any specific questions or thank you, Kay. You pretty much answered all the questions and putting it in the document and sending it out to everyone. Great work. So going back to that uh the growth. We are going on a 70 million growth. So if I was looking at the last five or six year average, it's almost it's way more than 200 million. So for last year, even when we went with the 200 million growth, looks like we'll still end up with some surplus. So for this year, would you be comfortable going with uh 200 million growth assumption? I would. Based on the five-year history that was a part of the email that you received today. Um our growth is well over that on an average basis. So 200 would still be conservative, assuming the same collection rates. Okay. And that would uh give us an additional probably 400 plus. About 440, yes, sir. Yes, 440. Okay, that's what I have. Yes, sir. Um I'm gonna I'll come back to that uh how to split that. The couple of other uh uh questions and discussion items that we went on was uh the community development uh building inspection services. I know that's a big uh line item, but looks like we did try to in-source it and uh so can we keep looking at that option? It's fine to have it on the on the budget, but still keep looking at uh certainly it's a it's an ongoing conversation and discussion uh that Mr. Song and I and the city manager have related to uh what that right mix is, and right now in that particular field, it is just extremely difficult not only for local governments but also those third-party contracting uh firms to attract and retain qualified uh inspectors specifically. I can't. But we will continue to look at it and see where it makes sense for us to do that. We absolutely will. It doesn't have to be the the complete one, but at least partially if we can in source that would really uh the software license. We did put the payroll software license under finance, but it I thought it should go either under the payroll or IT services, but it doesn't matter. It's an expense of just being on the line item, but I thought payroll software should go more into the either payroll or IT. So the rationale on that, and you're absolutely right, it is a software license. It could certainly be housed in IT. The reason that it was uh put in finance is because payroll is in finance, that function is actually in finance. It's split between HR has the preliminary onboarding, the true HRIS components of that, but payroll processing and the payment to payroll that happens out of the finance department. The implementation team for the new software, we actually had that debate or discussion to your point.