The city council held an informal work session on May 5, 2025, receiving three detailed presentations. Leslie (Finance) presented a restructured annual budget process emphasizing earlier council input on key initiatives. An update on the electronic time and attendance system implementation was provided, including progress with a pilot group and pending technical integrations. Ryan, Health Director, gave an overview of the health department's history, divisions, and current initiatives.
Budget Process Changes
Time and Attendance System
Health Department Update
Leslie, you ready? Get us get us started off with the first two. Thanks. Good evening, Mayor. Council. So we we've changed the budget process for this year. And you may ask why are we changing? The budget process in general is somewhat of an exercise in dreaming. You know, what new services can the city provide? How can we do things differently? However, just like household budgets, the city doesn't have enough resources to do everything that everyone wants to do. So it comes down to priorities. And so this change is all about prioritizing differently and aligning our work plans with city council's priorities for the community. So remember the the key to the budget is to use it as an operations plan and manage workloads. So the way that it did work before this year, budget always runs April to October. So we always started in the finance department compiling the payroll budget and the revenue budget. And then usually in May, the departments would compile and enter their expenditure budgets for estimated actuals and their next year's requests, including requests for new operational and capital items. And then in June, department heads and supervisors met with the finance department. These meetings focused on operational line items for estimated actuals and budget requests, as well as needed replacement of existing capital. So essentially, what we were developing was the base budget. And then we would have a second set of meetings between the city manager, department heads, and myself. And these meetings focused more on key initiatives, new requests for personnel, operational and capital items. This was in July at that point, and so if proposed key initiatives needed updated, it was essentially too late to update the budget request properly, and it also did not allow for advanced input by you all. And then step increases and inflation adjustments were contemplated last. So you can see how things were being prioritized. So this process did not properly align the city council's goals and the action plans with the budget process. It did not match the funding priorities of the city, did not allow departments to properly focus on needed replacement items and new items. Instead, they were trying to budget their utilities and things like that. So it created extra and unnecessary work for the departments and for my staff. So we're gonna try something new this year. Again, we'll still start in April. Still takes six months, no matter how we slice the pie. And so we will actually start the process updating our current key initiatives that we're working on this year, and then setting new ones for next year. And then we actually held meetings in April between the department head, city manager, and myself to discuss uh the status of the current uh key initiatives and the new ones that we want to put before you for next year, and we'll actually present that to you on May 12th at the work session. And so at that point, City Council will have an opportunity to discuss the key initiatives at the beginning of the budget process rather than the end, and again, this the key initiatives are that's our work plan for next year. So that allows you to to weigh in on the work plan, and then we can build our budgets around that. So then by the end of May, uh the finance department will build the payroll budget, the revenue budget, we will do the base budget for estimated actuals and the base budget for next year. Departments will be now focusing between April and May. They'll focus on their key initiatives, uh replacement of existing capital items that needs to happen next year, uh new requests for personnel, operational items, and capital items, which should be related to key initiatives, and then capital projects. They won't be keying in that information in our software system, they'll be doing that in Excel form so that we can discuss those items. We'll still have uh the finance department meetings with departments and supervisors to discuss the base budget. So departments will still have the opportunity uh to make changes to the base budget, have discussion, and then we'll we'll finalize that in June. We'll also talk about the replacement of existing capital that's needed along with the new requests. And then a new step is that those new requests will be presented to the management team for discussion in June, and then we'll hold our normal meetings with the city manager in July and hopefully finalize the proposed budget because we have to get that printed and to you all in August. So again, this is all about changing the focus of our priorities. So this is how the priorities will be in order. Funding current services, so current staffing and operations, step increases, and really the next two go together. So it's replacement of needed existing capital and inflation adjustments before anything new will be considered. So new things will be will be last. So as you know, there's typically no surplus in the general fund uh operational budget, and so we need to prioritize.