Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Joplin City Council work session.

Budget sessions for 2025.

We have three items on the agenda tonight.

We will begin with the very first one, which is a fiscal year 2026 proposed budget overview.

Good evening, Mr.

Edwards.

Good evening, Mayor, Council.

I'm excited to present to you the FY 26 budget for your review.

In my cover letter, I mentioned looking back, looking back at some of the things that we've done as an organization, and I'm tremendously proud of the accomplishments that we've had.

And I have to give thanks for a great group of city employees, management team.

A lot's been done to improve the community and the organization.

With this upcoming budget, I see even more uh opportunity, uh opportunity to take steps towards your vision, and it's really quite exciting.

So I this is genuine uh excitement uh for me to get to present this budget to you.

Uh a couple of uh just uh overall or or uh high level comments here about the budget.

Uh this is an important document for us.

Uh it does a couple things.

One, it's a financial policy that sets uh the expenditures for each fund, it sets appropriations, it's a communication tool.

So this is uh a transparent process, a transparent document to show uh how and where uh tax dollars are being spent.

It's a financial plan.

Uh we know that there are uh maybe some some difficult days ahead for us financially when we look around the economy uh at the economy, so this also tries to uh make sure that we're in good shape this year and into the years ahead.

But most importantly, this is our uh operations guide, our work plan.

And it's this point that I want to emphasize.

Uh we plan key initiatives.

Uh those are the things that we endeavor to do each year, those are the things uh that we'll spend financial resources on.

It's also what consumes our uh staff time.

So uh this year, when we're going through our key initiatives, uh this is where your uh uh input uh and direction would be helpful and important.

Please consider these initiatives in terms of the council goals.

We want to make sure the things that uh we're doing align with your goals.

Uh it's and for key initiatives.

The the real difficulty that we have as an organization is capacity, so more so than uh the financial resources being spent.

This is a matter of workload and how we balance workload across the organization.

If you have items that you want staff to work on, this is the great opportunity to bring those uh items forward and uh try to limit uh adding things uh mid-year that you might want to do because this is our uh annual work plan things that we want to accomplish.

So uh just a quick uh overview of the process.

Uh tonight uh we'll go department by department, line by line of our FY26 budget.

Uh, we hope to get through the departmental reviews uh tonight.

Each department will come before you talk about their major expenditures and their key initiatives.

We want to complete that review tonight, and then tomorrow night, uh, there are two other budget books that you have.

One is uh issues and options.

Those are our list of uh items where we need your direction.

So uh please review those and we'll present those tomorrow night.

And then we have a third book that's a dot additional budget information.

Uh sometimes we've presented that, sometimes we haven't.

If you'd like to go through that, we certainly can uh tomorrow night.

And if we can do all that, then the uh third night wouldn't be necessary.

So uh with that, uh unless there are any questions from me, we'll go ahead and dive in.

I'll uh kick it over to Leslie, who I need to think in advance so I don't forget at the end, uh tremendous amount of work to put all this information together to account for it to build the tables and charts, and it's uh uh she's done an incredible job for us.

So thank you, Lisa.

Thank you.

Thank you, Nick Council.

Any questions for city manager before he moves away from the podium?

I see none.

Mayor, uh I just want to follow up on Nick's comments just a little bit and say that I'm also really pleased about and remind you all that this budget was uh put together with our new improved budget process.

Uh we we started by getting your input earlier in the year than we have in the past, uh, but also it helped us uh work on our priorities uh maybe better than we have in the past, prioritize the the services that we're currently providing, uh maintaining the equipment and assets that we currently have, and then finally looking at new new items, and and truly this was I feel like uh the first year that it was truly a team approach.

Uh department heads all got together, um, talked about uh the list of items and figured out uh what could go in this budget and what the priorities were based on what we heard from you all and what the council goals are, and so that's what this budget is.

Um, and so I'm I'm really pleased and think that while we have some some tweaks to make to the process, I I think it went really well.

So uh with that we'll get started.

Uh this is our budget this year uh for 2026 that we're proposing is 191.4 million dollars.

Um this is the summary of the governmental funds, and then the proprietary funds, and the component units, and this shows our positions, our FTEs, our full-time equivalents uh for 24, 25, and then what's proposed for 26.

So you can see that we're proposing to go from 637.5 FTEs to 646.5 FTEs.

And this pretty well breaks it down, adding an assistant IT director, an evidence technician, and two neighborhood improvement officers, uh, most of which is funded by use tax, adding an equipment operator, and two labor or twos to transportation sales tax through use tax, and then in the sewer fund, adding a utility locator and a wastewater biosol as supervisor.