On May 11, 2026, the Joplin City Council held an informal workshop to review the mid-year budget update and discuss proposed key initiatives for the FY 2026-2027 budget. The session was a conversation starter, with no formal decisions made. City Manager Nick Edwards emphasized that key initiatives are net-new items on top of existing departmental workloads, and that the city faces a challenging financial outlook with expenditure growth outpacing revenue growth. The workshop featured presentations from multiple departments on their 2026 accomplishments and 2027 initiative proposals.
All right. It's 5 45, and uh we'll get ready for the informal uh workshop session tonight and uh uh FY 2026 2027 key initiatives update. Mr. City Manager. Good evening, Mayor and Council. Uh the title uh for tonight's uh key initiative update. However, I feel like I really need to add a different part to it. Uh this is our mid-year budget uh update, and then also discussion on uh key initiatives. Uh key initiatives are important uh for us as an organization. Uh those are the things uh that we are endeavoring to do uh in the next year. And so tonight uh you'll hear uh where we stand with last year's key initiatives and then also get a look at uh some ideas for the 2027 uh budget. Uh I think everybody on council should uh know this about our budget. And our budget is our financial plan. It uh you know, we forecast revenues, we try to allocate resources year to year. It's our financial plan. Um it's a policy document, and it sets express expenditures by fund, and and so there's policy to it as well. Also communication device. It talks about hey, these are the things that are important to the organization, these are the things that we're working on. But for tonight, and probably the most important aspect of the budget is it's a discussion of our annual operations. Uh these are the things uh that we're committing to do. Key initiatives are things that sit on top of our existing uh programs and services. So you you'll see uh some key initiatives. Uh some are relatively minor, some are uh bigger and more ambitious. Uh each key initiative uh coming from the departments, those departments already have an existing uh workload that they're responsible for. So this is basically net new things on top of those already baseline level of services that we're trying to accomplish for the organization. Tonight's uh discussion is really uh not to decide anything, uh, but just a conversation starter. It's important for us to hear from you about those things that are important to you to the community, things you'd like to see accomplished. I'd really ask for council's uh intentionality during this time to uh really um you know let's let's not do the things uh that you don't want to do, and let's focus on the things that you do want to do. Uh because right now I think one of our the biggest challenges we have as an organization is our uh workload and our capacity. So we need to be somewhat specific on what it is we want to do and try to avoid uh filling the plates throughout the year. So um I've kind of already talked about you know what our key initiatives it's our work plan. Um we'll go through tonight. Uh you know, if there's uh questions that you have, if there's conversations you want to have about programs and services, each department director will come before you and talk about those. There's a key initiative that meets the mark, let us know. If there's one that's doesn't seem right to you, let us know that. Because after tonight, what we'll start doing is uh put in numbers and estimates to the costs uh for these things. We know that uh key initiatives will change. I think Mayor uh said at the last meeting we need to do a retreat. So uh this is these aren't set in stone by any means. There might be some that are presented tonight that come off because during the retreat uh you guys identify something else uh for us to do. Uh I think I think that pretty much covers it. Does anybody have any questions about what a key initiative is and how we use them here at the city? Okay. Uh the other part of uh the presentation tonight is a uh general uh about uh budget update. And so Leslie's gonna cover kind of where we stand almost uh mid-year. So you want to cover your projections here? Yeah, so this is uh each fund will have this fund balance projection. Uh this is very high level. Um it is based off of the fifth period. Um as I work as we begin to work on the budget, uh the projections will be literally line by line, and so it will be uh much closer uh than what this high level projection is.