Welcome to business session.

Our first item is approval of minutes for business session of January 27th.

Is there a motion?

Second.

Moved and seconded.

All in favor by saying aye.

Aye.

Motion passes.

Is the fiscal year 2022-2023 budget presentation?

And early congratulations to you all in the budget office for your outstanding work.

We'll make sure we do good work with it in the weeks ahead.

But Ms.

Morrison, our chief budget officer, take it away.

All right.

Well, good afternoon, Honorable Mayor, members of City Council and City Manager Platt, Krista Morrison, budget officer.

I am joined today by Tanner Owens.

Tanner Owens is a budget analyst in the budget office.

Tanner happens to be our most tenured employee in the budget office with 10 months of service in our office.

And really happy to have Tanner and the tremendous talent that this office has.

Tanner was a member of the Kansas City Parks team and lucky to have him over in the budget office.

Now I'd also like to acknowledge, and if you all would stand up, the budget team.

Small but mighty.

Yes.

And we have a rich and proud history of really educating on policy and operations to build up talent for regional leaders in the city.

So want to recognize our efforts.

All right, with that, uh today we're going to focus on a very high-level overview of Kansas City's budget.

I think there's a lot of positive in Kansas City's budget this year, so we'll focus on the highlights and of course leave time for any questions that you may have.

So, Tanner, if you would.

We'll jump in.

Kansas City's budget for fiscal year 22-23 submitted is a 1.9 billion dollar budget.

The budget is broken down in two categories.

Governmental activities fund at 1.3 billion dollars.

That is a hundred and twenty-three million dollar increase or 10.8% increase from the prior year adopted budget.

And we'll get into detail on the why of those increases.

And business type activity funds in your submitted budget is $647 million.

That is a $49.9 million increase or 8.4% from last year's submitted budget.

Some key assumptions and highlights in this year's budget.

First, it includes the compensation plan.

That was part of your five-year financial plan passed by this city council.

That includes the proposed market study.

You'll be hearing from the HR department, human resources department ahead to get our salaries across the city to uh uh market rates.

Um the submitted budget also includes all negotiated collective bargaining agreement step increases that is included in your submitted budget.

I will note that local 500 negotiations are still in progress.

We do have a placeholder in the submitted budget for an increase.

The submitted budget fully funds actuarial required payments for the uh city's pension plans, and then the budget includes health care increases of 8%, and these are just general because of health care costs increasing for the last several years, in fact.

Um, that's just a general cost increase in the area of health care.

There is some really positive work being done in the area of employee benefit plan enhancements.

Uh the health care trust is considering several no-cost benefit enhancements ahead to the city's employee health care plans, and the enhancements being considered include gender affirming treatments and procedures, fertilization treatments, hearing aids, and weight loss medications, just to name a few, but these are quite progressive, I think.

Um benefits that our um employees have been requesting.

In the area of revenue, the submitted budget, and we'll go into detail ahead.

It is cautiously optimistic as we're seeing many of our revenue revenue sources recover based on current trends.

So I do think we're presenting a budget that's still conservative, but also um highlights the positive trend we're seeing across most of our major revenue sources.

The submitted budget does include tranche two of the American Rescue Plan, and we'll walk through detail of the American Rescue Plan and how it's proposed for allocation.

And then the budget assumptions and highlights, a zero target budget, and that means no citywide budget reductions.

The last two years, of course, during COVID and the pandemic, have been challenging on the city's finances and cities departments.

This year we asked departments to present no increases but also no decreases, and that follows two years of consecutive reductions, a 4.5 and 11% reductions.

That excludes all of our union represented positions.

Each of our unions 42, 3808, and 500, as well as business type are excluded from that hiring freeze.

And we would anticipate that most departments are able to manage with this hiring freeze in the budget, just based on their regular turnover and vacancy rates.

So closing the budget gap.