On Thursday, February 1, 2024, at 2:00 PM in the 26th Floor Council Chamber, the Kansas City Council held a Business Session covering budget updates, trash cart implementation, and a community-led tax abatement program. The meeting began with approval of the January 25, 2024 minutes.
Welcome to business session. Our first item is approval of minutes for business session of January 25th. 2024 is there a motion. It's been moved and seconded all in favor of approving the minutes from January 25th. Say aye. Aye. All opposed. The motion passes. Our first item is the second quarter budget analysis report. Whoever wants to come. Krista. Budget analysis report, second quarter. No, it has been short. We can bring this down. All my problems get solved. Well, good afternoon, Honorable Mayor Lucas, members of City Council and City Manager Platt, Krista Morrison, budget officer. And I am joined today by Tanner Owens. Tanner is a senior analyst in the budget office. And among his many hats, he manages the quarterly analysis process for the office. So appreciate the opportunity to be here today. We will be presenting the October 31st monthly financial report as well as the fiscal year 20 for second quarter budget analysis. So jumping right in, um, the first two pages are actually from the month ending report, uh, pages two and three. And this is general revenue, general fund revenues, and it is prepared by the accounts division, and it is a view October 31st, so second quarter end of each year for five years worth of history. And just a couple items I'll highlight here because you'll hear much more detail ahead as we project out in quarterly a forward look. But in general, our major revenue categories for the city in the general funds, such as property tax, local use tax, earnings tax are strong. They are coming in above the budget. Um while growth is starting to slow in some categories, there's still growth. Um moving to the general fund expenditures year to date as of October 31st. I think most notable on here, you'll see a comparison October 31st from fiscal year 23 last year to the current year. You'll see that personnel services are up from the same time last year. That is in general just due to wage pension, health care costs planned in the budget. In the area of contractual services, um, we are trending above last year, and most of those expenditures were planned in the budget, such as the tree planting program, T Mobile Center improvements, and uh recycling and trash program, bulky item program expansions. So with that, I will jump in to your second quarter analysis. So we are required by um code to present to city council in first, second, and third quarter where we anticipate uh we're going to close the fiscal year. Um I want to acknowledge that this is a citywide process. It is collaborative with each and every department, so every department director, their financial staff provides input on um issues they're running into in their department and also where they anticipate we're going to end the fiscal year. The information is being provided to you to help um provide really policy decisions so you know where we're on trend, where we might be ahead in revenue, where we may be behind, and then also some of our operational issues we may be um running into for the city. Why this is so important? I think um a couple years ago, several of you were on this council when COVID first hit, and we had to make very quick mid-year reductions and changes to continue services across the city. Um, each quarter. Uh there will be a cleanup ordinance, a second quarter cleanup ordinance accompanies this and is being considered on the council docket today. That ordinance numbers 240093, and we'll go through the highlights of what that cleanup ordinance does. So, general assumptions in the quarterly budget analysis. Um, we have included all expenditures through through second quarter. Any of our uh collective bargaining agreement terms are included in that quarterly analysis. Um it does assume that the contingent appropriation is fully spent. As of the time we ran this report, contingent appropriation was at 2.2 million. There is recent legislation that as of today, the contingent appropriation is at 1.2 million to close the fiscal year. That's the available balance left from where we started a fiscal year at around 6.3 million. All right, with that, I'm gonna turn this over to Tanner Owens to talk specifics on our analysis and where we're anticipating to close the fiscal year.