The Kearney City Council held a special meeting on July 8, 2024, at 7:00 a.m. in City Council Chambers. The agenda included a presentation of the proposed 2024-2025 city budget by Finance Director Kayla James and City Manager Brenda Jensen, and a staff update on the SportsPlex by Sports Manager Lauren. No public comments were heard, and no formal votes were taken. The meeting adjourned after discussion.
By statute, a current copy of the open meetings act is available for me to post it on the wall. Take roll, please. Mayor Klaus Bushcutter clear absent Nicola More. Here. Okay, an agenda item three is a presentation of the 2023-2024 budget by Kayla James and Brenda Jensen. Morning, Kayla James, Director of Finance. Here we are again. I can't believe how quickly this rolled around. I did change this first slide here to include just the word highlights because it was a little misleading. This really isn't the budget. We'd be here all day if we were looking at the budget. So throughout this presentation, feel free to ask questions or have start some discussion because there's lots of things that we can talk about. This is the time to do it. So here we go. Starting with proposed expenditures by fund. And this would be comparing last year's budget to this year's budget. The general fund increased 7% or about $1.5 million for personal services. Supplies and materials increased about $600,000 or 5.3%. And our capital outlay expenditures decreased about $700,000. And then the general fund does not have any debt service in it, so that would be zero. In total, the general fund went up about $1.5 million or 4.1%. And we will start talking about some of these different components of the general fund here in a bit. The other funds, um, we had a decrease of $28 million in the other fund expenditures, mostly because of the capital projects that we have been doing this year and working on. We've had a lot of expenditures that we will not have next year. And we'll we'll discuss that later too. And so in total, the city of Kearney budgeted expenditures went down about $27 million or 17%. And kind of a fun fact for all the expenditures, about 60% of those are for operating, so personal services, supplies, materials, and contractual services comprise about 60% of the budget. And capital and debt represent about 39% of the budget. And the other funds there that we're talking about special revenue fund, capital projects fund, debt service fund, enterprise fund, internal service fund, and fiduciary funds, they're all kind of lumped together in the other funds there. So and if there aren't any questions, I'll just keep going. Starting with personal services, um a three percent pay plan adjustment is planned uh for cost of living adjustment, and this this one will cost the general fund or the governmental funds, excuse me, about $517,000. And the governmental funds would include the general fund and the transportation fund. These are most of the tax supported uh parts of the of the general fund. And then it will cost the proprietary funds about 215,000. So it's the the three percent pay plan adjustment in total is gonna cost about 732,000 dollars. Um the number of employees we started uh we're working in the 2324 budget right now. We started with 346 employees during 2324. We added 8.67 employees, and under the new, the new would be what we're proposing uh new positions for 2425 to end up with an ending number of 363 positions, and I have detailed down here down below the um 2324 mid-year additions um in the middle there, and then the 25 are the new positions that are proposed. And you can see um, I I wanted to put on here we didn't just add positions, we also reduced positions or eliminated positions and like an easy one. Um we added Brad, the assistant to the city manager, but we took away the deputy city manager, so a lot of things were moving. Um, some of these that I did not include up here that kind of were um moving a position eliminating this but adding that in it in within the same department. So it this list would get too lengthy to include everything, and then we are proposing a 10% increase in both employee and employer health and dental premiums this year. Um, just to give that a little bit of uh clarification. We project we're gonna have 4.6 million dollars worth of medical claims this year to pay. We have a few large claimants, and we also will have 1.2 million dollars of health reinsurance to pay and our health reinsurance to give you some context. And our health reinsurance, to give you some context, our monthly premium that we pay for health reinsurance increased from $52,000 a month to $81,000 a month. So that hurt a little bit. That cost us about $350,000. So that cuts us a little short. The reinsurer kind of took it deep last year because we had some high claimants, and anybody who had medical expenditures over $150,000, they had to pick up the rest.