1412 of the Nebraska revised statutes a current copy of the open meetings act is available for review and is posted on the wall.

Uh Peggy, please take roll.

Mayor Nicola Bush Cutter.

Here more Schmidt.

Here Stratman.

Here okay.

Agenda item three.

Oh, yeah, okay.

Agenda item three is to conduct a public hearing on the City of Carney budget for the 2025 to 2026 fiscal year presented by Kayla James.

All right.

Good afternoon.

We're here today, of course, to review the proposed budget for 2526.

And during the presentation, we will discuss next year's spending plan.

Compare the proposed revenue and expense budget to the current year's to the last year's budget to the current year's budget, explaining significant variances, and answer questions and gather feedback on the budget process here.

So some of the budgeted line items have changed just a little bit since we met in July because due to the valuation and some other updates that we did.

Not very many, maybe three of the amounts.

As always, feel free to ask questions throughout the presentation.

We want to have feedback and discussion about items on the budget.

So don't let me miss a slide.

Okay, so again, we will discuss expenditures, revenues, and fund balances, and then we'll dive deeper into a few other areas during the presentation.

So the first important slide here, proposed expenditures by fund.

Now keep in mind we are comparing last year's budget to this year's budget.

So in the general fund, personal services increased a little over $2 million or 9%.

This is probably due to some of the factors that usually occur.

Increased health care costs and insurance premiums.

We had a cost of living adjustment, merit increases, and an increase to the police and fire retirement costs that were statutory, as well as the sports plus sportsplex salaries will be for the full year this year.

Supplies and materials went up about $841,000 or 6.5%.

Capital outlay actually went down 33,731 dollars or 2.5%, and there is no debt service in the general fund.

So the total expenses for the general fund went up about 2.8 million dollars or 7%.

And then we grouped everything else into other funds, but we'll break these down on the future slides.

But in the other funds, um we had an increase in expenses of six million three hundred thousand seven hundred and forty-two dollars or six point six percent.

The other funds being special revenue funds, capital projects funds, debt service, enterprise funds, internal service funds, and fiduciary funds.

So as a total, you can see there that our total expenditures increased by a little bit over nine million or nine million dollars or six point nine percent.

So they have questions on this slide.

We're gonna get a little deeper into expenditures.

Okay, so personal services.

Um the providing a three percent pay plan adjustment costs the governmental funds five hundred and thirty-seven thousand three hundred ninety-eight dollars, and the government governmental funds are the general fund and the transportation fund within special revenue funds.

Um, the three percent pay plan adjustment will cost the proprietary funds two hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars, and proprietary funds are all the enterprise funds and internal service funds.

And we increased or yeah, so um the number of employees, we went from 363 employees last year to down to 358 employees for fiscal 26.

So we're down five employees, one is full-time and four are part-time.

Um I've listed the position additions and reductions for 25.

Sorry, they're very tiny.

Uh, you can see a lot of those were reclassed, as well as the um additions and reductions for fiscal 26, and basically it boils down to we added one position this year.

We added an additional fire engineer, so that's the only position we really added.

The not so great news 20% increase in both employee and employer health and dental premiums.

However, administration is currently working with our benefit consultants to explore other benefit options like the high deductible plan to keep premium costs manageable for the plan participants.

Um, just on this side, one of the things I want to point out is that the sportsplex would before we opened, we had planned on having more part-time employees, so the reduction of four part-time is where that's coming from.

As we were like right about to open um between Lauren, the sports plex director, and then HR had talked through kind of how that scheduling would look, and we decided to switch to a seasonal.

So we don't count sounds bad.

We don't count our seasonals and our overall employee counts because we hire probably 250 throughout the year.

But so that's where the four part-time reductions come from.

So there's still a cost to paying for the hours worked, but there's no benefits associated, and it's done in a seasonal manner instead of in a part-time employee manner.

Capital outlay by fund again, comparing budget to budget.

The general fund went down $33,731 or 2.4% in capital expenditures.

The special revenue funds went up $3.3 million or $40.9%.

And but you've got to keep in mind that $3 million of that was for the Box Butte Sewer project.

It's a grant that we received.

However, we still have to pay the expenses, but we'll get revenues to reimburse ourselves for that.

The capital projects funds went up $1.6 million.

The headlines there are our fire station is $12.3 million increase.