The Finance Committee held a budget hearing on Monday, December 8, 2025, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. in the City Hall Auditorium to review the proposed 2026 comprehensive budget. Presentations were given by the Human Services, Information Technology, Building & Housing, Planning & Development, Law, and Finance departments. The committee also handled several procedural motions, including approval of minutes and substitution of amended ordinances.
Why don't we go ahead and get started on the finance committee meeting for Monday, December 8th. Thank you everybody for being here. We have the full committee here as well as uh Council President Keppel and Mr. Evans from Ward 2 and the administration. We've got a lot of ground to cover tonight. We've even got a break with food coming for everybody to enjoy at the midway point. We're gonna have a couple of motions to make, but um, while I get my machine booted up in the proper screens here, what I like to suggest is that we go right into the human services department and keep on schedule the presentation. Any um actually I should gesture over where Chad or Director Barry. But first, uh council uh members on the committee or or otherwise any opening remarks. Just jump right in. Jump right in. Okay. Let's do that, and then we'll we'll circle back to procedural motion. So uh without further ado, um human services department. Welcome. There we go. Thank you. Uh I'm happy to be here again. Present our uh 2026 proposed budget for human services in all of our divisions. This is our typical slide you've all seen. I can I think go ahead and skip this. This is um I've tried to make this a nice and uh illustrative uh presentation. Obviously, we have a lot of substance in here, but you know, this is the work that we do every day. This is one of our events this summer. Uh and this is this is what we're bringing to the community. This is our uh overall Department of Human Services accomplishments and kind of strategic goals. Um 2025 was a really good year for human services. We um got a lot of uh outside funding and we created a lot of new programming, which is what one of our goals has been for many years now is to kind of really increase our programming and our opportunities. Now that we're in our new space, we're really coming to our own. We uh actually obtained a $17,000 uh national parks grant that allowed us to really update our uh outside space. Uh, if you've been over there recently, it's uh really really nice, it's really attractive. Obviously, we can't use it right now because we live in Ohio, and why we chose to live here, I don't know. But the when the weather is nice, it really attracts a lot of folks. And we had a common ground event where over 450 people came and participated. There's a whole new space that attracts uh younger, younger folks. There's um age-appropriate uh play uh apparatuses and all sorts of great new things. Another big thing that we have accomplished this year is the generator's been installed and it is up and running. So we are ready and willing and able to address any kind of crisis situations that come up, which as you all know that you know this has happened multiple times now. So cove is ready um to uh be open when when there is a crisis which takes the power out, which is uh frequent event. Um we've also spent a lot of time training on emergency management and kind of understanding how uh human services as a whole can approach those situations. You can see our strategic goals there for 2026. We're just again continuing to expand our community outreach. Um we're really also looking at our staffing structure and how we have um you know historically done things. We're trying to determine how we can uh serve the community better and how we can move staff around or create positions or modify positions that currently exist to really uh satisfy community needs and you know really develop a position and develop a response to um adult crises 18 to 59 because that's always been an area that we haven't really had the opportunity or haven't had the you know, we have the division of aging and youth, and they cover those age ranges, but we've never really had someone or uh an area that's dedicated to that middle age range. So we're really kind of uh pushing that this year, and uh a lot of collaboration between us and the safety forces in the city and our community partners. More fun photos. That's uh a trellis actually was built by one of our uh public works folks on his free time and donated to Cove. It's very, very nice. Um, but just bringing in a lot of uh beautiful uh beautification to the outdoor space. So our first uh budgetary area is our division of aging.