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The May 20th, 2026 meeting of the special joint city council and redevelopment agency budget is called to order.

This meeting has been properly noticed and posted in compliance with the open meeting law.

These proceedings are being video recorded and can be viewed live on City of Las Vegas TV on Cox Cable Channel 2.

You can also watch the meeting live online and access other city content by visiting Las Vegas, Nevada.gov slash connect.

The proceedings will be rebroadcast on the City of Las Vegas TV, the Wednesday of the meeting at 8 p.m.

and also Friday at 4 a.m.

Saturday at 7 p.m.

Sunday at 7 a.m.

and the following Monday at 5 p.m.

For public comment related to the items on the agenda, citizen participation, and public hearing items.

Cards are available in the clerk's office or at the rear of the chambers.

If you do not submit a card, it does not prevent you from speaking under public comment, citizens' participation, or specified public hearing items.

If there is anyone present today that has a need for hearing impaired equipment, please see the city clerk staff.

Item four is public hearing and discussion for possible action regarding fiscal year 2027, City of Las Vegas redevelopment agency tentative budget and fiscal year 2027, City of Las Vegas redevelopment agency final budget.

This impacts all wards.

Mr.

Jansen, welcome.

Good afternoon, Mayor Berkeley, members of City Council, Mike Jansen, City Manager for the record.

I'm gonna let my colleagues to my right introduce themselves.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council.

Susan Helpsley, Chief Finance, Chief Financial Officer.

Good afternoon, Madam Mayor and Council members.

Rosa Cortez, Deputy City Manager.

Well, Mayor and Council, we certainly had a uh interesting day today for sure.

A lot of items on today's council agenda that I think the city can be really proud of.

And uh hopefully we can uh finish the day in a similar manner with a FY27 budget that you all can also be proud of.

Uh I'd have to start off and uh thank Team Las Vegas.

Team Las Vegas uh is an is a name that we give all of our directors and managers over some of our offices, including our city attorney as well as our city auditor.

Um that team Las Vegas is uh what uh helps us bring to you a budget that uh as best we can meets the priorities of council and addresses things that are unique to all of your wards.

And uh the team that's in the audience today also includes uh reps from our finance department, and I will tell you we have an incredible finance department.

They uh live, eat, breathe, finance year-round, but uh starting in well, maybe just before January to today, it's pretty much nonstop all things budget.

So I want to I want to thank that entire team, and then uh last but not least, our entire CMO team uh who provides guidance to all of our departments, who gets the feedback uh from so many different um areas to try to make sure that we uh get a budget that uh keeps our city moving.

So uh with that, um I'd like to start off with really first things first with the most important part of the presentation for you today.

What I want to make sure you take away, and that is we're bringing to you uh an FY27 budget that is a balanced budget.

It's a balanced budget, and it also has even a surplus, and that surplus is gonna allow us to get back to a council approved uh policy uh as it relates to our uh general fund reserve.

Something that's really important for a community like ours that can be hit with changes in visitation that we have to navigate ups and downs, and by having a strong uh general fund reserve, we can get through those types of things.

So, starting off with that, um we've got themes that we follow every year in our budget.

Some years they change a little bit, but certainly uh for this uh budget, uh you know, Badland is behind us, and uh with that behind us, we have to get those reserves back to where they need to be.

And the reason for that we've talked about this is we got to protect that bond rating.

We do a lot of bond issuances for so many things that allow a city to run and expand.

And um, if we don't have uh at least a 20 percent reserve, we don't get that good bond rating.

Your policy, the policy that council endorsed a number of years back, was we got to get it to 25.

We weren't able to do that last year, but this year we're right back at it.

But in order to get there, uh it wasn't easy.

We had to ask our departments for a two and a half percent decrement, and uh they helped us identify how we can achieve those goals uh with some of those decrements.

I think we'd be remiss if we didn't take a moment to just look at what's happened since the end of February.

February 28th, I believe, is when the Iran conflict really was in full gear, and very, very quickly, uh the budget outlook for all entities in southern Nevada zoomed in on these two bullets you see here related to the soaring energy prices.

And essentially, crude oil uh is almost doubled since that date.

And similarly for jet fuel and for a community that relies on tourists that drive in, that fly in, that's a serious situation for us to navigate.

We're optimistic that it will be short-term, but we had to bring a budget to you that took into account the what ifs, what if that's sustained, and we start seeing a drop-off in visitation.

Similar to that, uh, inflation.

Inflation ebbs and flows.

Uh, it so happens that the most recent indicator for consumer price index, that's the one that just came out in April at 3.8% year over year.

That's the highest we've had since 2023.

Uh another indicator that is also important for us is we're looking at what it's gonna cost for us to buy materials, what it's gonna cost for us to build things, is the producer price index.

That was up six percent year over year.

That's the highest since 2022.

So those indicators are just uh another reason why we have to be careful with how we're projecting our revenues throughout this year.

And then uh, you know, from so many of our briefings throughout the year, we've done a great job bringing to our citizens parks.

Um parks get started, uh, and by the time they get opened, um, they got to have new staff, they gotta have new services, supplies.

So this budget is capturing, it just happened to be the way it is this year.

A whole bunch of parks are all opening in this fiscal year, which meant we needed to add those resources.

Every step of the way in our budgetary process uh follows the city council priorities, so I have these up here just as a reminder.

Uh and just about everything we do, every employee at the city is aware of these.

We have our newest one, housing and homelessness that is now a key uh tenet of all things that we do.

And then jumping into capital, what I'll just simply say on capital is again timing was everything.

This year, we have a park bond that's being paid off, so we had an opportunity to issue another park bond and get more of those projects that many of your constituents have asked for.

We can now move them forward.

Um you're gonna see in an upcoming slide from Rosa how so many of our key public safety projects, they're all moving forward.

I want to just give you an example.

When you build something like a fire station, they can take three to five years because you have to get land, you have to get that project designed, construct it, you gotta equip it and staff it.

So these are projects that take a while before you actually see them in the community, but they get on the CIP project so that we can get them going.

And I'm gonna just give you one example.

Since our tentative budget to today, there was a fire station we've been trying to site in the northeast area of the city of Las Vegas.

And uh only just recently, with Councilwoman Bruni's assistance, we've been able to identify a property owner.

It's an area of the city where we just don't have a BLM parcel that'll work.

We've been able to identify a property owner who's very interested in us potentially integrating that station into their development plan.

And so that project, the Northeast Area Fire Station has been added to this year's capital program, but it's as a result of relationships, and that goes across all of your wards.

You have relationships with property owners, with business owners.

When we need something, a lot of times your assistance is what gets us down the uh next step.

So wanted to make that aware, and again, a difference from our tentative budget to final and our tentative budget, our CIP was looking smaller than last year's.

But subsequent to that, we took a look at how uh our funds for few revenue indexing, that's our RTC dollars, those are very well set for the next 10 years, and we're also have very healthy um fuel tax that's coming in.

So, with that, we see an opportunity to issue a transportation bond as well.

A 40 million dollar bond is what we're showing here.

Um, that would move our CIP project going from 150 to 155, which is actually a little bit bigger than last year's.

So, again, um uh even though we got those uh challenges, some really good things happening.

I thought it would be really important for um you all to see um since um such a big part of Southern Nevada is dependent on the economic engine that is development to take a quick look at what's been happening um at the city of Las Vegas, um, and I've tied this date uh to um right after uh you were sworn in, Mayor.

I wanted to look at it from January of 25 to present.

What has the development situation looked like?

And um uh you'll see in the next slide all the entitlements that have come before you and your colleagues since you've come into your leadership role.

But as of right now, our economic engine has permit valuation a little over a billion dollars.

That's five months into the calendar year.

We still have uh six plus months to go.

Um what that looks like is 723 projects on the building side, 194 on the civil side.

And now compare that to the last two fiscal years or calendar years in this case.

In calendar year 24, we ended the calendar year with 2.3 billion dollars in permit valuation, and calendar year 25, we ended it with 2.1 billion.

And I have to put a shout out to our permitting team.

Um, their numbers are impressive.

On when you submit a plan uh for a commercial project, that permit review takes five days.

For a residential project, it takes three days.

For developers to decide where they want to develop, where they want to invest, how fast they can go through the process is a really important indicator, and just again, kudos to our team for doing a great job in that space.

I mentioned Mayor, since you've come into your role, um, this is a real interesting slide for you all.

Um, since 1125, you, your your colleagues, you have uh approved uh entitlements.

This is the pipeline of future permits.

You've improved entitlements for over 18,000 housing units.

And if you look at where those housing units are going throughout our city, it's fair to say that a whole bunch of them are gonna be more than 600,000, and another bunch will be less.

So if you just look what that entitlement means to our city at about 600,000 uh a house with the uh building and associated civil permits, that's about 11 billion dollars in entitlements for housing units.

Additionally, another million and a half square feet of commercial space at about $650 per square foot.

That includes the building and the permits, that's another billion dollars.

So why this is important is the actions that you've taken as a board, that's setting up our pipeline for the next four to five years for permit activity for developers to develop in our city.

It's also an indicator of developers having confidence in the city of Las Vegas.

And on to the right there, it's kind of an interesting slide.

I have to apologize in advance.

I wasn't able to get a project in Ward 1 that had over a thousand residential units approved since this date.

So you'll see there, you had the Grand Sword Cashman in Ward 5, the development agreement was for $1,200 units.

You had the Badlands redevelopment in Ward 2, it was almost 1,500 units.

And Monument Hills uh in Ward 6 was 6,000 units.

Those all have happened since 1125.

So MPT, my note for you is we're gonna work together to see where in Ward 1 so much of your properties already developed, but as you and I have discussed, there's some underutilized PARP properties, and hopefully we can find a way to get a ward one chunk on there as well.

But this is really um it's all that you've been doing over the last uh period.

Um, in order to get this budget to you uh in the shape that it's in, we had to employ a number of strategies.

Uh one of the easier strategies is to look at the true personnel vacancy rates.

Historically, we just took a straight 3% and said, hey, that's the vacancy rate across all departments.

But when you dig into each department, you find that some departments just have higher rates because of certain things.

Examples are on the Marshals Corrections Officers and our uh firefighters, they have a much higher rate of vacancy because there's a limitation on how many folks you can put through the fire and police academies.

They have much higher retirement rates, they can retire at an earlier age, and then sometimes some of those folks that go through the academy they don't get confirmed.

So in this budget, we've captured the effective vacancy rate, and that allowed us to better manage those costs.

We've also had to limit new positions.

If you look at 19 to 27, uh RFTEs grew by a little over 400 positions, close to 45 positions a year.

This year we had the limit it.

There's about 27 positions that are being added to the uh payroll.

Um, and how did departments help us on those decrements?

Well, they looked at some of their vacant positions.

They also looked at some services and supply programs they had that were maybe more nice to have than must-haves, and that's how they built their two and a half percent decrement plan.

Of note, what's really important is every month we walk you through what the C tax looks like.

Is it good?

Is it bad?

Is it flat?

Well, these positions that are on the decrement list, they're still in our staffing plan, but there's no budget associated with them.

That means throughout the year, we have an opportunity to potentially bring those positions back if our budget comes in stronger than we've budgeted.

So that's important to know.

A couple years ago, we offered a voluntary separation program.

We're in the final year of that to have some savings.

Uh, it's important to note no uniformed officers or firefighters are impacted by any of these decrements.

And um just as a point of reference, uh, for FY26, we're actually asking for decrements in the neighborhood of five to ten percent.

So we're we're getting away from having to have decrements, but again, uh they were necessary to build us back up.

Um last but not least, um, fee schedules.

We've got a lot of fees that had not been adjusted for years and years and years.

Our strategy is to try to get them updated with an annual CPI so that there is not a need to come back in the future and ask for a raise of fees.

Nobody wants to do that.

CPI built in will allow us to navigate that a whole lot easier.

So, with that, I'm gonna pass the mic over to our CFO Susan Heltzley.

Thanks, Mike.

Susan Heltzley, CFO for the record, and I just want to take a minute to echo what Mike said at the beginning of his presentation.

It takes a city to build this budget.

So thank you to Team Las Vegas and a huge shout out to the finance group.

They've been working on this budget since September.

So thanks, guys.

I know how much work that goes into it because I was their director for three years, so I get it.

So our FY27 major changes from tentative, as I like to put it, our general fund expenditures went down by about $800,000.

I call that budget dust.

So because you figure we have an $840, $850 million general fund budget, it's not really that impactful.

So we have eight items, eight major items that that moved the needle at $800,000.

We had a debt service transfer, it was actually reduced by $1.2 million because we refinanced City Hall ball, our city hall bonds.

So we wanted to make sure we pick that transfer up.

Our metro budget actually increased by half a million.

They had gone through and done an awful lot of work getting their budget finalized.

Their property tax revenue went a little wonky on them, so we ended up having to pick up a little bit more of their expenses.

Our payroll revaluation, it decreased by half a million dollars.

We look at our payroll three times during budget.

So we zero base our staffing.

We actually put in how many people we have, what step they're at, where where they're at on their um which range they're in.

So we can tell you exactly how much our payroll is going to be for our 3,800 employees, which is really actually pretty cool.

That's a lot of work on the payroll team.

Our mayor's fund was reduced by 100,000 per their contract.

We went through and made sure that that was picked up.

Our animal foundation budget actually was reduced by 100,000.

The crossing guards cost increased by about 100,000.

We added additional high schools and it went and went up by contract CPI.

And then we added about $15,000 to the workforce development group, uh, increased funding for strong start interns.

I know that's been a big, uh really nice program that we've had here for the summer, so it's nice that we're able to have a few more.

And then we just had some internal service fund charges in our facilities group that increased by $35,000, or I guess that's $350,000 and $150,000 for workforce development.

You know, decimals are hard sometimes.

One thing that's not on the slide is we're adding bonding authority, and Mike mentioned it early on.

So we're adding some bonding authority for next year, so we can go out and ask for that $40 million transportation bond.

That we would, it's a revenue bond.

It would be supported by our motor vehicle fuel tax and our fry tax, so that we can go ahead and move some of those transportation projects forward that have been sitting on the shelf.

We're also asking for a $50 million bond and the RDA.

So again, just uh the authority to do so.

We would of course come back to this body to ask for permission and run it through everyone to make sure that everything's okay on those bonds.

Uh another thing that changed our special revenue funds, where we've got some fire transport vehicles that were going to be delivered next fiscal year.

They're actually going to be delivered this fiscal year, so we don't have to put two six two point six million dollars in for next year because they're gonna come early, which is nice.

Our debt service fund, we just updated to include the refunding and refining financing tracks uh transaction for our city hall bonds, had a little bit of noise going on in our capital or sanitation capital outlay.

It increased by six million.

So it's five-year CPI is $461.4 million.

So we'll be making a lot of improvements to our sanitation program.

And then within our internal service funds, we increased our liability internal service fund by 10 million for potential and pending litigation.

Our workers' comp increased by 1.7 million due to rising claims in new legislation.

We had a few unfunded mandates that really hit us hard on our workers' comp.

Um AB 410 in 2023 and AB 142 in 2025.

They just have recognized additional things that people can claim workers' comp for.

And then we've increased our computer internal service fund for software liability amortization by 3.5 million.

This is one of those weird little accounting things.

So we we have this GASBE, it's a accounting standing board standards board that we have to follow.

So the $3.5 million is not cash, but we have to recognize it on our expenses.

So if we don't recognize it, taxation asks us, hey, what are you guys doing with your Gas B96?

So we're going ahead and putting that in this year.

Uh here's our general fund revenues.

Uh we're right about where we were, $838 million roughly.

You'll see that our consolidated tax is $53%, followed by our property tax at $20.5%.

And our license and franchise and our other are both very close.

Uh franchises and there's about $82 million, the rest of it being license fees that come in.

And our others is just we've got some property taxes that we don't show under the property tax and a few other things that that hit right there.

When you look at our consolidated tax history, it is it always astounds me how quickly it grew from FY20 to FY22.

That is really indicative of all of the money that came in through the CARES Act and the ARPA money and the $2,000 stimulus that people got.

They they had money and they needed to spend it because they didn't go anywhere in 2020.

And they realized, you know what, I can do a lot of online shopping.

So we have been very careful not to assume that that's going to continue to increase.

In fact, you can see as it levels, and actually, this next slide really shows it quite nicely, how the leveling off of our C tax has happened over the last couple of years.

So we've got a couple things here.

If we assumed continuous growth back to FY 2013, we would be roughly in a under 400 million dollars.

You can see that we've been growing faster than that.

Our five-year average growth is 5.9%.

So that would put us about 490, a little over 500.

We're actually doing a projective growth of 4.6 from FY21.

And interestingly enough, you'll notice that we're keeping it pretty flat this fiscal year till next fiscal year, as we were talking earlier.

A lot of uncertainty in the marketplace right now between the inflation and the cost of oil and jet fuel and our tourism numbers are just not as they're not where they'd want we'd want them to be.

So we're going very conservative this year.

However, next year for FY28, we've got some things going on.

We've got the and the uh the final fours coming, so we've got the basketball fans.

The Las Vegas A's are opening up, so we're hoping that that's going to increase our CTAX money numbers too.

And of course, we're getting Super Bowl back in 2029.

And I know I don't, yeah, I know I don't benefit from that because I don't go, but you know, somebody gets to enjoy my tickets.

I'm glad they're able to.

So that explains the difference that we've got going on in those outlying years.

And this next one just shows our property tax history for all funds.

It's a very stable growth.

I always like to tell folks we collect 99.5% of our property tax, so that's a very, very solid uh revenue source for us.

Of course, since we're landlocked, it's difficult for this us to grow this more.

So we we do look forward to all of the the permitting that Mike was referencing early on that should really help us with our property tax.

And our full-time equivalent history, you can see as Mike was saying, we we really grew our we grew our FTEs quite a bit up until about 2025.

Then it slowed down in 26, and this year we're adding 27.

The majority of those are public safety positions.

We do have a few positions to handle our parks and rec, and this number did not change from tentative to final, so we did not add any additional positions.

Our general fund expenditures $826 million roughly.

You can see salary and benefits is almost 50%, and then our non-labour cost is another 22.

Metro is 25% of our general fund, and then our debt surface 3%, and the other is a little tiny $6.2 million.

So we are very heavily focused on uh salary and benefits when you assume that Metro 80% of their budget is salaries and benefits, also.

And this next slide just shows it our general fund expenditures of the 826 by function instead of by category.

So again, our public safety is 67.5 percent of our budget.

That includes, of course, Metro, our GPS, our fire, our fire department, some of our public.

We've got some folks that work in public works and neighborhood services that all contribute to the public safety.

Uh culture and rec's another eight and a half, so it's pretty well spread out between the rest of the groups, but as you can see, public safety is truly our number one priority on how we spend our money here.

Uh, just a snapshot of our general fund final budget.

We believe our estimate for FY26 will come in with a 20.9% fund balance, which after settling bad lands is not too bad.

You know, we we we realized that we had some some work to do at FY26.

You can see we had some transfers out of 104.5 million in 26.

That was to go into our internal service fund for the liability so we could pay off the liability, and we also reimbursed our sanitation fund last year that we took out a loan for.

And at FY27, you'll see that our consolidated tax, we are estimating it to be flat to this year's estimate, and we will be coming in at a 25% uh surplus, which is about it's 12, it's it's 12 million dollars, not a huge number, but it's a start.

So we're very very excited to be building building back our our excess balance we've got going on.

And this just shows our general fund revenue and expense trending.

You can see the years where we actually were bringing in more money than we were spending.

FY20 was an interesting year because we took a lot of we went through and did a lot of um cost cutting just in case revenues didn't come back, and we actually ended up with a revenue surplus that year because we got some money from the CARES Act, and then the rest of the time 21 was pretty flat.

We've been running surpluses going forward, and you can see the last couple budgets, we had some deficits this year again is in a surplus.

So I'm gonna turn it over to Rosa before I lose my voice.

Thank you, Susan Rosa Cortez, deputy city manager.

I too would like to echo what Mr.

Jansen and Susan had mentioned about our gratitude and thankful for all the work that the department's team Las Vegas has done in getting this uh budget completed, and I want to thank them for being here today.

So thank you all.

All right, so with that, I will quickly go over the fiscal year 27 capital capital improvement plan.

This first slide shows the funding sources that we use to fund our capital projects.

This should look familiar to you as we showed you during the tentative presentation.

And most of these funding sources have restricted uses.

For example, the 1% room tax is used for transportation projects, and the five cent at Valorum is for facilities.

I also want to point out the bottom two bullets, which are the bonds that Mr.

Jansen had mentioned earlier, the park bond that we will be issuing for 21 million dollars, and I'll show you in an upcoming slide some of the projects that we'll be funding with that bond.

And then lastly, the transportation improvement bond that is a new opportunity for the city to advance uh some delayed transportation projects.

Wrong way.

So, as Mr.

Johnson mentioned, public safety is our number one priority in the city of Las Vegas, and these are the projects that we reviewed during the tentative budget, and they are listed by ward, and I will go over those quickly.

We talked about Fire Station 103, that's the new station that will be located at Alta and Falcon.

And then in Ward 2, we've been working with Summerlin Howard Hughes to amend that development agreement to include any fire station, and the dates are shown there.

In ward three, the fire station training center, that's a multi-phase project.

We will be starting construction soon, and that is located at Mojave and Bonanza.

The ward four project is the 911 joint multi joint 911 center, multi-agency.

That is a partnership with Metro, the City of North Las Vegas, Clark County, and the city of Las Vegas, and we hope to have that project constructed or starting construction at the end of this year.

We're still working out those details.

We also talked about advancing design for a new fire station in ward four in the northwest at Chomber and Tropical.

In Ward 5, we have Fire Station 1, the rehab project, that's one of our busiest fire stations.

We hope to start construction on that in quarter two of 2027.

And then in Ward 6, looking forward to seeing the Metro substation completed by the end of the year, another project in partnership with Metro, and that also includes a city park.

And then lastly, the uh new fire station that Mike mentioned earlier.

We're advancing design for a new uh fire station in the Northeast Quadrant located near Grand Teton and Rainbow.

And here I just wanted to go over the projects that are included with the FY27 bond, and this is not all of the projects, but I just wanted to highlight these.

So for ward one, we are adding construction funding for the firefighters dog park, which is located on Alban and Redwood.

That will include three dog cells and agility equipment.

In ward two, we are adding design money to complete the design of the Kellogg's Air Soccer Complex, the final build-out, which is a vacant parcel.

It's about 3.4 acres just west of Fire Station 44.

And we currently plan to include a soccer field, a multiplaza pavilion area, some fitness equipment, and additional parking.

So the money there will be used to complete the design drawings.

For the JC Levitt Park Renovation, as uh Councilwoman Diaz mentioned earlier, there's a survey that is currently ongoing, and that will allow us to define the scope of work.

But the funding for this will be to create design drawings, and this park is located at St.

Louis and Eastern.

And then in Ward 4, the Mountain Ridge Park Improvements, home of Mountain Ridge Lilly League.

We are looking to add funding for design to do improvements that improve pedestrian access at various entryways, uh install new netting, installed shade structures over the seating area.

Also do some transition with the uh batting, bullpen batting cages, and actually upgrade the walking path around the entire park as well.

And then ward five years park, the funding that's going to be allocated for here is the construction funding for that project.

That is a neighborhood park located near Smoke Ranch and Rainbow and Torrey Pines, excuse me, Smoke Ranch in Torrey Pines.

And this park is about seven acres, and we will be doing a complete renovation where we're going to upgrade the walking path with lighting, add fitness equipment, put a new basketball court, lighting, landscaping, redo the grass and irrigation, new playground equipment as well.

And then lastly, ward six, the Teton Trails Park final build-out that also has a vacant parcel.

It's about five acres.

And we have uh completed a schematic design, and we want to now do the final design documents.

So the funding will go to get those documents completed, and that entails some pickleball courts, sports field, a new restroom, and additional parking.

And with that, I will pass it on to Mike.

Well, thanks, Rosa.

Thanks, Susan, uh, for your slide coverage.

Um, take a little bit of time just to go over the RDA, and uh you all see Dina Babski uh at our RDA meetings on multiple occasions with all the different projects that are going on in our RDA.

And as a reminder, our RDA uh the area that it covers is wards one, three, and five.

And uh what this slide really just shows you in a couple of the bullets is just all the unique projects that are coming out of the ground that are in process, and it covers all of our major districts and wards 135, certainly the medical district, certainly Symphony Park, the Arts District, and our newest one is the Cashmin and Grant Sawyer, a huge uh redevelopment of that area of our redevelopment agency.

Um at the top, I wanted to just point out you'll see the assessed value increases and the tax increment revenue growth.

What some folks are not aware of when you see all the projects that are coming out of the ground downtown, they don't actually get added to the tax rolls until they get their certificate of occupancy.

And so FY28 should be uh a near record year because all of these mega projects are all gonna be added to the tax rolls.

They're in right now trying to get their certificates of occupancy, some of them already had them, but it should be a really banner year for the RDA next year, and that is simply gonna allow us to do more in the RDA.

Um I highlighted uh one of our support programs, and so if RDA funds are used, you know, you have to have that nexus.

So we've used had one today uh for uh some improvements with the new Greek restaurant on commerce, uh very popular one.

Uh seems like I see uh a security grant request coming through quite quite frequently.

Um it was a program we started during um ARPA time and we've sustained it through the RDA.

But the I wanted to just highlight the downtown special event public safety uh support program.

Really, what this is is we want special events to continue to happen all over the redevelopment agency.

But in order for those events to be safe, uh, when you have large crowds coming into an area, there's a significant cost for law enforcement fire support, et cetera.

And so as those costs went up, vendors came in and and told us, hey, you know, we may not be able to do this event anymore because of the cost, and we know how valuable those events are to our redevelopment agency.

So this support program was added probably about two years ago.

And again, I just wanted to get it out there for those that are listening.

If you're thinking of an event downtown, by all means, uh, when you meet with our event team, take a look at that uh incentive program because it may be a key way for your event to uh make it through the process.

Uh again, our RDA is in very good shape, it's very healthy.

Um, as Susan mentioned earlier, you'll see up there under other contributions for FY27, the number 53.

50 of that is that bond authority.

So there's no guarantee today that we'll actually issue 50, maybe it's 40, maybe it's 30, but we wanted to have the flexibility to take advantage of that bond if a number of projects happened during this fiscal year.

And some of those projects involve the MOM Museum expansion, the expansion of the NEON Museum, uh the biomedical health challenge, some strategic land acquisition for future garages, a whole host of things.

Um, and the FY27 budget will have that flexibility to do that.

Um, the only other item I would point out to on this particular slide is when you come down into our expenditures, you see that 85.6 under program expenses.

That is us saying if we are going to issue a bond, let's just say it is 50, we are gonna put that bond to use.

We're not gonna sit on those revenues, we don't want to pay interest on a bond and not put it to use.

So the idea is whatever we issue in a bond, it'll come out with some of those um expenses.

Additionally, in that program expense are funds for TIs.

We've talked to you about a number of very exciting tenants that may be coming into the third floor of Civic Plaza.

Not ready to announce just who that is yet, but there's funds in there that would cover those TIs.

And so again, uh a lot of great things happening in our RDA.

This slide is just a snapshot of what everything looks like when you look at all of our various funds that make up the city's uh annual operation.

And it's landing at about 2.2 billion dollars is what it takes to run a city of Las Vegas uh approaching 700,000 population, as you see on the bottom line.

We've steadily grown every year.

I'm sure this time next year we're probably gonna hit that 700,000 mark.

Um and you'll see again our FTEs, they've steadily um grown to to be able to meet the needs of the community.

Uh I go without saying if I didn't take a moment to thank all the regular employees you see there, 3,086 temporary employees, our hourly employees.

You know, we've got hourly lifeguards, we've got hourly uh instructors at some of our community centers.

What makes the city great is all of our staff, not just the full timers, but also those part-timers.

And so again, I wanted to take a moment to just thank our entire team.

Here's really the key budget takeaways for you today.

It's a positive budget.

Uh it's structured conservatively, but it's going to end with a surplus.

And again, this is after having deficits in 25 and 26 due to badlands.

Um it focuses on those challenges we mentioned, again, getting those uh reserves up, recognizing we could have a flat C tax, but at the end of the day, this budget really reinforces how much public safety remains our number one priority.

I have a lot of conversations with Chief Gray and a number of folks from the fire team, and I wanted to capture just the impact of this year's budget.

I I think I'm not going on a limb to say this is probably the largest investment in fire and rescue allocations that we've probably ever had in the history of the city.

And what you see there going ward by ward, the oldest fire station is being replaced, 50-year-old fire station.

The busiest fire station is being rehabbed.

A brand new fire training center is going to construction.

We're adding a ladder truck and a whole bunch of staff at Station 4 to be able to meet all of our new mid-rise building demands.

We've got a new Summerlin West Fire Station that's going into design, a new Northwest Fire Station, a new Northeast Fire Station, and I can simply say so much more.

It's a pretty it's a pretty impressive budget for your focus on public safety.

What's left?

The final budget's got to get to the state by June 1st, and we have to file with them our planning document, our five-year CIP by August 1st.

And Mayor and Council, with that, I I really appreciate the feedback you've given us throughout the process.

It really helps us try to figure out how do we get everything to land as best we can.

And uh with that, we're open to ask address any questions you might have.

Thank you so much.

Uh, this is a public hearing, so are there any people from the public that wish to comment on this item?

Seeing no one, we will close the public hearing.

Are there any questions or comments from members of the council?

Okay, go right ahead.

Thank you, Madam Mayor.

Um thank you, Mike, Rosa, Susan, you guys have done amazing job.

Sometimes life gets rocky at the city, but you three are amazing stewards and amazing leaders for our city, and you've got us through beautifully.

Uh, the high times, the low times.

Um thank you for your commitment to our fire department.

This is amazing.

Uh the future of Las Vegas Fire and Rescue is very, very bright here.

Thank you for all you do.

Thank you so much.

Mayor Pro Tem.

Thank you, Mayor.

I just would echo my colleague sentiments.

Thank you for all the work and for all the folks sitting in the audience.

Uh I know it takes a whole lot of work to put this budget together, and you and your teams do an exceptional job, and you're very responsive to uh the council and the constituents that we represent.

So we should all be very proud.

So thank you very much.

Thank you so much.

Ms.

Kelly.

Thank you, madam mayor.

I wanted to put a couple of comments on the record, particularly in light of our first budget hearing, and I had some comments.

Um, if you'll recall that the mayor had limited our time, and I didn't have a chance to say some of the things I wanted to say that I think are important for the public to understand.

Um I don't want the lack of comments misinterpreted at all as disengagement or apathy on the part of the council.

And so I'll just use me as an example.

Um this is a very long process for us, and uh, and I know that I reached out, I started a meeting with uh our CFO, Susan Health Slee, in uh either it was either very it was late fall, sitting down because I was the new kid, wanting to understand how this process worked.

And I met with you on multiple occasions.

You encouraged me to do so, and I really appreciate that.

I know, and and I and not that we need to go through everybody talking about what they had to do, but but I think but I think I'm representative of the kind of work that we do sometimes behind the scenes that's not seen by the public.

And so lack of inquisition sometimes at meetings does not mean that we weren't paying attention, that we didn't spend any time.

I know we my ward, particularly Christina Dugan and myself spent many, many hours understanding the budget, trying to interpret it, you know, by this is my first time on this side of the fence, if you will, with a municipal budget, uh, and representing constituents, and so I take take their investment in what we do very seriously, as I know you all do as well.

Um you talked, Susan, about the effort of the finance team, which I know is huge.

This is uh uh one of the most important things that you do, and so whether it was Gail or or the team that's sitting here, I certainly uh the directors.

I know I spoke to multiple directors about trying to understand better how they look at their budgets, how they come to the conclusions that they come to on whether to submit um uh new staffing, which was very limited.

I know, Mike, that the direction was for uh decrement, and I know that the directors uh look very thoroughly through that.

Um you referred, Susan, um, as I think when you're looking at a two billion, nearly two billion dollar budget is budget dust.

Uh, but I know that many of us understand $800,000 is a lot of money.

And while not every penny we get is from taxpayer dollars, the majority of that we do, and I know for me, and I'm certain this is the same for the rest of the council, take the responsibility, the fiduciary responsibility for those dollars very seriously.

Um, and I don't mean to suggest you don't, but I did want to put on the record that we do get that, and um it is uh we're good stewards of that money.

I feel while I don't there's not I I I wouldn't say that every dollar being spent that I looked at, uh it wouldn't be uh uh viable for me to do that, but um I feel confident uh in voting for and approving this budget today that I did the due diligence uh to be able to respond to questions that my constituents have or to be able to to get additional information to do so that those dollars are being spent in the best interest of of not only the taxpayers but more importantly of the constituents.

I am particularly humbled on many times as I've learned the extent to which we provide services, the way in which, you know, I I don't think I go through a meeting with RC, our um neighborhood services uh leader, and am not in awe really of how much we care and how much we work, and I know that when you know we have limited dollars that have to be stretched, we have a lot of responsibilities.

So I want to thank you all for the work that you do, and I welcome, I know I welcome my constituents uh at any time to ask questions, and if I can't, I don't know the answer to them, whether they're about this budget or anything we do, I'm happy to answer because that's what we're here for.

But it was important to me to say that I uh as I said at the beginning, I did not want anyone to misinterpret um lack of of critical questions or inquisition as uh uh some distance that we have or not caring because I know that many of the questions uh were asked through this whole process, and so uh that's very important to me.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, uh Ms.

Kelly.

Is there a motion for item number four with appreciation?

I move to approve.

Please vote motion carries, and for item number five.

We'll move to approve.

Please vote post motion carries.

Thank you all very, very much.

Very grateful to you.

Agenda item number six.

Citizens participation.

Public comment during this portion of the agenda must be limited to matters within the jurisdiction of the city council.

No subject may be acted upon by the city council unless that subject is on the agenda and is scheduled for action.

If you wish to be heard, come to the podium and give your name for the record.

The amount of discussion on any single subject, as well as the amount of time any single speaker is allowed, will be limited to two minutes.

Is there anyone wishing to speak under this portion of the agenda?

Hearing none, uh this special joint city council and redevelopment agency budget meeting is adjourned.