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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.

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and also Friday at 4 a.m.

Saturday at 7 p.m.

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and the following Monday at 5 p.m.

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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.