The meeting opened with the Finance and Investment Committee receiving a fiscal year 2025 financial performance update, followed by a series of tourism grant presentations from Marietta cultural and community organizations. The city's financial outlook shows flat or declining revenue with some reserve buffers, while the grant applicants showcased events and programs designed to attract visitors and stimulate the local economy.
Several organizations presented requests for FY26 tourism funds. Below is a summary of the requests and key statistics.
For the Finance and Investment Committee. At this time, the committee meeting is called to order. The only item of business. There we go. The only item of business is the fiscal year 2025 financial performance update. And uh before we do that, Carl, can you hear us? I can hear you. Okay. There we go. Patina, take it away. Thank you. Councilman Goldstein. So I will provide for you just a short breakdown of where we are thus far for FY25 as we go on to the end of the fiscal year. And give you a sneak preview into FY26 as I know it so far. We are still building out the budget, so that will be kind of sealed and ready to go by next week. We're anticipating a recommended budget book to be released by Wednesday of next week. So needless to say, we are furiously typing up budget and making sure that numbers are matching. So what I'll do today is just provide a um categorical summary and um highlight some of the areas that have had some of the most impact, not necessarily go through an entire budget line by line, but we'll just hit some of the major areas so that you can get an idea of what items have impacted us positively or negatively so far. So I'll walk through some of the budget assumptions for FY26, and then I'll as we go through the slides. So for all of the funds, um we are anticipating a mid-year salary increase of four percent. This is something that we uh the salary increase is reviewed at mid-year each year, um, depending on the financial status and health of the organization. A determination is made and approved by council at that time, but we are building in a four percent for mid-year. Currently um there are no health care cost increases built into the budget, and when I say cost increases, I'm from the employee side. So there are um multiple um self-insurance and health care costs that I'll get into momentarily from the employer side that is also impacting our overall budget. Um while she's uh talking about that, just would like to reiterate with everybody that uh that is one of the main things that we use to attract and retain employees. Um we uh because we have not increased their health care costs for many years now. Um our payment that our employees have to make for health care for either family or single is much less than what other governments have to make. And so that does go into their overall take-home salary. Uh they get to take home a lot more because of the fact that we're not taking out as much from their health insurance costs. Thank you. So um we do currently have approximately two million dollars of reserve built into the self-insurance fund um to balance out our um uh health care and as well as our insurance costs. I'll get into that a little bit more in just a moment. Um as we look um take a 10-year look from 2015 to now, you'll see that there's been a huge fluctuation in employee health care um benefit costs. So this is um what the city pays out for the employees and the um during COVID, of course, we had a huge um change in our health care costs topping out at almost 15 million dollars per year from a start of 10 million in 2015. We are normalizing um out a lot of that came from high claims um that we were receiving during COVID. Um, and they were high claims and very numerous claims that we were receiving. So that uh inflated our costs quite a bit during that time frame, and we've seen a um huge drop-off, and we've also had um refunds and rebates that we've been able to incorporate um that have also helped cut um curve some of those costs. So we are normalizing at around 12 million per year. In conjunction with that, we do have our property and casualty premiums, and this is where um we are feeling a huge pain point at this um going into this current fiscal year in this current fiscal year and going into FY26. So in 2024, uh which was FY25, um, we were we had to change our insurance companies, um, and we were also um at that time with the new insurance company we had to have our assets re-evalued. So with that, um our premium went from approximately one million to one point almost one point eight million. So um you may recall back in August during our renewal, um HR director came before the council and asked for an increase in the budget in order to cover those costs. Due to some pending um legislation, we may have another increase as they are um possibly requ uh requiring us to increase our uh limits for our um insurance for property and casualty. Um I think the claims would be is it three and five or one and three? Yeah, the um the legislature had in front of it this year uh the proposal that would uh take our limits from one million to one million and three million, depending on uh an occurrence that have multiple victims. Uh then the legislature changed that um after they had agreement from all parties, it seemed like the legislature changed that and went to three million and five million. Um thankfully, uh even though that did pass the original committee, it was held uh and did not get through both houses. Um so it is still sitting there and uh is ready to come back up on us next year uh for the second year of their session. Um but the real problem we're facing right now is that Milton lawsuit uh where the uh judge and then the appellate court ruled that uh Milton could not use their sovereign immunity uh like Cobb County does uh with their cases, and uh instead got hit with a verdict of over 30 million. Um so uh that is now gonna go to the Supreme Court, and we're waiting on uh their determination.