The city held a special called joint committee meeting to receive a financial performance update for the FY26-FY27 budget and to hear tourism grant requests from local organizations for FY27. No formal votes were taken; the meetings were informational and preparatory for future committee meetings later in May.
A series of organizations presented funding requests for FY27 tourism grants. All requests were for support of cultural, historical, and recreational activities that attract visitors to Marietta. No votes were taken; the committee will consider allocations later.
Call to order the special called Finance and Investment Committee meeting. I think I supposed to call it. Yeah, he's supposed to do that's okay. I know you're taking a call the special order. Good afternoon, everybody. I like to call the uh order the finance and investment committee meeting. To order the first item on the agenda is Ms. Patina with a financial performance update. Good afternoon, everyone. Um I just want to kind of talk through real briefly what um I'll be presenting, and then we can walk through the presentations briefly. So the special call committee um serves as a sneak peek for where we are thus far for the FY26 budget, and it gives an overall um account of um where we anticipate the budget to be for FY27. We are still in the final stages of completing that, but for the most part, we're um we're finished, and we want to just kind of show you in preparation for the finance committee meetings later on this month what we're looking like thus far, where we're anticipated to go, if there's any major hurdles that we're having to overcome currently and in the future, and also highlight areas that um we're also doing well in. So as I mentioned previously, we'll have the recommended budget book that'll be coming out in advance of the finance committee meetings in um later on in May, and so you have an opportunity to have the full um budget by account, and that is for all funds. So that'll account for all funds within the city, including BLW and other funds such as the museums. Okay, and you um these should be included for the most part. I'll get to the graphs once I get past the budget assumptions, you'll have this also included in your packets. So there are a few um major uh assumptions that I included in the budget. The first ones account for across all funds. So as we have in the past years, we assume or will try to provide a mid-year increase, salary increase for all employees that are eligible. When I say eligible, those that um were hired um on or before July 1st of this year, they have to be here for six months in order to be included in that four percent. And um, there are a couple of other qualifications that go into it for um longer term employees, but for the most part it would be a four percent. Um as far as our health care, our health care costs. Um, I'm happy to say that um the city has been able to maintain no health care um cost increases for the employee side since um 2018. So that has been um eight years consistent for the employees where their health care has um their cost of payouts has been the same. Now that is not true on the employer side, um, as you can imagine, health care costs like everyone else, market-wise, has been increasing, and but the city has um absorbed those costs so that it would not be passed on to the employees. Um also taking a look at um the self-insurance fund as we're talking about health care costs. Uh, this year was the first time that we had to kind of go into our reserves in order to um cover our um self-insurance costs, and that includes our property and casualty as well as our health care. That um had to do primarily with our property and casualty side, and I'll get into that in more depth in depth later on. But with our property and casualty, we saw a dramatic increase um over a three-year period, and instead of um burdening our general fund and our BLW funds, which were already um experiencing a number of constraints. We pulled from our reserve funds out of our self-insurance in order in order to cover those costs until we could find a bridge that would allow us to have a pathway forward because we understand that we cannot use reserves as a long-term plan. So I'll get into that um a little bit more in depth in just a moment. And then finally, for across the board, there were no full-time employee increases. We did not decrease our headcount in any way, but we did not add to it. So there are salary increases that are built in, but no additional head count. Taking a look at our general fund for our salary savings, we have a approximately 1.75 or 1.74 million dollars in our salary savings that are built in. And those are savings that we know that from just natural attrition and overall employee placement, that we will have some set some savings from that as not all the positions will be filled throughout the year. So in order to do that, we're funding our capital, and our capital funding is approximately a million right now, just over. As I said, we're still making the fine tunes to our uh year-end budget, and we'll have that available, but these are approximate numbers, shouldn't change too much. Um as far as our millage rate, the um council just did a um uh certification of our estimated millage rate. We do not anticipate that the millage rate will change any, although the um the county had a four percent increase um countywide um for the property tax. For us, we are um anticipating because most of that for them was um the increase was commercial. We have um our percentage is slightly lower, and so we're anticipating approximately three to three point three percent um increase in our property tax as far as our valuations, which also includes the residential freeze that um we have had in place as well. So there are some constraints there. Um as far as overall fees for the general fund as it pertains to our um sanitation, um parks and rec across the board. Um we have not built in any fees for the upcoming fiscal year. Um and then lastly, as I mentioned before, there were no um headcount increases. So looking at the um Board of Lights and Water, our BLW, we have not built in any retail um cost increases or rate increases. So that is the um the rates that we pass on to our customers for uh for the revenue side. So we have not built that in. Um typically what happens is uh the board will take a look at that mid-year to see if there is a need.