Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The Finance & Personnel Committee heard presentations and discussed the proposed 2027 budgets for all six divisions of the Department of Public Works (DPW). The meeting convened at 9:05 AM, recessed at 12:29 PM, reconvened at 12:47 PM, and adjourned at 4:14 PM. The committee voted 5-0 to hold the communication from the mayor (File #260001) to the call of the chair, meaning no action was taken, but the item remains available for future consideration.
Chair Dmitrievich who's on her way and will be joining us shortly. We're also joined by Alderman Scott Spiker to my left, to my far left, Alder Woman Charlene Moore, Alder Woman Cogs will be joining virtually, joining us shortly as well. Thank you also to our staff assistant Chris Lee and our legislative liaison, Kathleen Bregnos. And Charlie Charles from the CompTroller's office is here as well. The only item on our agenda is item number one, file 26001 communication from the mayor relating to the proposed 2027 budget. Up first today, this is our uh Department of Public Works Day. Up first is the water department, waterworks. Welcome uh budget director Kovac. Uh good morning, uh uh Chair and Committee members. Nick Kovac, Director of the Budget Management Division. Great win last night. We'll finish it off tonight. Go Brewers. Uh Commissioner Krusky will be by my side the whole day, which has to end before first pitch. And uh it's introduced, but we have six different uh departments and divisions with NDPW. We're gonna start with the Enterprise Fund Waterworks and Tyler Caligaro will go through those slides. And before we start, Nick, I just from the department, because obviously we have six different decision units in the Department of Public Works. Um, obviously, water infrastructure operations, um, sewer transportation fund. And so I just wanted to put it give a thanks to my entire team. This is not an easy feat. Um, we are a very large department of 2,000 FTEs. There's a lot of decisions that have to be made. There's a lot of difficult ones, but there's a lot of folks that don't sit at this table that put a lot of work in for numerous months, and I just want to just praise them for the job they've done this year on making some difficult decisions, but just wanted to give them some kudos before we started. All right. Tyler Caligaro, budget management division here today to present the 2027 budget for Milwaukee Waterworks. Starting off with the 27 budget summary. Um, the overall, as you can see, there's a 10% increase across the board of 17.3 million. I'll go into more details on those numbers in the upcoming slides. All right, starting off with salaries and positions. Um, as you probably have heard a hundred times, uh there's there was some increases across the board to salaries, mostly due to last year's COLA and residency increases. Um overall, there was a $2.4 million increase to salaries or an 8% increase. Moving into operating equipment, operating equipment expenses reflect the ongoing expansion of lead service line replacement, um, increasing from 5,000 um to 5,500. Overall, there is a 11% increase in operating and 20% in equipment. Um the breakdown for those increases can are below there's about six and a half million due to infrastructure services, 1.9 related to professional services, 1.2 to construction supplies, and just a little under a million just due to property insurance. Equipment also shows that there's going to be some replacements to some utility vehicles and some replacing some equipment at the plants. Moving on to special funds, not much of a change here from 2026, just a small reduction in the contingency fund for debt service. Moving on to budget by service. Just to give the department as much time as possible. I'm gonna kind of just fly through this. Um as you can see, the breakdown of their budget is done as shown on the screen, uh, providing in person and call customer service, uh, maintaining the water meters, maintaining the water distribution system, operating the treatment plants, uh, providing water quality, uh, providing internal engineer services, and providing administrative and uh operational support. Uh moving on to revenues. Revenues are also increasing slightly, about five percent or eleven point eight million dollars. Um most of that the change there can be seen in the um operating uh category there. Sorry, and then lastly, capital expenses.