Okay, thank you.

Right.

I was here at just a public.

Shall we go?

We are unmuted.

Okay, everyone, welcome to NAMPA's FY27 community budget presentation.

We're very excited to have uh Mayor Bruner here to welcome us, and then uh we'll get this kicked off.

Welcome everyone.

Is uh my first opportunity is uh is the new mayor in NAPA to be here and uh and then I get to introduce some really really special people regarding this City of Napa fiscal year budget, and I think I counted uh 589 pages, and uh and I often also heard rumors that once this budget year in August public hearing is over, pretty much you're automatically getting ready for the next one.

So uh anyway, we have the director of finance uh Doug Racine here, and uh your staff.

How many do you have now, Doug?

Oh your teammates, I should say.

Well, that's about nine.

Nine teammates, and I know a lady that uh printed all this, Leslie is back here, so you probably should see her face, but she probably won't come up here.

But anyway, I just uh want to thank the citizens.

Hopefully, you will take time to look as far as at the budget, and uh Amy Bowman, our director of communications.

I am so impressed.

I know she had help too, but with this uh city of budget summary, it's just well well well done.

And a lot most of you probably will not go through the 589 pages, but do take a look at this.

And the other person I get to introduce who has been through this process from the beginning is our chief of staff, Clay Long.

So we're gonna have him come up and bring some greetings and also give you some information before our our finance director.

All right, thank you.

Well, good afternoon.

Thanks for joining us, all of you here and online.

Um before Doug talks about the budget itself, we thought it'd be helpful to set the stage and give some context of how did we get to the point we're at today.

So, as you'll see in the budget book as well, this work really starts in the July time frame as we start looking at what the community needs and how that drives the pieces that come together for this budget for our community.

On the screen right now is the process kicking off with the budget on the capital that we just did recently, and then moving into uh today's presentation, the final one being in August, as council uh reviews and then holds a public hearing where there's another opportunity for folks to give feedback if they'd like to on the proposed budget.

So, how do we get here?

Well, for NAMPA, we definitely have strong roots in our conservative history of ensuring that we're good stewards of our dollars, that we're accomplishing the stuff that the community says is important, um, that we rank those and then identify those priorities, and you'll also find in our budget and within each of the department the goals that are aligned to the departments based on the city priorities that are identified through community voice.

That drives the development of the budget, and then we work on measuring those throughout the year to ensure that departments are accomplishing the work that the community has identified as important and a value to them.

Those all get put together, and then we have our proposed budget.

The proposed budget then goes uh before council.

Um those four community areas that we focus on are a safe and healthy community, the economic opportunity, excellence in city government, and movement in and through NAMPA.

So as you look at each department area within the budget book, you'll see all of their goals aligned to one or more of these four, and then every dollar that's been allocated or proposed to be allocated to those departments, help them accomplish and meet these goals to continue moving the city forward.

The services and amenity that the city provides are vast.

We are a large city that provides full service to our community.

We have a very strong partnership with the FIRE as a separate entity, but still an important stakeholder of our community.

The list goes on and on.

You'll get to read more about that within the budget book and identify and see what was accomplished last year and what folks are hoping to accomplish this coming year.

So to get into the technical side and go through the detail of the budget itself.

I'm excited to welcome our chief finance officer, Doug Grace.

Mayor and Clay, thank you very much.

The budget is a this presentation is a culmination of months of work.

Basis for our authority.

It is the proposed output of the finance department and all the departments of the city working together in a very effective cooperative matter.

And we'll go through some of the aspects of the budget, the bill, how why the budget mattered, where the money comes from, where it goes to, and we'll end with a uh comment about what's not in the budget.

What are the challenges of micro and how that might have been very important to say?

Let's go into the goals and objectives.

Every year in creating the budget, we start off with a theme, a goal, an objective to obtain some new measure of accuracy or improved performance.

This year we wanted to focus on holding our operational costs to zero so that we have room for dealing with the criminal issues and round control.

The um environment we were budgeting in was for the most part uh without a mayor.

Uh we have now rumors now been uh our ability gives us the guidance we need.

So the chief of staff um directed the city to build a budget that held things constantly prior years.

Don't create a new project, don't add something new, continue existing projects, and try and budget as conservatively as possible until we have leadership in place to help provide the need of guidance going forward.

We also wanted to maintain or improve our labor position relative to comparative municipalities and government agencies.

We have a challenge in that, but we've been um working for years to try and improve our pay structure to make the pay of a function in that equivalent to the pay of the everything function in Marine and other cities, so we have that correct balance of uh pay for performance.

Um in the past, we have sometimes been a training ground.

We train, we have a very good staff, we train, and then people are able to go get a better paying job, same job at a different municipality.

So our goal has been to not lose ground and to try and close ground, not overpay, not underpay, but pay the right value to get good value for the dollar.

We also wanted to reduce the capital budget so that the capital budget more accurate accurately reflected the projects that were likely to get done in the coming fiscal year.