All right, everyone, let's go ahead and get started.

It is just a little bit after ten thirty.

I will start with a roll call.

Obviously, myself, the mayor is president, is present.

Uh, Honorable Leslie Harris, Councilmember for District B is present, uh, Councilmember Morrell is present, uh, CAO Jeruso is present, uh, Director of Finance, Alyssa Rambo is present, and Mark Baumgardner for us uh with Tulane University is present as well.

So we have a quorum.

All right, with that, we will go through the adoption of the minutes.

If I can get a motion, please move by Councilmember Harris.

Second.

See no opposition, the minutes are adopted.

All right, with that, I will turn it over to CAO Jerusalem for today's presentation.

Thank you, Madam Mayor.

A couple of things of note before we get directly into the presentation.

So we'll have an REC meeting on the morning of November nineteenth before the council meeting to add that additional revenue, whatever it may be.

Um again uh Finance Director Rambo for all of her work in making sure that the city's bills got paid, but in particular, for making sure that the revenue anticipation note, also known as the RAN was paid.

We repaid the $125 million RAN back.

So it was close to having $975 million of things to deal with.

Now how we were able to do that is explained on this next slide, and I want to thank Abby for putting this together.

So that is how we made that work.

In addition, reimbursements from grants recognizes revenue in prior years are not reflected again as revenue, but those cash infusions supported the RAND repayment.

So in other words, as we got repaid for grants, we didn't recognize that as revenue, but we used that cash to offset what the RAN was.

So with that, we move into the revenue forecast.

Here is the previously forecasted revenue.

I'm not going to go through it line by line because it's been discussed many times.

Other than to note two things that are going to change as a result of this.

One, the Go Mesa will be deducted, and as a result of moving of the parking enforcement and less robust collection, that number will be deducted.

So for Go Mesa, the 2.9 recognized $2.9 million, recognized in April will be removed.

That really should be used for capital funding.

It's really what supports our ability to bond out against the funding.

So it was inappropriate to uh maybe inaccurate is a better word to include into the revenue mix, so we're taking that out of our calculation.

In addition, as parking has moved over to NOPD, and as we're also in the process of getting ready to do a new RFP, parking revenue is far less than what we anticipated, and so we have the obligation to make sure that that is reduced as well based on what the math is showing us.

So that gets reduced too.

Also here, the state transit appropriation is reduced by 1.2 million, also improperly included in the 2026 REC.

This was meant for RTA as opposed to us.

Yeah, sure.

So for the bond interest, we had originally planned or projected bond interest at a rate that was equal to what we had earned last year for 2025.

Um not realizing or not considering the actual spend down of those bond proceeds.

So we did have to reduce for that amount, and we do expect that there will be an uptick again for 2027, as we know that we did get a new bond uh sale this year, and so we have replenished those uh that bank account.

Thank you.

Next, um you know this this one is important for us just to keep in mind as a result of the renegotiation of the Caesars lease for the city receiving a little over a hundred million dollars in order to make sure its fund balance is more robust, and as it will continue to grow as a result of being in an investment account, we can no longer recognize the CSER's lease revenue for this year, and as a result of the fact that this is for half of the year because the transaction didn't close until May, we're subtracting $7.12 million from the revenue forecast.

So that's all all the news of subtractions.

Now let's get to the additions.

Um this one is actually something born from the mayor's time in the legislature, and I know also the mayor and council member McCarron and others worked on this, is a state appropriation of $8.6 million for short-term rental fees.

So we are we are we're expected to get half this year and we will get more in the in the future, and so we are gonna recognize that $8.6 million dollars and increase.

Uh it was $4.3 million the past year, so it is double now for this year.

The second one is um an interagency transfer from the assessor's office.

Want to thank Assessor Williams as a former CAO, he understood the importance of the city's financial situation, and because of his healthy fund balance, he transferred $16 million to the city funds, and those have already been received.

In addition, we're recognizing the $20 million from Sujan Waterboard reimbursements.

Um the city is working with Soujan Water Board on this.

As a slide notes, roughly $10 million has been received already of the $20 million.

And my understanding from finance is that there's another about $3.4 million being processed.

So we're almost three-quarters of the way there.

And want to thank Suech and Water Board for honoring that commitment and the additional funds that will ultimately be owed to the city.

This is the next biggest one.

This is how we reclassified the bond money earlier.

What we did was we took eligible projects that were ARPA funds and we moved them to bonds that freed up roughly $36.5 million.

This is in order to make sure that we are meeting our cash obligations for the end of the year, but it's also part of the revenue for this year.

And then as a result of the city and the mayor and the council passing the sanitation fee.

For now, we are advocating for a $2 million increase.

The map on this would be closer to a little bit over $3.3 million if full collections were in place in October, November, and December, but we wanted to be conservative in our estimation and only include $2 million for these purposes.