Mayor Stephen Otto called the meeting to order at approximately 3:02 p.m. in the Town Hall Council Chambers, 303 N. Beeline Highway, Payson, Arizona. All council members were present. The work study session was the fourth in a series of budget work sessions, focusing on FY26 revenue projections, compensation and benefits, hard-to-fill vacancies and development services contracts, the Public Safety Personnel Retirement System (PSPRS) funding policy, and the proposed Structure Hardening Code. No public comment was taken per work study format.
Let the record reflect that all council members are present. Work studies are intended for council discuss business. No action to be taken. As a result, public comment will not be taken during the meeting. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Members of council. This is our fourth in a series of budget work sessions. Right now, the next work session is scheduled on the calendar for May 6th. The topics for that work session are anticipated to be operating budgets by department. That would incorporate new requests, enhancement, any personnel requests that may be coming. It will also include some items that were approved last year as part of the current year's budget that perhaps based on our economic outlook or where our revenues have come in so far for FY25, less than uh and initially projected. We'll re-look at those to see if council wants to include those in the following year's budget. Typically, this code change will be presented to council as one package with a host of other updates to our fire and building codes that the town undertakes periodically to try and make sure that we don't lie too far behind national standards for our adoption. Then we'll move into presentation discussion on insurance benefits and compensations for compensation for town employees. Because open enrollment happens prior to the beginning of the fiscal year, for which you'll consider the budget later in June. Hopefully, we do seek some consensus from the council with respect to how HR should proceed with structuring the documents for open enrollment. Lynn will remind you of that when she starts her presentation again. With respect to compensation, no recommendations being made on tonight's meeting with uh how we move forward for next fiscal year. The presentations designed to be information fee council. Your budget team would like to hear though after that feedback from the council about our current compensation philosophy and practice. That will help inform the process for bringing back to town council later this year a balanced budget proposal. And then one other item on tonight's agenda is our fiscal year 26 public safety personnel retirement system funding policy. This policy is required to be revisited and adopted annually according to the state. The information that's in the presentation tonight from Dana as well as from human resources. We'll further refine some of the information that Clark Cartridge with the SPRS presented at the previous regular meeting. So hopefully Dana's presentation can recap and clarify some of the facts and figures related to the town's outstanding unfunded liability. Action on that policy won't be taken tonight. It will be direction from council if you want to make any changes from what we've done in prior years for potentially buying down that uh obligation, and then we'll come back to council with some of the other documents as we move through the budget process. So anticipate the content and discussion for tonight's agenda to be about three hours. It's your discretion, Mr. Mayor. We'll look to you if you want us to answer questions as they arise, or if you want the council to cover the questions till the end of each individual presentation. Miss Christina Werther Estes is on Zoom with us. She has a hard cutoff at 6 p.m. But if our discussion goes after this time, Robert Wingo also with Pierce Colpin will tag in for her if we have a draft. So with that, if there are no questions, Dana SN is ready for topic number one. Thank you. Mayor, Councilmember. This is just kind of a uh kind of a review and history of the PSPRS piece to our budget. And we'll look at some of our projections for um next fiscal year. Sorry, I'm it's not PSPRs, it's our revenue projection. Sorry, I'm I'm already hoping it's four o'clock. Sorry. Um this slide here shows uh what our budgeted was in this current fiscal year plus what we're proposing for fiscal year 25-26. Um, and the first first line of revenues is is our taxes. They're actually uh three million dollars less than what we budgeted last year or this current fiscal year, and it's down about 10 percent. The reason for that primarily is is the state or is the town's uh sales tax. Intergovernmental revenues are also down. Um you'll see it's down quite a bit, 30 percent.