The Common Council held a work session on Monday, November 3, 2025, at 6:30 PM. The meeting covered budget highlights, a food insecurity emergency response, street closures, a payment in lieu of parking program, a kitchen incubator bid award, a Verizon franchise agreement, and a police DWI patrol program. Council also discussed liaison reports and concerns.
We have a presentation and then a couple of agenda items and an executive session for discussion of matters concerning the medical financial credit or employment history of a particular person, persons, or corporation. Or matters leading to the appointment, employment, promotion, demotion, discipline suspension, dismissal, or removal of a particular person, persons, or corporation. Any discussion of matters related to proposed acquisition sale or lease of real property. So at this time, I'll turn it over to our city manager. Good evening, Mayor and Council. Good evening. Uh tonight we have a short uh agenda for the regular part of the meeting, and we're gonna start off with Tony Tracy, our comptroller who's gonna talk to us about the 2026 budget highlights. Tony. I forgot it. Good evening, Mayor and City Council. Good evening. Good evening. So as the city manager said, we are here with a wrap-up of the 2026 budget process. So it's kind of just a summary of some of the things we've already talked about. This first page is just a quick overview for the public, also, but of the budget process. So we begin in uh July, where we uh distribute packages to the department heads. It gives them several years of history as well as current information as to spending and revenues and things like that, and then they can use that to build their budget. During the month of August and September, there are meetings between the city manager, the comproller, and the department heads to determine what the budget projected numbers will be and the numbers for the following year. On October 1st, we submitted the city manager tentative budget to the city clerk and presented it to the council and the public. And November 1st was the common council budget, which is also uh that has been posted in the library and it is also on the website as of as of last Friday. And now at this point, uh by New York state law, we have until December 1st for the council to adopt a budget. It is planned for next week, November 10th. Uh this slide, I just left it in here just to again kind of point out to the to the public mostly, but that the general fund total of expenses really only 16 percent of that is something that anybody has control over. So again, we have 84% of the general fund budget is mandatory expense for salaries, New York State retirement, liability, health insurance, debt service, and things like that. Okay, on this slide, it's showing a calculation of the tax rate, and the tax rate is a levy increase of 3.5 percent, which we had also gone over that. But the next slide, I do have a comparison of that rate. Uh so versus if we had stayed at the cap. So what you'll see at the top part of the page is the seven dollars and thirty-nine cents increase that the proposed rate would be on the average value, the value of an average house, which from the assessor's office is nine thousand seven hundred and seven dollars. The rate is three hundred and sixteen dollars and twenty-five cents. So that is an effect of about seven dollars and thirty-nine cents for the average homeowner per month. If we had stayed at the cap, the rate on the bottom half shows as three dollars and twelve three hundred and twelve dollars and seventy-one cents. That is a an effect on a monthly amount of four dollars and fifty-three cents. So it's just showing that there is a very slight difference in the fact that we went over the cap on a monthly basis to a homeowner. And this slide is going back to our conversation on the fee schedule. So we just have a couple of items on here, but one of the items brought up by the council at the last conversation was the building permit extension fee. It is currently listed as 50 percent of the original permit fee that the person paid for the permit in the first place. So we've got a proposal that we've put in here that for a first six-month extension, it would be a 10% fee of the original. If they go to another six months, it would be 25%. And for the third six month period, then it would go up to the 50%. And the reason behind these fees is as the building inspector had mentioned, there is a little bit of a push to get someone to complete a project, but this kind of scaled down version of it, maybe it gives somebody a little room for things that are beyond their control. So that was a proposal that is now in there for the fee schedule. And on the other part of it, the parks and recreation fees, there was a question about certain fees, whether they were for individuals or for groups. So in the fee schedule, we have blocked off uh on the left column, we've put a block out there to say these are group rental fees. Some of them are grouped now as lesson-based fees. So we've just tried to define that to make it a little more clear. Tony? Yes. Did we get any comparisons for other places for that fee? Because even at if you had a um smaller project and a ten thousand dollar um permit fee, you're still talking a thousand dollars. Right.