The Raleigh City Council held a budget work session on February 16, 2026, to review resident engagement results, compensation and benefits, and a targeted staffing study. The meeting included presentations from Budget and Management Services, Human Resources, and Matrix Consulting Group. Council members discussed competing priorities, vacancy rates, retiree health benefits, and staffing needs across multiple departments.
Okay. Order. First item is just that Mayor Pro Tem Harrison is absent and excused. All right, and I will turn it over to Miss Sadia Sitar. All right. Well, good afternoon, Mayor and members of City Council, Sadia Sitar with Budget and Management Services. Super excited to kick off yet another budget season with all of you, our fourth together, at least for the most of us. We are kicking off our budget work session today with the engagement that we did as part of the upcoming budget process. Later on, our HR director, Sharnell Jones, will chat with all of you about compensation and benefits. And then after that, Assistant City Manager Ryan Bergman and our consultants at Matrix Inc. will chat with all of you with the targeted staffing study. So to kick us off as we dive into this budget work session, normally I would be the one who would be chatting with all of you about all things engagement. But this year I'm going to do things a little differently. I am going to give the opportunity to one of my fabulous analysts, Lauren Williams, who actually spearheaded this effort for the city this year, and she's done a fantastic job. So I'm going to bring Lauren on boat and let's get started. Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm Lauren Williams with the Department of Budget and Management Services. As you know, every year we try to involve residents in our budget process, and I'll be presenting the results of this year's engagement process with you today. So we'll start by going through the outbreak. Is it possible to move back? We cannot see them. It is very close. So we can only select the top third. Oh. That's a lot of things. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Cassidy. All right. Other duties as a sign. All right. So we're going to start by going through the outreach methods that we use to advertise the program. Then I'll take you through our budget listening sessions as well as the budget survey that we conducted and the resident feedback that we got from it. We'll conclude with uh next steps for the process. So in order to get the highest participation possible in our engagement program and build a budget that reflects the needs of as many Raleigh residents as possible, we worked with our communications department to create a comprehensive communication strategy for this campaign. So we got the word out in a variety of ways. You might want to move the microphone closer to yeah, your thank you. So we put a lot of intention in how these listening sessions are formatted. So we start with an education piece so that folks are all on an even footing when they're discussing the budget. We walk through topics like operating budgets, capital budgets, as well as enterprise funds. And then new this year, we had a second section uh budget games that was interactive for folks. So we started with guess the cost, which uh allowed residents to guess the cost of common municipal items like uh a fire truck or a mile of sidewalk, and then uh we ended up with a budget balancing exercise that put residents a chance to take a spin in our shoes and get a chance balancing expenses and revenues for a municipal budget. We closed the session with our core engagement questions that we ask folks. So, primarily we wanted to know where do people want to see increased funding for next year's budget, where do they want to see funding levels maintained, and where, if anywhere would they want to see funding levels reduced. So this is what we heard. Now, for all these questions, I want to emphasize that they were open-ended. So residents were given three open-ended questions, they typed the answers, and then budget and management services staff went in, read all of the responses, and categorized them here for easy viewing. So uh, and some folks did attend multiple sessions, however, we controlled for that in our responses, and they did not answer twice. So, for the first question that we asked residents where they would like to see additional funding in next year's budget.