The Redmond City Council held a study session on Tuesday, April 14, 2026, starting at 7:04 p.m. All council members were present. The agenda included departmental budget overviews for the 2027-2028 biennium (Executive, Finance, Human Resources, and Technology & Information Services), a review of the Long-Range Financial Strategy and Fiscal Policies, and council talk time.
Are we live, Chip? It's a bit quiet, but I think we are live. So I'll go ahead and call this meeting to order. We are now live. This is a Redmond City Council study session held on Tuesday, April 14th, 2026, commencing at 7.04 p.m. All council members are in attendance. Thank you so much. We had a just finished a recent special meeting with a couple of commission candidates, so we're a couple minutes late coming on the air. I also wanted to acknowledge that we've had a few meetings at City Hall this afternoon, including many of the team members who will be sitting with us through the study session tonight and helping us out, probably ate a granola bar for dinner at their desk. So thank you for extending your work day with us. It's been a busy evening. We're excited to work with you. So there are three items on the agenda tonight. First is the 2027-2028 budget process, departmental budget overviews. Tonight we'll be looking at the executive, finance, human resources, and technology and information services departments. We will also study the long-range financial strategy and fiscal policies, and finally have council talk time. So for the first item on the agenda, the 27-28 budget process with the department overviews. I'll introduce Kelly Cochrane finance director for this item. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm not sure that there's much more to say, other than we have had some switcharounds with department scheduling as we work with their availability. So thank you for working with us on that and your flexibility. I will go ahead and turn it over to Melissa Files, our COO, to get us started with the executive department, and we'll start with finance after that. Thank you. Good evening, Council. As uh Kelly said, I'm Melissa Files. I'm the chief operating officer for the city, and joining me today is Lisa Maher, the assistant COO. She'll be sharing some budget information with the council as we go through. So just an overview of the executive department. The executive department provides leadership mostly in a variety of ways. Most of the divisions, well, I should say all the divisions work cross-departmentally in the city to bring uh the goals of the city together. Um using strategic leadership as well as transparency and excellence, as you see in the mission statement. For an overview of the partners uh on this slide is all the divisions that we have in the executive office. Um the leadership uh includes Lisa and I and the mayor and Zach, who you heard from today. Um, we look over city operations, uh regional work, as well as legislative support and um and again oversight of operations. The city clerk, which you're all familiar with, um works with the council on agendas as well as the mayor. Um of the things that we'll talk about in the city clerk's office is public records requests, um, which takes up a lot of time in our city clerk's office as well as they oversee records management and the hearing examiner. Uh City Council, your budget sits under the executive office. Um, communications, which you also heard from today, so I won't um go over that. Um, you also heard about our ready initiative today. Um, the city attorney's office under legal and litigation, as well as environmental sustainability, which I know you hear from Ginny, our environmental sustainability manager on a regular basis and committee of the whole. Um, all of these divisions uh except for two, um, are um you know, prior divisions that we've had. There are two new ones, which was grant management and um the city attorney's office. So as you recall, in this budget, um, we actually had a long time contracted city attorney. Now we brought that in-house. Um, and grant management was new to look over the our um grant management systems, policies, and workflows. Um so that is new in the executive office. I'm gonna turn over to Lisa to go over some um budget highlights and then I'll be back to talk about performance measures. So over the next two slides, I'm just gonna highlight a few areas uh for you as a quick update. So on the baseline budget plans, I wanted to just chat real quick about the two largest changes, percentage changes you might see in the right-hand column.