The Richmond City Council held a budget work session on April 13, 2026, from approximately 6:00 PM to discuss proposed amendments to the FY2026-2027 budget. Council Chief of Staff RJ Warren outlined the process: each council member had ten minutes to present their amendments, with questions from colleagues not counting against their time. The deadline to co-patron any colleague's amendment was set for the end of business on April 14, 2026. The next work session for deliberation and consensus building was scheduled for April 15, 2026, at 1:00 PM.
Councilmember Breton
Council Vice President Jordan
Councilwoman Gibson
Councilwoman Robertson
Councilwoman Lynch
Councilwoman Trammel
Councilwoman Alba Baker
Councilwoman Jones
President Newbill
Good afternoon, everyone. The City Council's budget work session will now come to order. We'll ask that the chamber emergency evacuation announcement would be made, and then uh our council chief of staff, Mr. Warren will come forward with our process and procedures for this meeting. On activation of the emergency alarm signal, all persons should immediately exit the building. Please use the exits to the left or right front of the council chamber or the east or west stairwell outside the rear doors of the chamber. Do not use elevators or escalators. After exiting the building, security will direct everyone down ninth street to the assembly area located inside the former public safety building parking lot. Able persons should assist visually and hearing impaired visitors with exiting the building. Uh yes, may I please Council RJ Warren, Council Chief of Staff, this is your first budget amendment work session today. And how today we'll proceed, this is primarily for dialogue between council members on their proposed amendments. Each member um has been provided a uh list of their individual amendments they can reference and how this is going to work is uh each member is going to be provided ten minutes to provide the the background, the reasoning, the intent of their amendments. If during that explanation a colleague has a question, uh we asked that colleague just to light up their microphone, and the presiding officer will acknowledge them and allow them to uh ask a question of their colleague at that time. Uh that question will not take away from your time. Uh so someone's asking you a very lengthy question, that won't take from your time. Um, but when you respond, uh their clock will restart. Um but we're gonna see how this goes. I'm not trying to prevent you all from speaking with one another, and um we'll see if there's a need for more time as uh explanations continue. Um the posted amendments uh were provided on Thursday to all of City Hall, the public. And um that is just an initial draft based on conversations today. Uh, your staff are going to see where certain amendments can be combined. Uh, we're looking forward to city administration being here to get your reasons and explanation. Um maybe they will find where some of your requests are already being taken care of and could be crossed off. Or maybe where some collaboration can take place. Um again, if as you hear either the explanation and the reasoning from your colleagues today about their amendments, if you wish to co-patron any amendment by your uh colleagues, I just ask that you let me know. The deadline, because that will help facilitate how we review amendments on Wednesday. So if you desire to co-patron any amendment put forward by your colleagues, just let me know by the end of business tomorrow. Thank you. So I guess if you're following along with our on our green sheets, is that right? So all of page one is actually my attempt at being very constructive, collaborative, and helpful at finding opportunities for cuts to support whatever other goals that we all may share. So now these cuts have not all been judged or answered back by administration. But basically my tactic on finding these was to identify items in the budget where the actual from fiscal 25 was something small, and then the proposed for fiscal 27 was something very large. And so it just seemed where there was a big disconnect between what we actually spent in 25 and what we're proposing in 27. And so in those cases, I would flag them, and I would suggest that maybe we don't need to increase them by quite so much, and maybe there's some opportunities for savings there. Now I don't have any feedback on any of those yet. So I'm any of these might we might get feedback from administration that these are all crazy and terrible, but um when we get that feedback. Yeah, but we can we can we can judge those. So that's but the interesting stuff is my goals, which start on page two, the second page. So when you go to the third row, um these are all proposals here that I want to submit, and you know, to the extent anybody wants to join me in supporting them, we can discuss them. So um row three is the suggestion that we might want to um finance that sports backers land purchase with debt instead of with the um contingency fund. So I know the contingency fund purchased a um you know uh a note from the EDA in order to help support that transaction, but you know, we might find that it's more appropriate to finance that with uh you know another form of debt, replenish the cash balance in the contingency fund, and that way in the event of a contingency, we'll have more liquidity in that fund. So um just a proposal that I'm floating out there. The next three are related to um 311 and customer service and making uh some of our high volume departments kind of better integrated with 311 because we do want everybody using 311 as much as possible. It's a great service. Um we want everyone to make sure that if they have follow-up questions, escalations that they can also turn to 311 for that. So one of them is an extra um resource within the 311 team to integrate DPU and integrate some DPW like trash collection services. Um and the other are to get an additional staff in each of DPU and DPW for someone who can take escalations, answer questions the same way that we have liaisons from those departments who are fantastic at helping get us information. I think that um a customer facing role like that would be really really helpful for our customer support um you know as well. So that's the that proposal. On to the next one.