Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The City of Rockport City Council held its fifth budget workshop on June 23, 2026, to review the FY2026-2027 budget, including Hotel Occupancy Tax (HOT) grant recommendations, economic outlook, capital project updates, and outstanding budget topics. The meeting was led by City Manager Vanessa Shrauner and included presentations from Finance Director Robbie Sorrell and Public Works Director Ryan Picarazzi.
Mayor and Council, I believe you have a sheet that looks like this in front of you. I think that's gonna be the easiest way for you to follow along, but we also are gonna put it on the screen up here. Shelley, can we get you to can we knock off staff and knock off council and make this full you can see it out there? Never mind. Please know what you're doing, Shelley. I'm sorry, okay, no problem. I'll quit talking on that then. It was a good idea, but um so we changed the process a little bit this year. If you'll remember, we took in all the applications, and then we had a committee that basically went through everything to see what to award, what to prioritize, and um they made recommendations based on all the requests. Um the outside requests from all organizations were 764,891 dollars. You had just under a million dollars in requests, the total request adding in everything else that we were looking at funding was 1.9 million dollars. I'm comfortable with a um an estimation of our tax collections at 1.5, so there's a little bit of a delta there. You can look on the third column of your spreadsheet, and you can see what everybody asked for the committee prioritize new events and sport tourism as they were looking through them, um, and then if you go all the way over to the far right side, you can see what was recommended, and what the total award amount would be $349,000 recommendation, go down to the bottom half after the yellow highlight, take out our regular administrative fees, which is um 182,000, almost 183, get the visitor center $60,000 CDB has $800,000 in here, parks asked for $100,000, that's where the total comes to 1.9. Now, if we go over to the left, right, sorry, administrative fees, 1829, those are pretty set fees. We bump the visitor center down to 55 down to 750, we put parks events and cut them in half, and we're only recommending funding 50,000 out of pot funds, and she's found the room in her budget to do the additional 50,000 out of the general fund to make her whole for all of her events. Um so then that brings the total awarded with the above and with those that I just went through to 1.38. Now I said 1.5. We have this 1.38 because we also have talked about funding a full-time strength. That amount, I don't want to say is 100,000 because it's not, but it's about $90,000 with a $62,000 salary, and then by the time you add benefits, you get up to that about $90,000. So if we add that number in, we're pushing the door on that um $1.5 million. If you'd like to go through these individually, what was requested and what was awarded, we certainly can. Um, and we can talk about some things that we looked at as a um, and I'll use RCAD as um an example. We gave um specific amounts of money to programs, but we more want to give that organization the money as a whole and let them kind of decide where they would best use it. Like if we gave them money for the America Sweetheart show, they asked for 40,000, we awarded 10. If they say we really don't want to do that, let's put the 10 towards something else that would encourage and promote the art.