Oh, you didn't weasel.

All right, good morning, everyone.

I just want to call to order the City Commission workshop for July 28th, 2025.

And I guess we just start with our presentation and uh I'll hand it over to you guys.

So thank you, Mayor, Commissioners.

This workshop is um all about budget.

We will wear you out over the next two days um going over the budget, but it really is our fiscal plan for the coming year and beyond.

And before we start, I want to thank each department director.

Uh they went um they worked hard this year to get their budgets within where we found ourselves.

I want to thank Kelly and her team uh for their hard work and uh Pat and Doug, and especially Doug, no offense, Pat.

Sorry, but especially Doug Jeff Coat, who really worked and each department head went through their budget very carefully once we realized sort of where we were uh with the status of our budget.

So, but for them, um this would this wouldn't uh have come together as as uh good as it did.

So, Madam Mayor, if I can, and we'll just start right in.

I want to first warn you uh about what's coming.

We're gonna go through these fairly quickly, uh, but you know, we can take as much time as you want.

And um as we go through, just to prove we're making progress, we'll check each one off so that you uh can have a sense of of uh where we are.

Kelly, did you want to touch on the on anything before I started?

No, go ahead.

Okay.

So uh I thought we'd uh uh the discussion that I'm gonna have with you is primarily about the general fund.

The general fund is the fund that's um we turn to whenever we're in trouble.

And uh this past year we were in trouble with the storms, and you you turn to your general fund, you maintain a reserve for the very purpose we used it for, um, and it's there and it did everything we wanted it to do.

Uh this was a case study in uh fiscal planning and responsibility, and now the next chapter is how do we get ourselves back where we were at the beginning of this of the current year.

So to start with in the general fund, we show you in the charts there the revenues and expenditures.

General fund is uh made up about half with advalorum taxes, half with a whole menu of other uh revenues that we get, and the expenditure side is uh primarily employees, uh seventy over 70 percent, and the uh operating side of it is uh a modest 28 percent.

I wasn't gonna go through each because uh Kelly actually has a special revenue section where she'll go over each of the revenues, but um advalorum taxes uh are our primary means uh supported by a whole host of other uh revenues.

So a lot impacted us.

You know all this.

By the way, we decided to take out all the pictures of the broken parks.

We figured we'd all seen enough of the various parks in disarray and shambles, so you'll see no negative pictures in here, right, Kelly.

So uh uh the big impact on the city this year uh has been the hurricanes.

Uh following that is this new uncertainty as to federal reimbursements for the past uh almost 30 years.

Any uh municipality, county, or other jurisdiction that suffered a declared emergency could count on 75 percent of their eligible expenses being reimbursed by FEMA.

It was it was it it took a while and it took a lot of gyrations, but there was a check in the mail.

It was just a slow delivery.

We are uncertain now.

While we're hopeful and and we're even expectant, and we're gonna go through all of the steps.

We're not relying on FEMA reimbursements, and I'll show you in one of the slides if if they come through what what it would look like, it improves our uh fiscal position significantly.

And the last item there with the little piggy bank, this is uh every city and other jurisdiction has to always complain about non-discretionary expenses, pensions, uh insurance, and other things that we don't seem to be able to do anything about, but they're significant, and we'll go through each of those.

So I want to talk to you mostly about the ripple effect of the storms.

Um we estimate, and it is an estimate that the total impact to the city uh when it's all said and done of the three storms will be about fifty million dollars.

And that's all unexpected expenditure.

Nothing is budgeted uh specifically for those.

We think we'll have about a you know, it's again an estimate, about a $38 million impact to the general fund.

The enterprise funds of water sewer, solid waste parking and Van Wezel also suffered.

Um, and especially um, you know, Van Wazel, which has never suffered um an impact like we saw here.

And the water sewer fund uh was able to handle those expenses within their rate structure, and solid waste was.

Uh there were some impacts on the golf course, and we think that lost revenues were approaching a million and a half dollars.

And that was from parking, Van Wasel, um, parks, uh, special events, those types of things, just revenue that we budgeted didn't come in.

So I do want to point out before we leave that, uh the debris removal, which was paid for entirely out of the general fund.

Um, and I've looked around at several cities and counties, and often in their solid waste fund who that does all collections, they actually have an item for debris removal, especially these coastal communities often have that.

So uh I think that's a future discussion that the commission may want to have a small adjustment in your solid waste rates, can begin to accumulate a fund that's sort of off just for debris removal.

You can see the impact it had uh on our general fund.

So obviously parks suffered a significant impact from the storm.

I put this, I provided this slide just to give you a status report.

Now, from the time it was printed until uh this weekend, we've had a few uh changes.

All of the design work is now completed.

So uh where you see some with 60 percent or 30 percent or something, it's in final design now and it's pending permits.

If all goes as we hope, we'll have all the permits that are on this page by the end of the year.

I I got a head nod from Doug, so that's like as good as it as if it was printed.