The Sarasota City Commission held a budget workshop on July 28, 2026, from 9:00 A.M. to 3:16 P.M., with a lunch break from 12:00 P.M. to 1:31 P.M. The workshop focused on Enterprise Funds, Internal Service Funds, Trust Funds, and the Five-Year Capital Improvement Program (CIP) for Fiscal Year 2026-2027. No formal votes were taken; the workshop was for discussion and direction setting. The proposed total CIP for FY2026-27 is $104.4 million, with a five-year total of $276 million excluding utilities.
Good morning. Welcome back to this uh Tuesday, July twenty-eighth, day two of the City of Sarasota budget workshop. I just silenced my phone, so I hope you will do the same if you haven't already done so. And when we left off yesterday, we were just about to begin enterprise funds, and I will invite uh director of uh financial administration, Kelly Strickland, to make her presentation. Um Commissioner Um Almer. Yeah, Albert is going to be joining us via Zoom. Okay. Okay. So she's working her way through. And we do expect Commissioner Batti, although he was under the weather yesterday also. So we will move forward. Thank you. Well, good morning. Welcome to day two of the budget workshops. So today we're going to start in your workbook on page three thirteen. And then the PowerPoint slide is twenty two. And if you take a look at your workbook real quick, on page three fourteen, I have a list of all of the enterprise funds. These funds they're called enterprise funds because they are supported by user fees. And we have four subfunds that make that the utility system. The revenue account, which is where the uh general operations for the water and the wastewater system occur. The renewal replacement and improvement account, this is where the capital projects are paid from. The general utility reserve account, that's where the reserves are are held, and then the interest and seeking accounts, which is where the debt service principal and interest are paid. These all roll up into one fund uh for water and wastewater. Just a big picture for water and wastewater system. They have a beginning fund balance of 61.2 million. Uh revenues are projected of 65.2 with expenditures of 62.8, leaving them an ending fund balance of 63.7. And with that, I'm gonna turn it over to um Vern. Go ahead. Good morning, Madam Mayor, Vice Mayor, Commissioners, Vern Hall, Utility Director. With me is Mark Nicholas, General Manager of Administrative Services, and Scott Woodard, General Manager of Operations. So do you want to do this? Uh, you want to talk about capital improvement? Yeah. Just go right into the we just wanted to highlight uh few things. Um our major capital improvements right now. We have about six million in RR and I on the water side that we're working on, about eight million on the wastewater side that are actively in progress. These are obviously valve replacements, water treatment plant rehabilitation, changing out pumps, motors, things like that. Uh you see the 10th and Orange Street roundabout and a boulevard of the art streetscape. That's in conjunction with those projects we want to be there before that work happens so that we can relocate any of our utilities, get them out of the way so that they can come in and do their work uninterrupted by any activities we would do. On the wastewater side, you see our annual sewer main rehabilitation. That's where we go out, do the cleaning, televising, and lining of those main lines. We have manhole rehabilitation, which we inspect the manholes and we line those. And annual lift station rehabilitation, that's where we go in, we do uh pumps, motors, wet wells, just make sure electrical panels, those components are functioning and up to speed. We have a portion of the wastewater comprehensive rehabilitation. You'll see that is in the R R and I. That's to help pay for the engineering costs for that project. Um then we have a 16-inch force main that we're replacing on 17th Street. These aren't all of the projects in our RRI, these are just some of the major ones that we wanted to kind of highlight, but there's typical continuous things that we're doing in the R R and I. This next slide is from our CIP. And of course, we have the water treatment plant that you all have heard about, the North 41 project, which I will point out we just started the final phase of that project.