The Tacoma City Council held a study session on October 15, 2024, to review the proposed 2025-2026 Biennial Operating Budget with presentations from the Tacoma Fire Department (TFD), Tacoma Police Department (TPD), and an interdepartmental update on alternative response programs. Councilmembers received detailed budget briefings and discussed staffing, service levels, and the upcoming November 5 ballot measure. The meeting concluded with a motion to enter executive session for pending/potential litigation.
Council discussion:
Council discussion:
Council discussion:
I'd like to call to order the city council study session of October 15th, 2024. Clerk, will you please call the role? Councilmember Bushnell? Present. Councilmember Daniels. Absent councilmember Diaz. Here. Deputy Mayor Hines. Here. Councilmember Rumba. Here. Councilmember Sidalgay? Here. Councilmember Scott. Here. Councilmember Walker. Here. Mayor Woodards. Here. Mayor and Council, your materials were sent to you at 11 a.m. All right. Our first agenda item today is the proposed 2025-2026 biannual operating budget. And today we're going to have two presentations, one from the Tacoma Fire Department and one from the Tacoma Police Department. At this time, I like to call on Office of Management and Budget Budget Officer Katie Johnson to begin the presentations. And she will be followed by interim fire chief Selena Ala Alima. Did I get it right? Sienna. Oh, yes, so I get your last name right. And I say, you know what? From the for the Tacoma Fire Department depart department portion of the presentation, followed by police chief Avery Moore for the police department. With that, I'll start with Katie and then we will start those presentations. Thank you, Mayor and Council. So you know, we were able to do a quick walkthrough of your materials on the first day that we proposed the budget. But what we wanted to do today was to come back and just talk a little bit about how we designed the budget book information that you have as well as the presentation to answer some key questions that you have as policymakers. And so I just wanted to go through how we framed that up. So what you'll see is a slide with a couple of key budget questions. And really just as we get started, the budget document and all of the presentations that you'll have from departments, what they're intended to do is start with the basics because we know that members of the public listen to these meetings, they go to the budget document to learn about departments. So you'll always see us start with a focus on what a department does and the key services that they provide. From a financial focus, though, the the questions that we really focus on answering and the various materials that you receive are how a budget changed over time. So in general, what we're trying to do is explain if a service area's costs are growing or declining and what the major reason for that change is. So changes you might see or hear about our grant funding or one-time ARPA funds or cost growth that's changing over bienniums. And so ways that you'll see that information presented to you is on the department pages. You have a line graph that you'll see, as well as in all of the department presentations. We have a simple line graph that is really just at a high level to talk about how that service area has changed over time. If you go to our financial detail dashboard or departmental dashboard, you'll also be able to see that information on a more detailed level. So you can look at that for program areas, divisions, or specific funds like the city's general fund and see changes. One thing I do just want to orient you to is that in each department's um budget book pages, there is a narrative called the financial summary that's intended to be just a quick walkthrough of what's changed over time. They can be kind of long, and the reason for that is because some departments have things that happened, you know, perhaps last biennium, they had lots of one-time expenses that didn't continue into this biennium, but they may also have things like cost growth that occurs in other areas, or perhaps in some of the presentations that you'll hear today, you'll hear about new services that were added during modification, for example, that then added costs as we went into the 25-26 um budget on an ongoing basis. So those some places where you'll see that information and you can kind of crosswalk between the presentations that will be at a high level and then what's in your budget document. Um the other note that I'll made it make is that if you want to see specific changes that were approved to the baseline in all of your budget sheets.