All right.

Uh good afternoon and welcome to the 1 p.m.

budget and special projects committee meeting.

Today is Wednesday, June 17th.

Item number one, I call this meeting to order two.

Ordinance adopting the annual budget of the city of Tulsa for the fiscal year 2026-2027, ordering the transfer of enterprise income to the general fund appropriated appropriating unexpended balances for grant funds and capital projects funds for fiscal year 2026 order ordering and directing the uh computation and filing of levy requirements for the 26-27 sinking fund of the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma reserving fund, a balance of 10% as an emergency operating consistency in the general fund.

And then I'm going to read item number three, also ordinance approving the adopted the capital improvement plan for the city of Tulsa for fiscal year 27 through 31 as part of the uh fiscal year 26-27 annual budget for ordinance amending title 43K of the Tulsa Revised Ordinances, which is the City of Tulsa's expenditure policy for the 2017 limited purpose economic development temporary sales tax amending the projects and purposes for which expenditures and proceeds may lawfully be made, providing for severality.

Here we go.

All right.

Any questions?

Any discussion?

Yes, Councilor Director Wright.

Yes, here we are again.

Small budget meeting uh was held earlier today to reflect back some of the discussion that we had last week and throughout this week.

I know different folks have had different conversations with community partners, stakeholders, constituents, and um staff uh here in uh city hall just to get clarity on those like lingering questions.

I know emails had come through, so we took time this morning.

We uh at the small budget committee, council uh myself, um counselor Lake and of course our chair and vice chair all sat down with the mayor and his team to really iron out these final questions and around the biggest budget item that we talked about last week was the six million dollar allocation for Safe Move Tulsa.

So, through the meeting today, we came to a consensus that we all recognize that the projected cost for the next fiscal year are um targeted to be six million dollars with private funding to match, and that we're all committed to working at a pace over the next year to achieve that goal.

But we're also going to work towards establishing a more standardized reporting uh for this good work that we know is so needed in the community, and um we just really want to elevate um to our community partners and to the providers doing this work every day that we are um thankful and committed to the work, and we recognize what they're doing every day to achieve these goals as a collective.

So, um, I think it's a good compromise and a collaborative discussion that we ended up with after last week.

Um, so hopefully we'll see more of a quarterly reporting that's more standardized.

We're gonna do some work on our side.

Does it really set those expectations of what we want to see and how we want to see it come to the table?

And then I think we got some commitments from staff to make that work.

Right, yeah, yep.

Yes, Councilor Arching.

So I appreciate the update because I was I was gonna ask about that.

So the love the quarterly updates just regularly.

What's what's happening, but um, the funding will be given in a way that uh it's just reliable, predictable for our for our partners to the housing solutions can make the contracts and all that.

Yes, I I I regret that some interpretation was that we were requesting quarterly contracts just to provide clarity.

That's not what the city has requested, just quarterly reports.

I just want quarterly reports so we can keep updated on that.

I don't know where new and where that came from or how it came to be in our emails with the same message from repeated folks.

So whoever they got that information from, that that's not what we requested.

But we are going to hold an accountability and transparency measure of quarterly reports to make sure we're on pace and meeting benchmarks and outcomes because this is a new program we're all creating together in a in a you know very large investment that we need to steward well.

Well, that's important, thank you.

All right, counselor Bellis.

Yeah, transparently.

I had um heard the quarterly reporting piece during last Wednesday's meeting.

I was like, okay, that's my takeaway about what we're asking for.

That makes sense.

I know we all want to see certain data indicators, and then when I was asking and learning more about the functionality, um, and had um, you know, asked internal council staff, they um it was mentioned that there would probably need to be amended contracts to go with that for the disbursements, which is like what was my first understanding, which led me to just so you want to led me to ask it as nonprofits going, hey, what would that look like for you if that's like and I wasn't sure if that was with housing solutions, so I did start with Mark who had that impression.

He would like that's who first alerted me was hearing from housing solutions that that may be necessary for how the dollars flow and ask someone with a nonprofit who has a lot of contracts and goes through really the ringer to get them updated even with simple amendments that had made me concerned just for the functionality for those nonprofits.

So I had reached out, so I you know wasn't trying to spark any type of chain of misinformation, but that was my initial impression was that this would require quarterly amendments to contracts, um, which Sarah just confirmed with me from setting from the small budget meeting that it could be more like a change order, and then that it sounds like housing solutions should be able to do broad annual contracts, which is obviously a big relief.

Can you just explain it for everyone then to have the same information?

So I think I think part of this has to do with um from the year the program started versus your fiscal year, right?

Right.

So the program didn't start July 1 last year, it started later in the year, so you did a year's worth of funds based on an estimate, right?

Because it was our first time to do it.

So currently on the current contract, there are funds to kind of take people through um September in housing people, and so if you do an additional um 1.5 million, like we talked about, um, with working towards that goal of still doing six million in the second year of this program in next fiscal year.

Um, that that should take you a couple of months uh into the year.

So you're almost at mid-year on your spend rate.

So then, as you do your quarterly reports, and it's another budget amendment comes um for this the city's contract is with housing solutions as the sole source is the just for the public, there are continuum of care provider, um, and so then you just do a change order on that contract for housing solutions to increase the amount.

So if you get to September, and now it's estimated an additional funds for the next quarter are at 1.4 million or they're at 2.7 million, then you have that estimate and you can do that change order, working towards that up to six million goal.

Which is very standard operating when we have contracts.

So, yeah, yeah, okay.

That just gives us the opportunity to leave.

Right, which yeah, definitely a fan of that mechanism.

Yeah, my concern had just I was just trying my concern had been if downstream it was creating work for some of these smaller entities, or I guess sometimes you think it's just a simple amendment, and then it turns out it's never that simple, or they could rack up legal fees.

So that was really me wanting to ensure that we were you know keeping the lift on like that collective impact-like housing solutions in ourselves and not putting a bunch of the direct service providers or also acknowledging with like things like federal funding and stability, making sure that we weren't adding some layer of uncertainty to the providers themselves about can we maintain staffing or things like that, which I know and I really appreciate what counselor director I just said, going we're committed to this work, but we're also taking fiscal responsibility to start the dollars and make sure that outcomes are matching with what we have committed to doing.