Or whether him is a private citizen.

And I do want to thank Mike.

Mike taught me more about governmental accounting finance, but governmental accounting and financing than any class, any master's class I took in college.

He showed me what it takes to understand a municipal budget, and I'll always be appreciative of Mike.

And our city is a stronger city because Mike Wright served.

I want to begin this presentation by thanking first our accounting and finance team, certainly Carly Standridge, Savannah Hornsby, where's London Jenkins?

Thank you, then London didn't London did all this work for months.

And I think he came to pass out the budget books, and I think that he's had he's taken a little bit of a break.

You know, sometimes I want to take a break from me too.

I get it, I understand.

So I don't blame London for disappearing.

Um they have done a really good job, um, not just a good job, a great job in preparing this budget for you.

You have in front of you 238 pages, uh, well over a thousand line items, tens of thousands of data points that are in front of you with this budget, uh, but at the end of the day, um, it's prepared by well-qualified um and amazing public servants who they don't do this because it's a job, they do it because they love our city.

And I'm I'm proud to work with Carly, you and your team every single day.

I also want to thank our comms team, um, Sarah Gilmore and her team for putting this together, Huey and Shelby and everyone who was involved, um, trying to put this together in a way that's stylistic, that is understandable because when you have this much information, trying to make it consumable for the council and frankly for the public is an art, and I think they've mastered it.

And I really want to thank them for their job.

It's a lot better than the PowerPoint Mike that I did 20 years ago, uh, what they have prepared for us today.

So let me jump right in because this is and let me warn you, a long presentation, but I want to begin.

We don't have food.

Well, we actually have babe's donuts left over from the morning staff meeting.

But I do want to kick off with a video that celebrates what our team has done for the past year.

So it just gives you a small sense of what our people have been doing all year, and this city is complex, and it's much more complex than it was 20 years ago when I began my service.

And this budget does its best to reflect those things.

So we can put back the presentation.

So it begins for us internally with the standard of excellence.

Um this is our our standard we try to achieve every single day to be the most accountable, innovative, and effectively managed city in the United States.

It certainly doesn't mean we reach that in every single thing that we do, but that needs to be our absolute goal and accept nothing less.

And we as a team over the last two months have recommitted to this ideal, and where we fall short, we're going to work to meet that standard of excellence.

And where we fall short, we're going to work to meet that standard of excellence.

And our budget helps us do that.

And certainly, while we're achieving our standard of excellence, we have four core beliefs that I know you know well that are important in everything we do must be tied back to those core beliefs.

So let me first start by just congratulating this city council and our team for the financial strength that they've created.

And this has been a legacy with this council since 1985.

This city has always been financially strong.

We have 1.5 billion dollars worth of assets.

Right now we have 623 million dollars of ongoing capital budgets.

We are triple A by Fitch, which is the highest of the high, and a double A1 by Moody's, which is elite.

Your city is well managed financially and is strong and built to take on the challenges of the future.

It really begins with our core belief number two, and that is planning for our future.

Several years ago, we realized there were things on the horizon we need to be ready for.

First was making certain that we were going to meet the demands of a complex water and sewer department, and we passed a 10-year plan, which we will talk about in a little bit.

There are also two other issues we realized we had to take on in fiscal 22, and that was a new public safety plan and a conversion to RSA.

We began planning for all of that in fiscal 22, and in this fiscal 27 budget, you really see it coming together.

Again, I cannot thank our team for what they did.

Carly and all of our team members who led this from an accounting and finance.

They made our ability to do this, even in a challenging environment possible.

And everything that we pledged and began in fiscal 22 are on track and on time today.

So how are we able to do that?

Well, we've done that through the planning process, which has allowed us to have a very strong unassigned fund balance.

$85 million of unassigned fund balance between our general fund and water and sewer.

And as I was talking with our team members today, I will always remember April 27, 2011, and one of the things I will remember the most is we had the cash flow tens of millions of dollars in the weeks after.

Keeping those strong unassigned fund balances are paramount because we never know when we might face that next emergency.

The second thing that creates financial strength for us is the reserve amounts we have in several key funds, such as public safety fund, elevate, general fund, and river district fund.

I say all that is to highlight our strength, which gives us a flexibility in case we need it, but not to say to the city council we should go out and spend it.

For example, the reserve fund within the public safety fund.

Those are the dollars that are going to be needed to help us with the cost of transitioning from the police and fire pension fund to RSA.

The funds in Elevate are going to help us continue to use elevate as a fund to support public safety and do uh elevate projects throughout our city.

So those funds are there, they're in reserve, but they're certainly going to be allocated at some point based off the planning that we've put into place and working directly with our city council.

Why are those reserves important?

Because we face budget challenges and we face those budget challenges beginning this year.