Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The Valdez City Council held a budget work session on October 15, 2026, focused on the Parks, Recreation & Cultural Services (PRCS) Division, Fire & EMS, and Capital Projects & Major Maintenance for the 2027 fiscal year. Discussions included department budgets, staffing, debt service, bond proposals, and a request from the Valdez Fisheries Development Association (VFDA). The council provided direction on several key items.
Sure, thank you, Mayor. Jordan Nelson, the finance director here. I'm going to uh this is gonna be a multi uh department head effort. I'll just kick us off with just a couple of slides about some overview and things that have changed, kick it over to the city manager who will take you through the divisions or uh parks and rec as uh the mayor points out, and then fire, and then we will do a brief transition over to the projects where I'll give another brief overview of the pie, if you will, of revenues and how they're divided up and how we think about them as staff from a budget perspective, and then we'll dive into some of the actual projects and decision points from the city council that we're going to need tonight. So without further ado, the schedule looks like this. Uh parks and rec parks, recreation and cultural services division is comprised of four departments maintenance, recreation, library, and civic center. We have uh fire, that's just to accommodate a schedule. We have some out of office coming up, so a little off schedule. We would do emergency services division, and we would include fire with the uh police chiefs for departments. But this one's ramped up a little bit off schedule uh to accommodate a sketch uh out of office, and then uh we're at we're gonna close out the night with the CIP or instruction in progress, and just kind of a work plan around projects and major maintenance, as the mayor pointed out. Big topics on CIP and major maintenance, of course, are our projects and bonds. What projects correlate to what bonds and what does that timeline and what does the bond machine look like? We'll we'll get into that in a little more detail at the end of the night. The workshop schedule looks like this. We are here in round two of many rounds to go. The financial schedule, I promised I would bring this up every single time that we have a budget night. The financial schedule is just simply an appropriations chart. It's setting the legal, it's showing the legal authority to spend at every level in every fund along the city that includes the revenues on the top and the expenses down below. They don't reflect actual expenditures, they just reflect the authorized level of expenditure. So, for example, since we're talking about projects today, the capital projects column is uh one that I'll just direct your attentions to. That's the appropriations in this single year only. It does not include accumulated appropriations from prior projects. And so the projects team might be working on something like 40 million dollars in in projects, but you only appropriate roughly six or eight of that per year, unless there's a real big bond initiative, which there are some of those uh towards the end of the night that we'll talk about. Those will carry into multi-year uh schedule of appropriations, and so they're a little bit off-cycle, they're not quite as visible on the financial schedule. The only way you see that is through the debt service column, which is to the right. As you move a cough across that financial schedule, you can see an enormous jump. Our typical debt service schedule has been around six million. There's currently 18.1. You can see that if you follow the row facilities fleet and infrastructure all the way over, and then use debt service as your column, and you meet right there at 18.1. That's a new number that is based on the uh advolm revenue cap and the needed debt service in order to uh accommodate uh 20 mil tax levy with the advice revenue cap that exists at that rate. And so with that, I'll pause for questions and turn it over to city manager. None for me. Okay, go ahead, Nate. All right, good evening, council. Uh so the plan is as Jordan mentioned.