Note: The agenda listed this meeting as May 29, 2026, but the official instruction for this summary specifies the meeting date as June 1, 2026.
The City Council held a budget work-session to review the FY27 Recommended Budget, discuss strategic initiatives, and reach consensus on adjustments to the proposed tax rate. The session included presentations on homelessness strategy, Vision Zero projects, a detailed line-item review of general fund departments, and follow-up questions from the previous work-session. The Council aimed to reduce the proposed tax increase while maintaining core services and investments.
Council reviewed operating budgets for most general fund departments, focusing on personnel and operating costs. Key discussions and consensus items:
All right, we'll bring the meeting back to order. Okay, Mayor Protein will do the road call. Are you here? Mayor Pro Tem. Councilmember Joyner. Here. Councilmember Andrews. Here. Councilmember Lau. Councilmember Santa Guido here. Councilmember Clinton Quintana. Chairs here. Everybody's going to counterfor. Turn back to the city. Yeah. I got you here. Okay. Okay. Thank you. We are going to pivot just a little bit, talk about the unsheltered populations update because that may drive some of the other budget conversations. So I will turn it over to Rachel Schuler. Good afternoon. Thank you. So just to get started, we've talked a little bit about homelessness, exiting homelessness. I think it's always important for us to talk about the ways that you literally exit homelessness as part of this context. And so there are generally three ways. One is self-resolved, rapid exit. That's for the folks who may just need uh to get back in touch with family. It may be someone who just needs to have a month of their mortgage paid, whatever it may be, their rent, whatever it may be that small interventions. A little bit uh next step is that rapid rehousing. That's usually up to about three months of rental assistance, down payment assistance, things like that, uh deposits, just to get someone situated, and then they're pretty self-sufficient moving on. And when I say self-sufficient, that may include on vouchers, uh housing toys vouchers or other things like that. Uh and then permanent supportive housing is the most um comprehensive where you're talking about the actual units and the rental assistance and that, as well as the wraparound services uh due to the chronic mental and physical disabilities that are associated with the folks who are in that population. So uh back in September of 2024, council and the Board of Commissioners were presented the shelter uh strategy. We call it the strategy to address unsheltered homelessness. This strategy was put together with a number of our partner agencies as well as New Hanover County over the course of several months from March to September, uh, where we did a lot of deep diving into the problem, hearing from those with lived experiences, looking at paths forwards and defining what success would look like. This plan was a collaborative effort through those partner agencies and the county with all of the different uh players having a different role in this strategy and the outcomes. So just a brief refresh on what that looked like. Um we had the low barrier options shown here are the outcomes, objectives, and progress measures. As you can see, some of these um progress measures and even outcomes, some are not necessarily um something that you can just put funding behind, but rather systematic um and process changes that go along with that. When we talk about empowerment courts, um, I know council member joyner could speak a little bit more than I could on what that looks like. But when you're speaking about the folks who are um in that situation due to homelessness, there are not typically lengthy sentences like there may be for drugs or um some other different situations that those empowerment courts have helped to be successful. And so while this is there are some communities that have what they call homeless court, um, a lot of what that looks at is connecting people to services at those um places, and so while there obviously are financial um implications of some of those relationships, a lot of that is just that the partnerships, relationships, being at court, being able to make those referrals to get to those folks' house, and again, there's not necessarily a dollar amount you can associate with that, but just rather that larger systematic change. Um again, looking at the 911 calls uh for people who are homeless, that really came out with how the county was tracking calls, and so again, it's it's looking at the overall system approach of not looking to arrest your way out of a homelessness problem, but rather intervening in different ways. And so when we look at how we interact with our social workers and some of those uh street outreach teams and offering the community solutions of um who to call rather than just the police. Are there agencies that we can call? Are there people that they can call instead of just the um that 911? Um when we look at the caseload capacity, a big piece of that is how we move people through the system. When I say system, I mean the um homeless services system. So when folks are in, say a good shepherd, and if you have a case manager who has a case of 75, it's going to be very difficult to pour in and assist those 75 individuals.