You were also expecting I couldn't make it.

Good afternoon.

I call to order this meeting of the city council, meeting as a committee of the whole to discuss the 2026 budget.

And ask City Clerk to call the role, please.

Councilmember Joyner.

Present.

Councilmember Clark.

Councilmember Andrew Bowen.

Here.

Councilmember Scipio here.

Mayor Peritim Adams.

Councilmember Taylor.

Present.

Councilmember Hall.

And Councilmember Burke.

Thank you very much.

For the remainder of the meeting, I turned the meeting over to the Chairman of the Finance Committee, Councilmember Clark.

Thank you, sir.

We will begin today to discuss the budget.

We have another meeting tomorrow, I believe, at the same time.

That'll be it for the week.

Next week, I know Tuesday, we have a neighborhood or community gathering at Little Creek, I believe.

And so those are the next three meetings.

With that, uh City Manager, do you have some opening comments for Mr.

Tash takes over?

Uh no, not really.

Well, I'll take it just a cut just a moment and have uh Scott come on come on up.

Um we we gave you the the budget presentation on Monday with the document, so hopefully you've had a chance to at least glance through those and and start putting up uh figuring out what questions that you have for us.

Um Scott's going to spend some time going over in more detail the things that we talked about on Monday, and uh we're we'll stand ready to answer your questions as we go along.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Scott I'm gonna have to roll you out of order.

I don't know if y'all it was one of the coaches I heard speak the other day, said he named his dog uh coach, so he could say coach.

I mean uh yeah, sit down.

So uh give them a little power, get a dog naming mayor.

Um I would suggest we let Scott go through his presentation in its entirety, write down any questions you have, and then we'll answer questions at that point.

You got it.

Thank you, Chairman Clark, uh Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, and members of the City Council.

Uh first thing I want to do before we get started today is turn around uh and say thank you and recognize the members of the budget staff who are all.

I think they were doing their best to stay off camera in the back corner out there.

Um but I I get to present the details uh that amount to months of their hard work and so wanted to say thank you publicly.

Uh the applause is absolutely appreciated and necessary for their their output.

Uh as the city manager said, my intent today is to provide additional details to what he presented on Monday evening.

I would encourage people who are watching this either now or in the future on the city's uh website or on YouTube to go back and watch the city manager's comments.

I will do my best not to regurgitate exactly what he said, but we're gonna hit the same themes uh just at a higher level of granularity.

Uh the intent today uh from an agenda perspective of thinking about flying an airplane is to start at the 30,000 foot level, talk about the context of this budget, uh budget priorities overall.

We will spend a few slides talking about uh revaluation and the proposed tax rate, the effect of that on uh various types of properties, and then kind of bring that plane down out of the clouds, begin to talk about the budget overall, um a little bit further down, talking specifically about the general fund, where which is where we will spend a majority of our time.

The general fund accounts for most of our general government activities, police, fire, sanitation, recreation, and the like, and then we will spend some time also talking about selected enterprise funds, uh specifically those that have major policy decisions associated with them in the FY26 budget.

Uh so we did at the retreat in January spend a considerable amount of time going through um resident survey data.

But at a high level, the last time that we did this, we were uh scored higher in 30 of the 52 benchmark areas than the national average, and overall city residents provided that crime prevention, streets and sidewalks maintenance and housing programs were amongst some of their top priorities.

Again, just kind of flying at that high level with respect to the city as a place to live, as a place to work, and as a place to raise children.

If you look to the right, you will see we are significantly above uh the U.S.

and Atlantic region, and we have maintained or gained on each of those from when we started doing these resident surveys back in 2018.

We spoke about this very briefly at the strategic planning session in January and said that we would come back with a little more detail, and so we we are doing that here in a couple of slides.

But we did an employee survey for the first time in many years here in the city.

And as you can see from the chart on the left, a vast majority of the employees uh want to finish their career here with the city, are proud to work for the city and would recommend us as an employer.

And you can see that more than 70 percent were satisfied or very satisfied.

That's on a five-point scale.

We did have a couple of threes as well for folks that were neutral.

Um asking what prior priorities that our employees had, what they thought the that we could work on that we could could assist with over the course of the next few years.

Employee recognition was the number one priority.