The Committee of the Whole of the City Council held a budget workshop on May 14, 2026, at 2:00 PM. The workshop covered the Citizens Budget Advisory Council (CBAC) report, the FY 2026-27 capital plan, community agency funding recommendations, and occupancy tax fund review. No votes were taken on the overall budget; the council gathered information ahead of a public hearing on May 18 and final adoption on June 1.
You're watching WSTV Digital Media. It's my pleasure to call to order this special meeting of the Wistels City Council acting as a committee of the whole. And ask the city clerk to call the vote, please. Councilmember Joyner. Councilmember Andrew Bowen. Here. Councilmember Scipio. Councilmember Clark. Mayor Per Tim Adams. Councilmember Taylor. Councilmember Hall, President. And Councilmember Burke. This is our second meeting. Um Scott, if you'll take the podium. We're going to go over the capital budget. We're also going to talk about the nonprofit allocations because they're not officially in the budget. Just for everyone's information, we we're not voting on anything at this moment. We're still taking information. We'll have a the committee will have a public hearing. And that our last meeting, after I polled everybody, we'll decide kind of what we want to the committee to approve, and that will go forward to the full council for that's at the council level. And I think you also have a public hearing, uh mayor. And then the council will vote on it at that time. So we're still gathering information uh learning and seeing what's going on. And again, if you have questions, the staff will take them and they will put together answers for everyone. Uh and we'll continue to accumulate information and data as we head towards a decision. Mr. Tesh, you have the floor. Thank you, Chairman Clark, Mayor, and members of the City Council. We do have both the Capitol Plan and a community agencies discussion on our agenda. But before that, uh we have a presentation from the Cis Citizens Budget Advisory Council. We do have two of the members here uh with us, and the chair, Mr. Tony Piacenza, will be um giving the presentation. They did spend quite a considerable amount of time looking at the resident survey data in a much more granular level uh than we are able to present at a public forum of this nature. So they have several presentations related to the information and data analysis that they have done there. And I will turn it over to Tony and allow him to go through the presentation. Thanks, sir. Yes, sir. Um my name is Tony Piacenza. I live at 625 Jersey Avenue here in Winston-Salem, so I'm a proud member or resident of the Northwest Ward and even prouder member of the Citizens Budget Advisory Council. Um really appreciate uh Mr. Mayor and uh the rest of the council for giving us the time here to speak and to cover some of this material. Um we've spent a lot of time, as Scott said, um, really trying to look into the data that's been available, made available to us, especially via um the resident survey from 2025 and also the city manager's proposed budget, and we have spent multiple sessions as a group um going through that data and trying to um make some recommendations that we think both reflect uh the type of progress that we think the city itself should make, but also the feedback that the residents gave the city so that we can um make recommendations that said city um in a direction to being able to make the their communities a better place to live, work, and play. Um I'll go through a couple of parts of our work plan. Um had it there. We go. Simplest things. There we go. Um, like I said, we used uh the resident survey data um and a company analysis provided by Scott Staff and his staff and others, um, and also again the 2026 proposed budget. We spent ample time reviewing that as well. Um our recommendations take a couple of different forms.