City Council - Special Meeting

rolling all right i now calling to order a special meeting of the beaverton city council where the recorder please call the roll council president duggar i'm here counselor hartmeyer prigg here counselor hassan here counselor kimmy here Councilor Teeter?

Here.

Councilor Tivnon? Here. Mayor Beatty?

Here. Thank you. On tonight's agenda, we will begin with an executive session. We will go into public session at approximately 6 p.m. with the first reading of an ordinance and then conclude with a work session on fiscal sustainability. We have an executive session pursuant of ORS 192.6620 to consider matters related to safety of a governing body and of public body staff and volunteers and the security of a public body facility and meeting space. Generally, members of news media may attend executive session. However, the news media must not report on information from the executive session. Everyone else should leave council chambers. We'll reopen them a few minutes after 6 p.m. Amen.

RECORDING IN PROGRESS.

WE ARE ALREADY IN SESSION, SO WE ARE RETURNING FROM EXECUTIVE MEETING. WE WILL BEGIN WITH THE FIRST READING OF ORDINANCE NUMBER 4884LU32026-00094, SCHOLE HEIGHTS AND SCHOLE VALLEY HEIGHTS PUD MOD ZAM A32026-0081. On September 15th, 2026, during the regularly scheduled city council meeting, a public hearing will be held regarding an ordinance amending the zoning map for five parcels in the Shoals Heights and Shoals Valley Heights PUD LU32026-00094, Shoals Heights and Shoals Valley Heights PUD MODSCMA32026-0081. Okay, we are on to our work session for this evening, which is a work session regarding fiscal year 26, 27 budget reduction options. I will begin the work session with the presentation by the interim city manager. When the presentation is done, each counselors will have the opportunity to comment on the presentation and ask questions of the presenter. And Elizabeth and I talked a little bit before the meeting that she's got four points, four different categories for tonight. We will take a short break after the third round and then come back for questions. Of course, I would encourage us to try to get through the material and not stop every two minutes asking questions unless it is like a fundamental to understanding until there's a natural break. That way we can get through the material. So I would definitely schedule or I mean, write down your questions so you don't forget them. All right.

all right good evening mayor and council i'm elizabeth coffee your interim city manager and i'm here today to talk once again about fiscal sustainability so today we're going to walk through the city's fiscal sustainability efforts and specifically some budget choices that are before us focusing on potential 2.5 million dollars in general fund expense reductions for the current fiscal year So my goal today is to clearly explain the trade-offs and real-world impacts on services as it's related to budget reductions now and into the future so that you can provide informed feedback. And with me today is Carolyn Sullivan. She's our Chief Financial Officer, and she's here to help me out if you have some detailed financial questions that I don't know the answer to. This is quite a lengthy presentation, so bear with me. We wanted to give you as much information as we can. Next slide, please. So as background, during a budget adoption, we closed a $16.2 million general fund deficit with a combination of revenue as well as expense reductions. To avoid deeper service cuts, we did rely on $2.5 million in one-time funds this year, which was made possible by healthy reserves that are above our policy minimum, which we'll talk a little bit more about in just a bit. at the time of budget adoption city council directed staff to find ways to reduce or eliminate that one-time funding reliance so today's session addresses that direction so we'll cover three main things the first is my initial recommendation around budget savings that we could find that have relatively minimal impacts to service. The second would be around getting your feedback on larger reduction packages that do have policy impacts and will provide two options to you for consideration. And then we will preview some significant budget decisions that you're likely to face in fiscal year 27, 28. After this meeting, we are going to begin preparing a fall supplemental budget, which would include some proposed reductions. We have that scheduled for October 6th, and then the majority council feedback that we receive today will also guide additional next steps. Next slide, please. So just to provide you a preview of the staff recommendation today for you to keep in mind as you listen to the presentation, we have three recommendations to kind of kickstart the discussion, and we're seeking your feedback on these. First, we do propose implementing $750,000 in immediate reductions this fall via the supplemental budget. Second, our recommendation is to hold off on further expense reduction until fiscal year 2728. And third is to consider further strategy sessions around our fiscal situation and specifically fiscal year 2728 at your November council retreat. And the reason that I'm recommending that is that any additional mid-year cuts beyond that 750,000 that we've identified will have direct service impacts on either our community or our organization or both. And we really want to make sure that council has a chance to weigh those impacts carefully. And we are providing quite a lot of information for you to digest today. We are also mindful that our timeline is tight. Large changes that are made now would really only yield partial year savings because we're already in September. And staff are already turning their attention to fiscal year 27, 28. Finally, the reserve goals have been met and actually exceeded for this year. So there's no immediate need to worry about reducing services this year to preserve the city's reserves. So in short, staff are recommending that we minimize the community impacts for this fiscal year and that we really focus on comprehensive solutions for fiscal year 27, 28. And again, seeking your feedback on all three of these items. Next slide, please. So just a quick presentation outline. We'll go over the fiscal sustainability action plan, go over some brief background, briefly go over the staff recommendation, talk about some reductions with policy impacts. We might take a break after at that point before we dive into fiscal year 27-28. So starting with a brief recap of our Fiscal Sustainability Action Plan. Next slide, please. I know you all have seen this slide many, many times, but just in case there's any residents that are watching, it's always a good reminder of why are we even here in the first place having fiscal challenges? And those are really rooted in the structural limits on our revenue growth. Oregon's property tax measures, five and 50, cap our property tax increases at roughly 3% annually as our costs rise faster. So the graphic on this slide illustrates that Beaverton receives only about 21 cents of every property tax dollar paid, and the rest goes to other jurisdictions like Washington County, schools, THPRD, et cetera. So this means our largest revenue source simply can't keep up with inflationary pressures on expenses such as annual health care cost increases, PERS retirement contributions, and the general cost of living expenses. The result is a persistent general fund structural deficit that we are striving to address to sustain city services long term. Next slide, please. So as a result of this, the city council took action several years ago at this point to develop a fiscal sustainability action plan. And we've been talking over the last year to refresh that plan and figure out the path forward. And we have a number of actions councils identified ranging from short term medium term and long term. And the city council has made significant progress on our plan this year. We have moved forward with a general services fee, a street maintenance fee for our street fund, and then we have made nearly $3 million in reductions for fiscal year 26-27. But as a reminder, in total, the city has reduced expenses by $9 million over the last a few years and eliminated 32 staff positions in total. So currently under exploration, we're considering a transient lodging tax increase and we'll be coming to you on October 6th with a work session about that. And then still on the fiscal sustainability action plan is a potential local option levy and we'll talk more about that later this year as well. So you can see the graphic here on the slide, and it's just an example only of how all of the fiscal sustainability short-term actions together can work to solve the large general fund deficit that we typically have been facing. So no one tool is enough on its own. as the way that we currently have the fiscal sustainability plan structured. And so you can see that there are revenue pieces of the equation with the fee, the levy, and the TLT, but this illustrates that reductions are still part of our toolbox and our strategy when it comes to fiscal sustainability. And today we're talking more about the expense reduction side of the puzzle. Next slide, please. So as a reminder, because it's been a couple of months, our fiscal year 26-27 adopted budget solved a $16.2 million general fund deficit through a mix of new revenues as well as $2.75 million in cuts. And that left $2.5 million that was covered by one-time funds. Those one-time funds were available because some revenues came in over budget and some expenses came in under budget, leaving us with some additional funding that we could draw from. Per policy, reserves should include 11% of our operating expenses in the general fund at budget adoption. Even with the use of the $2.5 million, our reserve budget exceeded the goal at time of adoption and we came in at $15.8 million, which is about 14.5% of operating expenses. So using one-time money was a conscious decision to avoid further impacts to services to the community, knowing that this type of fiscal sustainability work often takes multiple years to implement, and knowing that we still have other tools and strategies that we're exploring. Next slide, please. So before we get into the details of potential budget reduction packages, I wanted to give you a little bit of background. Next slide, please. So I think it's helpful to really kind of acknowledge the partnership that exists in the budget between operations and policy, and it's a little bit unique in that way. And so there's kind of two types of budget decisions that we typically face. Some reductions are more operational in nature, and those are things like internal reorganizations, finding efficiencies, or aligning our budget with actual spending. And that's ways that your city manager can typically implement reductions with minimal policy impact. So that is how we have identified the first $750,000 in savings. And we'll go over that recommendation in a minute. Other reductions, though, do have policy impacts in that they affect what services the city provides or the services delivered to the community. And so those are cuts where we're really looking for council guidance in particular. And then the following slides will present two packages that have those policy-related impacts for you to discuss. Each totals about $1.8 million, but they target different areas to kind of illustrate the different strategies and trade-offs that are involved. Next slide, please. So when we evaluated potential reductions, we asked three key questions. The first is, can we implement that reduction with minimal community impact? The second is, we wanted to prioritize structural solutions rather than one-time reductions. And then third, we asked, can this reduction be implemented quickly? And by quickly, I mean can it be implemented by November? And with, we were not able to meet the full $2.5 million target and meet all of those criteria. So we'll talk a little bit more about that as we go through each of these options. One of the things also that staff kept in mind as we were evaluating potential budget reductions is that we do have quite a large list of things that we are continuing to pursue. that aren't on your fiscal sustainability action plan necessarily, but they are things that we've heard from council or things that we just are interested in pursuing to be more efficient and effective. And there are things that may kind of come to fruition for fiscal year 27, 28, because they're a little bit longer term. So one thing we're working on is additional cost recovery for the Center for Mediation and Dialogue. So we'll talk a little bit about the Center for Mediation and Dialogue today, but it is partially grant funded and then subsidized by the general fund. I don't believe that full cost recovery is feasible just through fees or renegotiating IGAs, but certainly we do think we could do a better job of recouping the cost for that service. We are also doing an analysis of the reprographics printing service that we provide in-house through community engagement and communications, and that work is anticipated to be completed by the end of this calendar year. We are also exploring how to be more efficient and effective in the way we provide administrative support. That might not sound very interesting, except to those of you that are wonky nerds like me. But we do want to be more effective in the way we provide that service, which may result in some efficiencies, but my initial assessment is not likely to be dollar savings. We are also having conversations with Tualatin Hills Parks and Recreation about the services we provide and the services they provide and just seeing if there are additional partnerships that we should take advantage of. We have a boards and commissions review that's coming to you later this fall. As we continue to face challenging financial times, we do have a number, the majority of our services that are mandatory that we are required to provide. But by virtue of continued reductions, we are going to need to revisit those service levels. And then finally, we do have a new photo radar camera that's enforcing both speed violations as well as red light. And we're evaluating the workload and the revenue that's being brought in for that camera as well as some additional cameras that we have planned. Next slide, please. So a couple of caveats and an acknowledgment before we get into the nitty gritty. So some things that we assumed when we were going through this exercise, we assumed that any changes would be effective around October or November. So we would not recognize the full year of savings for fiscal year 26, 27. I also want to caveat that our cost estimates at this stage are high level, and so we're aiming for order of magnitude impacts rather than super precise down to the exact penny dollars. When you receive the supplemental budget that has budget reductions, you'll get the line by line item with the precise dollar figures, but we really wanted to provide estimates. and then I just want to stress that certainly we're facing difficult choices at this moment in time and I know that if you're a community member that enjoys a particular city service or takes advantage of it or if you're a staff person watching and you're part of a program that's up for potential reduction or elimination I do want to recognize that the services that we offer, they all provide value to the community and the organization. We are in a spot financially where we have very difficult choices to make and conversations to have. And so I just want to acknowledge that, you know, that this makes for very difficult and emotional choices and difficult conversations. i also want to note that we are going to be doing our best to explain the benefits of the services that are provided and we're not our intent in doing that is not to be doom and gloom and say oh woe is us if we have to cut this service we really want to provide you with the clear impacts of reductions so that you have all the information to consider as you're making your decision. So we're not trying to leave you depressed today. We're feeling like there's no way out. We are trying to help you kind of carve out the path forward. No doubt we would all rather be here talking about how we can expand our services. Here we are, and this is the fun stuff that we get to do as leaders of the organization. So I just want to acknowledge the difficulty of the conversation, but we'll do our best to provide that practical path forward. Next slide, please. So moving on to the city manager recommendation. Next slide, please. Before we delve into the larger policy reduction packages, I'll briefly summarize my recommended $750,000 in budget trims that we plan to implement via the fall supplemental budget. And so these are more internal focused savings that have minimal impact on external services or they have impact that we feel like we could mitigate. And they meet the criteria that we've set. They have minimal community impact. They prioritize structural solutions and they can be implemented quickly. The majority of them, as you can see, are areas where the cost has been less than anticipated. And then 36% of this package is around efficiencies. And then reduction of the typical underspend makes up about 24% of the package. And I will go over that in a little bit more detail on the next slide. So looking at our underspend, we comb through areas where departments historically underspend their full budgets. So it's normal to have some year-end underspending due to staff vacancies, project delays, or conservative budgeting. We do believe we can trim from some various line items with relatively minimal risk. But I do want to remind council that if we reduce our cushion there, we may slightly reduce the flexibility. So a project could take longer or an unexpected need could arise and these departments may have a little bit less flexibility. We do also count on underspend to meet our year end reserve goal of 17%. So at the time we adopt the budget, our reserve target is 11%. We do capture underspend through our budgeting process because by the end of the fiscal year, that reserve target needs to be 17% of operating expenses. Nonetheless, these are areas where there's minimal risk. We feel like we can reduce the underspend, should not be a problem. The second area is where savings have come from specific projects or expenses coming in under budget. And so we had a couple of larger ones here. One was a facility study for our central plant that ended up costing quite a bit less than anticipated. And then we took a look at some of our court's temporary expenses and realized those were not going to be as costly as we had anticipated. This category often reflects some hard work by staff and negotiating better contracts or refining project scopes to save money. And then the third area is really taking a look at efficiencies. And so this is a lot of our internal service areas kind of chipped in here. We found that we were able to eliminate some software subscriptions that we do not need. There's a little bit of manual work that's involved by staff in doing that. And then we are adjusting the frequency of our citywide survey that we do for employees and then re-evaluating the use of where we're using temporary staff in some areas. So in short, this $750,000 package avoids noticeable impacts to the public. And again, any budget reduction comes with some risk, just providing less flexibility, but we believe we can mitigate the impacts of those cuts and are comfortable moving forward with those at this time. Next slide, please. All right, so now we'll talk a little bit more about the larger reduction packages that have policy impacts. So both these packages total $1.8 million approximately, and they each have about 12 to 13 staff positions that would be eliminated. And the key difference is where the cuts fall. And so the first option is what we're calling the minimize overall reductions package. And this option tries to limit the overall reductions. And but what that would mean is that that would end up eliminating or sharply curtailing several community programs. And it would still reduce some services and staff capacity and other departments. It's essentially a Stop doing a few things entirely so we don't have to spread cuts everywhere approach Option number two would preserve more programs This option tries to preserve the city's community programs by spreading reductions more evenly and you can go back please. I If you can just go back to the reductions with policy impact slide. There's not a lot on that slide, but I guess I have a lot to say about it when we're back. Thank you. And so option number two spreads the cuts more evenly across the organization. It features fewer outright program eliminations than option one, but it does require more across the board service reductions and capacity cuts. And it's more of a kind of share the pain across the organization type of scenario. And so before diving into each option specific I do want to emphasize that these options are illustrative. There's no right or wrong answers. They can be combined. You can pick and choose various elements of them. We're not asking you to choose one package or the other and then that's it today. We just are trying to get some feedback around which elements or approaches are more acceptable to you as we navigate our budget shortfall. Now we can go to the next slide. Thank you. So option one would cut around almost 13 staff positions for a total of $1.8 million. As noted on the slide, we were not able to meet the criteria that we set. It does prioritize structural solutions, but it does not meet the criteria of minimizing the community impact. And some of these reductions cannot be implemented by November just because of the impact that they would have on the community or the organization. So you can see here that the majority of this package is made up of program elimination at 51%, followed by service reductions at 27%, and then capacity reductions at 22%. Next slide, please. So the first kind of component of this package centers around eliminating three programs or services to the community. And so the wholesale elimination would be around our Center for Mediation and Dialogue program. This certainly would have a community impact and could not occur immediately due to the grant obligations that we have and the projects that we have in motion. It would need to have some lead time before we were able to wind down a service like this. And this is an example of some of the difficult choices that we face. There's no question that the service provides value to the community. The Center for Mediation Dialogue currently handles around 300 mediation and conflict resolution cases per year. offers 36 workshops and trainings annually. We provide free mediation services for landlord tenant issues, neighbor and neighbor disputes. We help vulnerable residents avoid evictions and resolve conflicts. And then we also have been supporting our municipal court by diverting some cases from the legal system. And so the court and Center for Mediation and Dialogue recently launched a restorative justice pilot program to allow certain low-level offenses to be resolved through facilitated dialogue with the charges dismissed upon successful completion. And so definitely a valuable service. The general fund does subsidize about 55% of this program at around $538,000 per year. So as I mentioned, we do think we can whittle that subsidy down by taking a look at our fees and potentially renegotiating some of the IGAs we have. we are actively working on that however for the purposes of this exercise this is an example of a program that could be reduced in order to meet the targets the other program that we have listed here is our down payment assistance program and so this program provides financial assistance to first-time homebuyers in Beaverton it is a relatively small program in the number of residents that it impacts which is one of the reasons why you see it here on the screen Annually, we are able to help around two low-income homebuyer or homebuyer families per year achieve homeownership. And so certainly it's an impactful program to those people that receive those funds. But when we look at the breadth of the number of community members it serves, it's relatively small. And then finally, looking at other services that are not mandatory that the city provides, the other one is our events program. And so if we were to make some significant budget reductions to that program, that would result in the elimination of city support for multiple events. So we would be looking at smaller events like bike Beaverton and the volunteer fair and support for some neighborhood Events would be cancelled and we would need to look at at least one of our major signature events such as the Beaverton night market tree lighting or celebration parade Would need to be suspended so that would have tangible impact to the community and those are popular events and that provides if your opportunities for residents to celebrate and engage with the city Next slide, please. Beyond cutting programs entirely, option one also entails reducing the level of several services as well as some of our internal capacities. So in the service reduction category, we could reduce our emergency planning and management coordination while still retaining the program. But a reduction to the program in general would mean that we would need to look at how we operate the CERT volunteer program. and look to see how much we can sustain the program at its current level, which would limit that kind of volunteer community emergency preparedness resource. We would also look at our recycling and sustainability program. This also has some external funding in this program. but there is a general fund subsidy. If we made significant reductions in this program, we would need to look at a slowdown in our climate action plan implementation, a reduction in community outreach on recycling and waste reduction programs, as well as our multifamily recycling and composting education. The program does offer certain levels of mandatory services. So this is an example of one where in theory, yes, we could reduce the mandatory service that we provide. So for example, Oregon law requires local governments to collect data on large building energy use. And so with less staffing that data reporting might be delayed or less robust. So that's just a small example of kind of what that means when we talk about reducing the mandatory level of service. The other reduction could be a reduction in our abatement program. So we offer an abatement program to address code violations and nuisance properties. So these are things where there might be an accumulation of trash or graffiti or vegetation or just generally unsafe conditions where the owners won't or can't address those. So currently we reduce, excuse me, excuse me, currently we budget for two abatements per year that help those blighted properties from posing dangers to health and safety. So this reduction, we reduced that from two to one, leaving us with one per year. So again, a relatively small program, but could have a meaningful impact for those residents in those neighborhoods. Finally, this option contains some capacity reductions, so we would reduce some capacity within the city manager's office. That would mean that we would have less capacity for special projects, research, policy analysis, and internal communications. We would continue doing that work, but we would be just doing the same with less, and that may result in some non-urgent work needing to be deferred. Police records reduction. I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about that because we do talk quite a bit about kind of the external facing police services. But we don't often talk about police records. This team is really the backbone of our police administration. So they process every police report, citation, warrant, handle public records requests, and then staff the front desk at the Public Safety Center. Last year alone, they processed more than 20,600 case reports, more than 4,200 subpoenas, entered 2,100 warrants, and handled 5,000 requests for police records or background checks. So this work is not work that we can necessarily stop doing, but if we had a reduction in this area, residents and officers would face longer wait times for reports and records. So victims of a crime may need a police report to file an insurance claim or obtain a restraining order. We pride ourselves in our quick turnaround in those instances, but a cut would need to kind of slow down that turnaround. So it preserves the service, but provides a slower response. This option also contains a reduction to our city recorder services. Again, they're a team that does a lot of legally mandated work. So the work would need to continue, but would result in delays for those functions. They manage our city council meeting agendas and minutes, our public records requests. They support city elections. And so tasks like agenda preparation, records archiving, and response to public records requests would need to take longer. And we would run the risk of some delays responding to those. Finally, reductions to our arts program could preserve the fundamental services of the arts program and maybe shift some work to other teams. We are exploring how this impact could be mitigated because it does directly relate to your October 6th council work session on the transient lodging tax increase. because the stated goal of that increase is to fund our arts program and take that burden off the general fund so we are going to come back to you with more information about this budget cut in particular and because it is related to a revenue ask so more to come on that So to sum up option one, this approach emphasizes deeper cuts in a few areas to try to protect more services. So while the community would lose some services entirely, we're trying to minimize the reduced service levels that they would experience in others, but there would still be some of those impacts. So I'm gonna move on to option two. Next slide, please. So option two is an alternative package, and you can see here that the breakdown here is a little bit different. So you can see that the majority of this package at 47% is centered around service reductions, with more capacity reduction for staff at 34%, and then less program elimination at 19%. So, in other words, option two preserves more programs by reducing service levels and staffing across multiple areas. Next slide, please. So kind of some key impacts in the service reduction category for our police department. Additional reductions would impact our patrol team. Excuse me, our patrol officers are really our frontline responders to 911 calls. Collectively, they handle tens of thousands of incidents annually. So for example, in 2025, they received 82,000 calls for service. And so that averages about 466 dispatched calls per officer that year. So for each patrol officer that we reduce, that pushes hundreds of calls onto other officers that are already at capacity. So what the community would likely experience are longer response times, especially for lower priority calls, like a minor traffic collision or a noise complaint. This also really means more reactive policing and less proactive work like neighborhood patrols, community engagement, traffic enforcement. And so our remaining officers would spend more time just going from call to call to call to call. and they would have reduced capacity to participate in community events. And if a major incident occurred, like a disaster or complex investigation, we're more likely to need to call upon a mutual aid for some of our neighboring jurisdictions. and additional cuts to our police department would also result in reduced support for our municipal court so right now the police department assists the court with warrant service handles and all they also handle community complaints about chronic parking violations and so reductions to that area would mean spreading those tasks out among already busy officers so there would be likely slower response to things like chronic parking issues And then that overall workload per officer would increase, which contributes to not only officer stress, but our overtime expenses. On the court side, that impacts the security in our courthouse. It impacts our ability to timely transport defendants and then fingerprinting services at the court. You'll see Center for Mediation and Dialogue again here. So this particular budget option preserves the service, still makes a reduction to it to the extent that we can. This reduction prioritizes what staff that we would need to continue to administer the grants and the external funding that we have. So we would really focus on operating at that reduced capacity And scale back workshops trainings and services that are not supported by external grants And so our core mediation services might continue at some level But you know community workshops and some of the outreach and training aspects could be suspended and then our new restorative justice pilot might proceed more slowly. So we would do our best to maintain the most critical aspects of Center for Mediation and Dialogue, but residents would see a reduction in the availability and reach. This option requires a little bit further analysis just due to some of the complexity of some of our grant programs in order to make sure that we're still able to, you know, what is the level of reduction that is sustainable to still be able to offer those grants. This slide also shows a reduction to our recycling and sustainability program, just not as deep as option one. So you would see some impact to our overall outreach and some delay to the climate plan implementation but to a lesser degree than the first option. So community members might notice a drop in workshops, outreach events or responsiveness to inquiries that we might receive on things like solar incentives or energy efficiency. And then there's some impacts that continue on from option one, the abatement program reduction and a reduced emergency management program. Next slide please. So option two does contain a couple of program eliminations and then a set of capacity staffing reductions. So our police victim services program assists around 275 to 300 victims each year with things like navigating the justice system, obtaining restraining orders, and then connecting to resources. If the program was eliminated, victims of serious crimes, felonies, would rely on Washington County's Victim Assistance Office, and then victims of misdemeanors could get support through the city prosecutor's office for cases in the municipal court. And so that's one of the reasons that this program, while an amazing program, is kind of on the table for consideration. A Beaverton's program provides a personalized level of support and an immediate local response, but there are a few other options that in theory are available for certain level of crimes. For city-supported events, this would be still in a reduction to our events program, but not as significant or severe as option one. So this option means that we would reduce the events program by eliminating some of our smaller events, like Bike Beaverton or Volunteer Fair, but we could preserve those city signature events. The same as option one, we would eliminate our down payment assistance program. On the capacity reduction side, it would contain additional records reductions. So the reductions that were in option one for our police department, and then that would result in the police department absorbing our front desk customer service duties onto remaining staff. which would impact kind of the customer experience and kind of exacerbate the potential delays to our records team. In preserving other programs, option two would also suggest a cut on the police side in terms of leadership capacity. So our police leaders handle day to day operational decisions. GUIDE CRITICAL INSTANCE AND MANAGE ADMINISTRATIVE DUTIES LIKE TRAINING, POLICY, COORDINATION WITH OTHER AGENCIES. SO THE POLICE SUPERVISORS THAT WOULD REMAIN WOULD COVER A WIDER SPAN OF CONTROL WITH MORE OFFICERS UNDER EACH MANAGER SO THERE WOULD BE REDUCED OVERSIGHT AND INCREASED STRAIN ON THE LEADERSHIP TEAM. Option two also contains a similar set of internal staffing reductions that I described in option one, a position in the city manager's office, a reduction in the arts program, but would preserve our city recorder's team. So to sum up, this scenario spreads cuts across more areas to keep most programs running, but at a lower capacity. And so the trade-off here is keeping more programs alive, but accepting that many services would run a little bit leaner or slower. So that was quite a lot of information. Would you like me to keep going, or would you like me to pause before I get into fiscal year 27-28? Either one.

I THINK WE SHOULD DO A LITTLE BIT OF QUESTIONS BEFORE WE MOVE INTO THE NEXT ONE. THAT WAY I KNOW I COULD SEE THE COUNCIL FEVERISHLY WRITING. SO LET'S TRY TO PUT A, THIS COULD GO ON FOREVER. SO AT THIS JUNCTURE I'M ONLY GOING TO ALLOW IF YOU CHIME IN ONE ROUND OF QUESTIONS. YOU CAN'T COME BACK IN 11 TIMES BECAUSE WE NEED TO MOVE FORWARD TO THE NEXT ITEM, WHICH I KNOW IS UNCHARACTERISTIC, BUT I WANT TO GET US TO THE END TO BE ABLE TO ASK MORE QUESTIONS. I DO WANT TO ASK, I'LL START Tell me how you frame and came to this because I'm surprised at some of it in it And I'm surprised that I don't see other things in it. I'm very knowledgeable about the general fund So can you tell me a little bit about the methodology that you use to present this framework tonight?

I?

Yeah, and so we use the three criteria, things that can be implemented pretty much immediately, which does put some limits on things that we're able to reduce. We use the criteria of, can you please try to minimize the community impact? when you're looking at reductions. And then we also looked at what are some structural solutions. And then we worked with our executive team. We gave them some budget targets that they needed to make. I gave those services that are a little bit more discretionary I guess I'm slightly higher targets right because we want I knew that Council's been having some discussions about kind of what services do we offer and what we don't and then departments I kind of give everybody a worst-case scenario of in terms of their budget target and then departments provided their best recommendation for okay if I'm going to minimize the impact to the community and I'm going to focus on things that I can implement right away and here is my best sense of where that would be. And so does that help answer that question?

I guess I was looking at like was staff outside of the executive team consulted with this?

We gave our executive team a little bit of latitude if they needed to work with their management team. And so some of our staff in our larger departments, I believe, did consult with their management team to get recommendations. I know that some of our smaller teams kind of worked more independently on that. And so there's always a little bit of a push and pull. We do wanna be transparent with our staff when we're undergoing budget reductions, but this type of mid-year kind of unexpected potential budget reduction does cause a lot of anxiety and alarm. And while we were kind of getting initial feedback and taking the temperature for council, we didn't wanna go too deep into the organization with some of these discussions. And we were also on a tight timeline to turn this around.

Council, any questions? Please tip your card if you have any. Councillor Husson.

Is the goal for us to recommend an option tonight?

I want to also recognize that this is a lot of information right and so To digest at one time. I didn't feel like it was fair After we had kind of pulled together both of these packages to ask you Okay, it can only be option one and I and I'm only interested in that I feel like there might be a fair amount of follow-up Questions and so our ask from council tonight is Do you agree with the idea of coming back for $750,000 in the supplemental budget, number one? Number two, do you agree with the staff recommendation that we should pause on further reductions beyond that and instead focus on fiscal year 27-28? And then the third is, would you like to continue this conversation in some way, shape, or form at your council retreat? So you're welcome to provide feedback on option one, option two. It's especially helpful because we'll talk a little bit after the Q&A session about fiscal year 27-28. The options in option one and option two, even if we don't take them today, they are things that we're going to need to think about for fiscal year 27-28. So if you have feedback on options one and two, it's helpful for staff to hear it's especially helpful If there's something that the majority of council feels like is an absolutely not an appropriate thing to put on the table That's helpful for us to know that's one less tool in our toolbox Okay, so I'll just make a couple comments and then we'll see if it's appropriate because I know we're limited on time and

Yeah, so the question then, I think it's a comment because you won't know the answer, or maybe you will. I'd love to understand more about what the Center for Mediation and Dialogue serves, and so if you want to answer that question.

Yeah, so let me pull up my notes for that slide real quick.

For the record, I would view that as a question, not a comment.

I know, I just didn't know.

I didn't know if you wanted to answer on the spot, so...

So our Center for Mediation Dialogue has about 50 trained volunteers, mediators, and so they offer things like workshops and training on landlord tenant issues. We like our code enforcement staff may refer difficult neighbor to neighbor issues to mediation in the hopes of kind of mitigating those some of those code impact impacts. There's an eviction prevention service that we offer through that service. And then I mentioned that they have a restorative justice pilot program that they're working on with the court. They also do just some internal staff training. And so we just had them train our all management team last week about de-escalation and handling customer complaints. And so they do provide a wide array of services. And Dan, I'll defer to you in case you want to add anything more that I've left out.

I think that's a it's a good summation. I think in general they with three three and a half FTE that provide these services and they are essentially trying to leverage those folks so that we talked about the 50 volunteers They're doing a lot of training and a lot of hands-on support to expand the reach and to get more people multilingual folks trained to do mediation in their communities and specifically with with various constituency groups there and then you know yeah they're dealing with direct mediation over some gnarly things in the community right so they're trying to keep people in their homes they're trying to you know deal with landlord tenant issues and some of those things are grant funded some of them you know we're subsidizing with the general fund

Okay. For the emergency planning and option one and option two, are the impacts the same or is it different? Correct, they're the same. Okay, so cutting emergency management. Reducing it, yes. Because it says CERT reduced in one, is it also in two? Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah, and then last question you shared a statistic about calls for service We get this many calls we have this many officers I think it was like 400 per officer and that would increase do have an estimate of like what the norm is across other cities or jurisdictions I do not have the call volume of how we compare to other jurisdictions I know chief Jepson and deputy chief right here.

If you know welcome to come join the party

Good evening. I don't have the statistical numbers, but I can tell you anecdotally, our patrol division is staffed by 14 less officers than Hillsboro, and we serve more calls for service annually. So statistically speaking, we serve a lot more, if that makes sense.

I'll reserve comments for later. Thanks.

Councillor Tiffin on.

I think all these options are giving us extreme heartburn looking at them, and I know that there's still work to be done in here. And we've made really hard cuts in past budget cycles, and we've started, I think, this list off to the side of if we end up with additional revenue, what can we resurrect or reestablish? With either option, it is not ideal. Safety is landing in both of these in ways that either option just sounds not good. How are we thinking about that in terms of a potential passing of the levy? in how we decide what, no matter what we end up going with, we're losing something of value that is going to impact the community. So what does that look like for us to make these cuts and then have some sort of a vision of how we would restore them should we, should the state fix these issues at the state level, should we be able to pass a levy?

Yeah, this is one of the reasons too that we're recommending that we not rush into additional budget reductions right now for fiscal year 26-27 because as we'll talk about in a minute, as we move forward to fiscal year 27-28, we do have some difficult choices to make in how we build that budget and I'd really like to the levy is a key conversation there right and I think that we need to look at the big picture particularly when we are faced with budget cuts that do impact the community in this way and so I would I think it we would just be better served to look holistically at that big picture and Because we also need to look out into the future for the over the next five years So if you were to go out for a five-year operating levy What does that mean? What amount would we be going out for? Is it possible to restore services or are we at such a position given? Voter appetite that we are only able to maintain the level that we're at or are we going to have to make reductions? so I think we need a little bit more information before we can really fully answer some of those questions, which is one of the reasons that we elected to use the one-time revenue to balance this year's budget, because reluctant to impact the community in these ways until we're a little bit further along in our fiscal sustainability action plan.

Councillor Teeter?

uh thank you to you and and the staff who who did this work for us and with us i know this was a heavy heavy burden to carry right after just going through a previous budget cycle um i've got one comment it leads into a question but my comment is about our council retreat and i do think this could be helpful for us to focus on more on the council retreat uh specifically in my mind potentially the definition or detail what actually community impact means for each of us because each of us as counselors has a different value for what we might see as being the the hardest impact to actually carry or the different burdens we're actually willing to put on the community in different areas and I think we need to have some sort of more open conversation about what that means when we're looking at, does this reduction have a community impact? And the answer from pretty much any reduction we make will be yes, it's just a matter of what is it and are we willing to carry that burden? So my assumption is, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, my assumption for this exercise, it was just very general, will the community feel the pain of this cut, is that right?

Yes, and I do think it's not a scientific analysis, right? And so on some of the slides where I put kind of the red X are ones where I felt like, you know, this has a significant community impact. So but for example, I put that kind of red X to say, hey, this has a lot of community impact under Center for Mediation and Dialogue. I didn't put it under our down payment assistance program because absolutely it has a community impact. But the breadth of that community impact is very small. And so, you know, I agree with what you're saying because it is subjective and it would mean different things to different people.

Okay. If we have time in our council retreat to give you all and staff better direction of where we are willing to accept some of that pain, I would be willing to have that conversation.

Yeah, I would say, when I look at these council goals, they're not gonna change much, and rather than go through an exercise where we wordsmith what good governance means, I think we have lacked the ability to have that in-depth conversation, which is why I think the city manager is kind of recommending that we go that path, so just keep that in mind.

Councilor Duggar, sorry, Council President.

Thank you, Mayor. How much are we spending on consultants this year?

Oh, gosh. I don't have that number off the top of my head. Carolyn, do you? See, this is why I don't like that mic.

So we did do an analysis on that earlier this summer. If I recall, it was something like 5.9 million. But it's a bit of a misnomer because the general ledger account says professional services. But when you dig into the details, a lot of that is not consultants, right? So it's things like our janitorial.

there was a whole bunch of stuff in there i'm drawing a blank off the top of my head here but very little of that was actually true consultant that is hired to do some service that is otherwise provided by the city because i think um i can't speak for it like that's pretty high on my list and not because it's not important work everything we do is important work but i want more of our important work done by our important people you've asked about this a number of times and i know there's reasons to do that and sometimes it's cost beneficial to do that but we also like like that's an important one for me um how much of the proposed in the scenarios are cuts to management versus uh and what is our capacity to absorb those cuts

So we really tried to steer away from identifying very specific positions through this exercise. We did try to keep it more high level. And so we would need to do some more analysis on, you know, if we were to implement option one or option two, what would that actually mean? Where would it make sense to cut a manager versus a line level staff?

I'll be paying very close attention to that too In my mind this represents to maybe two and a half percent So were there scenarios where we asked? the entire city to give us two to two and a half percent of cuts and what would that look like because I see I see I'll get where I'm going to just ask the uncomfortable question. This feels like purposely uncomfortable for us to make us make a decision. And I'm not saying that's the case. I'm just saying what it feels like. Like, oh, we're going to cut the things that are really visible to make it difficult to do versus something else. And that's like, I don't think anyone's watching this. I would be shocked if they were. But if they do, like, that's the question I want to know as a Beaverton resident is like, why is this? seem to focus so much on relatively minimal things when we have 600 employees that are just incredibly impactful to me as a resident. So that's where that question's coming from. Was there a scenario where we said everyone in the city, whether that be materials, people, whatever two and a half percent is pretty reasonable across the board. And that would generate more than two and a half million dollars. I believe if our general fund is 110 ish million, I'm going off memory. I could be wrong about that, but was that scenario addressed?

Yeah, so option two really represents kind of each area being given that target and asked to meet it. There are some areas, to be transparent, that are minimally staffed enough that I don't feel comfortable recommending a recommendation to them. I don't feel comfortable recommending a recommendation to our HR staff. They assist the entire city. They're minimally staffed. People feel like they're not getting always the timely service that they want. And so we're already working to try to provide better service there. And so there is some judgment on my part. But I guess I'm a little confused about kind of the comment that these are minimal reductions because they're pretty impactful. And then I would say in terms of trying to provide counsel the worst case scenario, I don't want to be sitting here tonight giving you a presentation recommending cutting incredibly valuable services. Neither do any of our executive team. If we could come up with an easier reduction, why wouldn't we? We have made 32 cuts to staff over the last several years. We are out of easy options to take. So even if you take, and we'll get a little bit into this when we talk about fiscal year 27, 28, if you look at our purely discretional services, and those are things that are lovely and amazing, like Center for Mediation, events, sustainability and recycling, some of the things that we are just not required to provide as an organization you can cut all of those services to the bone or eliminate altogether and still not make a significant dent in the forecasted deficit for next year so Unfortunately, that's the situation that we're in, and that's kind of what I meant at the beginning of the presentation. I don't mean to be doom and gloom. I don't mean to leave you feeling like you have no path in front of you, but that is why it's important for us to start having these conversations about What does it mean to be Beaverton? What makes Beaverton feel like Beaverton? And what does it mean to offer services here at the city? Because we're in a really difficult spot. There's no easy answers, unfortunately.

that additional context I'll say my comments obviously but I would like to reiterate what a couple others like for our November retreat I think it makes so much sense for us to spend like I don't want to talk about our goals anymore I think we have to spend our November retreat talking exclusively about these and these cuts and getting this right because the reality is I don't think If we go out to levy, I don't think it would pass right now based on the thousands of doors we knocked in this for this May election. And I don't, I just worry about that. Like, I don't know that that's going to be a solution, but we can talk about that later. But I just, I think we have to get, we can't keep hunting. So.

Councilor Hartmeyer, break.

I have a lot of comments, but we were asked to stick to questions for now. And if you're gonna get to this into the next section, please let me know. But I'm curious, do we have an anticipated or projected deficit for 28-29?

We do, but I think I would feel more comfortable coming back to us unless you feel comfortable. But I think we've started to run a couple different scenarios of levy, no levy, but we were also kind of not sure what direction we would get tonight. So I think I would appreciate the opportunity to spend a little more time on that. Of course, yeah.

And I don't need to know what it is. I'm just curious. I think one of our challenges has been we're trying to close the gap and and every year it's big and it's really hard and it feels really insurmountable and so also acknowledge just thank you for the hard work um i i think you kind of touched on this and i think this is why the staff recommendation is where it is to hold on anything beyond the kind of operational reductions that um were identified But am I correctly like maybe assuming or just like gleaning that like making these cuts now won't really impact 27, 28, 28, 29, right? Like it's like doing it now doesn't really change like 27, 28, right? Like it seems like it's actually just going to cause more pain right now.

They are structural in nature, so they are designed to carry forward. And so they will carry forward and impact fiscal year 27, 28. Now I'm getting my years mixed up. Sorry. 27, 28. And so really my recommendation to pause has more to do with kind of wanting to look holistically at the big picture. We have a lot of ongoing work going on around evaluating things like the Center for Mediation Cost Recovery, you know, as one example. And then the other really is around timing. And so literally I think next week is our first kind of debrief about this year's fiscal budget and designing the process for fiscal year 27-28. So I think we would be well served kind of looking at that larger picture and evaluating more holistically what choices and tools that we might want to put into play for that budget.

Thank you. My other question is, I'm trying to recall back to our many, many work sessions where we've been talking about the obligatory, the statutory, the required services, but I think I was surprised to see emergency planning in here. Is emergency planning considered a discretionary service and not a required service from even a state staff? There's nothing requiring us as a city to provide that.

Yeah, we do need to require emergency, provide emergency management services. The level to which we're providing them is not required. And so I'm not proposing that we eliminate emergency management. That wouldn't be responsible. But we could put it on the table as a potential reduction and still offer core services, but change the way that we offer them.

Okay, thank you.

Councilor Kimme.

Well, thank you for all the work so far. I know it's very difficult. What would we do to help you today to implement this, frankly? That's one question. Another is, actually, I'll ask the question first.

Yeah, I think we're looking for feedback today kind of on, you know, moving forward with that city manager $750,000 recommendation, kind of thumbs up, thumbs down. I'm assuming that it's fine, but I always just want to double check. We're looking for feedback about if you're in agreement with the general strategy of kind of focusing our efforts on strategies for fiscal year 27, 28. and then Thirdly, you know continuing the conversation into your November retreat. I want to make sure that's a productive discussion So I'm looking for feedback and thoughts around if we're to continue that conversation at that retreat and I've heard a couple suggestions so far So kind of what would be helpful? for a council to kind of have that conversation? Is there additional information that we can provide? Because ultimately what I and staff are gonna be looking for is, and we'll talk about this in a minute, if you think of the fiscal year 27, 28 deficit as a big bucket, we have a variety of different tools that we could fill that bucket with. And I don't want to come back with a budget that's filled with tools that this council will not support and does not agree with. And so I'd like to get it as correct as we can before we get into a very legislative and mandated process where we're not able to really talk about it in the way that we can talk about it today. Because today we're talking about policy impacts and service delivery. So I think that this year's budget is a little bit different. Would like to work a little bit more with this council given the magnitude of some of the service choices that you have. And so ultimately, even if it's not today, what I'm looking for are kind of your acceptable outcomes. You know, what are the services that are acceptable to reduce? What are the services, if any, that are acceptable to eliminate? Where does one-time money come into play while there are outstanding potential revenue choices? So it's kind of those types of decisions that ultimately staff are gonna be looking for, but I don't necessarily need to have them today.

Okay, so if we make the decision in November on council retreat, what is the turnaround time to implement that before the 27-28 budget cycle? Do we have enough time?

So I'm not recommending that we implement any decisions in addition to the $750,000 I'm recommending today this fiscal year. We are already in September. The soonest we can come back to you with the supplemental is October 6. Anything that's significant in options one or two are going to take some time for us, and I don't think I mean budget reductions are great. They help solve our structural issue I am running into some staff capacity issues because I need our finance team focused on 2728 so the goal for that council retreat would be to really look at our budget process a little bit differently than we have by involving council a little bit more transparently and some of the Policy and service trade-offs that you're facing for fiscal year 2728 so that would be the goal would be focusing on that upcoming fiscal year. And that's what we're looking for feedback on, if that's acceptable to council.

Okay, I'll hold my comments later, yeah.

Okay, so we're gonna return to kind of the last part of the presentation. Next slide, please. Okay, so now that I presented you with lots of tough choices, now we're gonna talk about fiscal year 27, 28. Again, not trying to be doom and gloom, but trying to kind of paint a picture of the road ahead and kind of some potential paths to get there. And so as we think about fiscal year 27, 28, the operating levy has been mentioned a couple of times So that's something that's on council's fiscal sustainability action plan is something we will actively explore this fall, regardless of whether May of 2027 is the right time, whether it's November of 2027 or into 2028. We would be looking at building the fiscal year 2728 budget without levy revenue in it Even if council decides to move forward with the May of 2027 operating levy Due to the state requirements around when we have to have a budget legally adopted It would be most prudent to build the budget without that levy revenue and if it's successful add it back in rather than try to make a bunch of significant budget reductions all at once. So we are facing a challenging budget situation. Next slide, please. We are still working on a number of different things to calculate the potential general fund deficit that we might be facing. So I don't feel comfortable giving you a number, At this early stage you can see here in the screen We are still working on a number of things fiscal year 25 26 actuals compared to budget 27 28 capital outlay estimates and department expenses revenue forecasts medical medical dental costs impers contribution rates those will all kind of Come in gradually over the next couple months. So we'll be able to narrow this range down As we continue to work on it But for now what I can say is our best guess at this moment in time with lots of asterisks Attached to it is we think that the general fund potential deficit will be between six to nine million dollars That's a significant improvement for the deficit that we face this fiscal year in large part due to the hard work of this council implementing the general services fee as well as the hard work of implementing reductions in this budget. So that's what we're looking at right now. This does not include the $750,000 in supplemental reductions that we are recommending. And so that will impact fiscal year 27, 28. But for the purposes of this forecast, we just looked at kind of where we're at today, at this moment in time, and then tried to forecast ahead for what we're facing. So in the next couple slides, we're gonna discuss a couple scenarios to start to kind of forecast what strategy that we could take to address that projected deficit. And so for those scenarios, for the sake of those scenarios, we're going to go ahead and split the difference in this range and just give you an example of what would it take to solve for a $7.5 million deficit as an example. Next slide, please. right so the first slide from a service delivery perspective is maybe the most ideal that is like we have a successful may of 2027 levy what does our financial situation look like i want to put a couple very large caveats on this slide in the next couple slides we have not done official revenue projections And so these estimates are really, really high level, kind of our best guess. And what the goal here is for you really to kind of see the potential order of magnitude of some of the tools that you have on your disposal and how they can all be put in play together to kind of meet that, reduce that deficit. So the first revenue item that you have here, again, this is a very, very high-level estimate. Lots more work that we need to do. But we did add a new photo radar camera just a few months ago. It is too early for us to really tell how that revenue is going to be coming in and where that's going to be meeting what we projected at. So we'll know more in a few months. But we do anticipate adding a couple of new cameras that we anticipate at least one of will be in play for next fiscal year. So a very broad guess that perhaps, much like this year, we could budget for an additional million dollars from that expansion. I've put here on the screen additional money for the full year of TLT so that the full arts program would be covered. And then finally, because we had initially been talking about a five or six million dollar operating levy last year, I've gone ahead and put that number here on the screen. I do think that before any decisions are made about a potential Levy amount you'd want to obviously look at voter polling, but you'd also want to look at a five-year Forecast of the general fund because as we know one of the problems with property tax revenue is that it structurally does not keep up with expenses So over the five-year life of a levy you get less buying power And so but for the purposes of an example, I've just put in five million and In that scenario, at least for the coming fiscal year, we would have budget reductions that we're making mid-year that would come into play, would probably be a little bit higher than the 750 because we would have the full year. And then we would probably need to make a few reductions in service delivery equivalent to two FTE or so. some modest reductions, but heavier on the revenue side, puts us in not too bad of a place, at least for that first year. Next slide. But I told you that we wouldn't build a budget with levy revenue in it. So what would that mean? So if you just look at on the revenue side, photo radar and the additional money from the full year of TLT, what are we looking at? We're looking at significant expense reductions absent additional revenue into play. So if we looked at all of the cuts that are identified in options one and two and totaled them all together, that is approximately $2.5 million. That leaves us with still an additional $2.8 million in reductions that would be needed to close the gap without a levy, without one-time revenue, and without those. And so, next slide please. What does that mean? And that means that we would need to look at additional service reductions and then also just some other structural changes. So we do have looking at healthcare plan design as something that's in our fiscal sustainability action plan. This is just a real initial guess of what that number could be. We have not entered into official discussions around this yet, but it is probably something that we need to start talking about and exploring. This could be things like looking at the plans that we offer, changing to a high deductible, offering more cost sharing options. I don't want any employees watching to be alarmed. Nothing's going to be happening tomorrow, but it is something. That given potential cuts of this magnitude that we should probably explore if if we're going to be pursuing down this path and then Looking at making up the remainder through service reductions. That's roughly equivalent to seven to nine staff So I didn't list on here. There most likely would be some internal impacts, you know, at some of our internal services when we're looking at impacts of that magnitude. But what I'm focusing on for the purposes of this presentation is really looking at the community impacts that would go along in addition to that. So we would need to consider things like eliminating a 24-7 police records response. This would continue to impact our patrol team, as we noted earlier. We would need to look at eliminating our proactive policing efforts, like the bike team and the traffic team. We would consider reducing the amount of graffiti cleanup and trashcan service that we offer. We would look at reducing our permit counter hours. slower code compliance resolution and eliminating events altogether. And so obviously there's a number of different ways that you could look at how we reduce our services. So this is just kind of a high level example of like if you had to go to the worst of the worst case scenario, what might that look like? So certainly further work to be done in terms of potential expense reduction. There is another tool that we can look at that I did not put on the screen, but for me, for fiscal year 27, 28, I would also want to consider looking at our anticipated level of underspend and our reserve targets. If council determined that a levy is worth exploring at some point, and if we project that our reserve targets are likely to be exceeded, I think it's worthwhile considering what short-term use of one-time funding is acceptable for the organization as well as council, because these are pretty drastic service level cuts. And then once that service is cut, building that service back up can take a significant amount of time and can have significant community impacts. So this is a really common strategy for cities that are working through significant fiscal challenges. We did it for a number of years at my previous agency on the east side while we were kind of on the edge of the fiscal cliff. because it does take time to implement things like voter-approved measures. To be clear, it's not a viable long-term strategy. We cannot do that for forever. But I think my advice to you unsolicited, someone who's been through many of these conversations, is think about, again, what kind of community that you want to be, what levels of service. you're willing to take on, and what outcomes are acceptable to you. And that will probably guide our use of one-time funding, because if we hear from you strongly, You know you're willing to kind of write things out over the next few years in the hopes of trying to get some sort of voter approved measure in place We can do what we can on the staff side of things to try to preserve those services And I certainly have all the confidence that Carolyn and her team will tell us if we are using one-time funding to the decree that we shouldn't have. So that is a tool that I did not put on the screen, but just to not leave you feeling like there's no way forward, that is something that you can consider to try to mitigate some of the more severe impacts. So next slide, please. I'm gonna wrap it up. Next slide, please. So just as a reminder, here are the things that we are seeking feedback on, looking at, again, reducing expenses via your fall supplemental budget that you'll see on October 6th, holding on further expense reduction until fiscal year 27, 28, and then considering further strategy sessions at your November council retreat. So next slide please. I just want to thank you for engaging in a difficult conversation. I know that these choices are not easy, but we are at the point in our fiscal sustainability efforts where we just need to make some difficult decisions and start carving out the path that's ahead of us. So I'm happy to take your questions and get your feedback on how we'd like to proceed. Thank you.

Councilor Titor, first to the gate. Oh, you were first. Were you first? Did Councilor Hartmeyer pray? She's hiding behind the computer. She's so skinny now I didn't even see her.

We don't talk about other people's bodies. I am curious, Carolyn and Elizabeth, and it kind of ties into kind of your last comments, Elizabeth, about techniques, is that is there a reason to not use one-time fund, especially when it's underspend, in budget planning when our reserves have been met right like it to me it seems like it's kind of a healthy cycle that if you had underspend to use that into next year's budget um so i'm just kind of curious right is there a reason we should not is there kind of i guess you know government budgeting principles here that you can kind of guide us a little bit on Sorry about that.

I think about that as sort of the rainy day fund, right? Do you really want to spend all your rainy day fund right now? Oh, sorry. Sorry, which one should I be talking in the future? Can you hear me? No. Like this. sorry so there's a rainy day fund that you could be thinking about right what's gonna happen three to five years from now do we really want to save or there's the more immediate impact that we could head off right the really big impact that we're talking about here like Elizabeth said it is a not taking a whole lot of time to tear things down but it takes a long time to rebuild them there's community trust at play there are other longer term retention issues at play it's sometimes more expensive to rebuild things so that's really the trade-off that that you need to be thinking about in my opinion thank you elizabeth did you want to add anything

Yeah, I think that that's right. I mean, I think that, you know, let's say over the course of 10 years, you're using one-time revenue every single time. That's not the best strategy, particularly if the one-time revenue remains like the same, right? And so one of the things that we didn't point out in this presentation is we use significantly less one-time money this year to balance the budget. And so what I would be looking for from a management standpoint is are we taking action to try to resolve that structural issue? And if so, then I'm more comfortable with it. Are we continuing to at least keep that level steady or starting to decrease it? That makes me feel more comfortable. And then obviously just looking at our overall reserve goals. So again, We exceeded our reserve goal at budget adoption. And so even with the use of that one-time fund, so those are things that I ask myself just from like a management standpoint.

I'm going to put a question I just heard you say back to you. Just in terms of how are you feeling about our progress towards reducing those structural challenges that we've seen?

Yeah, I mean, I think that the organization and the council have done a lot of work. And so I'm really proud of the work that we've done over the last couple of years. And I think that getting that general services fee in place was no small feat. And I think that We were able to make that after thoughtful and robust discussion, but we still were able to make that in in the time frame that we identified and that's really no small feat. I wish that we didn't have to reduce staff to the extent that we've had to reduce over the last several years, but we did through that exercise exceed the initial expense goals reduction goals that have been set in the fiscal sustainability action plan and that's also indicative in my opinion of the organization's willingness to tighten our belt and be good stewards of taxpayer dollars so I think that we are making good progress towards structural solutions I just think it is it's a marathon right and it can take some time yeah

thank you thank you so much um i i'm gonna maybe kind of frame myself within the stuff that you're asking for feedback and add in some thoughts but i definitely think that we should move forward with the supplemental you know operational reductions that are that you've identified and are recommended and knowing that the impact, while it's not easy, there's work involved, right? But just knowing that this bucket of that 750K seems to be an amount that we can really handle. I do really think we need to hold on further expense reduction until next fiscal year. To me, the benefit of cutting that dependency on the one-time fund now is not strong enough for me to have that work continue. I think staff has been, you all have had to do such hard things. And putting together these recommendations is really, really hard. I think it'd be nice to breathe even if it's for a week, right, between getting ready for the next budget cycle. So I would like us to hold on any further expense reduction. I definitely think it's worth spending time at Council Retreat on this in a deeper way. I think that we've spent a lot of time building our foundation, building our base, trying to understand. I especially was grateful today to see the, here's some operational recommendations and here are some policy considerations. We both have a hard job here. None of these decisions are easy. And I think Councilor Duggar to your question is like, well, we feel them because we are at the bare minimum of even like discretionary services left to cut, right? Like we really are, there's just so little left to go after. So of course we feel them. And I think a lot of these things are things that kind of help you feel connected to community and that you're a part of the city. And so I really struggle to see some of these things on the list and at the same time they make complete sense when we've talked about what is required of a city and what have we required of ourselves through ordinance so I think that November will be a difficult conversation but I I think that's when is the right time to continue the conversation um and and with that hold on the additional 1.8 I think my only other thought is I have some ideas I'm gonna save for retreat because I think that's where like these types of you know maybe play comes in of how we can work on this and then in another way but we will have a new counselor coming on to this council and this council has had years of Exposure to this and it's been it's hard. It's hard to learn. It's hard to grasp. And I'm just thinking back to all of our roundtables of like having that in one packet for whomever comes on board to help them. Because I think that even tonight, I think we are it's hard to recollect all of the things that like have got us into this conversation. So for whomever comes next right to it, it's a book at this point of all the things and just a sincere. acknowledgement and gratitude for all of the work done to each and every one of you that had any piece of this. It's just so challenging and I know that we asked this of you and I really appreciate the quick turnaround and to put the effort into seeing what's possible. I think the exercise was important and I think it's okay to say we should only move forward with part of it at this time.

Councillor Deiter.

Yeah. I support also approving the $750,000 in supplemental reductions and holding off on further policy changes until after our council retreat and until we include it in our next fiscal year budget. I really appreciate that recommendation. I like that recommendation. And all my time prepping for this meeting and thinking about this work in advance, And even through most of this meeting, I found myself leaning towards the framework or the idea behind option one of just going ahead and forward with elimination of more programs instead of reducing capacity of the rest of the organization. However, I did feel my mind changing there at the end. Elizabeth, there was something you were saying about just how hard it is to restart programs that we stop. I am supportive of a levy. I do think we need to do a levy. I am afraid of doing a levy in May because I don't think it'll pass. i don't know if i could support doing a levy and may without some more polling and some understanding of if we've got a chance of being successful with that framework and with that context in mind that's where where my mind i think is is kind of leaning towards just kind of preserving some programs even if they're far are greatly reduced capacity of those programs just so we can restart them a little bit when we get some more funding from from a potential levy That's kind of where my head is at right now. I did see some of the potential cuts you all listed out in the $2.8 million of reduction options in the next fiscal year budget. I see some of those things and my mind is like, yes, we should absolutely be looking at these things either way, and then some of them I'm like, oh, I would never wanna touch that. So I think that's where the council retreat conversation comes in, where we need a way to actually visualize it as a group and give staff very clear direction that I don't think you could get just from us giving a few minutes of conversation tonight of where our highest priorities are and where our red lines are or where we're just gonna say I can't vote for a budget that would do that. But where there's some wiggle room, I want us to be able to find that as a group and really start tackling that. But I really appreciate that you did call a lot of this out because it definitely gives me more clarity. And I think that's really important right now, especially leading into the council retreat in a couple months. But I really appreciate this work session tonight. It's been really helpful for me, so thank you.

Councillor Tivnon.

Thank you. Agreed on the... agreed on the supplemental budget. Right now, and I agree to holding off on So my final comments are on the retreat itself, and I really loved the comment you made earlier, Councillor Teeter, about finding what we truly mean by community impact. I think that's kind of at the heart of all of this, is what is a city government responsible for ensuring? And I know the first things that pop into my head, but having a facilitator walk us through how we unwrap that together to find where we're aligned and where we're not, I think will help all the other conversations be just a little bit, maybe just have more clarity to them. The other thing is around what are core services and making sure we're in complete agreement on that as well as thinking about it, not only in terms of like a Venn diagram, but like at the center of it, what's in there and what concentrically going out in terms of like the absolute, like the water must run through the pipes. You must feel safe leaving your front door. That kind of stuff, like having that conversation. I think also, I'm really curious to know, even just a point in time now, as well as projections, what does it really cost to live in Beaverton? Having an idea of what does it cost to live here versus elsewhere in the state? What does it cost to live in Oregon? I think we've read a lot of news articles about that. But what does it mean to someone deciding if they're going to live in Tigard or Beaverton or Portland or anywhere else? And just getting a sense of where we kind of stack in terms of that. Because affordability, I think, is going to have to shift a little bit in there. heads, everybody's heads, everybody. And then the community impact part, yeah. So those are the big things I would love to be able to cover at the retreat. And the last thing is, can we plan to drive down to Salem What is happening? I just read this article about Independence, Oregon, and it was like looking into the future. I don't know if it's every single city is having the exact same conversations we are at their council meetings, but I bet the majority of them are. And that's something I would just love to know how we... as a body can get out and in front of our legislature because we're just gonna keep doing this and we're gonna continue chasing this ball that just keeps moving further out in front of us because of this issue at that level and we can't change that. But I mean, every city is spiraling because of it, and I'm not seeing urgency in the media right now around it. So how do we how do we create an urgency there, but also in our community, regardless of if we go out for a levy in May or November, we There is urgency here. We have to sound the alarm as loud as we can. I don't know if the banner we carry in the parade this year is the dollar or what, but like every single opportunity that we've got, how do we take the best advantage of it to make sure people are coming along with us on this rough road?

Spoken like a true marketing person. We'll be switching out the banner this year to put the dollar in. And I will tell you, because I think Jocelyn is sitting over there, we drive to Salem together probably 25 times a year and talk about this. Anytime you're welcome to drive down with us and I will tell you that this is a. Massive topic of conversations with local government and showed up in the governor's prosperity council recommendations. But the problem is the state legislature does not rely on property taxes they rely on income taxes there's no incentive for the state legislature. to take on this politically hard topic because resetting property taxes and not reducing money like on income taxes is gonna make this place unsustainable to live in. And Independence, Oregon is the canary in the coal mine, but every other city is in the same scenario. I mean, it's happening in North Plains. They can't even keep a mayor. They're on their fifth mayor, and city manager's on a 30-day contract. So I think we always thought it would be bigger cities to topple first, but we're seeing it. the other direction. And I will say for everyone's edification, the League of Cities is taking this on as a major issue. They've brought in a communications consultant to make recommendations. But like everything else, people don't understand the difference between income tax and property tax. I mean, I got asked by the media last year, why are you making cuts? The state just gave back a billion dollars. And I said, well, I think you need to ask the state why they gave back a billion dollars. And I'll tell you why we're making cuts.

people don't understand how taxes work i mean at the core issue counselor husson okay so i have a general few general comments i would say mostly in agreement with what the counselors can you hear me is that working yes okay um i'm in general agreement with all the things the counselor said um i know it sounds like you had a couple people on option one and option two i will i was leaning toward option two but here's what i will share i'm comfortable with the down payment assistance being cut i'm comfortable and devastated with the city's supported events being cut i'm comfortable with the abatement program i'm a little hesitant about emergency but it sounded like we're not removing emergency we're just cutting a little um i had some hesitation about the center for mediation and dialogue that's where my i think i don't To be clear, my creepy crawlies went up on all of it, but these are the ones that I would like to vocally say. I'm also a little on the police, but I think it just comes from more question asking. That said, I think you're looking for me to say it. that I support the $150,000, so I will support the $750,000. I'm comfortable holding on further expense reductions, and I'm comfortable considering further strategy sessions. I do want to say that I pull up the multicultural gap analysis all the time because I think it's one of my favorite documents, and for those of you who are dying to see it, page 37 and 38 have these beautiful recommendations around things that we can do to be accessible to all communities and so I wanna make sure that we're really rooted in that and looking at those recommendations in a way that does not put more burden financially on us. I love the concept of talking about this on the retreat. My concerns from all the retreats I've been to is sometimes we're being pitched really great programs by really great staff that I love but we're not always in the position to talk about those programs or get more data or understand more about those programs. So if we're gonna go down the retreat route, I'd like to make sure that there's place for dialogue and discussion, but that there's also some access to data around some of these conversations. And examples of data are some of the questions I'd ask, just so that we can understand more about just as an example, the Center of Mediation and Dialogue or call for service data. I get nervous to do this again with the presentation that we see and then respond without the ability to have feedback or more data or more perspectives from the community. The last thing I'll say is, There's been the conversation of the levy and I'm very hesitant. I think the polling was obviously not strong last year. I don't know how much we will change, but if that is the route that we are needing to go, I'm hoping that we can either pick up certain things that we got from this gap analysis or find other ways to make the community whole. I think that would go a really long way for me to feel like I could really fight for this. Kudos to everyone that's doing this work. I know it's hard, I know it's uncomfortable, but I think it's really big that we're comfortable to be cutting right now, because I feel like in previous meetings, maybe we haven't been so fast, and I think I'm hearing that, and I appreciate that, so thank you.

I'm trying to sum up kind of where council's at to give closing remark feedback at the end. Can you help me understand what you mean by make the community whole? You'll support cuts if we make the community whole. Like, what do you mean by that?

Okay, so when I'm talking, I'm talking about the levy. So if we go down the levy route, right? So what are the things that we're doing that we're in this gap analysis or what's the feedback that we're taking from community to incorporate in the future so that I can be like, okay, like here's what we're, like here's what we've been working towards, right? And we've gotten some good feedback from that.

That makes sense. Okay. Councilor President?

I'll start with questions. This is a revenue question. I know that new development is heavily a good thing in Oregon and in cities because of measure five and 50. We passed the Cooper Mountain Plan. I know that's not a budget question, but at the end of the day, we've got to get that developed. That's a revenue question for me. and don't answer tonight because i know you don't have the answer but like we like what is this strategy and what do we need to do because it's it's we've passed it a while ago and it's still sitting at the up there and we got to get that developed so not necessarily a question for tonight but like I think revenue through a lot of different lenses, and that is one of them, right? We've got to get development. Same with our properties in downtown. Big question, and I don't want anyone to read into whether I'm supporting this or not, but I understand we can eliminate Bureau if needed. Like from a city council perspective, I'd like to know what the impact that would be on the city fund.

Actually, we cannot. It's voter approved.

Believe we can I believe it. I remember hearing that or can we get clarification?

Yeah, yeah You say no, okay

Yeah, like I remember someone saying that at some point.

Let's get attorney feedback. I don't think the council has the ability to overturn a voter-approved levy, but can you do that tomorrow and get back to us? That feels like a top-of-the-question feedback of can the council, do we have the authority

to overturn bureau like are you are you saying i'm saying like the 150 million dollars we're not required to spend it like we can eliminate and and in the program today with obviously the existing bonds in place that's what i mean so maybe i'm not clarifying but we can stop that stop you know and and reset stop future debt yeah but but reset the tax ultimately right does that make sense

I don't think you're correct, but let's get the attorney's feedback.

The reason I ask questions is, to me, we've looked at this through a few different lenses. We haven't looked at massive shifts in the way we're operating. I don't support that. It would be a really big... LEAP FOR ANY OF US, SO DON'T TAKE ME AS SUPPORTING THAT, BUT I'M CURIOUS TO KNOW. THAT WAS MY LAST QUESTION. AS FAR AS COMMENTS, I WOULD LIKE TO SEE US MOVE INTERNAL AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. SO I KNOW I ASKED A QUESTION EARLIER ABOUT CONSULTANTS. I KNOW TO YOUR POINT, LIKE, IT'S NOT QUITE JUST, WE'RE NOT JUST BUYING OUTSIDE KNOWLEDGE OR OUTSIDE PROJECTS, BUT I THINK I know that there's expertise outside of the city that we don't have. I know that we have a lot in the city, too, that maybe isn't quite as qualified, but it would get us 90% there. And I think we're at the point in a budget cycle where we like 90% is probably good enough or however much we can get internal if it's not 100% as good as it might be external. But like, could we if we have capacity? So I'd like to see that. One of the weird things about budgeting, and I apologize for my comments, I'm kind of all over the board, they don't feel like i have a lot of expertise even though i've been doing this i've been on budget committee since i believe twenty eighteen i still feel this is not the same as a household budget i think a lot of people mistakenly think that we don't we've been here i often wonder what it would look like if we just said you have a hundred and ten million dollars you're the experts bring that to us instead of it going through this situation where we have to go through this whole rigmarole or whatever you call it on like, these are my priorities and these are your priorities. I feel like there's gotta be a better way to budget operationally than we're doing right now because it continues to I feel like just to get to a conversation around $2.5 million of cuts, which is, again, 2% to 2.5%, we didn't solve it. It is incredibly painful the way we're doing it. I will say, I think... there's still a massive opportunity. If we're thinking about a levy, whether it be in May, November, or the following year, we should be talking about it widely. We need to engage with every single partner. And I think our comms has improved, but not nearly enough to make me comfortable asking the community. I think we've got a double, triple, quadruple down on better communications on value. And again, I think it has improved, I have noticed, but I just don't think we're there. I can support 750 and that's a no-brainer that that doesn't that feels like to me that would have happened anyway so it feels like we're almost cheating a win there just because like the only The only maybe thing that wouldn't have happened was the elimination of the consultant to do the study on the central plant. The other stuff, if we were just seeing lower costs anyway, that would have happened anyway, stuff like that. So that's a no-brainer to me. I would strongly encourage us, from an operational standpoint, We know what's coming next fiscal year. You guys know it better than we do. Like if there's opportunities for strategic, you know, operational adjustments here and there, I know you're going to make them. I know you're going to do your best at that. But like anything that we can do to get that number lower before it hits us will be super helpful. There's fatigue, you know, in this over and over. It just feels like we're just death by a thousand cuts, right? So thank you.

Okay, I'm gonna go and then we'll have Councillor Kimme and then we'll, if there's second comments, then I'll wrap up where I think we are. I do know that we have enough council direction for the $750,000 in cuts, but I wanna hear from everybody tonight. I also hear that we have agreement on taking our council retreat to do more of this work. I agree with Councillor Husson about just getting Feedback from staff and pitches, but we do need some work on What these cuts would mean like this is this report? I know took an awful lot of time I see you in your office late at night when I'm back here and for second meetings I see you there first thing in the morning every time I walk by your office. This is up and I understand the workload Required to go into this particularly when we're asking you to be an interim role doing your job and the job you held before so I Think the council hears you on the workload piece moving into The next budget cycle we need you to be able to do these things I would say though for me like I understand seeing the emergency manager cut here but what's missing for me in this document is that I WE, RIGHT, THERE'S A LOT OF GRANTS THAT COME TO EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT. SO IF WE REDUCE A STAFF FROM TWO TO ONE, IS THAT PERSON GOING TO HAVE THE CAPACITY TO DO THE GRANT WRITING AND DO THE STATUTORY REQUIREMENTS THAT ARE REQUIRED BY THE STATE LAW AND AS THE PERSON THAT HAS THE EMERGENCY MANAGER SEAT ON THE GOVERNMENT? on the governor's task force? I don't think so. So what revenue are we forgoing by cutting one of these positions? And then so it's not such an easy cut for me to say that this particular program could have a reduction of 50% and still be functional. And we are all old enough to remember living through COVID. And we just went through a global emergency where emergency management played a large role. And I understand that we are not in one right in this second. But it would be foolish for us to think that another emergency event isn't coming. Greater than 50% chance that a Cascadia level event is going to happen within the next 20 years And so there's a lot of reasons why I think we need to understand what a cut to emergency management Really understands. I mean I was surprised that arts library wasn't at all in the mix I'm not advocating for cuts to either one of those but we have three people that do art so if you're asking the council to cut emergency management by 50% and would there's no other choice like what I say reduce arts function over cutting emergency management but I wasn't given those perceived two choices here I am a huge proponent of the library but like we had talked about last year right I know we took a little bit of public heat on this but library taxes went up 65 percent and we lost two million dollars How do we reconcile with that? And like and see have virtually no cuts come out of it and nothing like the gap is made up through our general fund. You know, the council probably should have worked a little bit more in alignment to push that kind of information to the community. And it is a really, really important third space that lots of things it would be my last level of cut ever. But we don't like it. It's we're at mediation, emergency management and sustainability. and we're not seeing cuts in other areas. And I get that, that's why I asked your feedback on how you frame this, and I guess it's not exhaustive, but those are the kind of things that I'm interested in weighing in on. And the same for events. The other aspect that we could say is one events person and every manager in this entire city has to work one event a year instead of having three dedicated FTE. But again, we're not giving these kind of opportunities to weigh in on what's the most important thing. You know, I worked prior to being the mayor for an organization that went through a lot of cuts, particularly as like healthcare and everything went up and down. And I worked for a part of the agency doing school-based health that didn't produce revenue. And so every year I had to be on the other side of this conversation being like, is my program going to be cut? Here's all the kids we serve. Here's what we're doing. So if this is your... If you are the staff person in these that we talked about tonight like I've sat in your shares too and I often have thought I often would think why is no one asking me my opinion about cutting this program and so you know I would want to make sure that I understand why we didn't do it now but are we talking to people in these departments to understand truly what those cuts would mean and if they have any outside the box ideas. Those are things that couldn't happen in the timeline we gave you, but could most certainly happen between now and going forward. Mediation, the other thing that Jocelyn and I have been working on with the mayors is trying to compel Metro to look at non-traditional services in the supportive housing services. If our mediation team is keeping people from eviction, it should be supported by the regional tax we all agreed to. And tomorrow, Metro is launching, they have, Metro collects, 30 million dollars of fees for them out of this measure and now they're going to announce that they want to do special things with it before they fund cities before they fund all the services we've asked for so the mayors have put together a list with the help of every staff in every city to say this is what we're spending on homeless and housing services that need to be funded before you start doing more grant programs. Like our budgets can't withstand it and there is amazing examples between what Carly's team and mediation have done, what our courts have done to keep people housed, what our mental health court has done and none of that is being funded by the services. So we do need to like walk the dog on some of these to make sure that we're doing it. I would also say that you know health care we have two health care options which is not typical for an organization this size i've also worked for agencies that incentivize people to go on to their spouse's health care so this is a huge cost for us i understand we have a million dollars of potential uh savings i mean that's gonna we need to be looking at those the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about is pers it is killing cities it's our obligation to our workers but it is very difficult for us there's not a lot of places you work that pick up both sides six percent of the employee cost and six percent i'm not advocating i'm somebody in the system i'm a full-time employee of the city whatever decision we make impacts my family too but these are the conversations that we need to have with our employees like Would our employees support a 1% reduction if it meant saving jobs? The council can't sit here as seven of us and say, we should do this without hearing from our employees in some kind of town hall. Individually, of course, nobody wants to do this, but these are the tough decisions that we have to make, and we need to understand what our employees would think of some of these costs, too. I had a different take on bureau versus eliminating it bureau is like one of the only driving forces We can create to do revenue in this city It's one of the only areas and these are empty lots if you don't know empty lots produce virtually no tax dollars So if we cut bureau we're not gonna gain a bunch of revenue from a bunch of empty lots sitting around us because we do not tax that way. We do not do land value tax. We tax on the value of what's on top of the land. So if we don't push our staff to get going on buildings, We are sitting on lost revenue out here. And the same with Cooper Mountain. Those two things. This whole presentation has been about cuts. And I get that because it's what we asked you to do. And there has to be more than revenue than is just the council doing a levy. What would Bureau produce? What would Cooper Mountain produce? What would infill produce? Why are we not turning up when people want to be in Beaverton? Why are we not doing more infill? That is growth. And what is holding us back from that? And then I would say we need to do a bit of a look back. You know, I know I'm the only person that's been around this table for longer than 10 years, but we used to have a bunch of employees combined in that, we'll call it the mayor's office, don't read it that way, rename it city manager's office, where we did cross departmental work all the time. after the change of government, we siloed and we produced more managers and we produced more people to do the same work. And so I think we need to look back at what did FTE reporting charts look like in 2015, 16, 17. There most certainly wasn't two to three people in some of these areas that were asking to cut. We had a lot more working together. So those are the things that I really need to do. I can't say cut package one when i don't know like can the emergency manager do the almost million dollars of grant writing we get probably not so we're gonna we're gonna are we gonna spend more out of the general fund And I think the council needs to do it. And I would say right now, I would not move forward with a levy. What I have said at the dais is the same thing that I say to staff all the time. Our communication is not OK in this city. It is not healthy for how much we spend, for how many people do communications. Simple things are not happening. The community doesn't understand the value of the city. And as the person, the seven of us that would have to drive it, I don't know what it's going to take for this organization to continue to hear from this council that we need to do better in communication and it can't be we don't have enough people there are people doing communications all over it we paid for a communication study that said here's the things we can do so I think we need to hear what is changing I keep hearing oh in the next iteration the next staff the next person Communication is going to be a monumental piece as if this council will agree to a levy or not. I have told you before that the building's on fire. I will not, I will not agree to do a levy until the community understands value. I don't know how to be more clear that communication needs to work better. So I don't mean to be doom and gloom, but I feel like I've had this same conversation 100 times in the last two years about some of this work that needs to happen. We did something really difficult by passing a service fee. I feel like we have done our fair share. We need you guys to meet us here because asking us to do a levy is just a bridge too far. And there's some Councillors that might agree to do it, but I'm certainly not going to do it unless some things change relatively quickly. I don't need polling. The polling already says people don't understand the value of the city. Councillor Kimme.

Well, it's hard to follow that. Just a quick question. Your potential budget deficit for 2017-2018 is 629. That's a little wide gap, but do we know, kind of, pretty much know what that would look like? Not at all?

no I don't feel comfortable providing an estimate at this time because we have a significant number of steps that we need to take before we're able to really true up that number so we will be able to you know as we progress that gap is going to narrow but we have a number of significant steps that we need to take before I'm able to narrow that down into something more definite

Okay. I mean, I agree with everything Mayor said. Everyone, I support you for your recommendation tonight. Just reason that I asked about timing. Come November is time when we make a decision and I will be very ill prepared to make a critical decision with the information that I currently have. I need some suggestions. How can I or how can you make or educate me on making these critical decisions? Because I can go through the budget line by line and try to figure it out, but I don't know what it means. I don't know. So I need some suggestions. How can I be more educated about the budget and the impact to the programs? before I can make critical decisions come November. That's what you expect us to make a decision.

Yeah, and I think to clarify we're not asking for you to make final fiscal year 2728 budget decisions at the retreat and so we're not It's not a business meeting of the council. You're not making decisions You we are looking for you to provide some high-level feedback around your priorities right around kind of your reactions to proposed tools that we have in our toolbox and building the budget it is an iterative process it's going to continue over several months so that doesn't necessarily mean it's the end of the conversation um and that that's the only time we're going to be talking to you about the budget in advance of the budget process so so out so before we have november retreat at least when we have a discussion about the budget

it has to come from well-educated decision-making process to us to discuss about our priorities per se, because now is critical time to choose which one, right? I don't want it to be budget-driven, but we have to be. So maybe one-on-ones, I don't know. I don't want to do any more one-on-ones, but it's the choice that we have. The timing-wise, then everything, combines to 27, 28 budget cycle. That means 2.5 million or 1.8 million plus whatever reduction that we haven't done, which is 2.5 plus 2.8 minimum, right? at one time if levy fails. That's almost, I did my calculation, I might be totally up on like $6.3 million of a budget impact that we have to make decision on next May. That's a lot. And then implementation time is very quick turnaround immediate going forward after June. So that's why I kept asking, when do we make a decision? I think we need to make a decision pretty quickly, ease the impact to the residents. And even if levy passes, we're gonna go into severe deficit before levy starts to kick in, and we will never recover our losses on reserves. because Levy does not replenish the losses, right?

I think it depends on a couple different things. If you went out for a May of 2027 levy, you would receive that revenue in time to mitigate potential budget losses. And this is one of the reasons that we should thoughtfully consider our use of one-time money if our reserves allow that to kind of avoid some of these significant budget cuts while still working through the various budget scenarios.

Right, because I understand, but depends on the timing moving forward the reductions that budget is very severely declining to cut into reserves quickly I don't know how much money or how much you're talking about but I imagine to be very quick and 11 million dollars is not much and then I think few years ago we already had adjusted our reserve lowered a little bit to compensate for that so it didn't used to be 11% used to be higher but I think we averaged out all the cities and we were a little higher so we decreased the reserve budget already. And that's what I'm kind of mindful of. So even though I agree with you, we need to start implement quickly because even if we pass the levy, that has to happen anyways. And then even if we fail the Revit, it's not five mil, it's more like over six, whatever. And then it's declining pretty quickly to our deficit. And that's what I'm worried about. And there's no way to recover that. Whatever loss that we have on our reserves, we cannot replenish it because we have an ongoing deficit. Minimum that might be. So that's why Love to keep talking about it, but I think we need to start implementing some reductions November, December. There's no way to avoid it. And that's where I am. There's no way to avoid. We cannot wait until May. We cannot wait until April. If we do, then immediately after May, that night, next day, we got $6.3 million that we have to cut. And I'm not exaggerating. That's like simple math here. So that's my sentiment. I support you tonight. But I think I would consider making decisions and have implementation of reductions as soon as we can somehow while we set up the budget for 2728 because I think that's just sound budget. I don't want to extinguish or empty our savings or reserves. then what are we going to do right one-time budget yeah sure but as more with delay is going to keep going down so that's sorry about that but but then end on a kind of funny note i envy you reading that once i could impossible to read that but anyways thanks for that he's got younger eyes counselor hartmeyer prig

Thank you. I think my comments are maybe a little bit more for us as a body, as a council, and a little bit for staff, but tonight I just am feeling so much angst that just not feeling like we're showing up as one team. And I really regret that. I think that staff, you have put an incredible amount of work into this. budget after budget after budget. We asked staff to come back to us three months after a budget cycle and make $2.5 million of one-time cuts. That's what is in front of us. We turned it into something more. They're giving us an opportunity at retreat in November, and that is where a lot of this conversation can be, but I just hope that we all come with the spirit of doing what's best for Beaverton at every step of the way. The other thing I have to say, and Councillor Duggar, I know you have good intentions, but We do not hire consultants because they would do work better than our own staff. but it's absolutely not why we hire consultants. We hire them for capacity, for regulatory reasons, or any other constraint that we need to augment our staff. Our staff is, I'm sorry, but it's just so insulting to imply that our staff would only do something 90% as good as a consultant. That's just fundamentally not true. So staff, I just want to apologize, because I think tonight that there have just been things said from us as a body that are just unfair. I see the work you're doing, i know we're in this together i i recognize we did the hard work of the services but we signed up for that we said we would do what it took to take care of our city and implementing those service fees were a requirement of that and if we come to a levy that's another hard thing we have to do and we would do it because we're on one team together so i just i'm frustrated um and staff i hope none of you leave here feeling less valuable than you are because you've done such incredible work for us And I don't want you to think anything other than that. I appreciate you. I see you. We ask you to do hard things and you continue to do it for us every time. So thank you.

Councilor Titor.

uh thank you counselor for my break um counselor kimmy was referencing a document i've got in front of me that's many many pages long of tiny tiny text that city staff created for us uh within maybe a year or so ago listing every single service that the city provides whether it is discretionary or not and who requires us to do the work. Is it state, federal, local agreements? There is very little in here that's purely discretionary. And if it is, it likely has some connection to other services that the city provides that help us provide our services more efficiently or more affordably. The city's been doing this work for a long time, and city staff have been doing this work for a long time, and the city council has been doing this work too. And so for community members who are watching this, I want them to know that this work is being done, and it's not just being slapped together spur of the moment, but there's a lot of forethought that's gone into this. I wanted to echo Councilor Hermer Prigg's frustration. In my role as a city councilor, I take a lot of personal responsibility. It's on me to educate myself about our city services too, like Elizabeth, you've done a heck of a job tonight as our interim city manager to answer some really hard questions and set us up well for the future. and we can't expect one person or our staff, we got three staff technically, our city attorney, city manager, and municipal attorney, or municipal judge. We can't expect them to educate us about everything in the city, but some of the best things for me have been right alongs with patrol officers or garbage haulers or visits to our public works facilities or one-on-one conversations with public works leadership about why we do things the way we do. And these can be hard conversations, but they teach me a heck of a lot so that when it comes time for council retreats or conversations like this, I feel much more prepared. I can learn a lot from a spreadsheet, but I learn a heck of a lot more from the one-on-one conversations where I can ask hard questions, I can ask dumb questions, and then I can show up in these rooms feeling a little bit better and a lot more confident in the work that staff is doing and the direction we're headed. I do think we are headed in a really good direction. I think this is part of that process, and I think staff has done a lot of that hard work to get us here. So yeah, thank you.

I appreciate that, Councillor Teeter. And I will say, I hear a lot of feedback from staff that you're doing these things, meeting with the judges, going on ride-alongs, doing the work and getting educated. So I appreciate your comments. And I also want to say, I see it. You called me last week about meeting with other elected officials and the questions you were asking. And I would just encourage the council to do the same thing. And my list here wasn't intended to be RETRIBUTION ON STAFF WORK, BUT I HAVE A VERY DIFFERENT VIEWPOINT AS SOMEBODY THAT'S IN THIS BUILDING FULL TIME, SOMEBODY THAT MEETS 40-PLUS HOURS A WEEK, OFTEN WITH OTHER LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT. I UNDERSTAND THE FUNDING TO A DEGREE THAT I THINK MOST ELECTED OFFICIALS DON'T, AND I WOULD ENCOURAGE YOU GUYS TO to heed some of both of these advice, which is speed up and understand what these things mean. There's a reason that I could write 17 bullet points in three seconds about what I wanted to see coming in November, because I deeply understand not just the budget, but the impact to decisions. We all have some responsibility along with staff and I my intention was not to say we did the hard work and staff isn't doing but there are themes that the council's asked for through this process and my job is I track a lot of what we're asking for communication is one of the things we continue to say needs improvement and to help us do our job better. So I appreciate that. Councillor Duggar would politely ask that we don't get in a tit-for-tat. Thank you.

No, I was just going to actually thank Councillor Harden for helping me communicate better because if that's what you heard and I heard it in your voice and I believe you, you're my friend, that was not my intention was to call into question staff. In fact, it was quite the opposite, which is a deep appreciation for our staff and more, like I want more of their input. I want more, so like I was really bad at communicating that, so thank you for pointing that out and allowing me to clarify that. I just, like I think about it as a person who manages people myself, just because you're doing a certain job right now doesn't mean that's what you always wanna do. And so I think about it from a development, stretching, certainly augmenting their existing capacity, all that sort of stuff.

did not communicate that well so thank you for calling it and giving me the opportunity to clarify that thank you uh i would say in similar vein i asked counselor hassan to clarify what she was asking for it helps us all be better i think a lot of times where i myself included waiting to talk next and so i like DON'T NECESSARILY ABSORB WHAT EVERYONE ELSE IS AROUND ME IS SAYING, BECAUSE I'M TRYING NOT TO LOSE MY TALKING POINT. AND I WILL SAY THE OTHER, IT IS SIGNIFICANTLY HARDER TO HAVE GONE FROM FIVE TALKING OFFICIALS TO SEVEN. FOR ME, OR FOR ALL OF US, AS SOMEBODY THAT DID COUNSEL WITH FIVE FOR, YOU KNOW, OVER SEVEN YEARS, PLUS THE STAFF, IT'S A LOT OF INPUT TO TAKE. say that in wrap up what I heard consensus from everybody was yes on the $750,000 cuts of temporary revenue now. We are interested in trading our retreat time for a more intensive conversation and as the RETREAT FACILITATOR REACHES OUT, MAKE SURE THAT YOU USE YOUR TIME AS THE COUNSELOR TALKING TO THE PERSON FACILITATING TO GET SOME OF WHAT YOU NEED DONE. IF YOU NEED SOME HELP AND FEEDBACK IN AREAS THAT THE CITY MANAGER AND I CAN HELP YOU LEARN MORE, WE'RE HERE TO HELP YOU GUYS DO THAT. THE CITY MANAGER IS THE PERSON TO GO THROUGH IF YOU WANT TO TALK TO STAFF AND LEARN MORE. LET'S NOT GO ROGUE AND BUCK OUR OWN AGREEMENTS OF CALLING STAFF AND DOING WHATEVER WE WANT. LET'S MAKE SURE SHE HAS THE her she's never once said no to a request for me to talk to staff but it's our our joint agreement to have the city manager facilitate that understanding we have a new finance director who i find immensely knowledgeable in a short amount of time and i think if you know spending time with her in the budget would be helpful as well there are some legal questions that we need answered that i think spending time with the city attorney would help um And as a reminder, it's an interim city manager that stepped up into the role to do this for us. Unluckily for her, she came from a city that did this eight times, so we gave her no other choice but joining us on this journey today. Tonight's work session was hard. It's not intended to be hard. It's the reality of the situation we're in. And I think the community doesn't understand the situation we're in because we keep making cuts and we keep doing the hard work and often time in silence and there's no media sitting here. Maybe they watch the video on repeat and on occasion they'll do a story. But we really, the seven of us, need to think about communication differently. I mean, I spent my summer recess going to all of our boards and commissions, senior living facilities, all of our NACs, talking about our budget, measure five and 50, understanding how we're framing the budget. And I think if there were seven of us doing that, the level of understanding would be immensely different. And I would also encourage you, to work with other elected officials so they understand the dire needs we all impact each other. When we look at that dollar graph, the advantage that we don't have as a city is like maybe we would make some reduction to park services. Maybe we would make some reduction in what the fire department is offering to maybe hedge our bets in some of these other areas. We might say, MAYBE WE MOW THE LAWN EVERY FOUR DAYS AND WE KEEP MEDIATION. WE JUST DON'T HAVE THAT LUXURY BECAUSE VOTERS APPROVED A LEVY A CERTAIN WAY. IT'S OUR JOB TO WORK WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF WHAT BOARDERS APPROVED US TO DO. BUT WE HAVE OTHER PARTNERS THAT CAN STEP UP. I MEAN, THE CITY MANAGER TALKS A LOT ABOUT WHAT CAN THPRD DO, WHAT OTHER SERVICES. SO WE HAVE A LONG ROAD HERE, BUT WE HAVE A ROAD MAP TILL NOVEMBER. And where we can help for the first time since I've been an elected official actually frame what the budget might look like. And so this is an opportunity for us to share in the misery of what staff do year round. So like we started with, there's no easy cuts left to be made. If there were, I'm pretty sure the city manager would have already offered it to us this evening. With that, I think, do you have all the feedback you need from us? All the beating from us as well? Okay. All right. With that, we will adjourn.