City Council - workshop

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It is now 618, and I will call this budget work session of the Burnsville City Council to order. Members of the public are welcome to attend in person. They may also choose to watch the meeting at BurnsvilleMN.gov slash meetings or Comcast Channel 16 or 859. The public can also participate through Zoom. by joining us at zoom.us slash join. More information is available on our meetings webpage and the council agenda packet. This is a work session, so we go directly to the items that are on the agenda. And the first item on the agenda is the proposed 2027 budget and property tax levy. And our deputy city manager, CFO, Jenny Rohde, is presenting. And Jenny, the floor is yours.

Thank you. Madam Mayor, Council Members, tonight our discussion regarding the budget will focus on the operating funds as well as the proposed tax levy for 2027. for the 2027 budget we've balanced to the 7.69 tax levy increase that is the level that was proposed in the non-binding property tax resolution from 2023 this is the final year of that five-year non-binding resolution. With that, we budget to that and we feel it's a responsible, we've been responsible in terms of providing a budget that will support operations and future planning. The impact of that 7.69% tax levy increase based on preliminary information available from market values from the county is approximately $15 per month. Our overall taxable market value increased 1.9 or 1.8% from 2025 to 2026 for payable 27 or $175 million. With that and those two factors and the 7.69% tax levy increase, that did change our tax rate from 48.72% to 52.16%. And again, those numbers will change a little bit. County information is still preliminary and we'll get more final numbers before our final budget approval. So we'll update those when we can. We'd like to kind of take a look at what other cities are doing. And about this time of year, we do a survey of other cities. that we compare ourselves to, and these are the cities that provided information to dates. There are a couple that are left off here. They didn't provide that information, but as we look at levy increase comparisons across similar cities, they range anywhere from 2.9% in Eden Prairie to 8.93% increase in Apple Valley, with the average tax increase for all those being about 6.5%. As we look at 2027 pressures, still unpredictable conditions continue to challenge the budgets. It seems like we've had an unpredictable, this last five to six years has been relatively unpredictable. We continue to see some inflationary impacts as well as an increased demand for our services overall, especially in our public safety areas. Continued impacts of duty disability and PTSD those continue to challenge us in areas We did have health insurance premium increases of seven and a half percent So still you know relatively high although that's a very competitive rate and less than we were expecting we were expecting something in the double digits, so We were very pleased with those results There continues to be uncertainty around federal, state, and county funding at this point in time and how that will impact us in future budgets. What the outcome of proposed OMB uniform guidance revisions are and how that impacts our management and our in our federal grant area We do currently have one opening bargaining one open bargaining agreement We continue to see market pressures in our with our even our local cities or our cities that we compare ourselves to we just continue to increase in our sector And we continue to invest in our capital and maintenance and we respond to those deferred capital and maintenance items. The current five year plan includes maintaining current service levels, spending fund balance down close to policy minimums as planned as part of that 2023 year plan and carried forward over the past five years. New FTE requests informed by staffing assessments, and I'll go into those in a little more detail on a later slide. And just the knowledge that additional programs or services as we go forward will need to be prioritized as we are under our target fund balance, but above our minimum, we just don't have a lot of space for large, unexpected changes in the next five years. just want to touch on the studies that have been informing the budget. These studies are used as they've been completed to inform either the capital budget or operating budgets. Certainly we've got capital improvement and related studies. We have two capital studies remaining to be presented by the end of this year. We do still complete an annual organizational analysis really looking at our service levels staffing and compensation amounts and then individual departments have completed staffing assessments over the past three to five years and we have a couple planned for 2027 and a fired standards of cover that was presented last year Additionally, we will have some operational studies in HR, public works, facilities and parks, as well as the community vision and 2050 comprehensive plan. So a lot going on, but a lot of information to help us inform our budget development. as we look at our property tax projections for the five-year FMP. 2027 is in white there, or circled in a white box, is the 7.69. That is the last remaining year of the non-binding resolution. What we have projected out right now for 2028 through 2031 is 7.5%. Last year, for that same time period, we had projected about 7%. The difference is really additional ITF investment that was approved or directed in May, less the assumption that the land sale revenue will go into the ITF fund in that that would reduce that 0.8% by 0.25%. So that's how we get to the 7.5. So that really half percent increase is really our additional investment in the ITF fund. As we look at revenue assumptions, the property tax levy, as I mentioned, is 7.69%. Fees and charges, we have 5% there. That really was for discretionary fees that we target 5%. Certainly there are a number of fees across many departments that are either set by statute or other means that couldn't follow that 5%. but when we can, that was the direction in terms of putting the budget together. Certainly, the biggest one I can think of is utility rate fees. Those will be based on the utility rate study, and we'll be talking about those next Tuesday night. Investment earnings, we plan for 2% in the out years. Our current year quarter to date investment earnings are closer to 3.5% to 4%. But just to be conservative, in the subsequent four years of the plan, 2028 through 2031, we've assumed 2% just because market conditions can change, and so we want to make sure that we're We're being conservative in that area. And then all other non-property tax revenues are assumed to increase at about 1%. Expenditure assumptions. For compensation or our compensation plan, we've assumed about 5%. That includes a 3% COLA plus step increases for those employees that are eligible for step increases. Again, health insurance premium increases at about 7.5%. And a current expenditure inflation assumption of about 3.5% in 2028 through 2031. As we look at general fund revenues, we are projecting or proposing about $71 million in revenues. Property taxes do make up the largest part of that at 75%, followed by charges for services at about $7.5 million or 11%. Intergovernmental is 6%. Licenses and permits are about 3 million or 4% of revenue, with miscellaneous investment income being about 4% of that total. But as you can see, 75% of our funding of operations does come from property taxes. As we look at expenditures, since we are a service organization, those personnel services do make up the largest portion of our operational expenditures at 75%. Last year they were actually 74%, so that has changed a little bit. We are anticipating about $70 million in total expenditures. Current expenditures are about $17.1 million, or 25% of the total budget. And then to break those expenditures down by department, as we look at those percentages, police is 37% of the general fund expenditures. So we've got about 60% of our operations does come from, or those expenditures are from the public safety areas. Parks, recreation, and facilities are about 12%. Organizational services, about 11%. That includes finance, HR, communications, IT, as well as insurance, and I believe elections and the clerk are included in that total. Public works is 7% of the total general fund budget and community development at about 5%. Leadership and administration is 4%. That is the city council, city administration, legal services, those kinds of things. So the little bar with no number is just transfers and other, which is 1% of the total. So as we talked about the general fund, we wanted to go over what's included and kind of what are the major changes or increases for this year. We do have one 2027 fire standards of cover position. That was the one remaining after our additions from last year. We do have three police positions, a patrol position that was part of the original staffing assessment that was reviewed in 2024. one additional captain, and a social worker. In IT, we have a collaboration specialist, and that position was informed by the IT operations assessment. We have two facilities positions, an events coordinator, so that position would facilitate and plan for and help us with events in the new city hall space, and a facility superintendent. Additionally, we've estimated or proposed an annual 3% cost of living adjustment and step increases for those that are eligible. We did see quite a significant reduction in workers' comp premiums this year, so that was really a helpful factor as we were putting the budget together. If you recall, when we did our insurance... renewal in April. There was a 25% reduction in workers' compensation rates. And so as we projected out into 2027, we did use those rates. At least the information that we have now is to kind of, those rates will remain flat. We may have additional activity. We may have additional expenses, but we really don't know that yet. So we did modify those rates based on that most recent insurance renewal. And then we do have two additional, at least two additional staffing assessments in police and community development that we're planning for in 2027. and health insurance increases, additional IT operating and maintenance expenditures. We have fire and EMS equipment, including axon cameras, EMS simulation equipment, as well as maintenance of existing capital assets or assets. We have the community vision and comprehensive plan update included. And then additional inflationary increases, including Dakota 9-1-1, which I think had a $76,000 increase for this year. And what's not included, we have additional fire standards of cover positions from 2028 through 2030 that are not yet included. Those will be reviewed with the budget process annually, similar to our other positions as part of the org analysis. So we're not pre-funding or funding those positions those positions beyond the next budget year and we'll come back and review and prioritize all of our positions, including any of those that are part of any ongoing operations or staffing assessments. But as we look at the org analysis at the beginning of each year, we're gonna include all known needs so that we make sure we're keeping keeping pace with what we need. Additionally, drones as first responders is something that's not included, but we do expect to come back as a separate discussion at a future date. So as we look at the main components and the dollars associated with the changes overall in the different components in the general fund, as we looked at total personnel last year, the total budget was $51.5 million. We're anticipating about $52.6 million this year, an increase of just over a million or 2.1%. Those components, we have position requests. We do have seven additional position requests, and we'll talk, I mentioned those on the earlier slide, and we'll take a look at an FTE graph later on in the presentation, but those make up about 2.2% of the increase, or about $1.2 million. Workers' compensation decrease ended up to be just over about $800,000 as we worked that into the budget, so that's about a 1.4% decrease. And then all other changes, including changes in seasonals, changes in other benefits, changes, colas, et cetera, make up about $708,000, or 1.3% of the total increase. In the current expenditure area, we planned for last year we had about $15.7 million in total current expenditures. This year we have $17.1 million in total expenditures. The biggest, we wanted to put kind of the biggest single increases. We do have those staffing assessments that I mentioned on the previous page are about $160,000 or 1% of the total increase. One of the IT expenditures is Microsoft Cloud Data Center, so that contributed about $112,000 to the increases. We did increase our estimate for property insurance. As we open new spaces in the new facility, we do expect an increase in our insurance, our property insurance. And then as I mentioned, Dakota 911 had about a $76,000 increase. All other adjustments across all departments, whether they're small additions or changes from year to year, changed about $786,000 or 5%. So overall, current expenditures increased about 8.6% on the year. These are just the main categories of expenditures, as you can see them all together, but total expenditures in the general fund are projected at $70.5 million, about a $2.2 million increase over last year, or 3.2%. And as we look at kind of what this does and where we sit with our fund balance policy, as we've talked about, we did have a plan to spend down a fund balance, and you can see that kind of from 25 to 26, these bars, the blue bars, show total fund balance. The lines, the gray line on top is the top end of our fund balance policy. The bright blue line at the bottom is the bottom end of our fund balance policy. And then that middle is 45% or really kind of our target per our policy. And right now we're sitting pretty comfortably within the target and just under 50%. And that we do expect that to change we did have I think last year if you look at this You see a very similar trend, but we did in 2027 through 29. We did go below that target this year we do have a little bit of improvement and a lot of that has to do with just we didn't see the same kind of increases and we did have a significant decreases in our workers comp area but as you can see we do dip below the target in 29 and 30 and we come back and by 2033 we will be about be at 40 percent that's what the FMP or 45 percent excuse me that's what the FMP So we do maintain our fund balance above our minimums, and we do start coming back up and going towards that target in the later years of this plan. This just shows a comparison of revenues and expenditures and fund balance, actual fund balance being the black line and our fund balance target being the blue line. If you were to compare this with last year, there was a point I believe in 29 where those two lines touched, so you can see we are maintaining a fund balance at a little higher amount but still underneath our 45% target for this five years. Moving on to the EDA fund. As we look to the EDA fund, the black line represents our investment balance or the cash in that fund. It is expected to be about $8.2 million by the end of the five-year plan or by 2031. Revenues and expenditures. Revenues are between $750,000 to about $900,000, most of that being property taxes. And then expenditures within the EDA fund are in the $300,000 to $500,000 range on an annual basis. So we are increasing that fund balance over the five years. Last year, as you recall, we did reduce that total levy by a million dollars. Really that coincided with the receipt of local area housing aid dollars of over a million dollars that we knew we could put towards housing programs. Also allowing some of those of that levy to be reallocated to the general fund operations. We did a comparison of where we were in the 2023 budget and what we had planned to maintain or what we had planned to collect on EDA investment fund balance. We did plan for $5.3 million in fund balance at the end of the five-year period. We are trending in that direction. We are just above that at $5.6 million. So the plan is working. We still are significantly adding into that EDA investment balance. And now, the activity I showed you on the previous page also did not include the housing fund, and we'll take a look at that next. This fund, the housing fund, accounts for the activity around the local area housing dollars, or housing aid, excuse me, and the programs that we've implemented to help our residents. And our current fund balance is just under $2.5 million. We started receiving the aid in 2024 and for a half of year in 2024, so about $400,000 and just over a million dollars in 2025. So we didn't we do have a significant balance from those years on hand. And we have implemented those housing programs and plan to spend the dollars within the approved timeframe. I know we do have a restricted timeframe in terms of when we need to get those dollars out to residents. So definitely a priority as we look at this fund. The Cable Franchise Fee Fund, this fund includes the revenues from cable franchise fees as well as peg fees. It also includes activities, the activities of the multimedia team and those expenditures in that area. As we've talked about for probably the last five, six, seven years, those fees are declining steadily and you can see that, see some of that in the revenue projections. We do have a plan to keep this fund solvent and really to keep this fund financially, you know, in an acceptable place. This fund used to transfer money to the general fund. You know, at some point, the general fund will need to start subsidizing the activity in this fund. And in the next five years, we might want to look at how we might structure that. Do we bring the multimedia operations into the general fund as well as the franchise fees? We would always need to keep the PEG fees separate. They do have some spending restrictions, but it's something that's not, it doesn't have to happen right away, but it's something we should be thinking about as we move forward. And now that we have a new communications director, those can be some of those projects that we take a look at. the forestry fund this was initially initially created about 2012 to respond to the emerald ash borer issues that we anticipated luckily the the remediation and the the impact to us has kind of happened gradually so we haven't had the large expenditures year over year early on, but still is something that we, you know, we're dealing with on an annual basis. This levy does increase about, I think about 3% annually. And we do, as you can see, we did have some larger expenditures in 2026 and 2027 to deal with some more tree removal and things, but the fund balance is in a healthy spot. We still anticipate having about six hundred thousand dollars on hand by the end of 2031 The sustainability fund this fund accounts for our DVR act mostly our DVR activities, but also our own city kind of city funded sustainability activities, but the largest component in this fund is really that the grant from the county and then the activities of the four cities through that DVR programming. One thing, we were notified that the grant amount is staying level, it is not increasing for 2027, so the four cities will need to share the increase in expenditures, and I believe it's about two to three thousand for Burnsville's share. but generally the money that comes in is spent annually. So we're not necessarily growing the fund balance in this fund, but we do spend what we take in. The opioid fund, the revenues in this fund come from opioid settlement funds that we receive at various points and from about seven or eight different settlements This activity, the revenues, those funding sources are known to us. There are payment schedules, so these reflect what we anticipate to collect annually based on those payment schedules. And then the expenditures are for the Community Risk Reduction Program, which includes one FTE from the Fire Department, as well as any other current expenditures for for that program and equipment that's needed in that process. Initially, these funds, we did have about $500,000 on hand, so that is fully covering the salary of the 1FTE for the next two years, but as we spend down those funds, those funds are coming in at just over $120,000 a year, so we do drain that balance and the general fund picks up the other portion of that FTE so that by 2030 the general fund is fully funding that position with the other expenditures in this fund really being current expenditures or any other needs for that community risk reduction. We anticipate continuing to collect funds through 2036, and those amounts will be annually anywhere from about $120,000 to about $65,000 a year at the end. So the settlements are different lengths, so some drop off earlier, some continue for the entire time. And then the grant fund, this fund is being used for the activities of the neighborhood grant pilot program. Right now, we've just included what council has approved to date, really that pilot program being the $100,000 in land sale revenue, and then grants that were awarded last year of 50,000. and then we are awarding grants again this year, shortly. I believe they'll come to council in the next month or so. We do have eight total neighborhoods, so we are anticipating that there will be $80,000 in grants. We've included that activity, but we have not included any future activity because we wanna wait to get council direction on the neighborhood grant program going forward. Currently, there is $100,000 in this fund, and there also is about $330,000 in available cash, available revenue that was from previous grant activity and interest income. So there is funding available to cover what we anticipate in terms of grants at this point in time. And then finally, here is our FTE schedule. We always show kind of where we started in the current year at 349.2 FTEs. Proposed for 2027, you'll see 10. BRINGING US TO A TOTAL OF 359.2. THE NEEDS, AS WERE IDENTIFIED IN THE ORG ANALYSIS, AND SO THESE ARE NEEDS ACROSS MULTIPLE YEARS, FIRE INCLUDES ALL FOUR REMAINING YEARS OF THEIR STANDARDS OF COVER. SO THE ORG ANALYSIS SHOWED 2022. CURRENTLY WE DO HAVE 10. THAT REALLY IS SEVEN ADDITIONAL FTEs. There are three over-compliment positions in the fire department. You can see that asterisk next to that. They don't have a budget impact, but they are positions, flexible positions that are used and funded from turnover savings, and they really are helping to staff and prevent... overtime, mandatory overtime. That's really reduces stress on staff. This is a practice that was recognized and implemented in 2020, but those FTEs weren't really included in the full-time complement. So we wanted to add them and just be transparent about that. There are times where they would exceed that 71 complement if they were had an overcomp position on staff anticipating turnover, and so we wanted to make sure that we didn't go over our approved. We wouldn't be in a position where we're going over those approved. So those three overcomp positions do not have any budget associated with them. They really are timing to help us plan for turnover because it does take about 24 months for those firefighters to be trained. So really there's seven new budget FTEs, those that really had an impact on the overall expenditures in the general fund. In terms of the 2027 tax levy, the total city tax levy anticipated is $62,153,477, and then an additional $750,000 in EDA levy, that is $50,000 increased over last year for a total of $62.9 million, a $4.5 million change from last year, or 7.69%. And we like to compare kind of where these different metrics have, how they've changed over the last years. That property tax increase, again, this will match that non-binding resolution from 2023 with those levies. And we've balanced to that 7.69 for 2026. The city tax rates. Again, you see we have 52.16 projected for 2026. Estimated market values from 2023, excuse me, 9.1 billion. We are at about 10.2 billion. FOR 2026. SO REALLY, I BELIEVE IN 2023, FROM 2022 TO 2023, WE HAD A VERY LARGE INCREASE, AND THEN WE'VE CERTAINLY INCREASED OVER THE PAST FIVE YEARS TO REACH OVER $10.2 BILLION, OR $10.2 BILLION. AND THEN THE MEDIAN HOME VALUE INCREASED ABOUT 3% FROM 25 TO 26, TO 365, ALMOST $366,000. taxable market value We like to kind of look at the different components a residential component in the city of Burnsville is about 62% of the taxable market value so definitely the largest component with commercial industrial at 21% and apartments at 15 There had been some shifts over the past couple of years, increasing that commercial slightly. This year that allocation stayed consistent. And then as we look at estimated market value and the median value home, you can see, generally speaking, they have increased at the same rate, although you can see that median value home has increased slightly more than the median. than the total estimated market value. They're very close, very consistent, but there is a slightly more of an increase to that median value home as we see that going forward. So just something to be aware of in terms of how property tax changes impact that median value home. And then the budget calendar, just to review again. In August we talked about the CIP plan as well as we saw some department presentations. Tonight we will have FIVE DEPARTMENT PRESENTATIONS FOLLOWING THIS ITEM. NEXT WEEK WE WILL DISCUSS THE PROPOSED 2027 FEES AND UTILITY RATE STUDY AS WELL AS THE TWO REMAINING DEPARTMENT PRESENTATIONS FROM COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT AND THE CLERK'S OFFICE WILL BE AFTER THAT MEETING WITH THE PROPOSED CITY AND EDA PROPERTY TAX LEVY ADOPTION ON SEPTEMBER 22ND. November 24th, we do have space, if needed, for an additional budget work session with the adoption of the final city and EDA property tax levy and budget scheduled for December 8th. And with that, that completes my presentation. I will stand for any questions.

Questions for Jenna? Yes. Okay.

How does that 4% admin compare to other cities of similar size? It seems pretty low.

Yeah, it's hard to say. We haven't necessarily compared that city to city. Sometimes there's different components, but I would guess it's comparable.

In the past, you had forecasted one of the out years, I can't remember which one, to come in around four, I'm sorry, not four, but five something, five and a half maybe, give or take. What was the cost driver that caused that to now be forecasted at 7.5?

Yeah, I think that the final, our presentation this time last year projected at about 7%, and the difference between the 7 and the 7.5 is really that additional investment in the ITF.

There was no forecasted out years at 5 and change?

There may have been at some, may have been at a, maybe an FMP presentation prior to that, but our most recent budget discussions have been planning for the seven or at least last year's planned for seven. Yeah.

Yeah, I thought it was maybe a couple years out. It might have been like 29 or something like that. But there was relief sort of at the end of the tunnel of this unsustainable 7.5% every year.

There is... I mean, if you... So that's the most... That's the five-year plan. The 10-year plan does start to decline at 6.5% to 6%. So certainly, as long as we don't have... large, unanticipated expenditures without other relief, we can generally expect expect that and certainly as we get closer you get more defined in terms of what we have you know we have more activity we you know we typically have budget savings I can't knock on wood I like to have that every year but typically departments are very very in tune to their budgets and we typically do have budget savings overall in the general fund so that helps give us relief even in those out years as we as we maintain or maybe have a more positive fund balance. But again, this is a projection. We do the best we can with what we know. Certainly, If the picture gets better or if the picture, you know, gets more expensive, we do have to make those changes to make sure we, what we are balancing to is really kind of trying to maintain that fund balance target or around that fund balance target so that we don't spend down that fund balance below our policy minimums.

Of the 7.69, how much of that is assumed to go to ADA? Or is any of it, is that exclusive of EDA or inclusive of an estimated EDA?

I can show you. Thank you. Yeah, so about 1%. Yeah. Or 0.01%, yeah. Well, that's the change.

So one-tenth of 1%, so pretty much flat to last year's contribution. That's right.

Yeah, a small increase. We really tempered that increase to be about $50,000 annually, so that annual increase is about 0.9%. But the levy is about just over 1% of the total levy.

Okay, that's a separate discussion. I think as a council we've got to discuss what we're going to do with that. We're putting a lot of money away, but we have absolutely no plan. of what we're going to do with it, and I don't like to continue to do that and just hoard money for an EDA with no plan on what we're going to actually do with it. Not a good idea. The housing fund, you mentioned we have to expend the dollars. You made a comment about expenditure, and I'm curious, because it was just our first year granted. What if the next two or three years we still continue to spend under what we're taking in from that tax revenue? Is there any Is there any thing that we could be looking at that if we're essentially not expending everything we take in within that allotted time?

um well i imagine you you might speak to this better than i do jeff but um i imagine that we will want to make sure we spend those first dollars we got first right so that we keep so that we keep spending i believe it's a three-year window if i'm not if i'm correct but i can let jeff go into that further and further detail mayor and council um

As Ms. Rudy said, that's correct. So it's a rolling requirement. So the city receives an allocation annually of the LAHA funds. It's a rolling requirement for each year. We have to commit the funds within three years of the receipt of the funds, and we have to expend the funds within four years. So that's the deadline that the state provides on a rolling basis as each year funding continues to be received by the city. And if we don't meet that funding deadline, ultimately, and there's not an a couple exceptions that I don't want to get into, the funds would have to be turned back to the state. So if we don't meet the funding commitments or qualify for a different use of those funds, we would have to return that money to the state.

So I thought, if I remember right, the original. And so that formula that gave us the dollars wasn't based in any exact science. It was an estimate based on a broad need, and any given city could find themselves with not enough money to meet the needs, and some cities may find that they've got more money than they can actually legitimately find expenses for in the specific required housing area. That seemed like a really odd statement in a period of time where HOUSING SHORTAGE AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING SHORTAGES ARE THE TALK OF THE TOWN ACROSS THE COUNTRY, NOT JUST IN MINNESOTA, BUT WE DON'T HAVE LAND, SO WE'RE IN A SITUATION WHERE WE MIGHT FIND A BIT OF A CHALLENGE TO SPEND THAT MONEY. MY LAST QUESTION IS, SECOND TO LAST, WHAT IS THE NET BUDGET IMPACT OF ADDING OUR PD AND FD STAFF AS FAR AS THE 2027 BUDGET when accounting for any grants that we got to help fund those positions in the first couple years or so?

Well, I'm going to do the math in my head, but it depends on if we are fully, if we are able to hire. If we hire them all, I believe, oh gosh, BJ, you can probably make an assist on this SAFR grant, but it was maybe eight.

800,000.

800,000?

Is what we're absorbing or what the grant is covering? What the grant is offsetting. The grant is roughly 2.3 over three years. It covers, what, 60%, 60%, and then 40%.

So we would be absorbing, yeah, roughly 800 the first couple of years, and then probably 900, and then probably around 400 the last year. That would fall on us? Correct.

Our portion of the model to tie it, right?

Gotcha.

Okay.

So it reduced that by that much, and so the inverse is we're paying about $400,000. Basically what ended up happening is we were planning on hiring three in 2026 and six in 2027. Mm-hmm. And basically what happened is for the cost of the three firefighters in 2026, we're getting all nine of those FTEs for the next three years for the cost of those three firefighters.

I remember the decision we made on using some funding to just advance them, get them on board. And so the net, what's the current equivalent of one percentage point of levy increase? What does that equal in dollars?

So one percentage point is probably about $620,000.

Madam Mayor, you were closer to what I was thinking it was. It's really grown to like six and a quarter is one percent of our budget. I remember it was just two something. I remember when it was just 150 and then two. Wow, inflation has been killing us. Okay, so one percent is six and a quarter, so the grant is saving us a little more than one, maybe one and a quarter percent. But at some point, we absorb the whole thing.

And that is accounted for in that five-year plan. So when the grant is done, what we have proposed does include us taking on that full cost. That's why, too, in some of those later years, we actually fund balance gets a little lower because we are taking on additional expenses in the general fund. I mean, there's multiple reasons, but that is...

IS THAT ONE OF THE REASONS? THIS IS COMING BACK TO MY EARLIER QUESTION, BECAUSE I'M TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHY IT CHANGED. IS THAT ONE OF THE DRIVERS? BECAUSE WE JUST GOT THAT GRANT AND MADE THIS DECISION OVER THE LAST YEAR, AND YOU'VE DONE A FORECAST OVER FIVE YEARS EVERY YEAR, RIGHT? SO EVERY YEAR, THEY ALL MOVE AROUND BECAUSE NEW DECISIONS ARE MADE, ET CETERA. IS THAT PART OF THE ABSORPTION OF THAT IS PART OF WHY WE SEE THE 7.5% YEAR-OVER-YEAR BECAUSE along with some other things, inflation and other costs, you're feathering in those costs of those additional staff when we absorb their full salary and benefits.

Correct. That's part of why some of those, later years, I'll call them in this five-year plan, increased kind of last year and, you know, and continued to be at that same level, right, because we took on additional expenditures that we didn't have in the first year or two.

Yes. And two years ago we weren't actually budgeting for yet.

Correct. So those, yeah, anything before last year didn't have that assumption included because we hadn't received that grant. Right. Or we also didn't have the standard of cover.

Thank you. And then I have one last question that you won't have the answer to tonight, but if you could get it to me. What do we spend in park staffing that directly supports programming and activities?

Okay. Yeah, we'll have to get that to you.

Thank you. Yeah, okay. Mark?

Quick clarification. How would you define supporting park activities?

Is that the maintenance staff? Programming.

Okay. Okay.

Just like when you go through our brochure and you see that we have all these programs, social programs, activity programs. So recreational is what I'm hearing.

Yes, recreational.

Does that include the ice center and golf course, which is also in those?

Well, you can, but I would line item those out because they have a direct revenue against them.

Yeah, we can.

You know, like pay for service sort of thing.

Council Member Keeley, one of the things you asked about and things we talked about in the past, so the EDA fund and you wanted to know whether the visioning process is going to inform us as to what The need might be on a commercial industrial side of things if you remember that discussion. So until we get to that point and then we have some revenue that will help with increasing our commercial industrial. Because we're not like LAHA, where we have some of the funds that help with residential, but we don't have that on the commercial industrial side. So I believe that the visioning process is going to help inform us.

I recognize that we all willfully said, let's start putting money into the CDA. And we have to. Because we saw the possibility of certain uses that could be that could help the city in the commercial industrial area. We've just never really, and we've been piling money in there for a few years now, and we still don't have a clear plan.

We didn't want to spend it also. We wanted to make sure that we have a pool that will be significant for a development.

And there could very well be a development coming. We just don't know what it is today.

But the other thing is that we have had a lot of discussion about the age of our industrial district.

And the maturity of those buildings and profitability of them and why the owners don't really want to change.

Yeah. But the thing is there comes a time when we're going to have to take a look at the viability if we say vibrancy is one of the pillars of what we want in this community. So, but, you know, it's not that staff hasn't worked and this is that we have to have something that informs all of that. Just like all of the studies that's informing the decisions that we're making. Yeah.

I ask the question because when we sit there with, you know, we're going towards $7 million, $8 million, sitting in the bank with no plan for what we're going to do with it, and we're talking about 7.5, 7.5, 7.5, this is a whole different world of levy increases that is two or three points higher than historical. And we've got to make sure that we're, you know, certainly being prudent with the expenditures. And if there is a vision for that use of that EDA, I'll be the first one to continue to invest money in it because I know its importance. I just don't like year over year it keeps growing and we still haven't really had a discussion on what we're going to use it for.

You know, if you remember when St. Louis Park came in and talked with us about how they build that fund and what they were able to do with it. So from my perspective, We're getting there because we didn't have a fund that would look at that. Yeah, I know. And we have a lot of places.

It was going in and out to the AIM Center and not really growing beyond that.

And so I am confident that we'll have a plan as we move forward because that's what we do. Yeah.

Otherwise, we're going to have to talk about who's the next EDA chair if he can't come up with a plan.

We have a great deputy city manager with our community development and a team leaded by our city manager that will get to that point. But I like the fact that we're going to have the community weigh in on that. Yeah, I agree. On the vision because that informs us. Sure. Yeah. Okay. Anything else?

But from my perspective to ‑‑ I'm laughing, Dan, because you're the one that was pushing for this big fund so you could buy the mall.

So it's like ‑‑ Well, that may still be presented in front of us one day.

You may be surprised. To Greg and Jenny and Jeff and everybody, thank you very much, because from March, when we ‑‑ had our first meeting with the financial management plan and everything. Everything that you've talked about tonight, there are no surprises because all along we have been informed. And what is good about all of this is that I go into the website and look at the budget portal and it's all there for our citizens to see. So what we see here is in the budget portal. Correct. everything is transparent and there are no surprises as to where we are tonight with going forward to the September 22nd meeting so but it'll it'll be good to hear from all of the departments and what's going on it's good for our community to hear What they do.

Budget discussion is causing our city manager to get something stuck in his throat.

Yeah. So, but thank you very much. No surprises. Everything is on, you know, on track and so. Thank you.

Would it, could we close out the discussion by maybe a high level statement on where these increases are going? you can really tie it out to 68, I think is that your correct percent, 64, 68% of all of our budget expenditures go to public safety.

Well, you had a good slide on all of that.

It isn't necessarily a mathematical accurate statement to say well then 60 plus percent of our levy increase goes to that. Sometimes a higher percentage of that

Of the levy increase is being allocated to public safety because we're in a cycle of of what we are in right now Which is adding staff as a result of the call point Correct and and and the other revenues where they're coming from oftentimes, you know, we have a large we have three million dollars in permanent revenues We do have EMS Charges for services. So but yeah that can be it can be different proportionally depending on the allocation of of expenditures in total.

For us, in elected office, it's an explanation to the general public, where's the money going? Why are you increasing 7, 7, 7, 7? And what are you spending it on? Why is it going up higher than inflation? Why is it going up higher than Eagan? He's only going to have a 5%. All of these are the types of questions that we get, especially every two years. One more. And so we need to have an answer that makes sense and that's truthful, right?

One of the things, Dan, when I get that, 60% goes to public safety. The other thing is that you can't compare apples to apples because we have a full-time fire department. Others don't. They had a volunteer. They're just transitioning now to full-time, but they're not at our level.

By the way, that transition cost is expensive. There's some big levies out there to get them to that transition.

Yeah, and some of them are going to be a lot of them were looking at double digits. Yeah.

I don't know how Egan pulled it off. Maybe they got a big donation from the Vikings or something, but they ended up with a lower levy than they thought.

But when you look at our, if you compare our fire department to any other fire department, our standard of service is so high, and people are envious of what we have.

They can't have BJ. They've tried.

Yeah. So, you know, and that's what drives a lot of when you look at 60% is public safety, police, and fire.

Yeah, and you can augment that or add on, enhance that statement by saying we're a very mature city. Yes, we are. We have an older population than these other cities around us. Yeah. burden that we are bearing with this call volume is coming to them in another 15 or 20 years but today it's on us and it makes us different than lakeville or so way behind of us because chief when did egan go to full-time was only two years ago two three years ago

Probably got that answer off the top of his head. They were a combination for a number of years, but when did they go all career?

They got their first safer grant in 2014.

So between 2014 and 2021, they made that transition from all volunteer to all career.

Yeah. And Lakeville is just transitioning now. Yeah, their combination currently. Yeah. And Bloomington just a couple of years ago. In the midst of it.

Yeah.

So when you look at all of that and other cities, that's why it's not apples to apples.

No. And, you know, we do have our communities different. We can compare on some things, but not everything.

And I would also like to add that for a long time, we did not do a proper levy in this city, which put us behind, which caused us to do that 14 and a half. And we're still playing catch up with that. And that's one of the reasons we're still at this rate. And then changes in this world have happened that are putting pressures on us. And so I understand why we're at the 7.7%.

And we're not alone. I'm not saying that we're on an island.

Well, you alluded earlier, our common used to be around 4%, but we were underperforming at that time.

I will say I'm a little jealous of Eagan getting down to 5.3 or 2. How did they get there? And we can't. It's something I'm going to study their budget a little bit more and find out how they got there. There could be one-time things that came through that. bought it down. It is a deviation from what they were over the last few years.

They also have a lot of land they're still developing.

Yeah. And they're still a developing community, Eagan and Lakeville.

I'm super excited for the obvious increase in salaries that everyone is getting that is at the 7% or higher every single year, which allows cities to just keep raising tax rates because, of course, everyone's just getting a raise, and we can just keep doing that indefinitely. That works out really well. But I'm very excited for that. I'm happy for everyone.

Okay. All right. Is there anything else that you need from the staff before we transition? Dan, anybody else? I'm good. If not, Ben, thank you, Jenny, thank you, Greg, Jeff, and our wonderful staff, thank you very much, because I know this whole budget process is a new system this year.

It is, it is.

And Alyssa, you've trained over 50 budget preparers for?

With Adam's help, of course.

This is a byproduct of the new system as far as, I know the numbers are coming from the new system, but is that new system also creating these charts and graphs?

Not yet.

They did look a little updated.

It was very nice. The complete budget being in one system is definitely, I highly recommend. So that's been good. But we will have more improvements coming out that the system will be able to create for us, a budget document and some other things. So there are some other things to come as we continue to implement it.

Well, thank you everyone. And now we'll transition and the department budget and we're going to step with communications.

Sounds good. Yes. Mayor members of the council. Um, thanks for having me tonight. I'm going to kick off the org services round of, um, budget updates here for 2027. So, um, with me here. As a general overview of our department, the core focus that really a bird's eye view for our community is that we work to build trust and engagement by connecting our residents and community with our city services programs and our staff. So we work across the city to provide our Burnsville community with consistent timely and accurate information that also results in meaningful engagement with our residents so they can participate in their local government. We have three really main core drivers of our work across our department. These are core beliefs that kind of drive our work in general. The first being that local government is stronger when our stakeholders are informed and connected and involved in the decisions and issues that impact Burnsville, their local community. THAT CLEAR COMMUNICATION AND UNDERSTANDING ARE ESSENTIAL TO BUILDING TRUST AND HELPING OUR CITY ACHIEVE ITS GOALS. AND THAT MEANINGFUL ENGAGEMENT HELPS ENSURE THAT OUR COMMUNITY'S PERSPECTIVES ARE HEARD, UNDERSTOOD AND CONSIDERED IN OUR CITY'S DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES. So this is a look at our team, the great people who make this work possible across our city. It currently consists of 12 full-time staff and one part-time person, Ken, who is helping broadcast this meeting tonight. Core areas are really four across our department. That includes strategic communications, multimedia, community engagement, and community experience. So aligned with the department audit that was completed in 2024 and the organizational analysis work, our department has continued to grow and evolve over the course of this past year since this presentation was last given. This year we welcomed two new communication coordinators, Chelsea Brat and Matt Steichen. They joined us this summer. They're working alongside Katie, which makes our communication team fully staffed. We also restructured the communications and events assistant position to be a engagement specialist this year. That is Laura Kruger's role, and that's really to help with the digital accessibility website requirements that are going to affect in April of 2027, as well as to support our growing engagement programs alongside Ishmael with our neighborhood organization program and other activities in that area. Also on this slide, Sue and Rachel do an exceptional job serving our front desk area, making sure we're creating a really welcoming experience for our residents and our visitors here at City Hall and those who reach out via phone every day. And those core areas, I'll report to Amber Jacobson, our assistant communications director. And then on the right side of the slide, Jay Golden manages our multimedia team alongside Tim and Dan, who are our full-time videographers. And they do a great job of broadcasting meetings, live events, and video storytelling. Um, you'll see there's one open position that was approved this time last year. That's an engagement and experience manager. Um, we did post for this this spring. Um, and due to the market, we did not fill it at that time. We do plan to repost in the coming months for that role. This is a look at our core services that these full-time staff support every day. That includes everything from general communications, strategic support for our departments, to media relations and crisis communications support, branding and marketing of city programs and initiatives and activities, and print and digital publications for our residents. We also do multimedia storytelling, public broadcasting and community TV engagement activities and creating a positive guest experience. So looking ahead at the investment and impact of the dollars that are allocated to this department, our overall goal for 2027 is really to maintain excellent customer service as our team grows together across these areas, both internally and externally. We're looking to build and maximize our communications and engagement activities to meet our community's needs. And, um, for the 2027, uh, department wide budget overall, it does remain generally consistent with 2026. Um, the proposed increases are really in two core areas. One being multimedia technology, as we transitioned to the new city hall space. for broadcasting and post production needs. There are some costs associated with that. And then increasing a line item for our critical incident support and training partially. This is a look at achievements over the last year in this department that has included restructuring to meet department and organizational needs aligned to the audit. Year two implementation of our neighborhood organization and grant pilot program. We have successfully refreshed our brand and implemented that this spring and summer. And alongside that, updated our website to reflect that visual identity and as we continue to push forward on digital accessibility requirements. OUR DEPARTMENT ALSO CONTINUES TO SUPPORT CITYWIDE COMMUNICATION ACTIVITIES AND INITIATIVES, THINGS LIKE THE POLICE CITY HALL PROJECT IS AN EXAMPLE. AND THEN OUR MULTIMEDIA TEAM HAS DEFINED A STORAGE SOLUTION THAT WILL HELP US WITH THE LONG-TERM HEALTH AND WELL-BEING OF OUR FILES AND FOR PRODUCTION AND POST PRODUCTION. This is a look at some of the challenges and opportunities for the year ahead. With a growing team, we're learning ways to streamline and maximize our work together. New digital accessibility needs in April of 2027 coming quickly, so that is definitely a theme of this presentation in our work in the next several months. We continue to look at enhancing our storytelling goals, really through multi-channel communication activities. We're looking at the results of our community survey that was completed in 2025 for areas to really continue to grow our storytelling, as well as implementing a department liaison model to enhance our storytelling work as well. We've also, um, made many updates to our website this year and, um, continue to assess those future needs. Um, once our website accessibility work is completed, um, as that's really the core of the foundation of information for our community. And then in partnership with our friends in our it department, we plan to assess our internal, um, website or our internet is what we call it, um, to support staff information needs next year. Trends and cost drivers, just overall for the department, what you'll see on the final slide is just the investment in staffing that has grown our operational budget and that is reflected on that final slide. We're also investing in digital technology to support our website accessibility implementation needs. So that is a cost driver in both monetary expense and staffing time. And as an organization, critical incident support and internal training around just crisis communication needs and plans just continues to be needed to support our community effectively. So you'll see that as a recommendation as well. And then communication technology has continued to evolve over time. So as Jenny shared earlier, we do anticipate just decreasing cable as you've heard over the past as well, moving forward. Staffing, we do not have any staffing changes or requests for 2027. So this is a look at the two areas our department is recommending budgeted increases for in 2027. The first being our edit, share, play out, and live view systems. These are subscription costs related to multimedia broadcasting technology and really support our live production needs, editing and storage solutions, and then addressing aging technology. And then the second being a slight increase to our critical incident communication consulting fund. And that's just really to support the city in the event of a major incident or ongoing support needs across the organization for crisis response planning. Um, as Jenny shared, uh, the department generates revenue through the community television fund. So, um, as with past years, we're projecting at this time, a decrease of 4% to that revenue fund. And this is the final look at our department's total proposed operating expenses for 2027. This includes community TV, communications or public affairs, engagement and experience. It includes the two proposed changes that were recommended on slide 13 and reflects the growing department staffing that you all have invested in as a city across the operating expenses. So with that, that's the communications department.

Thank you. Any comments?

I just like how this is all spread out here so we know what it is. I mean, forever we know we've been supporting this with either general funds or the PEG fees and that, and now we're seeing what actually goes into all the stuff that creates everything that our public sees and we see.

Very interesting. So I notice in one of Jenny's slides with regard to staffing needs, you need one more person. Your slide also shows that you're in need of another FTE in one of your slides.

At this time, we need to fill for a position that was allocated for in 2026. We are not requesting any new funds for 2027.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, because you're just making sure that you fill the position that was in 2026. Yes. Yeah, okay.

That's the community experience manager.

Yeah, okay. And I like how you're restructuring how your staff is supporting different departments.

Thank you. Yes, we're teams of teams in the core area of communication.

Okay. The only thing I know about that is because we have Matt coming to all of the ribbon cutting instead of Laura. And I found out why. Why isn't Laura here? Oh, because you have Matt, because Matt supports community development. You know, it's asking questions when you're on the run. WHEN YOU'RE USED TO SEEING SOMEBODY AND THEN YOU DON'T SEE THEM AND SAY, WHERE'S LAURA?

YES, MAXIMIZING OUR STRENGTHS.

YEAH.

DAN? NICE WORK. I HAVE A QUESTION IN THE COMMUNITY OR PUBLIC EXPERIENCE AND ENGAGEMENT. IS THAT THE JUMP IN 26 OVER 25, I CAN'T REMEMBER SPECIFICALLY WHAT THAT WAS, BUT JUST THE GROWTH IN THAT, IS THAT ACTUALLY HARD COST INCREASES OR IS IT A of where someone spends their time from a different area? Is it truly a net increase? We hired somebody, and that's why it jumped, and it's going to jump another figure in because we're hiring more people, we're part-time, or is it what we're allocating to that particular purpose, existing staff?

It would include the staff that are within that core area of our work.

Do they do other things? I mean, are they... Like, if I'm one of those people, is part of my salary allocated toward public engagement and I might also be doing something with the senior center or something else, right?

Yeah, I mean, certainly it includes the front desk staff. It also includes our experience and engagement staff, so Ishmael, Laura. There was some changes in one of the positions, so that accounted for a little, there was a little increase overall. into for that position but also it's everything else all the other current expenditures and things that they use so there may be we could get we could get more detailed information but additionally I know there's additional costs related to we did have some increases and they may not have been large increases but overall more materials to do Some of the, okay, the words escaping me. The accessibility website improvements, there are some things related to that. They may not have been large individually, but there is some overall increased investment in that area as well.

Which was probably outsourced to some. or did we do it internally? Like the accessibility features, I know there's a cost to that to bring that to a website. Did we do that internally or did we outsource it?

Yeah, some of that work we do do internally. Some of it will be, the council just approved a contract with Siteimprove, so we'll have some technology products moving forward to support that work too. It's a combination of staff as well as the programming costs associated with running things like the neighborhood program and other areas of engagement for the events we do out in the public and supporting the truck.

I didn't realize the front desk receptionists fell under communications. I mean, that's what they do, communications, but just kind of think of that as like the admin number from a previous slide. One last question that the... The IT, like the website, for example, that was a good example. Is that billed through you, or is it an IT cost to make the website more accessible?

That is within this overall communications department budget within public affairs. Gotcha.

So you didn't have to fund it, that's what she's saying.

It's already hosted, and so it's...

funded through the communications budget and it has been traditional for many years okay thank you okay very good thank you so much this is i think very helpful for our community to see this these kinds of numbers and and i know it's all going to be on a portal i always like saying have you seen our portal

okay next is mike with human resources welcome yeah good evening mayor and council here to talk about the human resources team uh in budget for 2027 quick department overview uh just to kind of tell our story so our our purpose i always say is we're here to care for our people so they can care for the community so we're with employees for their entire life cycle we help obviously with recruiting and staffing and onboarding new employees. We also administer benefits, leave of absence, workers' compensation claims, our compensation plan and job evaluation system. We process biweekly payroll. We manage labor and employee relations and employee health and safety. So we do a lot with our team. We also support managers so they can make sure that their teams are available and providing the best service that they can for the community. In terms of investment and impact, so this is my third year, I think, going through budget, and my focus every year has always been trying to right size our budget without impacting operation or how we serve the organization. This year was no different. So we were able to make budget effectiveness reductions within the HR team to really help offset some increased costs. We're going to be doing another compensation market study next year as part of our organizational analysis. So that's a consultant cost that we were able to offset through some budget effectiveness reductions. And then also transition to a new COBRA administrator. So we have a third party that administers our insurance for retirees and COBRA enrollees. And we're looking to switch to a new vendor that will provide better service to those on those plans. just help us with some administrative burden that our current provider can't. Some achievements that we've had over the last year, I would say we've made some significant progress in terms of not only documenting our processes and procedures, but most importantly I would say expanding our cross training. So we're a small team. We have five of us total in the department. One of our most critical functional areas is payroll. It's every two weeks and you can't miss a paycheck. So we focused heavily this year on allocating time. You know, payroll is a very complicated, complex thing. It's not just importing time sheets. So it takes a lot of dedicated time to get somebody trained in on that. So We've been doing that this year, and actually our payroll coordinator, Amy, was actually called for jury duty this year over a payroll week. And thankfully, the work that we put in there paid off. I still have all my hair. Everyone got paid, so we're good. The investment, the time paid off. We did settle three labor agreements within our public safety groups last year with really productive conversations. I'm grateful for the great partnership we have with those groups. I think I was optimistic when I created this PowerPoint. We haven't completed the review yet of job descriptions. We are very close to completing the review of job descriptions ahead of our compensation study or market study next year. And then we hired 335 staff over the last year. That's full-time, part-time, and seasonal.

Wow. That's a lot.

So some trends in cost drivers. There's growing demand for HR services, which isn't surprising as we increase staff in the organization. That's more recruitments that we're doing. That's more leave of absences. That's more benefits questions. That's more timesheets to go through, et cetera. My team works really hard to make sure that we're responsive to employees and they get the answers that they need and the support that they need. The labor market continues to be very competitive, especially in certain industries, you know, public safety in particular. So I would say we positioned ourselves very well compared to our market cities. So I think that's definitely a good thing. You know, we're seeing it. The fire department can attest to this. You know, we've probably failed more people through our process over the last few years than we have ever before, and that's because our standards haven't changed. But the competition for the best of the best is definitely harder. So that will continue to be a challenge. And then insurance costs, I know we covered that during the presentation this evening. Health insurance in particular continues to rise. We're very fortunate, I think, or are grateful for the renewal that we got this year. About 7.5% previous years weren't quite that favorable for us. And then talking to some market cities, there's many that are seeing double-digit, some into the 20%. increase for health insurance for 2027. So, um, us being at 7.5, uh, you know, we were anticipating teens when we were going out for renewal, but, um, we feel very, very good about that. Um, and then we are seeing just some inflationary cost increases over department services, occupational health, for example, um, or some things, but we've been able to absorb those through those budget effectiveness. Our department is fully staffed. So we have HR director, HR manager, Cameron, two HR partners, Janae and Christine. So we have a liaison model similar to the communications department where our HR partners partner with our departments and are kind of the go-to main point of contact for any HR service needs. And then we have Amy, our payroll and benefits coordinator. The one request you'll see for 2027, is request for an HR intern. That's really to support our team during our peak hiring seasons, like spring and summer. We bring on a lot of seasonal employees, and my team gets bogged down a lot in a lot of the paperwork and onboarding and kind of the administrative stuff. And having an intern to help with that would be extremely beneficial. Also, I think it's important for us DEVELOP THE NEXT GENERATION OF PUBLIC SERVANTS. I WAS VERY APPRECIATIVE OF BEING HIRED AS AN INTERN FOR ST. LOUIS PARK WHERE I LEARNED KIND OF MY APPRECIATION AND LOVE FOR PUBLIC SECTOR, HUMAN RESOURCES, AND SO GIVING BACK TO THE INDUSTRY AND TRYING TO CREATE THE NEXT GENERATION OF PUBLIC SECTOR HR FOLKS I THINK IS IMPORTANT, TOO. AND SO THERE YOU'LL SEE WE ANTICIPATE ABOUT $15,000 FOR THAT INTERN. And so in total, and in conclusion there, you'll see it's about an 8% change. That includes the 15,000 for the intern, and then the rest is really personnel increases through wages and health insurance. Okay. And with that, I'll stand for questions.

Any comments, questions for Mike? You know... What people don't understand is the level of work that you do to support 336 people who work for this organization. So thank you to you and your team for others.

They do great work.

Yeah. And like you say, compensation, payroll is a complicated function. It's not as easy as, oh, here's your Here's what you get. So there's a lot of areas that you have to make sure, from the state government to the federal government and all of the laws that you have to comply with. So thank you to you and your team. Very well done.

Thank you.

Yes.

You know how much that $15,000, is it like a summertime internship type of thing? Or how many months of the year is that person going to work?

Yeah, that's kind of targeting 20 hours a week-ish for six months, although we don't really know. Ideally, we would bring this person on in the spring to help us with spring and summer hiring.

Is that the usual cycle for interns, like from college interns, I guess? Usually they get close to the end of the school year and they try and get intern jobs, or is it during the school year?

It can vary. I mean, for college, typically it can be during the school year with limited, you know, you're not getting a full-time person, someone putting in 40 hours a week. But there are a lot of programs that require an internship for credit. So there's some programs that someone might be interested during the school semester. For example, when I was an intern, it was just one or two days a week. When you didn't have class, you'd go in and work. So it's part-time, but we might have to be flexible depending on what the person's availability would be.

Inver Hill or Dakota County Tech, do they have any HR-related type of courses, or where would this intern likely, in your opinion, come from?

I mean, there's a few programs out there. So Metro State is probably one of the bigger institutions that have, that are local, that have HR programs. The U's program is probably more corporate. So, or the Twin Cities U of M program. And then there's, you know, there's a lot of business degrees that have minors in human resources. So there are people who, you know, Bethel University and Augsburg and stuff like that. They might have a business degree with a minor in HR. And I'll say, most people who are in HR stumble into it. Maybe they didn't dream, people like me, of going to school and becoming HR. So someone who might just be looking for some type of professional experience might be interested in this type of role or administrative experience and then find that they enjoy that type of work.

Is that a self-admission? You stumbled into it or did you intend?

I'm a big fan of The Office. Toby was my favorite character. Something wrong with me. Nice.

You know that was a cautionary tale. Yes.

So one of the questionnaires for candidates is, do you watch The Office? Are you a big fan?

We got some of the best humor in city department budget presentations that I think you can compare us to. Yeah.

Thank you. I was trying to calculate what 15,000 was on the base of 767 to see what part of that 8% was that 15. It's not very much, but so it's when I see or we see 8% in basically you said cost of salaries and benefits, that's a big jump in one year. IT KIND OF MAKES SURE THE DEPARTMENT LOOKS LIKE IT'S PAID BETTER THAN THE OTHER ONE. SO I DON'T KNOW IF THERE'S OTHER PEOPLE GOING, WAIT, HOW DID HE GET 8% OUT OF THAT?

MAYOR AND COUNCIL, I THINK AN IMPORTANT COMPONENT OF THE PERCENT CHANGE ON THESE OPERATING SLIDES IS YOU'RE LOOKING AT THE TOTAL OF THE OPERATING EXPENSES OF THE DEPARTMENT. SO THAT IS STAFFING. Councilmember Keeley, to your point, staff are the single most expensive or the single largest investment we ask the community to make every year. However, that percent change also includes all other operating expenses within these departments. So that 8% is reflective of $63,570, in this case, of change year over year. and that includes both those staffing costs and the current expenses, the operating expenses associated with the department. One of the challenges with the HR department is they carry the administrative cost burden of taking care of our employees. So that 8% includes some of the components that Mike talked about tonight that provide service across the organization, police, fire, public works, so on. So you see some of that impact organizationally or administratively supporting the organization through the HR.

I didn't catch that when he said that. I didn't realize that you're actually cost centering those benefits. to his department as opposed to allocating it based on usage.

The administration of those HR people.

Way to go. Carrying a big load.

Okay. Anything else? Thank you, Mike. And now we move to Alyssa Ryan, our finance director, who is going to give us the report on finance. Alyssa.

Thanks for having me tonight. Just a quick department overview we provide stewardship of the city's financial resources to serve the community today and to the future Part of our mission is to safeguard public funds support sustainable operations and empower decision-makers Our community investment and impact we do is safeguarding public resources through transparent, accurate, and accountable financial management of taxpayer dollars. We're ensuring sustainable operations with our responsible financial planning. We empower decision makers by delivering timely, clear financial data. We're building community trust with our strong financial management practices, and we also do have direct community service. Much of our work is behind the scenes, but we also interact with our community daily. For utility billing, we have 16,000 accounts that we send bills out monthly, and they're calling every day. We partner with the fire department for the EMS billing, and our EMS patients are calling every day for assistance that we're helping them with. We also have vendors and contractors that are calling for assistance also, along with just everyday things our taxpayers call all the time, asking questions. Some achievements and challenges from the last year. In the past year, we delivered a clean and timely audit with our new audit firm. We also had our 30th consecutive year of our GFOA award for excellence in financial reporting. So go us.

Congratulations.

We transitioned to a new utility billing payment processor and bill print solution. So all of you may have noticed in the last year your utility bill looks different or you may have received it in the mail instead of just an email if you're signed up for eBill. And we worked closely with IT and the communications department to make that all happen. The new utility bills are consistent with our brand standards and also accessibility standards. Proud to roll that out.

Is there a way to turn off the envelope if you're on auto pay?

You can turn off your whole bill, but I don't think we can just take out the envelope.

It just says we took your money. It seems like a waste of a stamp.

So you can... Our new utility billing solution started out by default sending everybody a paper bill. So on the new solution, everybody gets a paper bill. What you can turn off is if you get e-bill, you can turn off your paper bill and just get your bill online.

Then that shuts off the postage.

Then you won't get the paper.

So you get the bill, and then if you pay it, you get a letter saying.

Well, it's on autopay, so it just says we took your money. Ah, you get the autopay. And I still get the envelope. This was the question of the evening. Can you make up something humorous about that to keep us on a roll?

I wish I could, but. You just did. In the last year, we also implemented the budget system, and Adam stepped out, but he was an integral part of that, laying the groundwork for our future ERP.

Here comes Adam. We were just talking about you, Adam.

See, you can't leave. Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, I think it's a point worth underscoring. We had talked last year at about this time about getting the basics right and really being focused on how we're using the core of things like a budget system to make sure our processes work, and it really will late. the foundation it already has. It's made a significant impact operationally as we've put this year's budgets together, but it really will lay the foundation for us to think differently well into the future about how we continue to increase and innovate transparency and be very clear about the financial decisions that you're making on an annual basis, and perhaps even CHANGE THE WAY WE DO THINGS, WHO KNOWS WHAT HAPPENS, BUT IT REALLY, GETTING THOSE BASICS RIGHT REALLY LAID THE FOUNDATION FOR US TO DO SOME IMPORTANT WORK IN THE FUTURE. VERY GRATEFUL FOR WHAT THE FINANCE TEAM HAS DONE THIS YEAR.

SOME OF THE CHALLENGES OUR DEPARTMENT IS GOING TO FACE IN THE COMING The coming time is we have a need to build our department resiliency just like any department does. And you've heard me say that before, but through cross training and expanding our resources, um, that'll be important as we go forward planning for ERP system replacement. We want to streamline, sorry. and be very intentional about replacing our ERP system and laying the foundation and make sure we're doing it right. We want to expand our financial system improvements, including streamlining our workflows and our automation, and also enhancing budget transparency with clear reporting and community-friendly budget communications. Trends and cost drivers include a changing grants environment. In the last couple years, it's been quite the roller coaster. It went from a booming environment to almost nothing with a significant reduction in the opportunities. And then lately there's been a increase in our opportunities and as Jenny spoke to earlier the administration federal administration has proposed some significant changes to how federal grants are processed and Administered and so we expect that that could have some administrative challenges on our behalf Increasing cost of software applications Not sure if you've noticed, but.

We notice that when it comes on consent agenda.

Yes. Across the board, software applications are increasing more than just the rate of inflation, and they're increasing more than our levy increases, and a couple thousand dollars here and there really adds up quickly over a couple years. So we have been evaluating our use of software in our department and swapping for lower cost solutions where they're available. Trying to be really careful and conscious about how we're using the taxpayer resources. Also, I have on my side modest insurance cost increases. We've been talking a lot about insurance tonight. health insurance, and property casualty insurance, and workers' comp insurance, and there's all kinds of insurance across the city. We've been working hard to right-size insurance costs and budgets together across the city, because as trends go up, we're playing catch-up all the time. STAFFY AND WE'RE A DEPARTMENT OF 11 FTEs. CURRENTLY WE HAVE ONE POSITION THAT IS, I'LL SAY OPEN, BUT IT'S BUDGETED. WE DELAYED FILLING THE GRANTS POSITION IN 2026 WHILE THE GRANTS ENVIRONMENT STABILIZED. A COUPLE YEARS AGO WE ALSO HAD A FINANCIAL ANALYST ROLE PROPOSED. for the next couple years, and what we're doing this year is we're proposing combining that grant's position with the financial analyst's role to respond to our current situation that we're in to try to make the most of what we can, our efficient and effective use of resources. This change will help us build resiliency, maintain service quality, and prepare for our ERP implementation. CAPITAL IMPROVEMENTS, WE REALLY ONLY HAVE ONE, THE ONGOING PLANNING FOR OUR ERP SYSTEM REPLACEMENT THAT WE'VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT FOR A LONG TIME. MAJOR CHANGES WAS REIMAGINING THE ROLE OF THE GRANTS POSITION WITH THE FINANCIAL ANALYSTS, AND THAT MIGHT REQUIRE JUST A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT SKILL SET AND THE COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENT MIGHT, WE MIGHT FIND THAT WE NEED TO INCREASE THAT BUDGET SLIGHTLY. For operating expenses, this is my last slide, but we have a 5% increase across our finance department operations. We split between the general fund, the water fund, and the sewer fund. So you can see from this slide, we've been working on from 26 to 27, splitting the water and sewer fund into two separate funds, which is why you'll see a minus and a plus of about the same amount. and that takes care of our utility billing functions are in the water and sewer fund, split between there, and also the rest of our department helps support those utility funds, so part of us are allocated to those funds also. That's the end of my presentations. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to take them.

You know, thank you so much Alyssa, I also want to thank you because you talked earlier that you know you you. The finance department supports and. our residents and businesses that call in with questions and what i have heard from people who have engaged with you is how patient you are with them in explaining the different issues that they bring whether it has to do with um the facilities plan or anything from ambulance charges to everything else. So thank you so much for taking the time to being patient and talking to them. One of the things that I do know, whether you give them the answer that they wanna hear or don't wanna hear, It's how they leave feeling that they were treated with respect and kindness and that you listened. So I want to thank you for that because that's what I hear from people about the way that you respond to them on some of these issues that have to do with money. And you are. The finance department are the stewards of the public's trust. You know, it ends up with us, but at the end of the day, you're the one making sure that those funds are appropriately allocated. So thank you to you and your team. I'm glad to see that you're finally have a full complement, Jenny and and Greg in the finance department, because they're for a while. Because I remember what it was back in the 90s with Liz. And I think there were only three people in that whole department. And so it's good to know that you're at a good place.

Thank you.

So thank you so much. OK. Tom Venables, our IT director.

Madam Mayor, city council members. Following the process, I'll go through several slides and open for questions along the way. Just a brief look at the organization of the IT group team today. We're made up of four distinct groups. that provide services across the entire organization. We have GIS services led by Matt Turan. We have our service desk and daily operations led by Chris Salenia and our technical services group. Our application services group recently lost a manager here in August, so we've got an open position today, but we have one person, Heather Malecka, in that position, and we also have our IT manager Infrastructure group which is led by Raul Boudreaux today in our team. So we're allocated 12 FTEs currently We've got 10 FTEs in place with one contracted position. So a total of 11 positions today And we do have a GIS intern currently working with us, too. That's an annual position that we bring in to help out GIS throughout the organization In terms of the department, we drive digital transformation. We enhance operational efficiency. We ensure security and reliable access to the tools and services and the data that staff need on a day-to-day basis. We support staff in our daily operations, along with partner organizations that we partner with on many projects, which include our adjacent communities, Dakota County, School District 191, and several other stakeholders that we work with on a regular basis. And we create value to the organization and the community through a lot of indirect services to the community through the support that we give on a day-to-day basis through our organization. Some of the investments in impact in the last year or going forward have been many of these things I've talked about in previous meetings. The modernization of IT assets. and operations through a significant amount of investments we've recently made in capital replacements and the addition of managed services in the organization. And I'll talk a little bit more about that as it impacts our operational expenses. Those capital investments were guided by the capital investment study that we delivered in 2025, along with our security assessment study in 2025 and our operational assessment study. So those were all combined to lead and guide our capital investments and our ongoing operating expenses associated with those investments. And in 2027, we're going to continue an emphasis on change management training and improved uses of technology and proactive services and align that with one of the position requests that we have in the organizational analysis that you've heard about in tonight's conversation. Some of the achievements in the past year, as I mentioned earlier, our capital investment study was completed. It allowed us to move forward on significant projects that have been approved and funded through the capital budget. Those included our significant network infrastructure replacement project that touches 60 city facilities, primarily the majority of those facilities being water utility sites, but all of our staffed facilities. In addition to that, we have a significant investment in staff device replacements that is happening now. We've received... equipment and we're ready to deploy here in the next several weeks and months to come. In addition, we're making significant investments in our city hall new data center. And as part of that process, I'll talk a little bit about the closure of our secondary data center located currently at our maintenance facility. We also completed, as I mentioned earlier, a security assessment that guided our investment in cybersecurity protection and initiatives in this organization. And we've started implementing recommendations where gaps were identified and recommendations were made that aligned with our capital and our operating budgets. And then, of course, our Police City Hall project phase one start that is occurring as we speak and anticipation of transitioning into that new space here in the end of the month. So those are some of the achievements that we have been driving our activities in the last 12 months. Some of the challenges that are constant challenges but we live regularly especially in the last year. Cyber security of course is a constant pressure and how we minimize risk associated with incidents and protect our investment in our infrastructure and the tools that we use on a regular basis. Plus, the system's life cycles. The investments we're making in the products and the applications that we utilize are much shorter life cycles than in the past many years. So our replacement cycles are shorter, our investments are bigger in many cases as a result, and the demand is not changing. We see an increased demand And you hear terms like IOT devices or OT devices. OT is operational technology associated with a lot of SCADA related platforms or water utility platforms. Those types of devices continue to increase as we continue to make investments in those platforms. So that continues to drive the pressures around support, maintenance, and security of those platforms. We do use our capital plans to inform our work. We're actively doing that now, so that's actually a great opportunity that continues to drive what we do. We're leveraging additional managed services, as you'll see in some of the expenses that I'll highlight coming up. We are investing in some additional managed services around security, and we anticipate additional managed services in years to come to help offset staffing needs, to help improve our posture around security, and our ability to just keep doing things that we need to be doing. We're addressing staffing resources through ongoing organizational analysis positions and looking at the future of our needs specifically along GIS and the GIS services we provide across the organization. Some of the trends that drive our costs or our activities, security spending continues to rise as a result of Not only normal increases in the cost of software and the equipment that we use to protect ourselves and our systems, but just the increase in the amount of activity, malicious activity that's occurring that's driving costs associated with how we respond to those activities. And then AI everywhere. It's driving costs associated with licensing of AI tools, governance and how we manage AI, and the training around that. We will continue to see that increase as we continue to spend more time and investment in that. And it's one of our strategic priorities this year and focused on AI governance. Plus the continued modernization that's guided by our capital improvement study. That'll drive some additional maintenance costs, at least long term. But it also adds to some of the additional items that we have as part of our asset and our inventory of items. And then vendor inflation, you've also heard that's an item that's not controllable on our part. We've seen in the last year an increase anywhere from 3% normal inflationary increases all the way up to 130% for equipment and services that are driving some of our costs beyond what we budgeted originally. As I mentioned earlier and was reflected in the budget conversation tonight, There is a request in 2027 for an additional IT position called a collaboration and engagement specialist position. This is to align the organization around driving adoption of modernized tools that we're investing in, making sure that we're leveraging the tools that we have today to do our jobs in a better fashion. This is also to drive the modernization and collaboration around ERP as we bring ERP into the organization over the next few years, some of the new investments around our telephone platform that we'll be rolling out this year, and as you heard Steph mention earlier, our investment in intranet-based tools in the next year is driving the need for these positions and these resources. This would be a position that acts as an IT liaison to the organization that engages the departments in more active participation in tools that we have an awareness, heightened awareness, and also leverage more training and improve communication across the organization around those tools and systems that we have that we can leverage. Enterprise Resource Platform. Yes, which everybody's been throwing. I know you're very familiar with that, but as we talk about ERP and our organization, it really is about our financial management platform, our utility billing platform, our HR payroll platform. and our employee experience portal that provides employee services to the organization.

It's a huge distance.

First thing I thought was PD was over there and FD going, we stole our emergency response plan acronym. Like, come on.

No, apparently not. Lots of acronyms. We are also planning to bring forward in 2027 a GIS assessment to review our GIS services in the organization and one of the possible outcomes around that assessment may identify additional staffing resources needed in the future. There is no request for a staff position in GIS in 2027, only the assessment to bring forward at this point. Some of the capital improvements that we've already talked about a little bit, ERP again shows up on a slide. That's intended to start in 2027. That will drive some of our ongoing expenses associated around our operating budget. Network infrastructure replacements, I mentioned that. As we start seeing that coming into service over this year and by the end of this year, we'll start seeing some operational expenses associated with that. And then staff device replacements I talked about and our new phone system. In addition to that, one of the things that we did actively this year as an investment is we are closing down our secondary data center as a result because we are moving into what's called a hybrid environment. We have a new data center opening up here at the end of September in New City Hall, and we will be adding a Microsoft-hosted data center. It's cloud-hosted that will provide us backup services for our primary onsite. We anticipate through the redirection of capital investments not needed anymore for that secondary data center, about $104,000 annual savings. That'll continue to see, we'll see for the next several years as we finance that new equipment in the one data center that we'll only maintain going forward. And then of course we'll have activities associated with police city hall phase two as we move into that phase and the investments we make there And we have an intentional improvements around AV at other city facilities as to align not only this facility with those facilities. Some of the major changes that are driving the operations budget in 2027. I mentioned the GIS strategic plan. The acronyms there for HCINC2, cloud instances, that Microsoft hosted platform. as we mentioned earlier. That's one of the large budget drivers. And then we're adding licensing for Microsoft to accommodate our new phone platform and other services that we need to accommodate staff increases and just general tools available to us in our Microsoft hosted environments. We are increasing the costs associated with our broadband internet service. This is the first time in almost two decades that we've had an increase in our internet service costs. It's a result of increased demand on our internet service across the organization because the amount of services and devices we have across the organization. This also includes expenses around some of the public Wi-Fi services we provide in all the city facilities today too. So there's a separate expense associated with that. And the demand in that area is also increasing. We've actually seen, we're hitting some caps in this last year around our internet service usage. So we have to budget for some increases around that. And then AI licensing. That dollar amount really reflects an average amount that we think it'll cost to add AI licensing for an amount of staff that could use the AI tools effectively going forward as we identify what tools we need. And then recorded call licensing is a feature that is needed for law enforcement use on our new phone system. Some additional changes that are reflected in the operating budget for 2027 is, as I mentioned earlier, we are adding a managed service in 2027. We're increasing security as a service services from Logis. We're currently a member of Logis for many application services and infrastructure. Our biggest application service today is public safety applications, but We have also used some of their security services in the past. We are actually going to what's considered a full managed service where they will provide us an enhanced managed detective response platform around cybersecurity, staffing resources around incident response, risk analysis services around being able to analyze our vendors that we work with and the risks that they pose to our systems. and several other tools that are bundled into that increased cost. And that would be an annual expense that we will see over the course of the next three years. We have a fiber project relocation project that's a known activity. It's a county-led project, a trail project that we have to move some fiber for. We also have a workplace management system implementation. That's kind of a broad term for visitor management and mail management platform for Police City Hall. So we will see this system in use by our our front desk in police and our front desk here at city hall. As we move into the new facility, this gives us some enhanced security capabilities around visitor management. It also provides the ability to do some mail management around retrieving and tracking down people when mail products come in are delivered. Um, and then, uh, the position that's been, um, recommended for 2027 is also included in our overall increase. Rather than increases, this slide reflects the revenue that IT works on primarily around our antenna and asset leasing around our water utility sites. Chris Salania leads that effort in our group. He manages all the vendor relationships and all the leasing that is brought forward. In addition, this also reflects the annual revenue we bring in on fiber agreements that we have still in place. And more recently in the last year's budget, we have a land use agreement that we added through a company called Giga Power here at Lac Lavon Park, if you recall that. So this reflects all the revenue anticipated in the course of the next year. And this reflects a regular annual increases to each of the agreements that we have in place. The overall increase in the operating expenses for IT is expected to be about 14%. It is made up of our radio building expenses. The radio buildings are those assets that we manage tower leases around that are associated with our water tower sites and our monopole sites. our general information technology budget, and of course our GIS budget. Those all reflect the overall 14% increase in operating. And these are the funds that make up the overall budget, the fund allocations. As you'll see between the water and sewer fund, in general we did water allocations in the past. This coming year we will be separating water and sewer rather as one line item, we are separating those so we can do some more specific allocations between water-specific projects and sewer-only projects. And again, in general, most of those are related to our water utility sites, our wells, our lift stations, our water towers that IT is involved in and projects are funded through. And then our general fund allocation reflects that overall 14% between those funds. And with that, I stand for any questions you may have.

Tom, I just want to thank you for all the work, all of those analysis, those studies that we went through and you submitted last year that informs all of this. Even though there are some words that I didn't understand, I had to sit with a with one iPad to go and get the definition of those words that were in that study. But I got through all of those reports. Thank you because that helps give us the information. And I'm very appreciative and also grateful for the knowledge base that you bring. I remember when we had a IT department of one And the need got greater when we needed to cable this building. And Tom Hanson didn't want to hire anybody and told you to go get trained at the technical college to cable the building that you did at night and on weekends. So when I think about what path you have traveled on with us throughout all of this and now a new city hall. The expansion of the Police Department, and Fire Station One, and then Fire Station, to have the knowledge base that you bring. And I thank you also for the collaboration with all of the different partners that we have. Because what you do benefits everyone. It's like everything that we do here, whether it's roads from water and sewer, everybody touches in a different way. So I want to thank you. And I look at your compliment of staff And I go back and think about 1992 when we hired you. And then everything. And you've been very innovative, even with the Cisco platform that we wanted to go international. I think it was 2000 or 2001. But hey, it was a good shot, but it was way before a lot of people were thinking about global communication.

Before broadband was a term that people were used to at that time.

And then the fiber system. So thank you for that. I mean, that connects all of our systems. Yeah. Thank you. Anybody else? Thank you. And now our fire department, fire chief Gilman. Thank you.

All right. Good evening. Madam mayor, members of the council. Thanks for the opportunity to present tonight on the proposed 2027 budget. Uh, just as a reminder, the department is dedicated to providing efficient, effective fire, medical rescue and prevention services. The highest quality. It's really four buckets of services. Each four of those are all equally important to us. Um, I would tell you and point out our values. We operate with character, communication, collaboration, and competent excellence. Um, to us, we need to deliver that service through those four values and that's what we hire and train for. Um, and that's served us really well. We appreciate the support we've had and the impact we've been allowed to give the community based on that. We talked a little bit earlier, but the Safer Grant was a godsend to us, provided us with nine FTEs that were planned to be in 2027 and allowed us to fill most of those last year and move those up. And I would also say, and we'll talk about it in a little bit, but the training program has opened up a whole new pool of candidates. For next year, we're also looking to update our strategic plan. The last one was done in 2021. We continue updating our equipment and technology. It's evolving, whether that's personal protective equipment that expires after 10 years, radios that need to be replaced, vehicles, all that stuff has a serviceable life to it. We also are working to balance the demand with capacity. We continue to see that increase when you look year over year, at least in a trend line. We do have some flat years, but overall you think of where we were in 1984 at about 1,900 calls and now this last year over 10,000 calls. So really trying to build that capacity to meet what we think both today's demand is going to be and the future demand. And then right-sizing our support systems to meet demand and staffing. We're no longer a 20-person department. So having the quality assurance and the training and the administrative capacity to support all that, the logistics to support that many staff just takes more time. And then I would also note on the equipment and technology front, one of the proposals we'll have for next GOC in there is equipping our frontline vehicles with a body camera. We've used them on fire inspectors and admin personnel for a number of years. We added fleet cameras last year. The latest version of Axon body cameras allows us to improve our documentation, our quality assurance. It has AI translation of a number of languages for us. It has real-time mapping, so if our staff call for help, it's no longer where their truck is. We can actually see where they're at, which is more important to me than where the truck is. And that it also allows us to upload our policies and protocols so that we can ask it questions and it uses AI to help us answer it. So if we need to figure out the calculation of a pediatric dose of medication, the body camera can actually help us with that. So that technology has come a long ways. So that will provide us a future impact that's super helpful.

How many firefighter paramedics have body cams?

Right now, only... Our two inspectors and our community risk reduction medic, Mike Andrews, and then the four chiefs and our battalion chiefs. So there's eight of us that have them currently, and this would put one on each truck. So it's an additional 16 roughly body cameras. So we'd put one on each engine, one on each ambulance and the ladder truck. So it would allow us to put one on each crew because they operate as a team. Um, is the proposal.

Is that sufficient?

It is sufficient. I think we'd be one of the first in the country to be using it in the way we're using it. And not that we might not need them in the future, but I think starting one per crew is a great place to start. I don't want to overinvest. I would rather roll our way into this and see what the efficiency and effectiveness is before we put both feet in that bucket. Achievements and challenges. I'm really proud of the folks we've got working for us. We have the best of the best, and we're fortunate to have that. They've been through a grind of hiring two large academies with greater than six people, which takes a whole department effort, not just to train them the first eight weeks before we put them on the street, but another 12 to 18 weeks of academy. And now with the trainees, as we're getting them through paramedic school, they need to precept them and get them their clinical hours and teach them as we go. So that's anywhere from an 18-month to 24-month commitment. And our folks have been up for it. and have been all in on welcoming and training our new folks. We implemented a new records management system that took six of the 12 different systems we had and put it in one. And that's been very helpful. It's put a lot of information in our folks' hands that was in disparate systems previously. We've had great transition in our leadership roles. We knew this was coming, but we had two assistant chiefs retire in the last 24 months. When two of your three assistant chiefs retire, that's a huge leadership transition. Fortunately, we've had two very qualified assistant chiefs step into those roles, and they've picked up right where we left off and are taking us to new levels. And I'm proud to have them as part of our team, and they're doing great things for us. But that doesn't mean that it's not without time and transition and backfilling those roles. We implemented that EMS community risk reduction program. You've heard me say it before. We don't call it community paramedic for a reason. We're tailoring this to the risks in our communities. Firefighter paramedic Mike Andrews has done a great job getting into that role and tailoring his approach to high-frequency utilizers, high-risk populations, making relationships with facilities and group homes. We're doing things that are impacting our community in a very positive way, and it's an additional resource opportunity. to our frontline folks, as well as his integration with behavioral health in the PD has been great. We implemented that fire trainee program. The last two postings we've had, we've had over 200 candidates. I will just remind you that prior to that, we were less than 20 candidates per firefighter paramedic posting. So we've over tenfold increased our candidates. And then we talked about the implemented fleet cameras. That's been a great addition to the fleet. Expanding the use to more body cameras is proposed for next year So trends and cost drivers again that increased demand for service is a driver for us We weren't necessarily well resourced before the increase happened So we're both catching up and meeting the current demand plus we know there's a future demand there So it's kind of a threefold hit for us and really we need to meet that demand and And then also the implementation of the required leave laws in the state, and it's been very generous. And I'm glad we have our own program because we're taking much better care of our employees. But those do have strains when you run a 24-7 operation. You need people in seats to provide service. So without the people in seats, it's either overtime, over-count positions, finding ways to put people in seats so trucks can go out the door. So that has increased the demand as well. We know that vehicles, equipment, and supply costs have increased. We've seen it in fire trucks, right? We're paying over a million dollars per fire truck. We're now approaching $500,000 per ambulance. And that's our fire gear. That's our radios. That's our medical supplies, our medications. All that stuff has gone up exponentially, and it's out of our control to try to do that. One thing we have done that's helped us is one good thing about the lead times is we're ordering them earlier and locking in at today's rates. They can adjust it if something major happens, but it has helped us control our future costs a little bit compared to some other departments. And we need to evolve, like I said, really about training and quality assurance. The training program is great, but these people are coming out at an entry-level firefighter paramedic. They don't have tons of years of experience, so we have to have systems in place to support them. So that really means more training, more quality assurance, more time and and care to get them up to speed and support them. So our staffing request for 2027, we do have the nine positions. We're working on filling the last three of those with our fall academy here in three weeks. We're excited to get those folks started. The additional staffing request is for the one admin firefighter paramedic, and that really is about increasing our quality assurance and training so that we can come alongside all those new trainees. So not all of a sudden you got your paramedic certification and we just put you out there. Come alongside them and help train them and get them the experience and the wisdom that they need to be effective firefighter paramedics. And then there's Two different categories of upgrades I requested. One is to take a fire inspector and make it a deputy fire marshal position. Right now, we have two fire inspectors and an assistant chief, and we have nothing in between. So there's no career development built into there. And when Assistant Chief Avoy is out of town, I don't have anybody at that next level to kind of fill in that gap. This would give us that additional level of responsibility and experience as a deputy fire marshal. And then the last one is really to upgrade three firefighter paramedics to fire captains. If you recall, we actually requested 12 positions from the safer grant and we got nine of the 12. The last three were for fire captains and that's really to deal with Hispanic control. Once we get fully staffed, we're going to have each supervisor, each fire captain having about nine firefighters and that's not a sustainable model to appropriately mentor and supervise those firefighters. So by adding a captain per shift, we'll bring that down to about five or six, um, per captain. So that will allow us to, to right size the supervision scale. Um, so those are existing firefighter positions that we would then upgrade to fire captain capital improvements. We've talked about fire station to moving forward with that and appreciate the support. So we're in design phase for Fire Station 2. Again, vehicles staying ahead of that and making sure that we are replacing our fleet at an appropriate time so that we have reliability and that our vehicles are meeting our needs. And so we're fortunate to have a great replacement program going on there. Equipment, again, we have a great replacement schedule. And then technology is ever-evolving. Tom just talked about that. That's no different in our world. It's not just the technology and computers. It's the technology and thermal imaging cameras, smart monitors, and all the different devices we use. I mean, heck, ultrasound is one of the things we have in our capital improvement plan in the future. Ultrasound is going on ambulances, and AI and ultrasound is a new thing that helps it and makes it easier for us to be able to do that.

Wow.

So we look at major changes. The majority of these are general funds. The top one here is some supply requests for... This will allow us to have funds to do things like refill that vending machine. That has been a great success at the library, buying supplies for that. We've been able to get grants and community support for that, but we know at some point we're going to need to provide that, as well as other handouts and informational things we can use that for. The majority of this, again, is equipment replacement. I'll note the $72,000 for the Axon body cameras gets us those additional 16 body cameras, one for each primary vehicle. The strategic plan for next year, fire software maintenance is at $69,000. That's really bringing all of our softwares, the majority of our softwares under one category here. It gives you an idea of some of the major requests and then a second page of those. Again, an interior drone, medical supplies, replacement gas monitors. The striker service agreements is for our stretchers and stair chairs and things like that. We are now buying them as part of the capital purchase. But when we initially started buying them with the ambulances, they didn't come with the service contract. So we'll have this in the operating budget for a few years. You see the admin firefighter paramedic requests, the three firefighter positions, the fire captain and the deputy fire marshal. So the net total of that between the two pages, 691,200. When you net that out, because there is some movement amongst that, we do anticipate a 3% increase in fire revenue, and I would say the big one is 7% increase in EMS revenue. I'll remind you, just like a clinic, the net revenue is different than what we bill, and this shows what the net proposed revenue is at about $4.5 million next year of EMS revenue. If you look at this from an overview standpoint, the increase for the entire departments when you net it out is about 2% increase overall year over year. So you do see some bigger numbers increase and some other numbers decreasing. For example, you see EMS going up quite a bit, but that's because we moved the opioid funded position in there and we took it out of fire suppression or fire operations And fire operations is a bigger budget line. So, again, that's all about netting it out. At the bottom line, it's a total change of $388,432 from 2026. About 2% increase overall. Why is the fire training building going down 65%? Yeah. This year we had some major renovations to replace walls in there. So we had some capital in there that we won't have for next year. So we had about $80,000 worth of wall repairs to do in there. and then we should be good for another three years, five years before we've got to do that again.

Thank you.

So summed up by expense type, the opioid fund again goes up by putting the things we think are associated with that $80,000 increase there. The general fund total increase is about 2%. So again, the change overall when you net both of them out is 3% or $468,000. So, went through that pretty quickly, but happy to stand for any questions.

Yeah. Danji. Is all of this included in the 7.63 budget we're talking about right now? Okay, so. Yes. That's in there. Yep. Okay. That's correct. That's all I need to know.

Everything, Mayor and Council, everything that you've heard from departments tonight is rolled up. It's all in that.

It's not any additional. Chief, you continue to. make us stand out in terms of our excellence in service. I mean, ultrasound, whole blood, the... the partnership with police and behavioral health with Mike Andrews there and everything else we continue to lead in this space. So thank you. I am so proud of the work that we do and the service that we give to our people. They expect great service and we're delivering on that. So thank you. Ultrasound. That's amazing that we're going to be.

Madam Mayor, members of the council, just to tamper any expectations. That's a 2028 request, but just in general talking about where technology is going, what we're looking at.

It doesn't matter. We're looking at it, and it's something that's in the plan moving forward. So I don't want anybody to lose that. because that says a great deal and it's a service to all people but to have that to have whole blood and i think is it 16 people that we've saved their lives with whole blood and i'm trying to remember the the number that i read madam mayor members of the council i can tell you we're closer to 20 if not over at this point i know we've given it a couple times in the past month so

I do think we're over 20 or very close to the 20 number for administrations.

Well, that's because I just remember reading it in Council Weekly and I don't remember what month I was reading that.

I think it was about three months ago and we've given it a handful of times since.

And now we're about at 20 people's lives that we saved.

Pretty amazing work that our folks do and we're lucky to have great folks here. It takes a team to do that and I will tell you the They take great pride in caring for this community, and they go out there every day and do the best they can, and we're lucky to have them.

Yeah. Just one of the examples, Mayor and Council, of the innovation that's happening in the fire department, and frankly, from my perspective, one of the competitive advantages of this community is the professional fire service, EMS service, that we're providing. It is a reason to live here, it's a reason to work here, it's a reason to be here. We don't take for granted Fire Department's nearly $16.5 million operating budget. It is a significant investment, but an incredibly important one to the outcomes and the priorities that you've established for the community. We certainly are grateful. I'm grateful to BJ, to fire leadership and our fire staff who continue to come up with ideas that only improve outcomes and the quality of life for everyone who's here.

Yeah. And the partnership between police and fire is amazing, especially also when you look at what we're doing that nobody else is doing. It's a partnership with the university, the psychiatric and the psychology department. and twice a month having those meetings with them to really understand what's going on. And the work that BHU is doing now, and I'm glad that we're going to have an embedded social worker that we're hiring, that we're not depending on anybody else for that embedded. So we continue to do things that are

Madam Mayor, members of the council, I know this isn't the police department's budget, but I wholeheartedly believe that bringing that service in-house is going to serve us much better and provide us more capacity than we currently have and more coordination. It's been a great partnership with the county, but I think this will take it to the next level. Just to be clear, that level of social service isn't the day-to-day coordination of someone's care. It's really crisis management and follow-up to get them the right resources. So it's different than what people think of like a county social worker. This is really about crisis response. So we're fortunate to have that great partnership, both with the social worker and the police department, and look forward to continuing that.

Well, because what our fire paramedic brings into the BHU are questions in medication that police aren't trained to ask or understand. So to have Mike Andrews there to do that evaluation and to understand where that person is at at that moment in time when they need. someone with a knowledge base to ask the questions so that they can be helped. And I was reading about Hannah and Michael Chief, two of our trainees that became certified paramedics and now full-time within our firefighter community. And if anybody has not read the rigor of the training program, you all need to read what they go through. I mean, for police, you need a four-year degree. I always tell people we have such high standards. And now with the fire department, Everybody. I mean, they go through EMT training. They go through fire skills training. They go through paramedic training. And then they do their clinical rotations while they're working. And the thing is, in just reading about the scarcity of applicants because of our standards, it's high, and we're looking for character to go to the four pillars that you spoke about earlier. Character is number one in that, in collaboration and excellence in service. So, thank you so much. I mean, everybody around this table in all of the reports that we've heard. Thank you so much for the work that you do because I can tell you, I can put you guys up to any corporate, and I think you would outperform any of them because of the work that you do and the care that you give to the people of our community. I think this community is better than where it has been because of the people who work here and provide the service that they expect. So thank you so much. I don't know. Yes.

I want to go back and revisit the body camera. It does seem perfectly logical given our history with PD.

Yeah.

And, you know, it makes you wonder, like, I mean, why didn't we have them all along, right? But there is a difference between the two public agencies, public safety agencies. The types of calls that PD is going on can be very different, obviously, than what fire is. So I just wanted to, if you could refresh, what's the goal, the objectives that you want to achieve by piloting a program? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, Madam Mayor, members of the council, it's a great point. Part of it was catching up and making sure that they're all HIPAA compliant because we need to make sure everybody's data is secure, which the system we use absolutely is. So the initial focus was on CEGIS requirements for law enforcement, which is different than the HIPAA requirements. So now that we've gotten to a point where we're comfortable with their HIPAA compliance, and secondly, they don't make them fire rated. So really this is about EMS calls, right? Oh, right, yeah. and until there was enough benefit for that. So really, in my mind, there's four things. One is documentation. There's nothing better than a video. If someone's got an issue, it's not a he said, she said. Now we have video of what transpired, and we have the whole thing. And in today's day and age where we're on camera, whether we're recording it or not, it's nice to have an end to end. interaction, plus from a quality assurance standpoint. We do it with the fleet cameras that we have in the back of the ambulance now, as they can go back and watch that cardiac arrest or that critical call and learn from it. Like, hey, what did we do well? What can we improve on? Because just like the lay public, the way you recall it may not be 100% in real time. This helps you jog your memory and see where you could improve or what you did well. You also have the real time from the documentation perspective transcription that will go into our record system and then it will use AI to help write the EMS report. So some of the things like the patient demographics, we can get off of face sheets from a care center or their ID. If we have a medication list, we don't have to manually type them in. Now we can take a picture of it. it'll import it. That conversation, we're talking to that patient about their medical history, it'll import all that. Saving us time and probably improving accuracy because all it takes is one typo and you've got something else in there you didn't intend. The third thing is the real-time mapping. So now we know where the crew is, not where their truck is. So their truck isn't always where they are. They go on a call and I'm in XYZ building. I can see when they call for help, we can send whoever to go help them wherever they're actually at, which might be further away from their truck and might have a better entrance. Um, and then you have translation. They have a number of languages in real time translation. So when we're interviewing the patient, it will pick up that language and automatically start translating for us two ways. And then the fourth piece is really the AI policy piece where we can upload our protocols and our policies. So if one of the fire medics has a question, they can ask the body camera a question. It'll run through our policies and our guidelines and give them guidance. Very impressive. It's a smart camera.

Very smart camera. It's like a smartphone sitting right here with AI.

To me, what tipped it over is it's not just recording. It's doing stuff with that recording. The recording is great, and that's a great tool for us, both from documentation and quality assurance. But I would say the three added value beyond recording has made it well worth the investment from my perspective.

From the HIPAA, so is there... like data retention, the privacy concerns. Somebody that's having a medical emergency for EMS is different than a crime or a crime scene. How does the storage of the data, the handling of the, you know, they're HIPAA compliant, but that doesn't mean they can't be hacked. So how's that all managed by the company that's...

Yeah, I mean, it's all, just like PD, it's all virtual, right? It's a hosted solution, and Tom would probably know better than I am all the acronyms of all the different certifications they have for that. But what I would tell you is it's encrypted end-to-end, and there's a complete log, both of when it was recorded, when it was uploaded, and then anybody that accessed it. And the only people that can access it were the people on the call or the supervisors. So the minute it goes in there, it's locked down. and then we keep it for our retention period based on the type of call it was.

Is PD gaining an enhanced body camera because of the body cameras that Chief Jungman is looking at? Is that where PD's body cameras could go, where they're not just recording, but they're also a smart assistant with AI capabilities that can help? INSTEAD OF WRITING REPORTS OR TAKING NOTES, THEY CAN TRANSCRIBE AND RECORD, THAT KIND OF STUFF. IS THAT GOING TO TRANSLATE INTO AN ENHANCED CAMERA FOR PD AS WELL?

MAYOR, COUNCIL MEMBERS, THE CAMERAS WE HAVE HAVE SOME CAPABILITIES ALREADY LIKE THAT. AND YOU KNOW, YOU CAN GOOGLE SEARCH. THERE'S ALL SORTS OF AGENCIES OUT THERE TRYING DIFFERENT THINGS AND TESTING THINGS. SO I DON'T KNOW THAT THE FIRE DEPARTMENT'S NEW CAMERAS NECESSARILY DO ANYTHING WITH OURS, BUT I THINK THEY'RE GOING TO END UP BEING THE SAME, PROBABLY THE SAME CAMERA.

YEAH.

IT JUST SEEMS LIKE THERE'S A LOT OF AI CAPABILITIES AND INTELLIGENCE WITHIN THAT CAMERA THAT, LIKE YOU SAID, IT'S NOT JUST RECORDING. IT CAN SERVE A LOT OF OTHER PURPOSES. HOW THAT COULD HELP PD AS WELL.

I JUST WANT TO BE CLEAR. WE HAVE TWO DIFFERENT INSTANCES OF THE SYSTEM. SO PD HAS THEIR OWN AND ABIDES BY THEIR. data retention and regulations, and fire has their own. So if a body camera captures it on a fire call or an EMS call, it goes in the fire system, it doesn't cross-pollinate. The only time it does is if there's a records release signed or a warrant or things like that, right? So we have to follow all these data practices, but they're not commingled. I just want to be clear. clear that there's two separate instances, even though we're using the same equipment. Because it's the same company, Axon.

Yeah, Axon. They haven't had any data practice problems like?

No.

the license plate reader company, Flock.

Madam Member, members of the council, we're talking about apples and oranges in terms of vendors when it comes to public safety solutions. I think it's also important to underscore Chief Judman's most recent point, which is although the technology, the hardware might be very similar, and certainly the back-end software, the hosted solution are similar, and there's advantages to that in terms of the data that we're collecting is the city's. There is both important controls that are regulated by other agencies, the state and beyond, but also the assurances of how that data in our experience over 20 years with Axon has been appropriately managed is important. I also think that it's important to understand that, and now we're getting into the operational details a bit, but the bifurcation between police and fire systems, although the technology might allow for the police department to use artificial intelligence to create police reports, as an example. The city has chosen not to use those features at this point in time, to Chief Smith's point. There are different considerations between how we might approach the police operation and considerations in making those decisions versus some of what the fire department is exploring right now. In the example of the fire department, the use of or exploring the use of that artificial intelligence under the guardrails the state provides and that we've provided for ourselves by our own internal operating policies. They just are different outcomes and provide different opportunities for the city to provide an advantage on the fire operation side, that maybe doesn't exist yet or that we haven't fully explored from a police operations perspective. So I think it's important to understand kind of the two differences and how we might approach that technology from an operations perspective.

Well, I think it's important certainly for us as elected officials given today's environment and the issues that Flock has brought on. We've chosen a company, and as you pointed out, for 20 years that has high integrity has not engaged in data sharing as Flock has or violating the contract as Flock has been accused of many times with Axon. They are a whole different company in a different kind of business, but it's the integrity of their company that we're buying into and investing more into with a proven track record of being very... very particularly in following the actual regulatory laws.

Any other comments? Thank you, you guys. Thank you so much, Greg and directors. Thank you so much for the great work that you do for this organization and for the people of Burnsville that we are all here to serve. Thank you. I'm very grateful. And thank you so much. Is there anything else? If there's nothing else to come before us, before 9 o'clock, we stand adjourned by acclamation.