City Council - Regular Meeting

You know, you haven't called this meeting to order. I am sidetracked.

Michael, can you hear us OK?

I'm going to get started. We got a lot on our plate today.

So just a couple things we kind of get started. I'm hoping that we won't have to come back tomorrow.

I think in leadership Kyle and I had chatted with Janine. And she had pretty put together a pretty distinct. Overview of the budget. I would. I would also urge as we kind of go through this. If there's any like personal curiosity and things like that on certain things to keep the meeting moving to to please maybe reach out to staff afterwards. if you have any minute types of stuff. And I always use this example, Thomas, in leadership. I was on the council several years ago where the council at the time was saying, what is this $20,000 for? We need to cut it. It got to that point. And so I would say that the council probably should be mindful of that. And so just wanting to kind of say this is kind of what we're looking at for the budget session this year. First questions should be, obviously transparent and open as much as you would like to. I just want to kind of frame that. All right.

Yes, I sure do. Thank you.

All right. So, session tonight, we'll talk a little bit about this. Who is an expert in this area, not me. And I'm going to hand it over to you.

Thank you, Mary. You give me too much credit, perhaps, but I guess I'll just take it. I will. Council, it's good to have you here. And I know that some council members tend to really enjoy going through the budget, others less so. So I will tell you, I've prepared a presentation for tonight that has tried to do a few things. First of all, to recognize that not everybody wants to be in the weeds, so to speak. and honoring the mayor's advice. With respect to that, I've also tried to really focus on what I call the 30,000-foot level, which is the level of policymakers and elected officials, and talk to you about how this budget aligns with your priorities, with the community's priorities, as we understand through your leadership, and also through our survey data and things of that nature. And lastly, I want to acknowledge that we have many, many fine members of your staff here, notably all your department heads and many of your leaders as well in divisions and whatnot. So recognizing that it is my first time around this budget earth, I may lean on these folks to fill in gaps and help answer any questions that you have. So we'll start off. I wanted to share with you kind of the agenda for tonight and what we will talk about so that as you, as we go through this, if you do have questions and maybe, you know, we're in the general fund section and you want to ask a question about water or wastewater, know that it is coming. We will be getting to it. This may help with the timing of inquiries and whatnot. So we'll talk first just with a general overview at that 30,000-foot public policy level, and then we'll get a little bit into the general fund, the enterprise fund, and then we'll talk about our capital investments. I'll let you know I'm going to be very light touch on the capital plan because we have had a previous work session with you where we've talked about that, and that budget has been in your hands now for many weeks. So I don't want to beat that horse any further. And then we will close out with our human capital investments for fiscal 27 and then end by talking a little bit about what's happening in 27 that will shape future fiscal years and the city's future. So we're going to start out with looking at all funds just very easily and what I call at a glance. So when you look at the entirety of your city fiscal 27 proposed budget across every fund, This is what it looks like, $196.4 million total, $33.3 million in what I call new capital. So those are a lot of those capital projects that we talked about a few weeks back that were new to you, literally. And we may not even start some of those until the spring of calendar year 2027. Those were some of the new things you saw. When you look at your operating budget, that excludes all of those capital projects. you'll see that there is a 4.5% change from fiscal 26 to fiscal 27. And I just noted at the bottom there some of the things that are what I call change drivers. When you look, it was one of my favorite parts about doing budget is kind of unpacking some of the local and regional economic factors that shape our business and every business. And what we've seen is in the U.S. western region, the consumer price index has flexed up by 3.5% in the last 12 months, ending in April. And also, as a part of that 3.5%, the largest growth that we saw in pricing was for energy prices. So that includes your electricity and natural gas, but also, fuels, gasoline, lubricants, those things, which this organization is a consumer of all of those categories and a large consumer of fuels, as you can imagine, for our heavy equipment and our plant operations. Of all of your funds, 35% of those are personnel expenses, so $68 million. And as you well know, most of that personnel expense is in the general fund, which is capital light and people heavy. Whereas your capital fund, your enterprise funds tend to be capital heavy and a little bit lighter on personnel expense. And Mayor, if it's okay with you, I'm okay with questions as we go through. Like if something on the slide doesn't make sense or we need clarification, I'm happy to.

Absolutely, yeah. Please feel free to motion if you want to ask a question in each slide or however you want to do that.

Do you have anything? I don't mean to take a lot of time, but it offends me a little bit as far as asking questions, so. But. So I I I'm not trying to nitpick, but just on the slide of the 16.6 energy prices when. How did how did that apply to the overall? expenses division by division, department by department. I didn't see that. In some cases, actually lower energy costs.

No, you're absolutely right. I'm sure you may. You're absolutely right, counselor. And I was just actually sharing this in leadership. So when you go through the budget booklet as a whole, You know if we were going to spend our time here looking at every division by every line item, we're literally talking probably a million line items. I'm just guessing at least half a million, so that's not where I'm going to focus my time. But what I've tried to point out to you is where we did see as I went through the budget and reviewed it with your staff where we do look at every line, every division, every expense. where we saw trends of change. And so I offer the change drivers because as I reviewed it, that's where I saw repeated requests. And you're correct. In some cases, some of your cost centers or your divisions, I would characterize some of them as having been a little over budgeted or too heavy on budget compared to actual expenditure history. And so in those cases, we may have reined those back in a little bit. But then there were other areas where we were a little bit under budgeted, right? Our expenditure history exceeded our budgetary authority, so there were changes made throughout the budget to adjust the budget numbers for fuel, electricity, natural gas to what is reasonable based on actual spending history and also based on our projections for the future, which as we look at the past 12 months, we've seen the 16% change as we try to look at the future 12 months. Frankly, it's a little bit of a crapshoot. I think all of the predictors say they're not entirely sure where energy prices will land in the upcoming year, so we took that into account as well and tried to build a budget that would be reasonable and sustain our operations. And I'll talk a little bit more about that counselor Sweeney as we get more into the funds, OK?

I'll just address apologize if you feel offended, Pat. However, I also know from experience of doing this many that there are things that we can get into the weeds to a point where we have to also know that our staff has that. There are experts in this. And I think there's time also for us to also have conversations with the staff outside of here in order for us not to be here until 10, 11 o'clock at night. And it's not to say this isn't important. But after many years of experience doing this, we as policymakers see this from a 30,000-foot view, and we shouldn't be going line item by line item. So my apologies if you're offended, but this is based off of my experience with this. But if you want specific things, I would suggest you go see the staff.

And I would reiterate, I would be happy to meet with any of you. If we want to look at – can you kind of take a deep dive into things? We can do that at any time. So this slide counselors, I kind of call this is the whole enchilada. This is everything. This is all of the city's budget for the upcoming year in all of its iterations and broken out by spending category for you. A couple of things I draw your attention to. One of the things that I found really to really reflect good financial stewardship on the part of the staff and the elected officials of the city for obviously many years. Is if you look at debt service, your debt service is actually quite low and that is a very notable thing. And undoubtedly what has probably what I know has gotten the city rated as one of the top best run municipalities in the country by Wallet Hub, for instance. So congratulations to you all. So this is the same, just with a little bit of a different look at our all funds at a glance. This is included, and I'll tell you just candidly why, as I've moved around the community, I often hear concerns that, for instance, Parks and Recreation is overfunded. Public safety is underfunded. You know, everybody has a perspective on how well things should be funded. And so this takes all of your funds and it tells you where 5% $196.4 million is being allocated, and you'll see by far the majority to infrastructure and public works activities in streets, engineering, solid waste, water, and wastewater. Parks and Recreation at seven, and your public safety functions are receiving about 22% of all of the resources. And then you have this fairly large category of everything else, but these are really the support services, as I would say, largely for all of the things noted above infrastructure, public works, public safety, parks and rec, etc. So that's the whole enchilada. I also wanted to show you if we look at your original budget, which is the budget you would adopt on July 1 of every fiscal year, and that is in your red dotted line. and then you look at your revised budget, which I would characterize as your year end budget on the final day of the fiscal year, you can see that those are very different. I think you've seen this information many years in a row, but the reason that we plotted it this way is I can appreciate if I were a lay person that when you look at, for instance, the original budget adopted for 2026 was 183.7 million, But the revised budget at year end, that same fiscal year was $344,000. And you look at that gap and you say, what is going on down at City Hall? And so I want to remind you that this is a planned practice that this organization has used for many years. And notably, you have three scheduled budget amendments each year. And the first one is where you roll your capital projects. And really, I think that gap for me can be easily articulated by just noting that you have a fiscal year beginning and end that occurs precisely at the middle point of a construction season in a Northern state, in a town of Casper, Wyoming, in a cold climate, right? So you have a capital project, for instance, maybe that's $50 million and you've started it in April. And by June 30th, you may have expended half of that. You haven't completed the project and expended the remaining half. And so we roll that through budget Amendment number one from fiscal year 26 into the front to add it to the original budget in that first budget amendment. And that is really largely what accounts for the gap.

Can I ask? Absolutely. Thanks, Janine. On that point, do you see any reason to believe like something that I've called out the past year or two is a worry potentially unfounded that our rollovers are the result of us simply being at capacity you know, local contractor capacity or whatever. I noticed those, those lines are getting further apart. Are we at capacity for the work that we're able to complete in our short construction season? Or do you think, you know, I'm someone that would love to see more in streets? Is it realistic and practical to assume we can, the more money we throw at streets, the more streets we can get done? Or is there a cap? Like what we can get done each year?

Honestly, I think through you, Mayor, Councilor, that's an astute question. And I can tell, obviously, you've been elected for some time. I think all of our Wyoming communities struggle with that, the capacity to do work in our contracting private partners. I want to say this, though. I don't know that I can answer your question yet. I honestly don't know if I have enough experience in this market with these contractors. I'm sure some of those folks out there might be able to give you a perspective. But I do want to point out one thing about 2026. If you look at original budget and the gap between it and your year-end revised budget, it's enormous. That's a big capital project. And if you look at your historical trend back to 2020, it's probably, you know, when we're out five years from now, there's going to be kind of this big gap in this year and maybe next from these large projects you're engaged in right now. And I think about CVC. I think about some of those other projects. I don't know that you're going to be that far apart in future years. And if you would like someone to, if you'd like us to talk, I can go back and talk to the staff about the capacity to complete work and you know how much can we reasonably get done based on their assessment of the private sector's capacity to partner with us and we can come back and talk about that more.

Any other questions on this slide?

OK, so a couple of things I wanted to start out with them and some of these are principles you're well accustomed to, but I just wanted to reiterate a new city manager that we are still embracing many of the aspects of responsible financial leadership and stewardship. Your funds still stand alone and nothing has changed from that previous approach you've taken. So for instance, we do not use excess money in the water fund. For instance, this is just an example, but we wouldn't take extra money from the water fund and use it to pay for general fund things. Every fund stands alone and they have to have sufficient revenue in each fund to pay for the expenditures in that fund, and there's no commingling or mixing in monies across funds. And that has been your practice and continues to be, and of course is also required by law. The cash on hand practice is continued here, meaning you would have cash on hand before you initiate, for instance, a capital project, unless debt financing has been approved. And as you saw, there's very little debt service here. Best strategies and strategic financial planning. This is your gap standards for accounting, the Government Finance Officers Association, and the National Advisory Council on State and Local Budgeting. Your budgeting practices and accounting do comply with that, have complied, and will continue to apply, and also required by law. And then lastly, we are going to decrease sales tax this year. So that's kind of cool, right? Like it's You hear often, you know, Facebook warriors talking about how the government just raises taxes all the time. But the truth is municipal governments in Wyoming, most of them haven't changed the tax rate in 100 years. So it is an interesting moment when we realize that we can tell our public we're actually going to decrease your tax rate this year because the council is determined to expire the six penny tax on June 30th when it will be fully funded. and fully funded after only 14 months of collection. So a success story, I think. I'd also tell you this budget strives to attain your goals, and we'll talk more about that as we move through, as well as it does seem to align with the resident priorities that we see in survey data, as well as your constituents priorities that you bring here and tell us about. More street funding, continued strong support for public safety, and sustaining opportunities for parks, recreation and cultural opportunities. And then lastly, it is a balanced budget as it must be and should be. So here's your total tax revenue. Your budget brings in not just tax revenue, it also brings in user charges from customers of our utilities. But when we isolate revenue to only look at tax revenue, we are projecting 50.9 million in tax revenue. And that does take into account the sunsetting of the sixth penny spec tax on June 30th, and also the fact that the fifth penny will be collected at this point only through the end of this calendar year, December 31st, pending renewal by the voters in November. As you can see, sales tax, both the first four pennies that are the state's sales tax and your local penny taxes of fifth and sixth are a huge share. OF ALL TAX REVENUE THAT IS BROUGHT IN TO SUPPORT CITY SERVICES. AND THE SECOND LARGEST SOURCE OF REVENUE IS PROPERTY TAX, BUT IT CERTAINLY PALES IN COMPARISON AT 4.9 MILLION BEING PROJECTED FOR 27 AGAINST THE 35-PLUS MILLION WE ARE PROJECTING IN SALES TAX IN TOTAL. AMBER.

YES, SORRY.

SORRY, I WAS JUST TRYING TO TAKE A CLOSER LOOK. SORRY, GO AHEAD, AMBER.

Thanks. This is, I think, just kind of a technical question related to how the budget is presented in the document relative to what we're seeing here. But just looking at the first where it's the summary, it says local taxes at at 15.5 million. So I'm assuming that's a slice of this. What other line items am I looking at to identify where the remainder of that 50.9 is coming from?

IT'S A VERY GOOD QUESTION, AND I LOVE IT BECAUSE I ACTUALLY HAVE THE ANSWER HERE. SO FOR FISCAL 27, YOUR PROJECTED TAX REVENUE INCLUDES THE LOCAL SHARE OF THE STATE'S $0.04 SALES TAX, THE GENERAL PURPOSE $0.05, AND THE SPECIFIC PURPOSE $0.06 FOR THE APPROPRIATE COLLECTION PERIOD, PROPERTY TAX, GAMING REVENUE, SEVERANCE, MINERAL RELATIVES, AUTOMOBILE TAX, GASOLINE TAX, FUELS, AND CIGARETTES. And they're listed there, but they're kind of, they kind of all blurred together because they're so small.

So, so line items that I'm looking at here, local taxes, $15 million in license and permits, governmental goods and services, fines and forfeits, miscellaneous revenue, utility revenue, and other sources.

Yeah, none of those.

So I'm confused then why the number is $15.5 million in our summary. 50.9 there.

I could let Jill address that if you'd like, but again, that's all fun. Let me I can't because I'm running the presentation. I can't go look at the share, but I'm sorry I need like two computers here.

Do you want Jill to come up to help you out?

What would help me to understand this has a change of 62 for negative 62% on that line item, so I'm just trying to like.

Yeah, I know there's a reason for it. I just well into to get to that. Get to that a little bit. The. For for the current year that we will end June 30th, we believe we're going to end at 74.7 million, so there is certainly a difference there. The general purpose fifth sense is because it's a half year collection at 10.2 million. By contrast, in 26 we collected twice that 21 million roughly and then sales tax also on the sixth set because it will sunset June. 30th, we will be collecting 14 and a half million less in this fiscal year than in the prior. Did I miss anything, Jill?

No, you outlined that very well. Just to let you know, we did make some kind of rearranging within our lines. So most of the time when we get tax money, whether it's from the state or from the county, it's not really listed as it's listed as intergovernmental or. I think if you look at the detail that that's where you'll see it more so than you'll see it under like property tax. So there was a little bit of rearranging that we did kind of at the end of the year. So if you'd like, I can get you a little bit more information on that. Sure, it is a combination of the intergovernmental because we're getting those from other governments versus just a tax line.

That makes sense and you've reminded me actually Joe and Amber. At the bottom of each slide where I thought there was a relevant and direct page number reference to your workbook, I've included it, so I think 15 to 19 those pages. Counselor Pollock will get you to where Jill was talking about where you'll see the detail of what's included in the intergovernmental category. Q yes, does that help you?

THANK YOU, JILL.

SO 50.9 IS WHAT WE'RE PROJECTING. IT LOOKS DIFFERENT FROM LAST YEAR FOR THE REASONS WE'VE DISCUSSED. AND THEN I ALSO WANTED TO LOOK NOT JUST AT REVENUE, BUT WHAT HAS OUR ACTUAL SPENDING BEEN ACROSS ALL FUNDS OF THE CITY AND PARTICULARLY WHEN WE COMPARE THAT TO INFLATION. AND SO YOU CAN SEE HERE OUR SPENDING THERE AGAIN IS THIS 26 PEAK WITH SOME NOTABLE AND FRANKLY UNUSUAL HIGH capital spending, but you can see absent those are trend of spending what we actually spent is certainly on par with inflationary changes over the last. 9 years. OK, I wanted to touch on reserves before we move out of the overview and work into some of more of the fund based discussion. Your reserve standards are the same as they have always been. Right now, you have $75.4 million in reserve across all funds. To reiterate for members of the public what a reserve is, these are planned reserves that we hold so we can balance shortfalls should they occur. Now, shortfalls can happen because, for instance, maybe we have an emergency infrastructure break of some sort. Infrastructure is very expensive. Pipes break. If your service line at your house breaks, it might cost you $3,000 to replace. If our lines break, they may cost $3 million to replace. And so we purposely hold reserves for emergency situations and also to protect against financial instability, whether that comes from inflation or or whatever it may be. So these are purposely set aside and really required if you're going to be a financially responsible organization. These are calculated annually as part of your budget process, and I understand they are disclosed as well to Council and the public once per year when they are recalculated. So that's kind of the overview and we can kick into general fund a little bit if you're ready for that.

Do we have any questions on the overview?

Okay, so we're going to look at the general fund specifically. So this is just a piece, not the whole enchilada anymore, but just a piece of it. Here's really your fund statement at a glance. Your cash on hand projected for the beginning of the fiscal year, which is July 1st, will be $29.7 million. Accounting for restricted funds within that, the remaining available cash is projected to be $10.9 million. And then you'll see fiscal 27 proposes operating revenue to come in at the level of $55.5 million. Non-operating revenue, which is really interest from your investments, at $3.4 million. So your total revenue is $58.9 million. Total expenditures balancing that, as we spoke about previously. Lion's share of your... Enterprise funds, of course, is capital, but I didn't want to go there until I just sort of talk away. Did I think we have a Oh, sorry, here we go. You also have capital in your general fund. But before we talk about that is certainly pales in comparison to the enterprise funds. But I wanted to mention the reserve amounts for some of your general operating funds, general fund being the biggest you have 120 day budgeted expenses there. And then just a couple other of your smaller, more operating focused funds, but not specifically general funds like weed and pests, the golf course, and your property insurance. You also are carrying reserves there. Okay, so when you look at the general funds, you look at all of the revenue sources that feed the general fund and bring in that $58.9 million. The majority, as you can see there, 61% is the local share of state controlled taxes at $35.8 million, roughly. Property tax is the second largest, or excuse me, the third largest, but the second largest portion is what you control here locally. And that is $18 million, or about 30%. So you can see when we look at general fund operations, and this is where the Governmental operations that a city must provides are accounted for. So this is your basics, police, street systems, administration, council budgets, all of those things. The majority of the revenue that supports those local services that we have to provide actually come through intergovernmental or state controlled taxes for the most part. If we break out the part that we control here locally, that 31%, That is the really, really colorful will there. Franchise fees are part of that pretty good share, about 30%. Got some inter fund transfers and the third largest share, which I think is pretty notable, and I would point out his interest earnings at almost 20% of the support coming from those interest earnings. In a very far 4th category, you're permitting and licensing fees that you And then we've got fines and forfeiture. Rentals and leases, just some small revenue sources there. Continuing to look at revenue a little bit, I wanted to share this with you. I thought it was interesting and I think it talks a little bit to new Toronto County situation within the state. So this is from our friends at the state economic analysis division, and this is the change from July to March of 26 fiscal year. back 12 months. And when you look at Neutrona there, you'll see we are down a little bit. And this certainly doesn't surprise you. Our sales tax has been coming in a little slower than projections said. Not much, but a little bit. And so you are all conversant in these numbers. But I thought it was interesting to see how Neutrona is sitting at 2.6% change in a downward or decreasing way compared to some of the other counties. who are seeing notable gains. For instance, Laramie County, also a large population county in Wyoming, is seeing notable gains. These are the kinds of data that we take into account when we project revenue for the upcoming fiscal year. Here's what our actual receipts have looked like on the state's four pennies of sales tax. And we are, based on our history, And the fact that the Wyoming Consensus Revenue Estimating Group is saying they believe we'll see a return to growth in fiscal 27. We are projecting a modest increase of 2.7% in our sales tax receipts for the upcoming fiscal year based on everything that we're seeing, including our local expenses. So this slide you already saw, but I'm showing it to you again because we talked first just now about the red part of the pie chart on the left. We're going to talk about property tax now, so I just wanted to orient us that you know we're talking about 8% of general fund revenue, but we still expect to see changes in that second largest category at 8% and we have realized some of those changes already. Historically, you can see the dotted line is inflation. Property tax has historically adjusted roughly with economic conditions and inflation. The solid red line is our actual revenue receipts for property tax. They trended with inflation until 25, and then we saw a very rapid immediate decrease of $1.3 million. That was a 21% drop in one year in our second largest source of revenue to pay for local government basic services. Uhm, we are projecting for fiscal 27 for property taxes to remain largely flat. Our finance director has noted that we do even if taxation on existing buildings stays at the level it is now, we do bring online new buildings. There is new construction, so Jill is recommending a 2% increase in 27 just to account for growth. Basically new structures, new buildings that become part of the taxable inventory.

And if I'm wrong, you can say I'm wrong. But anyway, so if we go back to this one and we know that the last legislative action dropped it by 21% or so, then we don't know what that's going to look like after the election, right? But that won't affect us until that fall. I think you've told me that.

Yes, that is correct. And we will touch on that a little bit. further in the presentation, if you read my budget transmittal letter, you noted, I did say there, as you're remembering, Mayor, that if property tax people's initiative passes in November, we will not see a change in our revenue until next fiscal year, so fiscal 28th. So we'll be here 12 months from now, and we'll be having that conversation.

Thank you. Appreciate that.

You're absolutely right. Okay, so when we look at... Where we're spending that revenue in the general fund. This is how it breaks out and I prepped you for this in the beginning. If you look at all of our spending about 35% as personnel, but in the general fund, this is this is the services that serve other human beings. This is police. This is fireman. This is EMS. This is planning and growth development folks, and so it takes people to serve people. And in the general fund, 67% of all expenses are dedicated to human capital, wages, and benefits. The second largest category are contractual services. So this is where maybe we hire an engineering firm to do some work for us or a structural engineer to go look at the parking structure, for instance. That's our second largest category. And then materials and supplies is our pretty much usually third largest closely running with transfers out. And that is where we have seen when you look at the page 15, Councillor Pollack, you'll see 17% change in materials and supplies. Some of that to your question, Councillor Sweeney, is those energy costs that we talk about. But some of it is literally just materials and supplies. And I'm really hating that I have to run this on my computer because I want to go look at You have that spreadsheet open, I bet you do. The one I can't open because I can't shut down the whole thing. Yeah. So I wanted to talk about materials and supplies a little bit. We've also seen just escalating costs, right? Inflation. Some of that's driven by it costs more to fuel a truck to deliver us chemicals for the water treatment plant, right? So those chemicals cost more. Some of it is heating the buildings. Some of, you know, just general literally materials increasing in cost. There's also, there are a couple expenditures in here that I want to touch on, notably within the fire department and the street department. So one of your goals, counselors, was to try to increase our investment into repairing and maintaining our street system. And so I'll let Pete come to the podium and I'll use his brain as my backup brain. but there are some increases in expenditure for streets that are part of what is driving this 17% increase in materials and supplies that is outside of inflation. And Pete can articulate those, and then we'll move on to fire. How's that sound?

Yeah, perfect. City manager. Yeah, so some of the major drivers of the materials and supplies, things that are going on. First of all, yes, we do spend, we are going to look to spend about $5.5 $550,000 or so on materials and supplies in streets. That's mostly for several specific street patching projects. We have a project on Kauffman that streets is going to do in-house, $40,000. And just as an aside, obviously, we've already talked about capital projects. These are actually not capital projects. These are things that we're doing in-house with our own staff. These are technically repairs. And so they show up in the general fund budget. So again, just to keep everybody when we get to this point. So we've got a $40,000 project on Kauffman. We've got $70,000 on Forest. We've got $56,000 on 21st Street. Again, these are just extra projects, a bit in addition to what streets would normally do. They've been trying to do a bit more of in-house projects, or again, it's to try to catch up on streets activity. Another major driver is the fire department. Their materials and supplies budget is also going up a great deal. A lot of safety supplies for that. increase their safety supplies by. I should say increase their current safety supply. $200,000 surgical masks like technical rescue gear, structural boots, things like that they need. So so that's that's where most of the materials and supplies is within the general fund.

I wanted to address. I think street makes sense, right? We are. purchasing more materials, more asphalt, et cetera, so that these people can go out and do more patching and repair work in areas that they've identified as in poor condition, really, and needing that and being a high priority. In the fire department, I would like to touch on this because I am recommending some changes here. Not changes. I'm recommending some additional acquisition of safety supplies for the department. that are frankly a little bit costly. So there is, I believe, 162,000 feet, if I'm getting correct, correct me, for what I call light bunkers for all of our firefighters staff. And the chief may have to back me up here, but effectively bunker materials are increasingly known to be maybe not really great for human health. And so this would provide our folks an opportunity to train and to do other things in the fire service in these light bunkers that are less PFE heavy. And only have to wear their heavy PFE bunkers when they are engaged in actual live fire response. So it's a really important in my mind workforce wellness issue. There's a lot of research that shows that firefighters have a higher prevalence of cancer over a lifetime, and a lot of research linking that to exposures to fire suppressant foams and also to bunkers, which have a lot, you know, that fire retardant comes with some tradeoffs, right? So I believe that was $162,000. Do I remember right?

I may correct you. It was $164,000.

I WILL TELL YOU, COUNCIL, THAT IS A ONE-TIME PURCHASE. WE TALKED A LOT, THE CHIEF AND I DID, ABOUT, YEAH, IF I MISSTATE, ABOUT THE REPLACEMENT CYCLE FOR THOSE. BUT GIVEN THE TRENDS AND RESEARCH THAT WE'RE SEEING IN THIS PROFESSION, I DO FEEL LIKE IT'S A VALID INVESTMENT FOR THE CITY TO MAKE, AND I HOPE YOU AGREE. SO I AM RECOMMENDING FOR THAT. THE OTHER THING I NOTED WHEN I VISIT WITH FIRE DEPARTMENT AND MAYBE SOME OF THE OTHER DEPARTMENTS, We do have a lot of equipment that's reached the end of its useful life and needs to be replaced. For instance, there's some gas monitors that we will be replacing to the tune of, I think, $74,000. They're all at the end of their useful life, so we have to replace all of them. And what I hope that we can move to is maybe a more measured replacement schedule, where maybe we do five monitors a year or something. But to transition an organization to that will take many years. But maybe that allows us to be a little more nimble financially into the future because we don't, you know, see everything expires this year. We have to find 100,000 to replace it or whatever it may be. So there are some additional safety equipment and fire. Anything else notable on that list, Pete, that I'm not remembering?

I've got.

I'm going to say no.

OK.

I wanted to disclose that because while that change in materials and supplies is partially driven by inflation, and I can confidently tell you that, there are some new things that are one-time expenditures that I am recommending.

So I wanted to disclose that to you to make sure you feel comfortable with that.

Is there any slide that, other than this one on personnel services, that I'm curious about VICA, retirement contributions, workman's comp, health insurance.

Yes, those are great questions, Counselor. There is a section where we'll talk about personnel, and we can dive a little more into that. I've got some slides on it. It doesn't address workers' comp, but I can give you a teaser. We have good news on workers' comp. I'll add that when we get to that slide. You can see we also have a 3% total change in personnel services from fiscal 26 to fiscal 27 in this budget. And that we will get into more when we get into that personnel section. I'll break that down for you. I just wanted to break it down, not just in general fund because it will touch every fund, right? So I wanted to wait till we went through the basics of the funds before we get into that. OK, so we're ready to go to enterprise funds. This is your water, sewer, refuse, I'm going to go quickly. I'll just tell you now I'm going to go quickly through these slides and there's a few reasons for that one. You just looked at these six months ago right before it got here in December when you made the rate adjustments. We have updated these slides to reflect the end of this current fiscal year, so these numbers will get you either through fiscal 26 or through the end of proposed fiscal 27. I can assure you budget reserves are still looking pretty good. Pretty good, I certainly you're not in any place that I would be concerned. There's a couple of these sections that are a little bit lighter than maybe they should be, and we'll look at that in the performance. So here's where you projected to be the beginning of fiscal 27. And then here's us now looking just at water. So starting on July 1st, your projected cash is 16.8 million. With an operating reserve of 3.7 debt reserve of 453000 and a depreciation reserve of 2.7 million. So your total projected available cash on the first day of the upcoming fiscal year will be 9.94 million. Then when we look at operating revenue to keep things moving in fiscal 27, that would amount to $17.8 million in expenditure. Non operating revenue. This is the one set coming in is 2.2 million. And then your interest earned again on your investments is estimated at 900,000 for fiscal 27 with the total overall revenue of $20.9 million. You'll see your budgeted operating expenditure that we are recommending is $15.1 million. And then your non-operating expenditure recommendation is 7.5 for a total expense budget of $22.6 million. So you can see there's more expense than revenue. The question is, what makes up the difference? And you see in fiscal 27, we are budgeting for cash use of $1.7 million. And when we project that out through the last day of the upcoming fiscal year, on June 30 of 2027, you would have a remaining cash availability of $8.3 million. So that's what the whole year would look like if everything goes to plan.

Thanks, Janine. For clarification sake, the non operating revenue from the one cent, this will be the last year that shows up as a line item for revenue, right? Because I believe the water rate adjustments we made were based on the condition that we were stripping that out of?

Yes, although I would say I think that is TBD in that I will be bringing a resolution to the council, I believe in July, to make sure that we understand what general purpose of government, purposes of government, the fifth penny general purpose tax will be used for. I do believe that your water performance did NOT CONTEMPLATE THAT GENERAL PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT ANY LONGER BEING SUBSIDIZING WATER.

THANK YOU.

BUT I SAY TBD, VICE MAYOR, BECAUSE ULTIMATELY THAT'S YOUR DECISION. OK, here's your pro forma for water distribution. I know you've seen this, but again, we've updated it. You will see that probably back in December the previous anticipated balance or I guess it was January when you saw this last. We thought we'd be telling you that on June 30th you would be at. Yeah, $18 million. The sorry. Yes, $18 million. OK, so. Then you can see 2031 where we were projecting we will be then. And that was what you saw in January of 26. We've added the blue line and I've highlighted in green where the proposed budget would land us a year and a few days from now on June 30th of 2027. We anticipate a year on balance in the upcoming fiscal year if budget is adopted as proposed of 15.01 million. So these are your current numbers reflecting the past six months. And that's water and we will move into a different section. So if you have any questions here, feel free to jump in.

Any questions about this fund?

Maybe I should talk a little bit more too. You can see the dark blue line and the green line slightly above it. The dark blue line is the reserve requirement. The green line above it is where we strive to be, so we want to be above the basic requirement and you can see from the purple line which is 2027 to 31 and then also from the blue line that we are well well above not only the reserve requirement. In the current years, but we are even above the target. If we did nothing, we would find ourselves for instance in 2030 and 31. Touching on our target. And dropping to the reserve requirement level and potentially falling below it. So this helps us to know that our rates are frankly adequate to sustain the operation overtime, so we will continue working on that. And this reflects only the rate adjustment you've made, not future subsequent rate adjustments that you have talked about and that we understand may be necessary in future years.

Just to make sure I understand what you're saying, as I'm looking at it, it looks like, you know, we're our current anticipated fund balance is a little worse off than we thought it was going to be initially, but improves our outlook is better long term, getting to 2031. So is the result of the rate adjustment strategy that we just implemented. Is that why it looks better at 2031? Or because it doesn't trend, you know, in parallel.

So there's another change in there that you're talking about, just to make sure you're talking about the blue line, the purple line, the light blue line. Excuse me. Yeah, I think I'm seeing properly.

Yeah, the anticipated previous anticipated balance and anticipated year in fund balance. Right, right.

Yes. I think everything you said is absolutely correct. Yeah. What what this tells me is, you know, what we've done is good. What you've done is good, but it doesn't, you know, just like any business, right? You have to keep up your costs over time, or you will see that declining trend as inflation eats away at your ability to address your needs.

Anything else? Okay.

Okay, so same slides for sewer fund. Again, we are starting with operating cash at $6.3 million. I won't read all these numbers to you this time, but this is basically the same thing you just saw for water. And what we see is a total revenue projected at $13 million. We are proposing total expense of $13.8 million with $836,627 from cash to balance that budget. And this would put us at the end of fiscal year 27, June 30th of 2027 at a balance of 2.02 million in available cash. Here's your pro forma. You'll see we anticipate a year-end fund balance at the end of fiscal 27 of 5.467 million. And this one looks a lot different, doesn't it? It's kind of wonky. Again, these are the same slides you saw other than we've updated for fiscal 27 year end and then shown you how the anticipated year end fund balance differs now from what you may have seen in January to show how that six months has has had what effect it has had.

Somebody many clarifications on that.

Yeah, in this case, of course, you're you're above where you thought you would be in January.

So this.

This mean we're overcharging. Down the line for sewer.

I think what I would say is no. In fact, I think what you looked at in December, counselor anticipated future rate increases to balance this fund, and of course that's taking into account your total capital need. And. inflation balanced against that. If you look at 2028 and 2029, we are anticipating that in short order, we are going to fall below the green line. And we don't want to be below the green line. So we're going to need those rate adjustments this year being the first of a number of years of adjustments that will make sure that we don't see that dip in the middle of the purple and blue line in 28 and 29. We want to boost that back up. We're not going to be dipping into our reserves or fund balance reserves.

That makes sense, Pat.

Okay, here is your wastewater treatment fund. You'll see total revenue 10.8 million being projected expense at 10.1 or 10.2. If you round it, we in fact, we'll see our expenses below revenue in the wastewater fund. So we will have a cash impact of $649,000. And by year end, and again, your page number references here, page 120 to 165 is where you'll see the detail of this. We're showing a cash balance at the end of fiscal 27 of $3.7 million. Still feels. Healthy. Here's how it will look against your reserve requirement and our reserve target. The end of 27. $8.9 million and you'll see that is a little different than what you thought six months ago. but certainly well above the reserve target and the reserve requirement. So this looks positive. I will say what I have learned about the wastewater treatment plant is you have notable and large capital investment needs there, and that is something that I hope to be continuing to work on with staff in coming years to make sure that that plant remains reliable for the community into the future.

which is about wastewater.

OK, we're going to go to refuse or trash you based on what we are looking at for revenue. $12.8 million total expense being proposed is 12.28. Again, slightly less expense than revenue, so we'll see a cash impact of little more than a half a million dollars and at the end of fiscal. 27. Looks like maybe we have a typo on this slide. It says 630 26. I think we mean 630 27. Yes. So we'll correct that this is fiscal 27. We'll see cash at 345,000. This is a smaller fund. And here's how we look when we look at our anticipated year-end fund balance. And you can see 26 and 7, we really need an adjustment. We've been on the wrong side of the green and the dark blue lines in my thoughts, but we're making adjustments and have moved that forward. When you talked about this six months ago, the previous anticipated balance was $3.4 million. We are a little bit higher at that now, anticipating year-end at $3.4 And lastly, bail fill. Total revenue at $13 million being projected. The expense well below that, 9.8. And we will see cash impact of $3.2 million and end the year, if things go as planned, at $3.2 million in available cash. Here's your pro forma. End of year balance, $8.3 million. And when you look at where you thought it would be.

Definitely better position.

Questions about this platform.

really quickly before we get into capital investment um staff did uh we did get a food if you want some dinner i don't know if you knew that but we normally do for budget sessions so please feel free just to get up anytime and grab that uh staff as well since you're here tonight please feel free sit back here okay you guys want to take a break and grab food how does everybody feel everybody's good okay just get up if you want to grab something

Okay, so we're moving to capital. And as I said, I didn't intend to spend too much time here other than just real big picture. So you can see really where the city's capital investment monies are being spent.

Go ahead. Before we go there.

Yes.

So I'm misunderstanding, I think, when these cash balances from beginning to end drop, hundreds of thousands of dollars and even millions. The last slide, I think, dropped from five something to one slide back.

Yeah, this one, Pat. Next, next.

So you start at $5 million and end up projected $3 million. Is that acceptable?

I think this is where I say we have work to do.

So it is acceptable to be better. I believe it could be better. But that means sorry, I'm going the wrong way that. Yes, it could be better. But it also, I guess what I would say is, you know what, wait, I'm going completely wrong. We're always gonna be balancing, I'm always gonna be balancing, I believe you guys are as well, what the community can afford to pay. So when we look at rates, could we build up reserves that are substantial? And maybe this gets back to the question you asked, are we overcharging, right? You're balancing that. We're looking 10 years out in the future at what, amount of investment we need to make. And in these enterprise funds and frankly, in most municipal operations, it's it's all infrastructure is very expensive, right? So you may have a $300 million need over 10 year and. You can raise rates to pay for that, but then the question is, can the community afford that right? And are there other ways we can pay for it? Can we use debt to spread that cost overtime? Sometimes even over generations. It's a 40-year lifespan of a plant. Maybe it makes sense to take out debt. We also can look for grant revenues or low-interest loans through, for instance, SLIB, which I'm sure you're familiar with the SRF program, to help make what our ratepayers pay as least as possible in order to get those numbers, get those fund balances in a place where we feel more comfortable, obviously, at least at minimum reserve requirement and hopefully at our target of having that cushion, which is the green line. Did I answer your question? Sure. Okay. And that's, you know, I guess I would offer that's why, you know, we're always looking out 10 years and trying to make sure that we have sufficient money, not just today, but for forever, frankly, right? The water plant will be here as long as we people are here, I imagine. wastewater plant, landfill, all goes with civilization.

Any other questions on this?

Okay, so here's what capital looks like. If you think back to our meeting a few months ago, you look at all of the amount of money capital spending, and it is sizable. This is where we're putting in this fiscal year money. So water, sewer, stormwater projects are 42%. Street construction, we were able to move that number up a little bit from 26 to 6.1 million. So that's about 18% of where we're going to spend all of that. And then public works and equipment at 4.4%. Some smaller categories there are operational heavy or personnel operation heavy. Functions still need equipment and still from time to time have capital projects, but obviously you can see they tend to be a lot smaller. But in total there is 27 I think million dollars. expected in this upcoming year for public works, street construction, water, sewer, and stormwater. Stormwater, a very small amount of this overall total.

$27 million, is that what you said, Janine?

Yeah, I think the $13.9.

Anybody have any questions about the proposed spending? Just kind of the high level here. Yeah, go ahead, Kyle.

Thank you, Mayor. Thanks, Janine. Unsurprisingly, I'd like to ask about streets, please. So I think the 6.066 is up from, I think we're at like 5.25 or something last time we did this exercise. The last time I recall Andrew Beamer being in front of us talking about the 2019 streets assessment that we had done, you know, those analysts said that we needed to be at 7 million just to maintain our average condition. Andrew Beamer believed that the actual number was closer to six. That was like two years ago. So my question is, I don't know if anybody can provide me their analysis on whether they think six is enough to guessing improve is probably too ambitious, but at least maintain street condition. I would love some reassurance in that regard because of the goals I have during my entire time on council. Really, the top one is Streets maintaining or better than they were when I got on and so just looking for a little reassurance.

So what I can tell you is. If I could pull that file. Yes, we have these numbers. I'm looking at Krista because she has the same file I have. Because I've been working with Krista and with Casey and those folks to unpack our street analysis to adjust those numbers for inflation so we can understand, well, if it was $6 million, what is it really in today's dollars? And if I recall, Krista, I'll rely on you maybe to fact check me. I think our new target based on inflation adjusted numbers is about $12 million. And I'm talking about pavement preservation or rehabilitation as well as mill and overlay added together. And we broke those apart too, Vice Mayor. So what I can tell you, Council, is this. I am keenly aware of your interest in improving the street system. We are working, you know, I originally thought, geez, maybe we need to update your pavement condition study, but At this point, I feel like it would, you know, when I looked at that, it feels still pretty fresh, pretty usable. And I think the streets folks and public services folks agree. So we're going to update it for inflation. And we did what we could in this budget, given the sort of short time turnaround that I've had. There's this, there's also what you heard earlier, which is additional, we're going to talk about personnel, personnel and materials and supplies to go out and do patching, asphalt patching, in addition to major street construction projects. But we are not, getting to your point, we are not investing this year what we should be when adjusted for inflation. We've moved the needle a little bit and really hope to get more aggressive with that next fiscal year if that remains a priority of council. What I'll also add there is we just did get survey data back, which I will talk to you about at the end of this presentation. And certainly the public's sentiment feels like investment in streets is warranted at a higher level than has maybe been historically done. Krista. Your counselor, you talked about that $6 million. That was from the 2019 study, and adjusted for inflation, that's $8.4 million. So we are not quite meeting that. And the distance, we also gauge, we'd like to be about $3.5 million. We're not reaching that because that $6 million doesn't go nearly as far as it used to.

Thank you. Can I ask, is this also a circumstance of, so this fiscal year budget is based on one our last year of one cent allocations. And so if you know through our exercise this time next year, hopefully one set is passed and we still have that funding. If we simply allocate more from those projections to streets. Is that a way that we can influence that budget next year?

Sure. I think so. I mean, certainly again, I say TBD because I need decisions from the Council, but that is a super viable source of funding in my mind. And without that source of funding, the outlook is not good.

Right now, streets is kind of bound to that allocation we made four years ago, right? I mean, of the one set, you can only, you're capped at how much you can spend towards streets. So if we just increase the cap next go around, should make that exercise easier for staff. I think that's a good statement. Thank you.

Okay, so we tried to beef it up, but we're not quite there. We still have work to do, which I don't think is lost on any paper or surprised anybody. OK, so here's what pays for capital projects from the previous slide. You can see really the largest source of funding. You just touched on this one set. 17 is your 5th penny of sales tax. 40% of that is going to capital projects, which makes sense, right? It is. Not a revenue that we know will continue every year uninterrupted. It could be interrupted, so it's probably wise to treat it as a one time revenue used for one time expenses or discrete single project projects versus ongoing operating costs and then your rates paid by customers of our utilities in water and wastewater are comprising 26%. And then your trash or sewer charge or excuse me. Sewer and wastewater. I think the pink column or the peach column is refuse. I was looking at the wrong place, but you can. You can see what this shows you is customer charges for utility services and the landfill are by far the largest source of funding. And then for infrastructure in the general flip, it's one cent. And I think this is our last capital slide. So from your. Funds capital projects are really the lion's share of how you have historically spent that over the last four year cycle that will end on December 31st. And this is, I think exactly what you were just talking about. Vice mayor, yes.

Yes, and I think I misstated will actually need to put together the one set resolution here in the next. couple months, right, for it to be on the ballot?

Yeah, my understanding is it's typically occurred more in the fall. I would like to bring it in July, maybe early August, for reasons we can talk about a different day. But I think for planning purposes, that would be better. Okay, so that is capital broadly. We promised you that we would keep you up to speed on the spec projects as we quickly approach the end of the collection period, June 30th. I know we told you two months ago what the status was when we talked about capital, but here's kind of where we are today. Not much has changed candidly. Metro, we think we'll be out to bid maybe late August. Design is still in progress on Fire Station 1. There was funding there to start the process of replacing Fire Station 1, not to replace it in entirety. So sites have been selected. Design is done. Design is, I think we're past 35% now, don't you, Chief? I think this slide's old. Yeah, yeah. And we've got a request for proposal going out for a construction manager at risk. Should be hopefully getting under contract before too long, so. That could be exciting. I'm one thing that we are working on here that I'll just be candid about. We could fund this entirely from the over collection of your fifth penny. I am hesitant to recommend that, so I have not recommended that yet. The chief and myself and the finance folks and grant people were going to be looking for grants. We did make an application which was denied through the state. They told us we could reapply in the fall, doing and Chief Black and I were discussing this thing this morning. So final decisions about how we're going to fund that are pending because we really hope to bring in at least some portion of grant funds to help with this. But it is viable to fund it entirely out of overcollection on the penny tax. Okay, and then your other projects, Washington. I know you heard an update on this just recently from Director Lopez, so I won't I go into too much detail there and let you know 911 dispatch equipment is part of this as well. They are trying to synchronize the ordering so that we will get that equipment in about the time that it can be placed at the CBC.

Just a question about this, because it just had somebody asked me about it, but Washington Park Band Show that goes out to bid by August. What's the estimated completion timeline?

It's a great question. I think I'm going to ask if Suleyman would.

So for Washington Park Fanshawe, we are into design right now. August was one of our original kind of timelines that could change just slightly as we continue through the design process, but the anticipation is regardless sometime in fall. Or. you know, late summer early, all time, we would go out to bid without construction starting until weather broke in the spring. And so we do anticipate that the project would be completed by the end of summer next year, or the end of the construction season next year. However, with a land and water conservation fund is structured, we actually have until the following year to complete, which gives us a bit of a cushion in case weather or the other delays that keep us from completing the project in its entirety by the end of next summer.

Thank you.

So this is the section that we alluded to earlier. How does the proposed budget for fiscal 27 invest in people? here's a breakdown of what is proposed in the budget so we are i am proposing that we initiate the adjustments that were recommended by your compensation analyst back in january of 2025. we did work with human resources and reach back out to your compensation analyst and ask her what these numbers should look like taking into account since she did that compensation study. So what you see in front of you, other than for firefighters, was recommended by the compensation analyst as updated here just recently. So we'd like to initiate the adjustments that the analyst has recommended. We have to implement the statutory changes that the 26 legislature just passed for pension contributions. And then, of course, you see reflected there the adjustments of the collective bargaining agreement has been agreed to with our local 904 for our firefighters. Walking you through that for police, a recommended adjustment by the analyst of 1% for markets. They would, of course, have their opportunity for merit-based step increases of 3% to 5%, and that varies based on their position and time in service, but that is according to an adopted and established pay plan. And then by statute, we will be having to increase the employer's contribution portion to the pension by 1.8%. I would note for police, my understanding is that in 2020, the council and the city made a decision to over-contribute to the police pension as a matter of trying to be more successful in recruiting and retaining police officers. And so while we will pick up the 1.8% pension that the legislature has required us to, we will maintain the over-collection of I think 4.5% That you all agreed to in 2020. I would tell you it sure seems like that's been successful. I was visiting with the chief just this morning and they are at 104. They're nearly fully staffed as the point of the matter, and that seems to be a good thing. I can't attribute it all to things like this, but every little bit helps make Casper a more desirable location for talented people to come work. Um, the general employees over at the Public Safety Communications Center, they would receive the same market adjustment as general professional staff, which is one and a quarter percent. They have the same opportunity for a merit based step increase of 2.75% as our general professional staff. You'll see where general differ is the public safety communications folks. They are within the law enforcement pension, so they There's a 1.8% increase there required by law now. And then for general professional folks, the pension contribution change that we need to meet is only a quarter of a percent. There was no change to the firefighter pension this year, so that's why it says NA. And then you'll recognize the percentages for market adjustment for them of variable between 1 and 5%, and that is based on their rank. and then their merit step opportunity every year is 5% as well.

So on police in particular, at some of the, it appeared to me that if we would hire more police officers, on the training side and try to beef up a little bit on our training programs. But my opinion in reviewing that budget, it looked pretty flat. And so did the chief or the department recognize or ask for Any increases that we just said? No, you're going to stay straight across the board.

Yeah, I'm for three American. I just dive a little deeper. Counselor Sweeney, do you mean ask for increases just for personnel or for anything?

Pretty much look. for anything.

Yeah, no, I think that that's a fair statement. As we started off saying in our operating budgets, the total change across every fund is only four and a half percent. So you will all have to forgive me if I don't understand what level of knowledge you have about the city's budget development process that happens way before we get here. And maybe I should have covered that. But what I will say to you is that I said that the department's request they sit with the city manager in the finance team. We go through every one of those requests. I in some cases agree with them. In other cases I don't. That's that's what you pay me to do. What I've recommended though to your point is pretty flat and there are some reasons for that, notably the revenue uncertainty in our future from 5th Senate elections and property tax and those things. But I will drill down a little bit if I can counselor to personnel. When it came to personnel, because I am so new in this position, I tried to learn what you had done as an organization to implement the January 2025 recommendations. I visited with staff all across the city. I heard from them. I heard from the department heads. And then we have the analyst refresh her analysis. And I took her recommendation in its entirety and did not deviate from what she said would bring our staff to the place they need to be to be competent. competitively compensated in the labor market. And I see the chief's up there. If he wants to add anything, please feel free.

Do you have a specific question about staffing? Why we didn't ask for additional personnel?

Just to make sure I understand the question. You know, in those community meetings up at the Ford Wyoming Center, it seemed to me that we needed to try to Beef up, add more personnel. Because I I think I I can't remember everything, but what are we at 115?

Mayor Council, we're at 110 authorized. And with eight of those going to SRO's and you actually have 102 for patrol and detectives, career services. Canines those positions.

I may have misunderstood, but to try to enhance those numbers, increase those, and I didn't totally understand, but I probably misunderstood.

Mayor, Councilor, before I would come back and ask for additional personnel, I would like us to get to staffing first and see what that looks like. Ideally, each patrol team should have 12 officers assigned, and on some days we're operating with eight. I'm hopeful once we get those additional six personnel. We're at 104, so we've made huge strides within the last year to get those personnel on board. We're not really seeing the fruit of that yet because we have three in the academy. So while on paper it says we have 104, we also have a significant number that are in training. And so they're not able to go out and police themselves. of the community, so they have a training partner in the car. But what I'd like to do is at least get to that authorized strength of 110 and then come back and look at potentially an over hire ask. But not ready to do that yet because we don't always see a huge applicant pool and so to ask for that before I can fill those positions seems a little put in the cart before the horse.

Thanks and that that helps me. I understand what you're saying more now in terms of if there was discussion around over hiring. So yeah. And overhiring can be a really great tool, but you're absolutely right. We want to fully staffed before we overstaff. But yeah, thank you. Does that help a little bit? And then since you're there, maybe just stay there cheap because I went to the next slide and this dovetails. I think well into Kelser Sweeney's question so. Within the personnel recommendation, there are seven positions recommended. What I want to tell you, counselors, is there were 54 positions requested, which as a new manager in your organization, I was like, holy cow, frankly. But I think what that tells me, what that probably should tell you is that your managers out here, your department heads, they have concern that there's more work than people to do the I mean, that's the lesson we all take from that. I tried to be very judicious and recommend these seven positions for a variety of reasons. I did not recommend more because I tried to insulate this to what I thought were the most essential. And part of that is we have to hedge against the revenue uncertainty that our future holds. Literally within six months we could see significant changes. to revenue, and so we need to, in my estimation, only bring on new positions that we feel that we can sustain over time. And if we really have that pent up need for many, many, many more positions because there's not enough people to do the work, we can look at that again, certainly in six months when we're back talking about budget development and these folks are submitting their position requests. So to the chief, since I asked him to stay up here, One of the positions I am recommending that was requested by the department is for this technology support specialist. So you see we are adding a position there, although it is not an LE position sworn law enforcement professional. But from the chief's perspective, a really important and needed position just to generally support the technology needs in the department, which are wide and vast, as you can imagine. They have phones and computers and MDTs and all the things. So Did you want to say anything about that chief?

Mayor Council, so that position was one that was actually an individual that retired. It was a manager position. We came back and had it reclassed, but with some of the property tax we opted not to fill that position last year and try to navigate that ourselves. So you actually have a support services captain on top of our fleet manager and with the work IT jumping in and helping us. It's put a kind of burden on other city staff besides our personnel, so we decided to come back and ask. We reclassified the position as a specialist instead of a manager and then asked that it be filled this year so we could take some of that burden off our support services captain, our fleet manager, and maybe help IT get some other things done other than

Thanks, Chief. The other positions, I'll just briefly talk about a few of them. Certainly the one with the higher cost burden for the organization is in community development, the planner one or two. It's certainly no secret that we need to be succession planning in the community development department, and this is part of that succession planning. I think this position is incredibly important. And candidly, I was shocked. I continue to be shocked. at the amount of work that your community development does with the staff that they have available to them. I think it's quite admirable. They are a well-oiled machine, but we need to be planning for people who may be leaving and approaching retirement in coming years. So that's part of this. The other general fund position that I've mentioned already on this list is in streets and equipment operator for all the reasons we've discussed. trying to be able to do more work in terms of patching and just repair of roads and being a little more on top of things. And then two other positions in general fund on this list are finance, a budget manager, and a volunteer services coordinator. For budget manager, this was requested by Director Johnson. I think it's an important position right now. The folks who are performing all of the work that goes into all of these documents that we're talking about and looking at right now is literally being born across the department and even at the director level. I think there is other work that our director could be doing. And I also have aspirations that I think this budget manager could help us attain, which is to have better. And gosh, I've got to take that back. There's nothing wrong with what we have. So it's not better because it's bad. It's that The way that the public are consuming information about city services and how we spend their taxpayer dollars has changed. And people don't want to read a fussy budget book anymore. They just don't. They want like one infographic that tells the whole story. And so I have aspirations for maybe retooling and what would I say, helping to modify the fantastic information that we're putting out. into ways that maybe the public are better able to digest it, kind of meet them where they are instead of asking them to come be municipal finance experts, right? Because we know that's not working. So I think this position could bring a lot of value to the organization for a lot of reasons. Those are some of them. The other position, I understand that perhaps Carter had approved a volunteer services coordinator position at some time. It went away. There is a lot of volunteer coordination that's going on right now. It's really fantastic seeing so many people out on river restoration. But what I'd like to develop is a really robust volunteer program for the city that can touch every department and every function of the city. And I think that takes concentrated effort by a single person focused on that and then almost creating, you know, a series of volunteer jobs and departments can submit jobs. And then this coordinator can help find someone who, yes, wants to go clean up the river, but maybe they also want to go, you know, repaint the bench at the fire station or something. There are a lot of people who want to contribute to the community. And if we can connect them with ways to do that service, I think that could really bring value. and make people feel more invested, frankly, in their community. So that's sort of the vision for that. The other positions I didn't touch on are in your enterprise funds, one equipment operator at Baleville, and then the wastewater treatment plant and operator, entry-level operator one out there as well.

Go ahead, Kyle.

Thank you, Mary.

Thanks, Janine, for the context.

I noticed in the budget memo, it's on page 52 of our packet, It looks like we were budgeting for the budget manager and also an analyst is the analyst or reclassification from somewhere else, or yes, thank you.

We did realize just literally in the last week. I think Pete 9 that that position made it onto that chart and it shouldn't have been. It's a reclassification, not a not a new position, so. Good attention to detail. Vice mayor.

Yeah, so. Um, I understand the need, but on the city managers office volunteer services coordinators, so this goes back. Wild back. Relationship to United Way with human resources and that kind of left up sore spot. Nobody wanted to pick that up. Whatever that. minimal workload in my opinion yeah yeah um and so between the staff that you currently have in the city manager's office combined with the hr which i don't know how many positions that is in total you don't truly don't believe you have enough staff

Yeah, thank you. Through you, Mayor Kelsey. I think that's a really great question and what I'll tell you is in HR we have my estimation we really have one HR person. She said note that right now there's a couple folks risk management and safety. Which is maybe tangential to or a part of overall human resource management. But it is really an HR manager and then potentially the department head who can support that as well.

But the department head is also having to be.

You know, you can't really say the director is part of an HR being an HR manager and for 525 employees. I think I feel like they're pretty tapped out. In my office, one of the things I want to talk about with this and why I'd like to put it in my office is because I want this person to work for the whole of the city. And I believe that oftentimes when you put a position in a particular department, they tend to become very focused on those functions, those services, and supporting that department. And so where I found success in the past is putting a position like this in the city manager's office so they work across the entire city and with the entire city and with the authority. of the city manager's office behind them. Right now there is likely ability to do more work in my office, candidly, but this kind of work is very specialized. And so that's why the other thing I'll offer is this is a pretty low cost burden position for the value that we could get back out of it. Seventy two thousand five hundred dollars includes salary and benefits. And I would really like someone who's focused only on this and doesn't lose their attention to other duties and needs of this organization. Case in point, I mentioned river restoration. There's tons of work that goes into getting volunteers for that. In the public engagement office and it's just amazing what has been able to be done with that, but they are constantly sucked away from really focusing on building a volunteer service in this organization into marketing and getting materials ready for the fifth set renewal and just all the things Facebook posts and all of that so. I feel like this is a stand-alone position that we need a single person with a certain skill set focused on, and that's why I'm recommending it in the place I am and as a new position. I will offer on United Way, though, Councillor Sweeney, I have to give some credit because the Zuniga's department took United Way up for this organization. This is an internal matter. They rocked it so far. You didn't see the turtle races. I'm just saying. But they really took it. I think it's been fun to watch. I've always been a huge United Way proponent, frankly, and so it was cool to kind of have tried to reinvigorate it within this organization. But that's just it.

It has a huge impact on the community as well.

OK, so that is personnel. The last thing we're going to go through is recreational subsidies, and I'm going to ask you guys for some feedback before we go there, and that is how much time do you want to spend on this? The reason this is here is because it seems that it has been a focus for Council and to some degree the public in these last few months, and so I thought it was worth touching on because of course these subsidies are have been policy priority for you. But Zulema is one. She has been working with the Parks and Rec Committee to look at the business plans. She's presented half of those business plans to you already. The other ones are coming. And so this is a little bit of redundant information in addition to the other work that you're doing in this space in recent weeks and into future weeks as well, because you're going to be in front of them with the rest of the business plans in like two weeks, right?

Okay. Okay.

So I guess what I'll say I'll go through it and I will go at a pretty quick clip, but if you want to slow it down and ask more questions, feel free. But no, there is a lot more to come on this, and so I don't know that we have to solve any issues here tonight, OK? But your budget is built on these subsidies, which is why I thought it was important that you understand what this investment looks like for recreation. So you see on this slide your targets. broken down by different functions.

You can see where we are in the red and where we are in the green. Retarget for instance for forecast first 20% and things are target of 50.

We're currently at 42 against that 50% target. So under golf course is doing well based on what we believe we'll see in the proposed budget. They will be slightly above their 110% target by 7%. Ice arena and rec center be slightly below target based on proposed expenditure where we project revenue to be as with athletics and cemetery and then Hogan on. Based on the fiscal 27 proposed budget, if we get some snow, we've.

Target.

Well, I think I might have skipped a slide.

Yeah, you're starting with Fort Casper. So the green line is where we break even. The target is your red line, as you can see, and then the blue line. And you can see for Fort Casper, we were slightly above in 22, but moving forward, we fell below our target for a few years. And in 27, we're at target. So these line graphs are just different ways of representing the information that you just saw on the previous chart. I like charts better. I don't really... Need the line graphs, but maybe this is helpful for others who are visually different. Golf course again. You can see our target in red. And we are above it. Ice arena target in red blue line below it and has declined in recent years. In a pretty steady way. Recreation center target is red. Fiscal 23 was a rocking good year, it appears to be. And then things dip down a little bit and we remain slightly below our target. Hogan on poor Hogan on in fiscal 26. That'll probably be the blip that you still see on this chart in 20 years. Like the was it 1980s? Thank you. 1981. Apparently, if you look back in history, had a blip like that, too, for Hogan.

I do the weather, too. Do you guys know?

Apparently, I think.

Weather it was.

Who? Two weeks of the whole season wow. Well, it's good to know that our forebears have been there before we've been there. And here's sports and athletics, which is slightly below and then cemetery slightly glow. One of the questions that has been brought to my attention is, you know what? What do we do? If why do we? I guess the question is, why do we keep contributing more money every year to this? And I want to just mention one thing. We have percentage based targets, right? And so we may well say Fort Casper. We may attain our target this year for a cost of $416,000, but next year 20% is still going to be a little more than $416,000 unless we see deflation, right? And that's unlikely so. I would just remind us when we talk about this, you know, percent targets likely are going to grow over time when we're talking about expenses. And then I mentioned Zulima and the crew are looking at whether some of these target percentages need to be adjusted. Are they realistic? And we want to be realistic for purposes of transparency and also just good budgeting practice. So we'll be talking about this some more in coming weeks.

Oh, sorry, Amber. I'm I'm studying the numbers.

Have we ever made a chart comparing those contributions over time to inflation over time, similar to some of the other comparisons we've seen in this presentation? I do not know the answer to that question, Mayor, and I'm looking out here in case anybody else does.

Mayor, Councillor, to the best of my knowledge, we have not. However, we are working on it. So Janine and I just recently talked about it. And it is my intention that after we review the last three business plans, we will do a comprehensive overview of all seven enterprises where we will provide charts like that. So you can see how the funds are performing over time compared to things like inflation.

Cool. I'm just gonna take I'm just gonna go. Another question. that I think would be interesting. I think we've touched on it a few times, but just what are like comparing how we're doing to some industry standards in these arenas. I had somebody asked me about that the other day and I was like, we've talked about it a little bit, but I don't know that we revisit it kind of in the context of talking about it. And so that might be helpful to have on the chart or just in the conversation as well.

will absolutely include that. National Recreation and Parks Association has benchmarks that we do use to measure against and so those will be included as well.

Thank you. Pat had a question. So my question is basically the cost recovery goals. I'll put them as goals, but. How I mean, honestly, very good. Sales pitch and. what we might expect and then boom, Mahogany close up on us and with no snow. So, I mean, how much should we worry about all of that, I guess, because things happen. So.

Mayor, Councilor Sweeney. I think that the way that we utilize cost recovery goals primarily are during our budgeting process to help us stay grounded in being as fiscally responsible as we can be. So as my staff are preparing their budgets, they're really looking at are there areas where we can be more efficient and reduce expenses? Are there areas where we could improve marketing or other strategies to generate additional revenue and how Do those changes impact our potential cost recovery? So it is a goal and there are a number of different influences that could keep us from reaching it or help us to exceed it. However, I think it does give us a benchmark to strive for, which is why I think it is important that it's rooted in reality, right? Which is why during the first presentation we said a few of these may need to be adjusted down to be more realistic. And you're going to see the same thing when we come back at the end of June for just a few of them. So we want to establish realistic goals. However, that challenge us to stay. Physically responsible for the funds that are given to us to provide the services that the community wants.

I felt like I should give some kudos to Hogadon though, because they have this huge dip on this chart, but a few years ago they had a really big mountain too. And then Zulema told me two weeks ago they got two feet of snow or something after we were closed.

Last snow we got 24 inches, so almost half as much as we got the entire season.

Can we open it up real quick?

It's almost gone now.

I was just about to... Go ahead, Pat. So would it be appropriate to ask a question on the rec center, in particular, page 197? I'm just trying to understand the process a little better. It's all zeros for proposed 27, but proposal budget. And unfortunately, Then on 98. Showing. And this is under goods and services miscellaneous revenue. So 2526 reside revised and 26 projected again. The different categories are lined out, but now in 27 we've got numbers, so I'm just wondering. I hadn't seen that in other areas of the budget. So I'm just curious. And I apologize if I should have done this two weeks ago and come in and visit with staff directly. But that's not, for me, it's not an efficient use of my time.

Great question and so occasionally as we're preparing budgets, we identify ways that we could structure the budget to be one more transparent and two to be more effective in our own management of how our programs are functioning. And so in that particular case, what you're seeing is that we we ended up extracting out what we spend and what we earn in revenue for summer camp or all of our camp programming. So we have summer camp throughout the summer. Then we have like spring break and fall break camps and then we have winter break camp and so camp is a big part of our programming and we wanted to understand more clearly how camp is performing on its own as a program and so we extracted that from the rest of the classes work which is where it lived before so that we could do that evaluation annually a little bit more easily and so that everybody who observes the budget can also understand that more clearly. So that was just a function of changing the structure of the budget to hopefully be more effective.

Thank you.

That is the end of the rec subsidy cost recovery goals discussion. And next we would, I just had some discussion points and things I wanted to talk about for the rest of the beginning part of fiscal 27, but the implications for future years.

So we're doing really well on time. And so what we can do is let's take a quick break. People can grab some food, come back, and then this is going to kind of open up an opportunity to discuss and ask questions. If you have some more in-depth questions you would like to have that. So give you an opportunity for that.

In particular, we did not it to a slide on FICA retirement contributions, workman's compensation, health insurance.

Yeah, thank you, Counselor. I'm sorry, I forgot that in the personnel section. So the numbers that you see for personnel, they absolutely include all of those, FICA, Social Security, all of the related employer's expenses. as well as full wages and all benefits. And that includes workers comp. And what I will tell you that we just learned about workers comp that I promised to tell you is we just got noticed that our rate will be a little bit less than we thought it would be and less than what is planned for in this budget. So that's good. We already know we should come in under budget for fiscal 27 in our workers comp expenses. And then I guess I would invite Do you have specific questions around our employer employment expenses or other things?

So it's a very broad question in all of those categories, FICA, retirement contributions, workman's comp, health insurance in general. I saw wide swings from department, division, line item to line item. Sometimes it was a negative right decrease in big numbers. Yes, in some cases made absolutely no sense when. Should be fairly predictable across. All sections on all of those costs and health insurance. When I see it negative, I'm like.

Yeah, so. Mayor through you up. I I can't speak to that specific negative, but certainly we could sit down and look at that page in the budget with you, but that also could be exactly what director Lopez just talked about. Just we've moved personnel into a different cost center for instance, and so we're just accounting differently. The position the person may still be with the city and still using the same benefit, but just got moved into a different place in the budget, so they'll show as a negative. What I will say, you can see big swings, particularly related to health insurance costs, because, for instance, we may hire somebody who is taking coverage for a single person. They might get a family, and then they change their coverage to select for a family, and the cost of that is very different on the employer side. And I don't have those numbers in the top of my head, but we can certainly get them for you as far as what the employer pays as part of our health insurance through EGI. I think you guys probably know this, but we are insured through EGI, which is the state of same program that state of Wyoming employees are participating in as well as certain municipal governments as well. And I think that's a good value proposition for the city, but those numbers can swing, pretty dramatically. Or maybe you have an employee who was using single coverage and leaves, and the new person who replaces them takes family coverage, and it's thousands and thousands of dollars different than the single coverage will be. So I would suspect that probably what you're seeing is health insurance more than anything else. FICA should be pretty stable, I would think. Jill, are there others that you can think of that we see big swings in that I'm not pulling off top of mind?

So one thing to remember too, Other things which are not connected to a particular person. So when we budget for personnel, we budget by person. So we would take at 15th of February, everybody who is an employee here gets moved into a projection. So then the departments go through and say, we need this much in overtime and this much in standby pay and this much in callback time and this much in all of these different pays that are not specific to one person. It's just in general. So it's a bucket or part-time people for that matter. So if they're increasing any of those, those impact your FICA and your Medicare and your workers' comp and all of those things, which are pension. all of those things which are percentage-based. So when you look at wages, you can't just look at the full-time wages. You have to look at that whole grouping of different wage types that could influence those benefits.

Maybe I could add one thing, too, just for edification of the council. So I assume you guys know this. If you do, just tell me, and I'll be quiet. But The positions are authorized by the Council, as you know, so there's a certain FTE allocation full time equivalent allocation of the governing body. We do not deviate from that without authority for doing so. Thus, the reason for disclosing the position, the seven positions that we'd like to add because it requires your approval to add those. So I guess I could assure you that while you may see changes or swings in the cost of Our employment expenses for wages, benefits and other things.

We are not exceeding your FTE authorization. Anything else?

OK, let's take a 5 minute. Come on back and then we'll open it up for questions. Anything else?

I'M TRYING TO FIND THIS HEALTH INSURANCE Parentheses. questions and things like that.

If anybody has anything they'd like to specifically ask about. So go ahead, Janine.

So as we think about starting off this fiscal year, the first half, we will have a lot going on. As you know, we have been working as a municipality for a number of years to address capital needs. And one of the observations that we wanted to share with you is as we catch up on those capital needs and we spend down some of the money that we have had for investments, we may see less interest income returning from that. For the general fund, that may be most significant. I don't suppose that this is something that will be an immediate impact in 27, but just something as we look to the future that we are mindful of. As we discussed, the sixth set also will end June 30th, and we are pleased that that was a 14 month collection period from April 25 through June. But that does change the available revenue to address capital and infrastructure needs as well as other things. The property tax constitutional amendment, as we all know, is on the ballot in November. I showed you this slide earlier. But this one has one extra data point on it so you can see our actual revenue that we typically receive from property tax in the red line and then the dotted line is what it would have been from 2018 forward adjusted for inflation. And we know that that's dropped in 25 and we're projecting it pretty flat for next year and 26 has been fairly unremarkable as well. But if the. property tax amendment fails, that last data point there, we've added that kind of blue line, we're projecting an additional $1.2 million decrease in revenue if that passes. And as you'll recall from earlier tonight, the decrease that we've already seen from 25 to now is slightly more than 20%, and that $1.2 million will drive that percentage up remarkably. So things that we need to be mindful of as we look to the future. The future is, I think, very bright, and the fiscal position of the city is very strong, but there are things coming that we need to think about as we make decisions. And then I think lastly, this is hot off the presses, I guess I would say. We have received the survey results from the survey that we sent out, And I thought this was interesting, at least it was to me, and I wanted to share it with you all because what I kind of took away from this is, We asked the residents, and this is a statistically valid survey. I want to start off by saying that. We said, if we collected $100 in one cent sales tax, how would you allocate it? So if you were the city council, what would you do with that $100? And this is what they told us. They said, well, they'd like about 33% of it to go to street repairs, drainage, flood prevention. They'd like 19%. and 19 cents of that 100 to go to parks, recreation, culture. Public safety was slightly higher. They were allocated $22.16. And then our two smallest categories were community and transit. So note that isn't community transit. It's community and transit with $11.13. And then facilities, cybersecurity, and technology. was allocated 14.41%. So this was interesting. We got it last week. I looked at it with the budget as proposed in mind, because that was at the top of my mind. And I really feel like largely this is affirming of how the city has been spending and allocating resources, particularly from the penny taxes. So what we know is, of course, the fifth set, along with property tax, will be on the ballot in November. the voters will be asked to renew that tax and continue it after December 31st for another four-year period. And as I mentioned earlier, my hope is to have in front of you guys a resolution maybe in mid to late July or early August where we can identify what the general purposes and uses of this general purpose penny will be so that we can start letting the voters know that This survey data was collected for your benefit to, in part, inform you what the preferences of residents were. And there is other data and results in the survey, but this was the one that seemed most pointed toward tonight's conversation and also as we look to the future and what the fifth cent will look like. So those are things that we'll see happening in the next six months. They partially affect the next fiscal year, but will certainly have big effect for fiscal 28 based on the decisions of the voters. And with that, I guess I invite your questions, your thoughts, considerations.

So how many citizens responded to the survey?

Councilor, I don't know off the top of my head that this was conducted. You can see the source at the bottom there by ETC. It is a statistically relevant survey. So regardless of how many responses were received, they did assure us that the methodology they used was a representative sample of the community. But we have that data and can certainly share it with you.

Last time around, it was a little over 700. So I imagine close.

Could you respond multiple multiple times?

Well, these days any any good survey researcher adjusts for all that there, so they make sure that people can't stack the ballot box, so to speak. And if they're submitting the surveys online using online means that they use. Measurements in the back and yeah and. internet addresses to try to normalize that data to make sure it's not overpopulating certain perspectives because people submitted multiple times.

Any questions related to the budget? Anything that came up that you were going through all that? You're looking through some stuff. Yeah.

Thanks, man. I'm kind of curious. We didn't talk about priority-based budgeting also I'm still kind of curious how that is being implemented or overlaid kind of our regular process yeah I'm just curious at what level integrating that yeah I think thank you that's a great question so one of the things I've been doing last six months is talking with Jill and her team and understanding what had occurred with priority-based budgeting

We'll be back. We recently had a management team retreat where we talked about priority based budgeting and how we're going to move forward with that. And Jill's team has also developed content for the public, a web page or a portion of our web page on our Web site. that would be forward-facing for the public. And I have not reviewed that yet. I think she sent it to me about two weeks ago. I guess what I would say is we have not thrown the baby out with the bathwater, and we recommend that we do so. And it's funny you ask, because on this slide, I thought, well, I wonder if I should add some priority-based budgeting data, because, of course, that also helps us to maybe understand where the public's priorities are for budgeting. And I just did not do that. So I guess what I would say, long-winded answer, but we're working through it. I think we'll have some public-facing information soon. I wanted to feel comfortable with that and know that we have a plan for how we're going to use that going forward, and it's going to be meaningful for the public. And I also will say, I think there's a point where we need to come back to this body, because I know you guys did a lot of work on that as well. So it's not gone away. It's just being worked through.

Distribution. Was the number they use there and in the budget. And the new formula or how? How was that proposed?

Through you, Mayor Councilor Sweeney, I think what you're alluding to is there is a. Change with direct distribution. where the formula has been embedded in statute. So the purpose of that, of course, is hoping that by embedding that allocation to cities and the formula for determining how much each city gets in the statute, that it becomes a more reliable source of revenue for cities. And so Jill and I've had some really preliminary conversations around, okay, well, The city here has treated direct distribution as one time money right and used it only for one time expenses and now that it. Hopefully is more reliable of a revenue or more ongoing of a revenue. Could we start to use it for ongoing expenses like more operational expenses? This budget doesn't do that, but I think for the future that is a conversation that we probably all should have.

up on that. Did the I see a small drop in revenue from direct distribution this year over last year? Is that a result of the formula? I mean, I thought that the formula change would work in our favor, but I wasn't totally clear on how it would all shake out.

If I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I could clarify one thing. I don't believe that the formula really changed. They just embedded the formula in statute.

And if I'm wrong, I'm inviting Jill to correct me.

So to that point, going back to this slide, because this slide is part of That formula is a pretty complex little beast. But. Jill and I were just talking about the slide because. You see the variability where some take, for instance, Albany County just because they're at the top. Their percent change as compared to our 2.6% in Detrona County. Lower theirs is 19.2% and Converse County also 14.8% less. One of the things that that formula picks up on is variability year over year, and so I would think that our direct distribution may be lower than previous year. Well, then at least last year because of the variability. But did we ever get the final numbers yet? We were just talking about this last week.

So they they did actually change the formula to base it on sales versus an appropriation from the legislature. So it is based on sales tax. The source of it, yes. As far as the distribution, the way they're going to distribute it, that did not change. So they are still distributing it per the amount. But their percentage that they're going to use for the state sales tax is a little bit lower than what we previously received. But it's better than what they originally proposed, which I think was like

That's very weird. So did we answer your question? Or do we just dance about it? Yeah, you answer my question. Thanks, Jill.

Go ahead, Pat. So on direct distribution in regards to, I think it's page 106 and 107 in particular. So I notice we use quite a bit of it, if not all of it. Two different, whether it's. Aquatics cap some capital funds for. Mike Lansing storage field as an example. River fund I thought was. Not much 10,000. So. How? Were those? YOU KNOW, EVALUATED AND FIGURED OUT THAT THAT'S WHERE IT SHOULD GO. ONE IN PARTICULAR WAS A COUPLE FOR HALL OF JUSTICE. ONE ON THE ELEVATORS ON PAGE 107. AND THEN THE MAINTENANCE, HALL OF JUSTICE 50,000. I JUST WONDERED, IS THAT WHERE WE USUALLY BUDGET THOSE AMOUNTS is out of direct distribution or funds.

Yes, yes, yes. So your recreation subsidies might recall we talked about that with the legislators that that is in part recreation subsidies from direct distribution and the whole of justice expenses apparently have always historically been budgeted from direct that has not changed.

Yeah. If I could go ahead. On the 5th cent, hopefully the voters will see the value in 5th cent again, number 18. So when does that, I think I saw on one slide that 17 ends at the end of December. And so when does the collection start from 4-18?

January. That is a great question. I believe if they renew it, it'll just be the first day would be January 1st. There's no gap. Yes, yes, OK. Other questions.

It's not a question, but.

When we were looking at the. A pattern chart. related to property tax revenue and the decrease from the 25% exemption and then the potential impact of the ballot initiative 50% exemption. I think it's also worth noting that currently circulating whether the 50% exemption passes or not is a proposal to reduce property taxes by 70% of the state. So I didn't know that.

I did not know that either. Representative Baer. Seems totally reasonable to me.

No, so you know what I did.

I did see that you can make a chart for that too, perhaps.

Yeah, I was just going there to see could probably eyeball it a little bit. It would be very dramatic. I think that that's fair to say. Yeah. Do you?

Go ahead. You know this better than I do.

I was like, can I ask a question? Just go. Do you know if the proposal proposes any replacement revenue to replace what would go away?

I'm not so sure that it's that fleshed out.

It was robbing from reserves to replace it until the reserves were gone.

Oh, wow. Okay. Also dramatic. Very dramatic, yeah.

Yeah, so it's worth...

WITH NOTING THAT REGARDLESS OF WHAT HAPPENS ON THE BALLOT INITIATIVE, IT'S STILL OUT, YOU KNOW, IN THE ADDITIONAL CONCEPTIONS.

THAT DOESN'T WORRY AT ALL, DOES IT?

70%. NO, THAT'S ACTUALLY REALLY SUPER WORRISOME.

Other questions? So your projections were based on the 50%, just residential 50%, because my understanding is that 25% goes away, and 50% is enacted. Mm-hmm.

Yes, and I did run that projection myself. These folks did. Yes, exactly what's shown there down to potentially 3.8 million. Again, remember, these are estimates. But we estimate that we'd be down to total property tax annually about $3.8 million, which is much different than what you see from 25, which was $6.6 million.

I think it's statewide $635 million. A cut of $600 million?

And a 50% on residential.

So one of your last slides talked about 27 and beyond. So I know it's too early to start thinking about it, but. Other communities have expressed interest in in a countywide 6 cent. Which would be. In 28. When do you think? we would start talking about that. 27 or.

I don't think January is unreasonable if you if you just want my opinion off the cuff, I would certainly wait until we see what falls out of November. And where we are there, but yeah, I don't see any reason why starting in January would be unreasonable if people. INTERESTED IN EXPLORING THAT AND I ASSUME COUNCILOR SWEENEY YOU MEAN ALL OF OUR SURROUNDING SISTER CITIES. INTERESTED IN THE MUNICIPAL SIX PENNY. OR ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT THE COUNTY TRADITIONAL COUNTYWIDE SPECIFIC PURPOSES. OKAY. OKAY.

I KNOW IN PARTICULAR EVANSVILLE'S EXTREMELY INTERESTED. AND I WOULD GUESS THAT. MIDWEST AND HAD YOUR be good with it. Bar none is going to have some things come up with their new police. You know for future. But I really haven't talked to Mills about it, but I would think she's got.

Could be used for you.

Evansville Evansville's at different needs besides. Their their water system. Mills probably could. Use some help with.

Their water system.

Night I don't know how that plays in in the future. Get differing opinions. into the water treatment facility because we're just a portion, the major portion, but usage, but how that all interacts with the other users on the sixth set.

Well, a countywide six penny, very powerful for infrastructure investment capital needs. And I don't have those slides in here. But I know you all have seen them about the capital need that we have in the city of Casper's utility systems. And I can imagine they have similar and the need far outweighs the available resources when we look at 10 year horizon.

So I got a couple. One is I know especially Zulima's department and others have been very successful in obtaining TAP grants from the state, land water conservation funds from the state. I know a lot of those, their origins are federal dollars. And so as we've seen our loss of a couple programs like the Branch Across America one, and I think there's one or two others, do we see, you know, TAP grants we've relied on incredibly, you know, I don't think we've built a single pathway without a TAP grant since I've been on council, Land Water Conservation Fund, Wyoming Outdoor Recreation Funds. Are there any risks on the horizon to those federal dollars drying up? And should we expect to be doing less projects over the next coming years, I guess?

I would certainly invite Director Lopez to weigh in if she knows anything different than I do. My best understanding right now tap and land and water. There is no effort to do away with those programs, and that's good because, like for instance, land and water was on the chopping block like 18 months ago and survived so. You know anything new or different here, counselor?

Honestly, I think Alex Vita could probably speak to tap grants far better than I can, but in terms of land and water, you know, as the city manager indicated, you know, our state land and water conservation fund program has been stable throughout this period of uncertainty when it came to grants and funding at the federal level. However, the land and water conservation fund legacy partnership program was actually put on hold. And we've just recently gotten noticed that that program is coming back and will be pretty well funded. Certainly what we've seen across the board is that the administration has changed some of the priorities and objectives of some of this funding, you know, to better align with their administrative priorities, but they're not cutting programs altogether. So I personally have no concern that those sources of funding that we have been quite successful in obtaining are going to dry up. And in fact, you know, I'm pretty excited to hear that the Legacy Partnership program will be coming back and do intend to apply for funds through that program um for some of the bigger park improvement projects that we have on the horizon and so um i guess that's where i'm at and then in terms of outdoor recreation of course um the outdoor rec and tourism trust fund is a priority of the state. It appears they are well funded and will continue to add to that funding trust over time. Unfortunately, we did already learn that we were not successful in the applications that we submitted this year.

However, I do see that being a source of potential funding for us into the future for outdoor rec projects.

Our intention to ask.

As far as tap programs, I am unaware that the tap program is drawing back.

Projects. Keep applying for this.

I was actually I have one question for Michael. Looks so good tonight. Might as well give you at least one opportunity. My question was, we had $100,000 for cloud security improvements. I was just curious what that was.

The $100,000 Mayor Council or the $100,000 for the cloud security improvements, the capital project being funded from once in 17, referring to right? Yep. That is with respect to we are currently using Microsoft Office 365 as our main portal for Word documents, Excel, email, our SharePoint intranet portal, and security around all those pieces. And more and more services are moving to the cloud. We're moving from data center locally stored services to cloud-based services more and more. And that's just the way the industry is working. So those services are going to help with our data governance on our Microsoft platform, our potentially beef up security, and also to use consulting services to help us better utilize those services that are with Microsoft 365. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it, Michael.

Thank you for not asking me that question.

Any others? You've got more bad, I can tell.

Do you have a little bit of time left? If anybody has any?

Yep, go ahead. Would have been better formatted had Pat asked a question first, but. Can we talk about weed and pest for a minute? I don't know the exact number, but it looked like there was relatively significant reduction. I know that came up quite a bit when we were talking about property tax exemption and how funding for weed and pest generally would be impacted. Can you talk about our current budget outlook for weed and pests and what implications that has?

If you don't mind, Mayor, I'd like to ask Tina to break this out a little bit. I think... What I believe you're alluding to, of course, is some of the reductions that were made in the current fiscal year, whether those are really continuing or not in fiscal 27, which was a point of conversation for us throughout our budget conversation. So.

Okay, so I apologize that I don't have my laptop in front of me. And I have it, but I think I'm going to speak more generally. Mayor, if I may, just So one thing, thanks to the support of our parks manager, Andy, Katie Hallock, who is the supervisor, Weed and Pest, and of course our finance team, you know, I think our Weed and Pest Fund is in a very healthy position and we've intentionally, you know, monitored our spending. That fund does cover operational expenses for Weed and Pest as well as capital expenses for Weed and Pest. And so we're very mindful of that, especially going into, you know, some of the, you know, challenges and uncertainties of last year. So I think the fund is healthy. We have, you know, made some reductions, particularly on the capital side, but some of that is just that we've made some large capital expenditures over the last few years, particularly in equipment that we need to perform the functions of weed and pest. And so now with newer equipment, we're not having to replace expensive pieces of equipment, which is probably the primary reduction that you're seeing. You know, historically, our staffing levels in Weed and Pest have kind of fluctuated a little bit. We share a lot of Weed and Pest employees with parks and forestry in particular, and so some of those positions are funded by the general fund within the parks org, and then some of them are more partially funded by Weed and Pest, and so being mindful of trying to maintain adequate staffing to perform Weed and Pest functions while not overstaffing I can't say the county would like us to have more staff when it comes to weed and pest. You know, that's that's something that we've just been. Pretty conservative with in terms of of personnel, and so hopefully that answers your question. But you know, we are maintaining the same level of service for weed and pest that we have historically had, and in fact just pretty recently. updated and solidified some contracts with the Wyoming Department of Transportation for some maintenance that we do on the I 25 corridor and things like that, that they pay us for they reimburse us for. And so but but right now I'm feeling pretty good about the health of the funds and the services that we're providing. And we may obviously look at some changes into the future. But for this fiscal year, I'm pretty good about it.

Thanks. Any other burning questions?

So debt service. I was curious if.

Lease arrangement on. The Casper. No, the.

Uh, the new cop shop. If that. Yes. In some of those numbers on debt service. Positive. Looking at page 71 but. Just wondering if. Everything. It's indicating that service around, if I'm reading this right, $922,206. Thank you, Mayor and Councilor.

We are preparing debt issuance, those certificates of participation. I addressed that a little bit in the transmittal letter. I don't have that page right in front of me. But yes, the plan that we have had all along will continue.

The letter says the budget has increased 9% over fiscal year 26 to cover first payment on the certificates of participation for the CBC. So I think the answer to your question is yes, it does anticipate that particular debt. Thanks.

to try to allocate about three hours for the budget based upon the agenda that we do have an executive you have a little bit of time if anybody has anything i don't want to push anybody they don't have anything good pass feel good

No, I'm going around the table. Just not checking with you, Pat.

Matt, you're good. Right?

You just spoiled the whole evening.

Would encourage, though, too, like I said at the beginning of the meeting, specific, really want to get into real depth, reach out to Janine, and she'd be able to sit down with you and also get that more intel Entailed type of stuff. How I kind of wanted this meeting is I want to just take a moment. I know that this is not an easy task for the staff. You guys put a lot of time, effort, energy and staff time to put this budget together. I don't think it goes unrecognized by this Council, including myself. That this work is very, very hard. And. We can just get that little snippet of the work that you guys do and probably takes you over. I mean, you start planning a year in advance anyway. When you start doing that, would you agree with that, Janine?

I think most municipalities are budgeting kind of all year and doing that kind of work all year.

I just want to recognize the staff and the work and Janine being able to put that together. So thank you all. Thanks for getting from us. Sorry. Hopefully Tommy will put that in there. We gave the staff burritos. And there we go. Sounds good.

How much did we pay for him? Donated. All right. Thank you everyone. We do have an exec tonight, so let's go ahead and go to our special meeting.

I now called it in March 26th, 2026, special council meeting to order. Please note that actually council's gone, right? Yeah, he's gone. Chair to entertain a motion to by minute action to excuse the absence of Councillor Bond.

So moved. Second.

Moved by Pollock, seconded by Haskins. Any abstentions or nay votes? All voting aye, say aye.

Aye.

Oh, yeah. Correct, yeah, yeah, our staff's leaving. Notice of an executive session to take place at this date and during this meeting was given. We have managed to discuss regarding personnel. Therefore, the chair would entertain a motion to adjourn into an executive session and at the conclusion of the executive session to reconvene the special meeting solely for the purposes of adjournment of the special meeting.

So moved. Second.

McIntosh, Pollock. There are a majority of members present and a motion to adjourn to an executive session has been moved and seconded. This motion requires two thirds majority of the council present. All voting aye.

Aye.

Greater than two thirds majority