County Council - Regular Meeting

Call this meeting of the Delbar County Council on August 18th, 2026 to order. Please stand if you're able. Have a moment of silence in memory of Stephanie Salee, Matthew Morey and their families and all those who have suffered loss and hardship this past week. Thank you. Another pledge.

Pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

And roll call, please.

Mr. Bucow. Present. Mr. Flanagan. Here. Mr. Mogul. Present.

Ms. Piper.

Here.

Ms. Wyeth. Present. Mr. Yance. Present. Mr. Hughes.

Here. Mr. Freeman.

Here. Here.

Marissa, was the agenda posted? Yes.

I'll move to approve.

Second. Motion to approve the agenda from Jessica, second by Dan. Roll call, please. Mr. Flanagan?

Yes. Mr. Wyhead?

Yes.

Mr. Mogul? Yes. Mr. Bookout? Yes. Ms. Piper?

Yes.

Mr. Vance? Yes. Mr. Hughes?

Yes. Give a brief introduction for this special meeting. One of the challenges that the council faces each year is that we are compelled to estimate our income from various sources when we adopt the budget, only learning the actual income figures, the revenue figures later on, sometimes months later. By way of illustration, we adopted our 2026 budget on September 23 of last year because we were required to submit it to the state in October. But it was not until December 3 that we were provided the amount of our local income tax revenue, our main distribution. The budget order we received from DLGF was issued on January 14th, a little bit late this year. The surprise there was that they had shifted $300,000 from our general fund to the cumulative bridge fund. That's the first we learned of that. In April, Councilman Mogul submitted an inquiry to Senator Alexander's office to see what they would tell us was going to be our net property tax revenue after the tax cap or circuit breaker loss. They responded that the circuit breaker loss would be $10.7 million. We had estimated $8.3 million. So that was quite a shock. On May 11th of this year, we received our supplemental local income tax distribution report, and it was less than half of what we'd received the year before. Now, we never count on that supplemental distribution. It can be zero. But again, it was a negative from what we had received the year before. So those last two items, the increase in the circuit breaker loss, the estimated increase in the lower supplemental LIT distribution, caused us to issue a guidance to our department heads and elected officials saying that it looked like 2027 income might be essentially flat, and they should take that into account in preparing their budget requests. We finally got the actual circuit breaker loss. It was not 10.7, it was $8.5 million, very close to what we had estimated in the first place. And then finally, on June 30th of this year, the state issued their max levy growth quotient for 2027, the amount that our property tax revenue might potentially increase. And they issued that number at 6.0%, which was higher than expected.

All these are moving parts.

going into budget, which we will begin to take up in a couple of weeks. We thought it appropriate, though, to try to get a handle as best we can on what 2027 revenue will be like. So that was what prompted this special meeting. We have some of our special services that provide services to the county and the financial area that will present to us and have an opportunity for discussion among the council as well as input from department heads, elected officials, and the public. Any other opening comments you'd like to make at this time?

For those that are in attendance, there are some copies of the two reports sitting at the end of Councilman Flanagan's desk if anybody wants to grab a copy of them. Going along, Jason O'Neill from Policy Analytics and Sam from Policy Analytics and Scott Finley from Baker Utility will be presenting on the screen as well.

Okay, I think we're going to start with Policy Analytics. All right.

Thank you for the opportunity to present today. My name is Jason O'Neill. I'm the Managing Director of Policy Analytics. We are a central Indiana or Indianapolis-based firm, and we specialize in economic and fiscal analysis, mostly for taxing units throughout the state of Indiana. And so a lot of what we do is help Units like yourself understand the complexities of what's going on with your revenue situation What the major drivers of change are and try to dial in what? expectations are for the future So I'm going to walk through our property tax revenue projection for you today. The purpose of this is to give you all a higher level of information, higher level of confidence in understanding the factors that affect the county's property tax revenue. and what to expect for next year and beyond. There's a lot of details that we're gonna talk about. We're gonna talk about legislative change. We're gonna talk about tax base. There's a lot of terminology. I will try to explain the technical terminology, but if you do have any questions, feel free to ask me. Even during the presentation, it's relatively informal. If you have questions, something that I'm not covering or something you don't understand, feel free to stop and ask questions. The whole purpose of this is to give you all the information you need to go into your budget process with confidence about your fiscal situation. So first thing I want to just cover briefly is SEA 1 2025. This is the property tax reform package that was passed in 2025 that had a really significant impact on how property taxes function and work going into the future. Property taxes are one of the major sources of county revenue, and this does have really significant impacts on how things operate. I'm not going to go through, talk through all of the tax base, all of the functional changes, but I want to hit a couple of high-level things that are changing in the future due to this bill. One thing that's happening is that the General Assembly decided to provide property tax relief to homeowners especially. They did this in two ways. First is by providing a property tax deduction that ramps up to two-thirds of the assessed value by 2031. For a long time, homeowners have gotten a property tax break in terms of the homestead deduction or the standard deduction. What this means is that the amount of assessed value that's taxable is less than the market value of the property. There's a deduction. What this bill does and what this language does is it increases that deduction to two-thirds of the assessed value by 2031. We're also providing a deduction for the first time for non-homestead residential and agricultural property. So by 2031, farmland will also have a deduction up to one-third of its assessed value. So those two things are affecting the real estate side. For businesses, there's a series of changes affecting business personal property. So that's depreciable equipment owned by commercial entities within the county. There are several changes that restructure how that will be assessed, resulting in less assessed value for business personal property over time. So those three things together mean we are changing how we're calculating the tax base going forward, and that's going to have an impact on how your tax rates are calculated and your revenues as well. And finally, the last major thing to talk about in terms of SEA 1 is the supplemental homestead credit. The second way the General Assembly is providing relief to taxpayers is by providing a 10% credit, which is essentially a reduction on property taxes due, up to $300. That was first in effect for 2006. So if you got your 2006, I'm sorry, 2026, tax bill, you would have seen that you had what was called a supplemental homestead credit that reduced your tax liability by 10%. That's an unfunded credit. That means taxpayers get that tax break, but taxing units just lose the revenue. There's no replacement for that. And so that was the second way that homeowners were provided property tax relief in that legislation. In 2026, some of this was phased in. The supplemental credit was implemented. Some of the deductions were phased in. But this will continue to phase in between now and 2031. So as we look through the future data here, you'll see that there's changes in the way the tax base works and the way tax rates work as we get to 2031. So that's foundational as we get into the numbers. Any questions on the bill itself before we move forward?

I guess I'm a little confused.

OK.

so our home so homeowners are going to lose their homestead exemption is that what i've heard so actually the homestead exemption is going to increase from about 35 percent of the assessed value to two-thirds 66 percent of the assessed value so the homestead deduction is going to going to actually increase between now and 2031. that doesn't make sense but at any rate um

Then you also kind of finish by talking about a deduction on top of that.

A credit on top of that, yeah. So in property tax parlance, a deduction is a reduction to the assessed value. So a deduction reduces the amount of assessed value that is subject to the tax rate. So the way the tax calculation will work by 2031 is we'll take the market value of your property, we'll remove two-thirds of the assessed value, and the remainder will be subject to property taxes.

So I'm sorry, so for those property taxes, then will they be higher than what they currently are?

Not for residential taxpayers, no.

Jim, put your microphone on. It is.

Because we're going to increase the deduction from about 35% to 66%. And then on top of that... I'm sorry, that would be feathered in. Yes. And then on top of that, we're providing a credit. And again, in the property tax terminology, a deduction is different than a credit. A deduction reduces the assessed value. A credit removes the tax liability. So we're going to take 10% of the tax liability, excuse me, off the top of property tax payment. So property tax payers.

Let's say the house is $100,000. Currently 33% comes off. 35, yeah. 35 by the end of 2031. 67% of that $100,000 value come off. So you're at 33% or $33,000 assessed value on it. thousand dollar remainder is taxed you're going to get another credit on top of that yeah 33 000 times the tax rate you know you know roughly 600 maybe in property taxes you take that down by another um so this is the slow reduction of property taxes yeah and the revenue associated with it that comes back to the county correct

Alright, I'm going to keep going into the data and maybe some of this will become more clear, maybe some of it will still be opaque. I'll do my best to provide clarity as we go forward. What I want to get into first is the assessed value profile so you understand a little bit of the tax base of the county. now we're kind of in still a bit of an in-between phase in terms of the data you know you just heard how like the timeline of property taxes changes over time and you know you get more rev more detail in different different points of time what we're looking at here is this is information that's based off pay 26 assessed values and as we go forward we'll bring some preliminary information for pay 27 in here as well I just want to go over the timeline just a bit, though. When we talk about assessed value for taxes that are payable in 2026, I want to make sure we all understand what we're talking about. The way that Indiana property taxes work, taxes are paid in arrears. So in 2026, we're all paying taxes on our property as it was assessed. As of January 1, 2025, that market value assessment is based on sales data over the course of calendar year 2024. So when we talk about what the assessed value is doing, how that affects the market, we have to understand there's a two-year lag. But high-level headline for Delaware County is that you have seen a lot of assessed value growth recently. The chart here on the top left shows your gross assessed value history. That's the market value of all property within Delaware County. can see between 2015 and 2021 there's really very little growth in assessed value across the county we went from 5.7 billion to 6.1 billion beginning in 2021 and this is a trend that we've seen statewide i would say it's a magnified or um uh in delaware county we've seen a really fast increase in assessed value going all the way up to 9.4 million by 2026 or 9.4 billion for taxes payable in 2026. between 25 and 26 we've seen about a 15.2 percent increase in assessed value market value assessed value The preliminary data that's not shown in this table that we're seeing on pay 27 assessed values is another increase of about the same magnitude, about another 15% on residential assessed value. So we're still seeing rapid acceleration in assessments for the counting. You can also see down in the bottom left your homestead parcel count by assessed value, so you can get a sense of what the mix of assessed value is. Still, most of the homestead parcels in Delaware County are assessed at less than $100,000. um that may give us a little bit of indication what's going on here that is low for the state probably low for the region we probably have some level of activity that assessed values are beginning to catch up with market value up as well that could be some of what we're seeing in terms of the assessment increase But overall, this is providing you a boost in tax base. We'll get to some of the implications as we go. One thing this is doing is it's helping to mitigate that circuit breaker loss that was talked about before. But it also if you're a taxpayer and you're seeing assessed value increase, you are going to see your tax bills go up on a year to year basis.

I have a couple of questions. Yeah, we're not even maybe that clarity, I guess, just in terms of the trend on the top left. In other counties, have you seen such a spike since 2015? Because it feels to me like since 2015 we've had, in essence, almost 10 years of flat growth from an assessed value perspective. Is that driven by what the state... Persino recommends and the values that they give the assessor's office. We've heard from them that, you know, the most dramatic increases that we're seeing now are because the state has recalculated their numbers. Or did we just spend, you know, 2015 through 2022 not really growing our assessed value even though it probably could have?

probably a lot of different factors and dynamics going on there. There is definitely not very much assessed value growth in this 2015 to 22 range in Delaware County. So it's unclear without doing further analysis exactly how that relates to sales. Statewide, especially between 2021 and 2024, we did see large property value increases across the state. That's a post-COVID real estate boom. Housing values went really high, assessed values went really high, and largely that's one of the things that contributed to the property tax reform in 2025. I think we have numbers elsewhere that's between like 2020 and 2025 statewide homeowners were seeing 9% average annual increases in their tax bill, predominantly due to assessed value increases. I'd say largely the trends have started to mitigate throughout the state, and that's one of the things we're seeing in Delaware County is still some increasing assessed value. That's a little bit abnormal, but we'd have to do some more longitudinal analysis about similar counties to be sure of that.

I just wanted to point it out.

Can I jump in real quick again? Yes. Sorry. I'm trying to follow the logic. I understand the numbers, but Logically, I'm trying to understand how between 2015 and 2026 projection, assessed values almost doubled, and yet you're telling me that you're telling us that the average assessed value is less than $100,000? I'm sorry.

Are 501c3s part of this formula? No, this is the assessed value for homeowners. So they have to be owner-occupied properties that you're seeing on that bottom left-hand corner. And I'm not saying the average is less than $100,000, but most of your homes are less than $100,000.

Okay, so when you say residential, are you also talking about rentals?

The chart on the bottom left there is owner-occupied only. And that's what I'm referring to. And that's, yeah, throughout the county. And this is straight from the assessment records. So that's definitely what we're seeing in the data.

Thank you.

On structural changes, it is important to note that there are two structural changes on assessed value that happened over the last two years. For taxes payable in 2026, the state initiated a change to the assessment process where a, this is getting into the weeds, but it's important, a value called the variable economic multiplier was shifted. Essentially what that had been doing in the assessment process would be was reducing the assessed value on a cost basis by about 30%. That was removed from the assessment process in between 25 and 26. I think we might see this. I'm going to go ahead. go to this slide, what we saw due to that change is a pretty substantial increase, especially in non-residential parcels. I'll go back so you guys don't have to move around. But we saw basically a 20% change, a 15% to 20% change in non-residential parcels due to that administrative change. Then for pay 27 next year there's also a change in the assessment cost tables that is going to further affect assessed value changes. All right. I don't want to bounce around too far. I'm on page six now. I'm going to keep moving through this assess value information. This is showing how your tax base has changed over time between pay 15 and pay 2026. Big takeaway here is that your tax base is becoming more residential over time. This is net assessed value by property class. In 2015, residential assessed value constituted 45% of your total tax base. By pay 26, residential assessed value constituted 51% of your total tax base. So what's happening is over time, due to price appreciation, due to assessment changes, residential taxpayers are picking up a bigger share of the burden of property taxes within the county. Now, this is an assessment change. This is not necessarily, it's not due to any fiscal policy on the county side, not due to any fiscal policy on any municipality or school side. This is just the way the tax base is changing. And this trend is one of the reasons the deduction changes in SEA 1 were instituted to begin to shift some of the property tax burden back over to commercial taxpayers. But you may have been hearing, especially over the last several years, especially from homeowners and residential taxpayers, about rapid increases in their tax bills. And this is part of what we're seeing, a two-step, essentially, condition that, A, assessed values are increasing. And the proportional share of taxes are falling higher on residential properties. And so the residential properties especially, we're seeing pretty substantial increases in tax bills between 2020 and 2026. Why is that? Goes back largely due to the speed at which the assessed value is growing for those residential taxes.

Why is general commercial going down so much? Is that general commercial?

Yeah, that's general commercial, and it's going down proportionally. You can kind of, that's really the reason we put that bottom graph on here, is you can see that red line is your total residential tax base. You can see how, sorry, you might not have color. Oh, you may have color. Okay, good. The red line is the residential tax base, and it's growing really rapidly between 20 and 2026, whereas the blue line is the non-residential, or essentially the commercial tax base, and it's not growing as fast. And so when you have that condition going on, one part of your tax base is growing and the other is not. Proportionally, residential is taking on more of an overall burden.

If we're not losing any commercial, it seems that the commercial property would go up exponentially like the residential does. And

know i read an article from mr hicks a couple weeks ago where it is shifting the burden off of commercial into residential yep and i don't i mean does that make sense it isn't to me well that's what we've we have seen um especially through 25 and 26 um that the residential or the property tax base was falling proportionally more onto residential taxpayers And you can see that in the progression of those pie charts as general residential went from 45% of your tax base to 51% of your tax base.

Do you know whether or not commercial properties are not being assessed as rapidly as residential?

That was definitely the case at least up to 2025. The commercial properties are predominantly assessed on a cost basis with the cost tables that are prescribed by the state. Those had not increased maybe since 2018 in that timeframe. But over the last two years, commercial assessed values have gone up fairly significantly. Let's get into the page eight here. Between 25 and 26, industrial properties went up by 20%. General commercial properties went up by 13%. And the preliminary data that we've seen for 2027 next year is showing another 15% to 20% increase for commercial properties. So historically, we had not seen very much increase in assessed value for commercial industrial properties. Over the last few years, we could see combined increase of anywhere between 25% and 40%, depending on the property class. And that is due to a change in how the state assessment practices has been implemented.

And how are the, when people want their assessment re-evaluated, how is that reflected in your charts?

So, okay, so you're talking about the appeals process. So once you get your notice of assessment, you have an opportunity to go to first the assessor and then the PETA BOA, Property Tax Board of Appeals, to get it re-evaluated. In the year that you get the appeal, like let's say I got my pay 26 tax assessment, I wanted to appeal, I went to the assessor, and I got it lowered. That doesn't show up in this data because that comes after the tax bill. But that lowered assessed value should be reflected into the next year.

But that's only good for one year, correct? If people don't understand that appeal falls off, then that'll show up the following, the next year.

Yeah, and there's a lot of discretion in how the assessors do that. Typically, the appeal would not go back up to the pre-appeal level the next year, but it's definitely possible the assessed value increases again the next year due to the general market trends. And so it is definitely possible or likely that taxpayers may need to appeal multiple years depending on what they feel their market value is. But this is based on the property taxes as they were billed, as the tax bills were written, not based on any post-billing adjustments.

So, you know, just in terms of trending, right, so we have not grown in commercial value. That's an economic development issue. We have not attracted that many new businesses or other drivers that would bring commercial property to the county, thus shifting the tax burden back mostly to the residential areas.

And the assessment process didn't embed as much inflationary or market adjustment in the commercial sector as it did in the residential sector until the last two years. We're seeing a change there.

So is it fair to say that the state altering the rates and the commercial jump, I mean, up to close to 40% in commercial jump is an offset for the fact that they're trying to reduce residential property taxes?

I think what we're seeing there is probably multiple years of inflationary adjustment compressed into two years of assessed value change is really what we're seeing there. All right. I'm on page eight. I'm going to move forward into the tax base and tax rate forecast. We've talked a little bit about assessed value composition. Yeah, sorry, I'm just keeping scrolling forward. Assessed value projections. I'm not going to dwell on this because we've talked about the composition. I want to move forward to page 11 where there's your future tax base projection. Let me talk a little bit about how we do this. One of the things we use for this type of modeling is a parcel-level local government revenue model. So we take all the parcels within Delaware County, and we replicate the tax billing process for each year we're doing the analysis. So we apply trending, assess value growth, we apply controls to the levy, and essentially are replicating the entire overall process for tax billing in order to produce these results. these forecasts. So what you're seeing here is our current forecast of net assessed value through 2035. That's the upper chart there. I've put the gross assessed value line on there because I think it's helpful to see where we're going. So what this is using, that green dotted line, is a projection of gross assessed value. That's the market value within the county. estimate of what's happening economically with market value of property. You see a big increase between 25 and 26, and you also see another big increase between 26 and 27. We don't yet have certified net assessed values for Delaware County, but we have gotten preliminary assessed value data for pay 27 from the county, and that's what we're embedding in here. Overall, it does look like another pretty strong year of assessed value growth. The preliminary assessment data was showing somewhere around 15% year over year assessed value growth for residential, about 18%, I believe, year over year for commercial. Agricultural property is not going to see that growth because it's assessed with a different methodology. But by and large, we're still seeing a potential for increased assessed value through 2027. And then we've moderated the trend line after that. One of the things we want to be careful to do is not overestimate revenues for you all. And we also are looking broadly at market data. And the housing market data is showing that the appreciation of residential home values is cooling off. We're not losing value in most places throughout the state, but we're not increasing as fast as we were in previous years. So that's the gross assessed value line. But the net assessed value line gets much more complicated. And that's because we're ramping up these deductions, the homestead and the non-homestead residential deductions between now and 2031. You can see how that's happening on the bottom charts there. But essentially, we still have another year of assessed value growth that we're projecting in the model. We should see how close we are to actual certified net assessed values fairly soon. But we're projecting a year of assessed value growth. And then we're actually projecting moderate reduction in net assessed value going forward at least through 2031 and that is because we're taking more and more assessed value off the tax rolls because we're increasing these deductions two-thirds of homestead properties and one-third of non-homestead residential property by 2031. And so as we do the forecast, it's important to understand how these assessed value changes are going to be factored in and what's going on with your tax base, because that's going to affect what happens with tax rates and revenues as well. There's a lot of analysis that's embedded in this page. I've tried to present it as succinctly as possible, but any questions before we move on from here?

I have a question. Am I jumping the gun by asking you what you feel like the net result of all of this? I mean, I see on the top line here the projected revenue, I'm sorry, projected assessed value between now and 2035 goes up substantially. You've indicated that that might be aggressive. And if it is overly aggressive, we are giving more of a tax relief, if you will, from current to 66% plus the additional 10%. What do you project or anybody projecting what the revenue is going to be?

You're about five minutes ahead of me. Okay, thank you. i thought we are going to get there yes um maybe maybe less than that depending on on how efficient i am but yes that's where all of this is going is what is the impact revenues on taxing on the county and on taxpayers that's what we're going to see in the future um i want to talk real quickly about personal property um One of the major changes of SEA 1 is what's called an increase in the de minimis personal property exemption. If any of you own a business or are associated with a business, currently if your business has a purchase price of equipment of $80,000 or less, you don't have to pay personal property taxes on it. It's exempt from business personal property taxes. SEA 1 increased that exemption from $80,000 to $2 million. So now, if you have a business and you own $2 million or less of business personal property, you don't have to pay taxes on it. If you own more than $2 million, you have to pay taxes on all of it. And so that will first be in effect in pay 2027. Really, the data behind that is most of it is confidential. So we've estimated the impacts here and embedded it into the model. This is probably a conservative estimate. What we're estimating is that... about $600 million of your overall personal property assessed value is greater than $2 million, but that you'll lose about $300 million of personal property due to this exemption. This will be interesting to see, like, when we do have certified assessed values, what actually is taking place in the tax system. But this is embedded into the forecast as well, this change in business personal. When we talked about assessed value, the other side of the tax revenue methodology is what's going on with levies and tax rates. I mentioned the MLGQ is at 6% for 2026. For the previous three years, MLGQ, which, let me define that term, it's a maximum levy growth quotient. It's a state-defined rate by which your levies can increase. Your levies are how much you're asking property taxpayers to pay. For the past three years, that has been statutorily capped at 4%. So you can only get up to a 4% annual increase in your levy. That statutory control was not enacted for pay 26. We've seen a lot of income growth in the state. And so the MLGQ actually moved up to 6% this year. So you can see up to 6% levy growth. I think you'll hear more about this when Scott goes through your budget and your comprehensive financial projections. And then you can see what our forecast is of that MLGQ on the top right hand side. Basically moderating at kind of a reversion to a mean of 4% in our forecast. So we've got all of this information that's going into the revenue impacts and here's what we're looking at. I'm going to show you two flavors of this revenue forecast and this is a summarized version and there's more detail in the back. This is our preliminary version of this this is not our final forecast because we ran an analysis when we just had the 20 pay 26 tax bills that's what you see on page 15 which showed for 2027 25.5 million of net levy that's revenue after the circuit breaker About $9 million of Circuit Breaker loss. We just heard kind of how that number was fluctuating around over the last year. And about $1 million of post-Circuit Breaker credit loss. That is essentially that new 10% credit that homeowners got. However, after we ran that first forecast, we got the preliminary assessed value data for page 27. Now if you go to page 16, this is an updated forecast. Basically, that assessed value growth is going to give you a little bit more financial flexibility overall. We are projecting at this point, with that assessed value increase, $7.4 million in circuit breaker loss, still about $1 million, $1.1 million in post-circuit breaker credit, but about $27 million in net property tax levy. and you can see that dark blue shaded area showing your annual increase in net levy that's revenue that actually comes to the county after the circuit breaker loss increasing from about 25 million for pay 26 to 27 million in pay 27. So that's where we're currently at with our forecast. We will update this one more time once we get actual certified net assessed values, but this should be a fairly reliable point for you to start your budget discussions.

Are those certified net assessed values typically in already?

August 1st is the deadline. Sometimes it takes more time to get them in.

Okay, thank you.

A couple things to look at. You have barely stable growth throughout 27 to 2031 timeframe. However, it's not very fast. And so a lot of the initial reaction to SEA 1 was about potential revenue loss for governmental units. You can see the net revenue you're bringing home is actually going up year over year, but not at a very fast rate. The real story about SEA1 on the property tax side is it's just not providing near as much growth as we might otherwise have had. And that's, you know, as you're doing a budget, that's a significant managing factor because you've got to manage your personnel growth, you've got to manage your fixed cost growth. The other thing that is impactful in this forecast is between 2028 and 2029. Delaware County currently has quarter percent of its income tax goes to property tax relief. One of the things that property tax relief does is it mitigates or reduces the impact of the circuit breaker on the county. That property tax relief expires at the end of 2028. There's still a little bit of uncertainty on exactly what the timing of what that's going to be as it expires, but we're showing the full expiration of that in 2029. And you can see that net revenue change between 2028 and 2029 is almost zero. That is another kind of warning light that I put. It's a couple years out, but just to manage on your fiscal projection, it's between as that property tax relief expires, there will be a revenue impact on the property tax side for the county. And that's something that can be mitigated on the budget side. Talk about mitigating on the income tax side. There's lots of various policy options, but it's definitely something to be aware of.

Compared to other counties, will Delaware County continue to have the highest percentage circuit breaker loss?

Yes. There's nothing in this bill that's going to mitigate that at a high level at this point. Unless there's other structural changes, that overall level of circuit breaker loss is expected to be about the same. On page 17, we're just showing that that increase in assessed value above the original projections is putting about $500,000 into the revenue forecast each year. So that is influential as well. And then last thing I want to do is just go through a little bit of what your property taxpayers can expect. I'm on page 18 now. This is just, I'm not going to get into all the detail here because we've gone through a lot of data, but this is a summary of how you can expect homestead rental and commercial tax liability to change over time. The structure here is that we've taken cuts of different geographic areas. Page 18 is a representative taxpayer analysis in unincorporated center township. Median homestead assessed value of $129,900. And you can see how that median homestead liability is expected to change over time. One thing that we're definitely seeing is that between 25 and 2026, property tax relief was applied. I mean, that taxpayer, median taxpayer has almost the same tax bill. Some people may have expected a lot of tax reduction, but at least that tax bill did not grow. We are still going to see residential and commercial tax liabilities increase into the future, predominantly due to assess value growth and partially due to the MLGQ growth going to 6% or MLGQ going to 6%. So we're already starting to hear some legislative talk about another round of property tax reform. This is the kind of thing that is being looked at, is that we're still seeing tax bill increases across the state, really, as we look into the future. So you've got Center Township there. The next page is a lower value property within the city of Muncie. So that's at $130,000. Then page 20 is a higher value property within the city of Muncie. And page 21 is a... lower value property and median taxpayer within Yorktown. So you can see how all of those change. I'm not going to go into all those detail, but it's for you to have for reference. And if you have questions, we can dive really deep into the detail. We've got lots of data now on property taxes within the county. We can do specific taxpayers, we can do specific geographic areas and do this type of analysis. Then the last thing that's in your packet is an appendix with the actual data, the numbers behind this. We provided this as an Excel file as well if you're interested in getting into the detail. But you can see all the details behind property tax revenue forecast. So that is a summary of the analysis we have to date. Happy to answer any questions or turn it over to Baker-Chile for the PFP.

I think, Jason, if you're comfortable, the Jim's question previously, in summary from what you're seeing, maybe you could just kind of give your assessment on what this data is telling you for the next five plus years.

Yeah, I'm gonna go back to page 16. So in summary, what I'd say is that we are projecting an increase in revenue, property tax revenue for pay 27, largely attributable to the assessed value growth that we're seeing in pay 27. That is going to continue to increase at a lower level going forward. The big red flag to look at is the property tax revenues as the property tax relief rolls off into 2029. On the other side, your taxpayers, especially your commercial taxpayers, are going to face continued increased property tax bills. Their assessed values are going up. We're shifting property taxes from residential back over to commercial, so you're going to see more taxes on that side. You are also going to see higher residential property taxes to the extent that you have homeowners in areas with growing assessed values. That's going to be the predominant factor on residential tax bills is how fast their assessed values are going. Those are the four things that I would really be keen into from this analysis.

Tell me the difference between page 15 and 16 again, please. We're talking about service. One increases $2 million and the other one increases $500,000. Yeah.

So page 15 is the analysis we did earlier in the summer when we just had the 2026 tax bills. We didn't have any information, actual information about pay 27 assessments. So that was page 15. Page 16 is the update that we did once we had the pay 27 assessed value information, which is increasing by, you know, somewhere on the gross assessed value side is increasing around 15%. And so there's a lot more tax base than we originally projected. So that's why we ran the second scenario. But we wanted to include both so you can kind of see what the sensitivity is to tax base growth within the counties. So in summary, your best guess is which? Pay 2016 is the updated forecast. So yeah, that shows the $2 million of property tax levy growth.

Sure, I understand how you predict

the increased and assessed values beyond 2027. Yeah.

That's a good question. Let me go back to it. All right. So for Pay27, we're using the preliminary assessed value information. Going forward, what we do is we take a combination of long-term trends by property class, and we also integrate market value data that we get from real estate aggregators as well. I would say there is uncertainty in that future forecast. We don't know exactly what's going to happen, but we break the tax base up by property class, look at historical trends, and use that information to project on a parcel level what's going to happen with assessed values in the future. We do bias that for budget discussions, especially low. We'd rather for budget discussions have a lower assessed value forecast in the future so we don't overestimate revenues. We don't want to overestimate revenues for budget planning purposes. But that's the overall methodology.

I'm going to go back to... Is it fair to say you're not trying to be either optimistic or terribly conservative? You're trying to Using your data, find the middle ground.

Yeah, we're trying to give you a, we're trying, the whole goal here is to give you a reliable forecast to build long-term financial plans from. So that's, yeah, that's what this is. We're not trying to undercut, undersell the forecast. We're not trying to overshoot. But especially as you go out between now and 2035, there is a lot of uncertainty in those out years.

And my age is a lot of uncertainty about 23.

Yeah, I'm going to go back to your comment in regards to commercial. And there was a deduction for $2 million you talked about.

Yeah, that's an exemption for $2 million for business personal property. Okay. Right.

And so I think you also indicated that anybody that had more than $2 million, so the deduction would be zero at $2 million or less. Yes. So anybody with $2.1 million pays the whole thing.

I don't understand that. That's the way the legislation was written. I know there's been lots of discussion about that, but right now the legislation is a hard stop at $2 million. I think if you're up to $2 million, you get the full exemption of your business personal property. But yeah, if you're just over $2 million, you have to pay taxes on the whole thing. It's not a sliding.

I'm just thinking of the smaller business person, you know, by virtue of maybe they do and maybe they don't. It's just by assessment. Two million dollars. I guess I don't understand why everybody doesn't get the $2 million and then over $2 million they start paying.

Yes.

That has definitely been discussed and proposed. I'm not in the business of making legislative projections. It would not surprise me if something like that would get folded into legislation in the future, but it's just not how the current bill was written.

It's part of the business-friendly mentality that the state has in terms of trying to contract Businesses. Smaller businesses, obviously. But to raise it from $80,000 to $2 million is a dramatic jump. Dramatic impact. So you said $300 million loss, potentially. In assessed value. In assessed value. The other question while raising their commercial property tax rates exponentially.

So what they'll do is they'll just start another LLC and put that machinery. Yeah, right.

Spread it across.

Yeah. We've seen some of that activity already. It's definitely something that could could happen.

Thank you very much. All right. Thank you, Jason.

Happy to stick around and answer questions. We'll do one more version of this when we get actual certified NetAssess value. It will look a lot the same with updated numbers. Thank you so much.

Okay, while Scott is getting ready, just the strategic financial planning committee that we had put together a year or so ago, I guess now. This is a collective draft of that information that Baker Tilly has been helping us with. We did the parcel level analysis with policy analytics to get as much concrete data as we could. They, in turn, Scott and team, have taken that and combined that with what they have available to us to try to give us some sense of what we're looking at as it stands today, which is bound to change, but gives us some indicator of where we're going in the future.

Thank you for having us here today. We've enjoyed working on this with the committee. If I haven't met you, my name is Scott Finley. I'm with Baker Tilly. I've been with Baker Tilly for about three years. I'm a senior manager there. Prior to being with Baker Tilly, I was a clerk treasurer for a small town just south of Indianapolis for about 12 years. So I've spent my entire adult career in public finance. With that, as Matt said, yes, we've worked. We've been working on this for several months now. We've gone through a few iterations, had some working group sessions, talked through some of the changes that we've made. We have worked in the information from Policy Analytics. The good news for you all is because Policy Analytics went first, that'll cut down on a lot of my talking about property tax and things like that. So that'll be good. Unfortunately, you'll probably hear a lot from local income tax from me. Yeah, we can go ahead and get started through this draft. This is going to go through from 2023 all the way out through 2030. So we're looking at historical data, actual data, 23, 24, 25, and then we're projecting out estimated 2026 through 2030. So the reason that we do these plans, especially around this time, is it really helps elected officials like yourself prepare the budget. We give you revenue estimates. We estimate the property taxes. We estimate what your disbursements are going to be, like I said, all the way out through 2030. We also want to look at, are your budgets sustainable? So when you're working through the DLGF process, you are going to submit a budget and they are going to say, do you have enough cash in these funds to approve this budget? If so, they'll approve it. You could spend those fund balances down to zero dollars and the DLGF is going to approve it. But that is not something that's going to be sustainable. So what we're going to look at is not only is that a budget going to be approved by the DLGF, but will it be sustainable going forward all the way through 2030 in this report. We're also going to look at how changes in your expenditures, changes in your revenues, changes in the legislature, how those are going to affect the cash flows for each one of the funds that we're looking at in this report. So that first page is just a table of contents showing what funds that we're covering in this report. We're looking at the general fund, the edit, all of the lit funds, cumulative bridge, health, all of your property tax-based funds, your statewide 911, essentially all of your main operating funds we're going to be looking at. And I will try to remind you what page that I'm on, but oftentimes I get bad about that. So on page... One, we can kind of skip over a lot of this. This is just narrative, kind of a lot of what policy analytics talked about, the changes in the legislature, how the assessed value changes are going to happen, the de minimis that they discussed. So we don't need to go through all of this. We'll kind of talk about it a little later once we get to the assumptions page. I do want to stop on page two as part of this overview and insights and talk a little bit about the local income tax structure changing. So with the legislative changes over the last couple of years, not only is there property tax reform, but to complicate things even more, they are completely changing the way that the local income tax structure is formed. So currently within Delaware County, no matter where you live, you're going to pay the same local income tax rate. With this new change, which you have to adopt these new lates in 2028, But per some DLGF information that came out a few weeks ago, we think the actual distributions from that 2028 adoption for the taxes in 2029 are going to be distributed in 2030. So that's one change that we've made to this report, is right now we are seeing the new county services lit come in in 2030, and 2029 is still going to be distributed based on the current structure, based on your levy. I would maybe expect to see that discussed during the legislature because it's not strictly said when it's going to be distributed. This is based on, like I said, DLGF memo about a month ago that came out, and their interpretation is that the distributions will happen in 2030. So right now, the current LIT that you have, you have certified shares at 0.6. You have public safety LIT at 0.25. You have economic development LIT at 0.40. And as we discussed during the policy analytics discussion, we have PTRC at 0.25. So your total LIT rate right now is 1.5. In 2028, when you adopt this new lit structure, it'll look a little bit more like what's in this blue chart on page two. So you will have the ability, the county will have the ability to adopt a county services lit rate up to 1.2%, and that'll be based on the overall AGI of the county. Similarly, you can adopt a fire protection, I should say that that will be distributed only to the county, so that is just county revenues. For fire protection and EMS, you can go up to 0.4%. That will be distributed to any fire and EMS providers in the county. For non-municipals, that's going to be your townships, your libraries, solid waste management, those types of units. You can go up to 0.2 for that, with the caveat that you can only do 0.05 per unit type. So for libraries, you can only do 0.05. For airport, you can only do 0.05. So if you have more than that, you actually couldn't go to the full 0.2 on that. So then we get to the municipalities. There's two different municipal lit rates that can be adopted. One is the municipal lit rate for units that are over 3,500. So those units can adopt a lit rate on their own up to 1.2%. And then for those units that are under $3,500 or other units that want to opt in to this countywide municipal lit rate, that can be up to $1.2 as well, but that is up to the county to adopt in working with the different units to see what revenues they're going to need. Paige Sansone will talk more about that later today when she's here for the must discussion.

On your... 2026 certified rate for Delaware County. The certified shares and the public safety is the same as what the report we got last November, but the economic development is somewhat higher. Our report was $5,642,000. This is $6,487,000.

It is possible that, I want to say for the economic development, there is, it seems like the county is taking the portions for like Albany, those smaller units. I think all of them except for Muncie. I think the county unit has been taking that economic development. So that might be the change that we're showing there. We may not have picked that up in the original. I think that makes sense. Thank you. So, with that, essentially, the max rate that you can adopt in the county, or sorry, the max rate that a citizen can pay in the county is going to be 2.9%. So, like I said, currently you're at 1.5%. So, this new lit structure is going to be very important to... talk about this with your other units and make sure that you're coordinating what rates are going to be adopted by who, what municipalities are going to opt into this countywide municipal rate, and what ones are going to opt out and adopt their own. So as was alluded to just down below that is kind of a estimate of your county lit currently and what you're going to be receiving out through 2029. And then 2030 shows a county services lit rate of .9. We'll talk a little bit more about why we're using .9 right there when we get to the general fund cash flow. Essentially 2028 and 2029 based on our projections we see a decrease in cash reserves so we are going to increase the amount of lit revenue that you're receiving in 2030 to build those cash balances back up and then possibly you could decrease that revenue if needed after that first three-year period. We'll talk a little bit more about that when we get to general fund. The next page This is just showing your net property tax revenue and your property tax credits. We've already talked about this with the policy analytics report, so we don't need to talk too much about that. It's probably a pretty similar graph to what was in the other report. We have implemented the data that policy analytics provided into this report, so it should match fairly closely to the property tax estimates that they have. Page four shows the trend of certified tax rates as well as net assessed values. So the purple bar is going to be your net assessed value trend from 2022 through 2026. And the green is going to show your certified tax rate for 2022 through 2026. So you'll see kind of the inverse relationship that we have between tax rates and net assessed values. So as your net assessed values have grown over the years, you'll see that that tax rate tends to drop down assuming no other changes. So in that date range, the tax rate has decreased about 14% from 0.7450 to 0.6376. And the net assessed value has increased about 39% from 3.788 to 5.281 million. The bottom chart just shows where your local income tax currently is coming from between your certified shares, the public safety, the economic development, and the property tax relief, as well as the supplemental LIT. So on to page five, we can kind of gloss over this. This is just a summary of the cash flows that we'll talk about, so we don't need to spend too much time on this. This shows the trend of the actual and estimated ending balance for these funds. On the next page as well, we're going to skip that and I'm going to come back to it at the end. This has some considerations for the report. The next few pages are our assumptions pages. This shows where we're getting the numbers that flow throughout the rest of the report. We talked a little bit in the prior presentation about the maximum levy growth quotient. So for 2027, that amount is 6%. Probably originally when we presented this report, we had it at 5.6%, but since then the official number has come out and that is 6%, which is good news. You'll get a little bit more growth on those property taxes.

We have 5%. Hang on, Scott, real quick. Your projections, though, in 29 and 20, they're a little bit lower than what policy had, right?

Yeah, we've used that. So we've come to that based on the estimations through a formula based on non-farm personal income. So those are our growth quotients that we have estimated, so they could vary slightly from what policy analytics has. The next section there just shows the distribution of your max levy. So your levy-based funds are your general, reassessment, cumbridge, and health. It just shows how the property taxes are split up there. Page eight. Shows the property tax credits. Again, these are going to tie fairly closely to what Policy Analytics has. What you'll see there from 2025 is you'll see that those property tax credits increased as a percent of levy. The amounts themselves may have went down, but the actual credits went up. Similarly, in 2026, that went down from 26% to 25.3%. And then we're starting to see a trend back up starting in 2028. For the net assessed values, looking at section four there in the middle of the page, this is kind of, this has been pulled in from policy analytics and it's going to show what we had originally predicted in, you know, slowed growth or a declining net assessed value. So you'll see in 2028 and beyond, we're showing very minor growth in 2020, sorry, very minor decline in 28 through 2030. I believe on page 11 of the policy analytics report it showed that NAV estimate out a little further and it did trend back upwards starting about 2031, 2032. So not a huge amount but it did start to trend back upwards. Next just shows our estimates per gross assessed value for your fit, excise, and CBET. Page 9 is going to show you where our revenue estimates are coming from. So it shows what growth factors we've used for our revenues. It shows the receipt name on the left and then the growth factors over there on the right. The one thing I want to point out on this page is just actually over the weekend, DLGF posted their 2027 estimates of LIT. And unfortunately for Delaware County, it appears that those have gone down from 2026 by about 3.5% for certified shares and 3.1% for economic development, 2.9% for public safety. So it looks like overall the county amount of local income tax went down. And with no other factors that I saw in my brief research, it must be that the adjusted gross income in the county declined from 2026 to 2027. So those are still estimates from the DLGF at this point. The certified numbers, as you alluded to earlier, won't be out until later this year. So there could still be changes, but this is based on that DLGF estimate that came out over the weekend.

3% seems like a huge loss.

I thought that when I saw it as well.

When our gross income in this county doesn't shift that dramatically.

Yeah. So we will look a little further into that. Again, these just came out over the weekend, so we plugged them in earlier. on Monday. I'm not sure what would cause that decrease but I looked to make sure that it wasn't just the county unit and there wasn't, it's possible that there could have been some other changes in levy and some of the other funds maybe in months a year or you know if there was debt issued they would have a higher percentage of levy and maybe they would pull some more of the income tax. But the overall number before the distributions happened was lower in Delaware County from 2026 to 2027. So that is something that we'll look into, and we'll want to see if we can figure out why that's decreasing. And like I said, the certified report won't come out until later this year, but that would be something that I would want to dive into a little bit more. We are still showing, for 2028 through 2030, a 6% increase based on AGI. So this looks at the historical increases that the counties had on their AGI. And that comes out to about 6% going back. I think we used 2019 through 2026. So that shows you that there has been historical growth. But for whatever reason, this 2027 estimate is showing a decline. The next page and the last page of the assumptions just shows what we're using for growth factors for your disbursements. So for 2026, that's hard to read. Let me zoom in a little bit on this. The 2026, we're using the certified budget. For 2027, we don't have budgets into this document yet. This is just based on a 3% growth factor on your 2026 budget. And we use that same growth factor for each year and for all of the different categories, personal services, supplies, and other services and charges. For capital outlays, for the most part, we have flatlined those if those fit into the budget. If not, we may have taking those out of the report. Okay, so we now get into our first cash flow, which is your general fund on page 11. So obviously this is going to be the only one of these cash flows that goes on to two pages. So it is pages 11 and 12. So I kind of like to look at them kind of stacked on top of each other so you can see the whole report at once. So just a quick explanation of how these cash flows are laid out. At the top, you're going to see the years that we're covering, the fund name and number. So we're looking at the County General Fund 1000. You're going to see actual data for 2023 through 2025. And then off to the right hand side, you're going to see estimated data for 2026 through 2030. On the left hand side, you will see an index that is simply just allowing us to draw your eyes to a line when we're presenting this. So if I tell you line 17, you can look at that index line and go straight to that line. Up at the top, you're going to see your operating receipts. So you have your first blue line. That is going to be your total operating receipts. The second blue line is going to be your total operating disbursements and then where it rolls over onto the next page, your green line is going to be your change in fund balance. So that is going to tell you whether your cash balance is increasing or decreasing. The next blue line is going to be the ending fund balance, and then the orange line is going to be your operating balance percentage. So there is no one size fits all number for what your operating balance percentage should be, but we tend to shoot for between 15 and 50%. So if you get under 15%, you start to maybe not have enough cash to fund part of the year if you have maybe a lack of revenue for a few months. Maybe you start to not have the cash to pay for those expenses. If you have more than 50% you may be holding a little too much cash in that fund and maybe you can either do some capital, maybe do a transfer to Rainy Day if it happens to be the general fund. But again, when you see the graphs, which are actually on the next page, you'll see a green line at the bottom, which is going to be that 15% operating balance, and then a red line, which is going to be the 15% operating balance. And you can kind of think of those as guardrails. That's where we like to see the blue line, which is your unbalanced land for your actual and estimated balances. So now that we've talked a little bit about the layout, I want to draw your eyes to a few lines here. Number one, we'll look at this highlighted line 16. That is your lit county services. So that is going to be the new lit that would be adopted in 2028 for what we are estimating as distributions for 2030. So you will see that the certified shares line right above that, for 2029, the estimated receipts are about $7 million. For 2030, the Lick County services, based on a 0.9% rate, we're estimating $34.3 million. And if you remember that chart that we looked at on the assumptions, that is about double the amount of local income tax that you're currently bringing in. The reason that we've done that, for one, if you look at the next highlighted lines, 32 and 33, where it says appropriations moved from edit and public safety, Once those two lit funds are no longer drawing revenue, those expenditures will now have to be covered from that lit county services out of the general fund. So for 2030, because this is where the report ends, we're pulling all of those disbursements into the general fund. So you'll notice if you look at the second blue line, the total operating disbursements, line 35, From 2029, your estimated disbursements go from $47.5 million to $58.2 million because we had to pull over those disbursements from those other two funds. Another thing I want to draw your eyes to, we talked a little bit, if you look at certified shares that line 15, between 2026 and 2027, I know we talked about that 3.5% decrease that the DLGF put out. That shows you the actual number. So in 2026, your certified amount is $6.4 million. 2027, the DLGF estimate is $6.2 million. So it's about a $220,000 decrease from 2026. So if we look at the blue line, total operating receipts for 2026 and 2027, you'll see that revenues stay pretty stagnant. So it's about 40 million in 2026 and 40.4 million in 2027. The reason that that's a little more stagnant maybe than the past has shown, one, as was mentioned earlier, we don't assume that there's going to be any supplemental lit. You may still get that supplemental lit, but we're not going to assume because that number could be zero. Also, your earnings on investments and deposits is going to decrease because it's estimated that your cash balance is going to increase. So obviously if you have less cash balance, you're going to earn less interest on those investments or your cash balances. So I want to kind of show why those...

Sorry, what line is that, Scott? Go ahead. Where were the interest?

Oh, sorry, line 11. Yes, sorry. So it's 1.7 estimated in 2026, and it goes down to about 1.1 million in 2027. So the way we calculate that is we take kind of a historical... percentage of your beginning balance in the fund. And we apply that and usually we reduce it, you know, either by 90% or sorry, reduce it by 10%, assuming that interest rates may trend downward. But the bigger factor here is that the cash balance is estimated to decrease, which is kind of the next thing that I wanted to point out. If we look at that second blue line, the total operating disbursements for general fund, You'll see in 2024, the actual disbursements, the recurring disbursements were 37.5 million. 2025, those actual disbursements went up to 40.7 million. In 2026, the budgeted expenditures are $43.7 million. So that is about a $3 million increase from 2025 to 2026. The majority of that coming from the other services and charges line 27. So in 2025, that line item was $9 million was actually spent. The budget for 2026 is $11.86 million. So I'm not sure if there was one large increase in that services and charges or if it was just kind of a general, but it is a large increase. I think it's close to $2 million of the total $3 million increase. Pause there for just a second.

And what is included in that service? That's not a question to you, maybe, but Ed, in terms of that line, if we were going to try to figure out the gap, that includes contractual services, non-personnel related things of that nature. How do we get a finger on that? Because personnel services is salaries?

Personal services is going to be your salaries. Supplies, obviously, is going to be those physical products that you're purchasing. Capital is obviously your larger purchases. And services and charges mostly is kind of a catch-all for the remaining things. So that would include things like utilities, legal services, accounting services, any contractual services that you may have. So it could be, like I said, it could be numerous things or it could have been one large contract maybe that increased, but we weren't able to identify exactly what it was just based on the budget.

Where would, like, insurance, workers' comp, things of that nature?

Well, employee insurance would come out of personal services. Okay. Typically, that's where it comes from. I guess it could come from services and charges. But your, like, general liability insurance, workers' comp, property and casualty, those are things that would come from services and charges, typically.

Is that a data point? We can request more information to break that down.

Sure. Yeah, that's data that we won't publicly be able to access. So if Ed can provide that to us, then we can try to break down why that line item increased significantly. And maybe you won't spend all of that budget. Again, one thing to keep in mind is that we do estimate that you're going to spend the entire budget for 2026. Typically I say that that may not be the case because we have a lot of units that you kind of over budget and under spend. Looking at the budget to actual for Delaware County, it does look like your budgets are pretty accurate compared to like your certified amounts you're spending. We like to say if you're spending between 95 and 100% of your budget, you have a good accurate budget. And I think in this 2023 to 2025 period, I think your expenses to your certified budget were like 101%, 98%, and 100%. So I mean your budget is very accurate historically. So you may actually spend all of that if that budget is as accurate as it has been in the past.

So we definitely need to try to figure some of this out because we're seeing reductions in insurance costs and, you know, in some areas we're seeing, you know, but we've got a dramatic increase from somewhere or somewheres, you know, and what's included in that.

Does this revert back to when commissioners needed an increase in their workman's comp?

It wasn't $2 million. It wasn't $3 million.

$3 million, I think, wasn't it?

And liability, yeah.

Yeah, liability. Thank you.

Okay.

All right, well, we'll need to get into that. Thanks, Scott.

Yeah, so kind of the reason that we start to see if you look at the green line, line 41 on that second page of the cash flow, kind of the reason in 2026 and beyond we're starting to see a large decrease in cash is because of that kind of large increase in 2026. So you'll see the budget increase between those two years is almost $3 million, and you'll see the change in fund balance in 2026 is about $3.6 million. So possibly our revenues may be a little bit conservative, but I know they're not $3 million conservative. getting a handle on what those expenses are of that $43 million and understanding why that increase and if we're actually going to spend it will kind of be vital for planning for the 2027 budget. Because if you start adding 3% each year on that extra $3 million it starts to add up and you'll see by 2029 the estimated change in fund balance is almost $6 million. So that kind of leads me to if this is actually what's going to happen based on these increases, you'll start to see negative fund balances as early as 2028, which is why in 2028 for distributions in 2030, we've made that lit rate 0.9. So that brings in enough cash in 2030 to refund that general fund. And for the first time that that's adopted, it's adopted for a three-year period. So after that three-year period, if that cash balance got up to a balance that made the council comfortable, you could reduce that LIT rate, and then your citizens then would pay less LIT. lit. After that three-year period, it's an annual approval. So first year you adopt, three years. Every year after that, you adopt it on an annual basis. So you get just that lit rate as it was needed.

And I know we're going to be covering this at four with our must-meeting discussion and diving deeper into the percentages, but you're talking about a .9 county services rate only. Correct. Which is stacked onto a potential fire EMS rate and a non-municipal rate.

Yes, this report is not estimated to have any fire and EMS in it. Once we start plugging scenarios like you would do through those meetings, if you have scenarios where you're adopting a 0.4% fire and EMS, if Delaware County works out to where Depending on the makeup of the county, if you adopt a countywide municipal rate, it's possible that the county gets a portion of that as well. It's just dependent upon the population of the county based on the other units that are involved in that countywide rate. Those are things that, you know, if it's a unit that can't bring in enough lit just based on the county services, sometimes we'll look at that to see if we can offset some of that loss. But since the county services is enough to replace what you're receiving, we just kind of found a rate that works. So that 0.9, if you decided to go 0.9, could be made up of 0.7 of county services and 0.2 of fire and EMS if you received enough from fire and EMS to offset some of those losses, maybe from the public safety LIT. So there are a lot of different options that can be done with these LITs from the county standpoint. You know, the municipalities are a little more stuck in what they can do, but the county has some flexibility with the county services, the possibility of bringing in some of that countywide municipal rate. and that fire and EMS lit the way that it is structured you can almost weight that however you want. You can weight it 50-50 on service area and population. You can weight it 50-50 between fire and EMS, or you can weight it 90-10 fire and EMS. There's just a lot of different things that you can work around in that fire and EMS rate to bring in exactly what the county needs. So those will be important discussions with the other units.

Right. So just, I'm going to say it out loud because I'm trying to get it straight from my head for this afternoon, but when we initially start to look at percentages of the new lit structure, you're taking into account sheet that we're looking at shows that there's going to be a need for a certain percent at some point just to recoup and try to maintain an operating balance of any sort of all else if this is completely and if this were completely accurate which is the same information that other taxing units cities need to have some sort of projection to say We're going to make up your lit income tax based on what you see. So if you've got row 16 and it says in 26, we're bringing in 6.4 million, 27, 6.2, 6.5, 6.9, 20, 30 is something different. We initially are under the assumption when it's make up that 6.9 so that everybody's even. But in reality, there needs to be a look at where are you essentially.

Yeah, and the other thing is, you know, it's not just the 6.9 that you need to make up. It's the 6.9 plus the edit amount plus the public safety because all of those expenditures will also have to be paid from that county services. So just, you know, as a ballpark of what your make-whole amount would be for the 17 million that we're estimating in 2029, it would be half that rate because essentially we've got double in here. So it would be 0.45% would make the county whole from what they're currently bringing in, or estimated to bring in in 2029.

That's really what the legislature intended.

Correct.

Was to use that rate to make up.

Correct. Yeah, and the other thing that you can think about in these must meetings too is if you have the ability, you can also make up the losses from property tax increase or property tax credit increase. So as you see those property tax credits increase, that may be something else that you want to factor in as well as not only do we need to make up what we're losing in LIT, but also what we're losing in additional property tax credits. So those are all scenarios that, you know, Baker Tilly can run. And, you know, some of the units that we're doing these must meetings for, we're doing live scenarios. And like the second meeting, we'll bring in our worksheet and we'll start plugging in numbers to see, you know, what does Yorktown need to make themselves whole? What does Muncie need? What happens if Muncie opts in but Yorktown opts out? Things like that.

Yeah. Right, that won't be happening today, but we will do that in our secondary meeting. Once everyone's brought their feedback, then we can start that process.

So ultimately, I guess the bottom line for the general fund before we move on to the others is if the budget for 2026 is accurate... you're going to start to see negative cash balances as soon as 2028 if spending isn't reduced or if somehow revenues are increased which obviously revenues increasing is a little harder to do than cutting expenses so that's that's what I would want to look at in 2027 so ultimately your goal for 2027 your goal budget should be and this this goes for all funds if you look at line 22 total operating receipts in the blue and you look at 2027, $40,391,000. that should be ultimately your target budget because that puts you at a perfectly balanced budget. And you'll see based on a 3% growth on 2026 that is 44.8 million. So you may have a little bit of work to do to see if one, if that budget's accurate and two, how you're going to reduce that to make sure that it's sustainable long term. Because again, that budget, if you were to approve a budget of 44 million for, 2027, the DLGF would say, yes, that's fine, but you would eat into your cash balance by $4.5 million.

I have a sidebar question, if you can answer it. Currently, the state kicks in, what, 42% leads it towards some of the judges, is that right? Are we going to lose any of that?

Not the judges. Probation. Probation.

That I'm not aware of. Does that fall into one of these revenue line items in the general fund? Is that what we're saying, like a revenue from the state? Correct. I'm not sure where that's at in here, but if it was a recurring...

But it's not added, it's... We're just reimbursed.

Is that maybe the refunds and reimbursements recurring that we have there of about $3.6 million? It would probably be included in that line item. We don't have an exact breakdown of what those refunds and reimbursements are. Line 19, sorry. Because it does appear that you have a lot of recurring refunds and reimbursements, we have assumed that those will continue. So we've estimated, so for 2025 it was $4.5 million. In 2026 we have $3.6 because that amount has fluctuated pretty significantly over the historical amount. So if you have an estimate on those refunds and reimbursements and they maybe should be higher, that would help a little bit, help bridge that gap a little bit. Any other questions on general before we move on? That next page, page 13, each one of these funds will have a graph that looks like that. It's just kind of a visual representation of what that fund balance looks like. I didn't pull it up on the screen, but I will. So the next fund that we'll look at is the edit the county share of the edit. So you'll see in this fund what we have highlighted there, line 10, that's where we are moving those expenses to the general. So you saw in general where those expenses were moving in, this is where we're transferring those out. So in 2030 is when we're assuming that these revenues would stop. The one thing I want to point out in this is that the county does have a large cash balance in this fund. And you can continue to use this fund until it is depleted. No revenues are going to be coming in, but you're estimated to have about $9.2 million in this fund at 2030. So for illustrative purposes, we've showed these expenses being moved over in 2030. You could fund at least a year and a half of these operating expenses through 2031-2032 if you continue to spend from this, which would allow you to not move those expenses to the general until 2032. A portion would move in 2032. We like to show that in 2030 just so we can show that illustrative example of what 2030 expenses are actually going to look like. Does that make sense? I know sometimes that gets a little confusing, showing it like that. So I just want to make clear, you can continue to spend from this fund, and you probably will still have a pretty significant balance in 2030. You can either continue the operating, or you can pay for capital until it's depleted. So for 2027, based on the growth factors that we're including, you're actually expected to add about $1.1 million to this fund. So ending 2027 with about 6.3 if you were to adopt a $5.15 million budget. And again, once the budgets are approved, we can plug those into this model and show what that looks like moving forward for each one of those years. Next fund is the cumulative bridge fund. For the one thing, there's no real issues with this fund that I'm seeing here. There's a lot of recurring that is budgeted for 2026, but for capital outlays, we have flatlined that for 2027 and beyond. It's possible that those expenditures may be more than that. If that's the case, I still don't see much issue with this fund. There's plenty of cash balance. 2026 estimated to have a 65% operating balance. and add about two hundred thousand dollars in cash to the fund and then in 2027 if you adopt a two-point essentially three million dollar budget you're still at a $250,000 surplus. The health fund. So this is another fund that is going to draw in property taxes. point out line 19 here we have an anticipated budget underspend so this is just based on historical spending compared to the budget this fund in general seems to be under spending their overall budget by about 10% so we have worked that in in each year starting in 2026 But you can see, even with that budget underspend, this fund will eventually go negative by 2029 to the tune of about $76,000. The reason for this is the anticipated revenues in 2026 are $6.8 million and the estimated operating disbursements are about $768,000. This one's a little more gradual. You'll start eating into that cash balance, but it also doesn't quite have the same cash balance that General has. So it's a similar scenario. A lot of times what we would show in this fund is we would show a levy shift to increase the property tax revenue. Unfortunately, with the General fund decreasing in cash as well, there's not really anywhere else that we can pull that levy from.

This also isn't the 1161 local public health services fund. Correct. So we didn't project that at this point, correct?

The 1161 is not included in this report.

If that fund, if there are expenses that could be moved to that fund and that fund has an adequate cash balance or, you know, revenues that are... Well, let me try to explain what I... And I know Jamie's not here, but let me try to explain what I... With the setup, when the state funds came available for the increase in the public health... We kept the 1159 fund at the traditional rate that we had been spending prior to that money being available. All the new money went into the local public health services fund, which then they've hired some people, they've done a bunch of contracts with local entities made a lot of progress in that. That was expected at a certain number in 26. 27, I think, has gone down. This is the Health First Indiana.

Yeah, the Health First Indiana. Yeah, that money is declining. It declined from 25 to 26, and 2027, we're estimating, it's not in this report, but we would estimate that it would be flatlined at the 2026. Mm-hmm. That funding is not yet approved for 2028 and beyond. So that would have to be passed through that legislature to approve that for 2028 and beyond. So the funding on that for future years is unknown. So if you have recurring costs coming out of that fund, you would have to try to figure out a place for those recurring costs from that fund to come from. And obviously health would be a good spot for that, but not with the current revenue.

I think we just need to get with Jamie and we need to discuss a look C into 1161 as we're looking at it from 1159 and what that projection looks like. But that's here or there right now.

Any questions on health? Local Roads and Streets, what I will say about this fund as well as MBH and MBH Restricted, those three funds are funded at least partially through gas tax. As you're probably all aware, there was a pause on the gas tax that started back in May. It was just recently extended, I think, through at least the beginning of September. So because of that, the distributions starting in there was a little bit of effect in june but in july we saw a huge decrease compared to 2025 to the revenues distributed to counties and municipalities so the way we're calculating local road streets mvh is we are taking the percentage that you received in 20 sorry in july based on 2025's actual data and we're using that percentage for July, August, September, October and now probably November because of the extension of that gas tax. So the distributions are a couple months behind on the collections. So you will see a pretty significant drop in your revenues in 2026. There has been one gas tax holiday reimbursement approved and the county should have already received that. The one that we have I think was $44,778 for local roads and streets. So we're showing that just under the local roads and street distribution. What we're doing for 2027, assuming that this gas tax is lifted, we're going to show the growth over the last few years for 2027 all the way out through 2030. So you'll see a big jump in 2027 revenues compared to 2026 because essentially we're showing two different years of growth on top of that. So we are showing proposed budget adjustments on line 12 here. So the estimated revenues in 2026, when you originally did this budget for 2026, the estimated revenues would have probably been about $940,000. But the budget with encumbrances is $1.245 million. So the approved budget was a little less than that, about $150,000 less than that, but there were some encumbrances that were carried over from the previous budget. So that's going to eat into that cash balance a little bit. Removing that encumbrance and then adding that growth factor, we come out with a budget adjustment needed of about $172,000 to ensure that this fund doesn't go negative in 2027. So that'll be something to look at when you're preparing your budgets in 2027, looking at that $950,000, $955,000 revenue and making sure you're matching your expenses to that. And that is one where if it is not reduced, the state would cut that budget because it would not be fundable because it would go negative in 2027.

So this tax holiday, gas tax holiday, is costing us.

Yeah, it's possible. There's rumors that the county will be made whole, but it would have to be approved by the state finance authority or whoever it is. So it Hopefully you're made whole and you come up with, you know, the $940,000-ish that you should get. But we can't estimate that because we don't know that it's the case. So if you're looking at it, it would be, you know, the total operating receipts, if you receive everything that you were supposed to get, it would be about $940,000.

So from a budget perspective with this kind of fund, so assuming we don't know that answer before September. Correct. in we need to take this 172 reduction yes in its be and

That is assuming that you're going to spend that full encumbrance of $150,000. I assume you will, because if you did an encumbrance, you technically probably had a purchase order for that expense.

Potentially. We just had road flooding.

We've got a lot of things that are potentially going to be well above what we have in this right now. Sure. So, yes, for a 2027 budget, you would have to cut, you know, It might be just a hair less than that because we're leaving $25,000 in there. I know it's not hard and fast, but generally speaking.

Generally, you're going to need to be around that $955,000 to keep your budget relatively balanced.

Okay. Lit Public Safety, this is going to be a pretty similar discussion to what we had for the Edit Fund. You'll notice this revenue for 2027 based on the DLGF estimate also went down. So for 2026, your certified amount is $2.8 million. For 2027, the DLGF estimate is $2.7 million. So that's a decrease of about $80,000 in that fund. You will see in 2030 where we're showing those recurring expenses being moved to the general fund, similar to what we did in EDIT. The difference in this is once we get to 2030, this fund does not have that cash balance that EDIT has. So you'll only have about $183,000 remaining in this fund. So you can still spend that, but again, you're essentially getting that down to zero by the end of 2030. Next is the NVH restricted. This will be a similar conversation as well as the next fund, which is NVH. It will be similar with that gas tax pause. You'll see a decrease between 2025 and 2026 with a gas tax holiday reimbursement. And then you'll see that increase in 2027 showing the growth factor on both years. So we essentially we normalized 2026 to see what you would have gotten or what we estimate you would have gotten if it wasn't for the gas tax holiday and then applied growth to that. So this fund does have significant fund balance and also is adding cash on an annual basis. We did only show about $2 million in capital outlays, just kind of based on historical data. So there may be other capital that you have from this fund. But I kind of want to keep looking at this fund while we go to the next page as well. If you have a paper in your hand, I know we won't be able to do that on the screen. But for MVH unrestricted, you're going to see that similar decline in 2026, but we are showing proposed budget adjustments in 2026 and beyond to keep the operating balance at 15%. So you'll see down at the very bottom in that orange column, the operating balance for 2026 to 2030 stays at 15%. So what we've done is just made that budget adjustment to where you have the minimum were recommended operating balance. Now, if you remember, MVH-R has a significant amount of money in it, so it's possible that if you have expenses that can be paid from restricted, you could move some of those expenses to the MVH restricted. But again, it being restricted, it has to be related to infrastructure projects. So that will kind of be the challenge there is making sure that those expenditures that you would be moving fit within the regulations of the fund. So MVH as a whole, because technically per the DLGF, MVH and MVH restricted, they get combined for the budget process. But for the SBOA, they are looked at as two separate funds. So... I guess all that to say, if you were to approve the budget without the budget adjustments, it would still show as approved by the DLGF, but you would go negative in your MBH fund. Because the DLGF is going to look at those cash balances combined, so they would say, oh yeah, you're still going to have money available, but technically one of your 201 funds would be negative. Any questions on that? I know that one's a little confusing with the fund and sub fund. We're getting towards the end. Statewide 9-1-1 is our next fund. No real issues with this fund. I do just want to state that the decline that we're showing in revenues from 2026, well, starting in 2023, that's just based on a statewide trend. We are seeing all of the distributions to counties going down each year. Do we know why? We don't have a hard... We don't have hard information anymore. What's that?

Because people don't use hard line phones.

One thing we think is because of the increased use of track phones, the track phones don't pay the 911 fee for whatever reason. So we think that's like the phones that you add minutes to. Those, for whatever reason, don't pay the 911 fee. But I think more it's probably that the 911 fee hasn't changed in a lot of years, but the expenses that they pay off of the top before they distribute them to the counties are obviously going to grow. So what happens is you bring in the same amount of money, your expenses go up, you pay your expenses, and then what's left you distribute to the counties. So therefore, the amount that the counties get is less, even though the amount of funding is the same, if that makes sense. But again, no issues with that fund, but you will start eating into cash balance. Reassessment. One thing, it's not very much, but this fund is at an estimated surplus for 2027. So based on historical with growth, we're estimating disbursements of about $576,000 with total receipts of about $618,000. So there is a little bit of levy that you could move to either health or to general, but it probably makes more sense to move it to health because this is kind of a drop in the bucket of what the general fund would need. But if your expenses stay around that $576,000 mark, you can move some of that levy probably to health to help offset some of that deficit.

And that assumes that the other funds also may have challenges, but we'll have to look at that. Right.

Next is the Wheel Tax Surtax Combined Fund. For this, for the disbursements, we have just balanced the supplies disbursements to the estimated receipts for each year. So you're bringing in about estimated $1.23 million in 2026. That's based on a historical average. There's been some changes in their receipts, whether that's miscellaneous receipts or the wheel tax amounts fluctuating slightly. But we're estimating those receipts just based on, or those disbursements based on the receipts that the fund is going to bring in. So budget for that for 2027 should be about $1.2 million. And that is our last fund. There's a couple supplemental things in the back. The first one is just a fund descriptions and uses that shows what the funds are, what they can be used for. The second one we'll look at is the budget to actual comparison for 2023 through 2025. As I mentioned earlier, if you look at the general fund here, your budgets have historically been very accurate. For 2023, you spent right at 101% of your budget, so there was probably either an encumbrance or an additional appropriation that was spent. For 2024, you spent 99.9% of your budget, so almost perfectly budgeted compared to what you spent. And for 2025, a little less at 98.7, but I would still consider that a very accurate budget. So that's why I say if your budget was 43 million, it is possible that you might be spending that because historically the budgets have been very accurate. So that's just something that you'll want to look at on the general fund to make sure that that is continuing to be accurate. And the last page is just a schedule of your outstanding debt. nothing much to talk about there, but I will go back to page six briefly and we can talk about a couple of the considerations that we have for the report. the majority of which are probably going to relate to LIT, which you'll hear about later with Paige. So obviously consider the potential budget impacts and necessary adjustments to prepare for the effects of SEA 1, including the possible reduction of overall LIT received by the county. This says after 2028 because this was when we still assumed that the LIT was going to be dispersed in 2029. Now it should say after 2029 because that's when we're expecting. But again, expect changes in the 2027 legislature or at least clarification on when those distributions will happen. Analyze estimated revenues from the adoption of the 1.2% county services LIT as well as the other LITs that the county can adopt and begin planning for that LIT structure through these must meetings, making sure that you're working with those other units to not only make sure that you as the county are bringing in the revenue that you need, but also that the other cities and towns and other non-municipals are included and can express the needs that they have with their LIT. Focus on prioritizing capital plans. Having a capital plan in place makes your budgeting life a lot easier when you sit down with your budget. It also helps you with these types of plans. It's easier to work the capital into the different funds. Also considering an efficiency analysis to see if maybe there's cost savings from redundancies that maybe the county may have. Maybe multiple departments either purchasing from different places that could be merged together. Maybe there's departments that are duplicating work and maybe those could be merged together, things like that. We mentioned this less for the general fund and more for some of the others, but consider adjusting appropriations to better align with the actual spending trends. The county has actually been very good at that, at least in the general fund, for at least the history in this report. That is all I have. Sorry, I know that was a little bit long.

Our next step is the capital planning process, correct? That's part of our So this was step one in the capital improvement plan processes is the next frontier because there are many capital improvement projects going to be required over the next five to however many years.

Yeah, and having a fiscal sustainability plan really helps with that planning and making sure that, you know, it's one thing to have a capital plan and know what you need to spend, but knowing where you're going to spend it from is a lot more helpful. Yes, I know back-to-back presentations about property tax and LIT is not the most entertaining thing that you probably wanted to do on a Tuesday morning, but I do appreciate your time. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out.

Anybody have any questions in the meantime?

Thank you all. We appreciate it. Anybody want to take a five-minute break?

We'll be back in five or so minutes.

I can just sit here.

After the break, I was ready to call on the other staff to present information.

I'm going to ask the auditor's office to present information on miscellaneous revenue and budget requests for 2027.

I do have to say, I don't have the whole presentation. I do want to point out Form 2, the packet that I gave you guys, probably looks a little different from last year. Gateway also made some changes to their budget application, so things are going to look a little different. But this is all of the revenue that was provided to us by the department heads as well as DLGF's estimate for the taxes, the CBET, LIT, all of that in there. And then I know you guys liked this chart last year, so I provided the 4B form for all of the funds in our levy, as well as public safety, so we can go over that. I provided my notes.

You've got some notes on there?

Yes. Our ending cash for 2027 looks crazy right now. It's still going to be crazy, but it'll be a smaller negative number by the time of budget hearings. We submitted every employee at max health benefits because we were trying to get more information on how we could budget health benefits, and it didn't quite go as planned, and we just wanted the full amount in for our DLGF meeting. But we have already started to make the changes to put everyone back to their exact plan, so that number will be less by the time of the budgets.

You're talking about the budget estimate expense of $55 million?

Well, that will go down, yes, but the cash balance itself that says it's negative $5 million right now, that will be less. We're guessing about negative $3, which is where we started last year.

The $55 million, was that just because we like to be... conservative by over-budgeting the report, reporting a higher budget that we know we're never going to exceed?

Yes. Yes. I do have to say, even though you asked departments not to put in raises, most of them did. I think there was only a handful that did not. So we've probably got some overlapping there, as well as the health benefits that's included in that number.

At the same time, we also included the council budget and a gross amount for raises. So there is definitely overlap. Anybody have any questions on those first two items?

Does the cash balance of 26, is that roughly where they're estimating? Yeah, 8.4, you've got about 8.4.

Roughly. For 26. So that's good. Okay.

And then the last paper is another changed chart. We're trying to make this as explanatory as possible. I've changed it again, I'm sorry. I might change it again before budget, I don't know. But the top part breaks out the four. I did include lit public safety. My number is different from what they have because I didn't have the accurate lit number. Ours, we always just did the exact amount that we received for this year. And this also includes the reimbursement for the prosecutors that they include in theirs as well. So we'll probably end up decreasing that amount for the lit public safety revenue at the bottom there. And then again, that cut amount will probably change by the time budget starts. uh... are circuit breaker We did not change from the DLGF's estimate this year. Last year they had estimated that the 10 million in County General. That's why we went through and did our own calculation to get it down to the 8 million in County General. So they are predicting a 7.6 million in circuit breaker loss and that's kind of where we left it at. I didn't think that it was DLGF's. That's their predictions.

So you didn't go through and do your own calculations? No.

Normally we go with their calculations. It was just last year it was such a crazy jump that we went ahead and decreased ours. And we, at this time, for our meeting with our DLGF, we didn't go over the max levy. So what we have in that bottom section right there is what we estimated about for the tax funds. The CUME Bridge, of course, is set on a rate, so we didn't pick that number. But $775,000 for reassessment and the normal $300,000 for Board of Health. And we stuck the remainder in County General. We were probably going to increase County General just a little bit because of that Hume Bridge rate. That'll change by December when they bring out the 1782s again.

And you hadn't seen the two presentations that we had earlier. No. So if you'll take a look at those and compare those as well to your to your analysis, make sure we're not, they're not wide differences.

I was looking at that earlier. I did notice the policy analytics one look kind of way different for, yeah.

Policy analytics.

So do you want to get with Jason and or Scott to look at those in greater detail and the differences.

The good news is we've got three weeks before we start the actual budget hearings. Do you have an idea of when our budget books will be available? Roughly? Ideally?

Definitely within three weeks. I think in the next 10 days or so.

OK. It's going to be coming straight out of OpenGov, the books.

That's the plan.

If you notify council when those are available, either online or in print, we could have those. at least a few days in advance, that's always helpful. Questions?

Free budget. I'm in OpenGov. Do we have the 27 budget in here yet to look at? I'm not seeing it in my dropdown. See one for like the fiscal year 2027 budget, and then it's blank when I open it. Oh, there we go. Well, the top is all blank.

I guess another question that we have, is there anything else you guys would like to see differently or something else that you are wanting us to change this to? Because we have to advertise by the 30th in order to make it for our budget hearings on the 9th.

What are you asking?

These numbers that are in the 4B, those are the numbers that we will be advertising. Yes, yes.

other than the expenses that will be going down is there anything else that any suggestions the suggestion to me is trying to accurately reflect what we just got presented from policy analytics and breaker tilling making sure there's consistency because if we're going to use that for our go forward planning it's got to match just you know as close as it should match closely to at least from not just what's done, but the estimated components, particularly for 27, but beyond. I know you guys are only going to be working on 27, so if we can keep 27 fairly close to accurate, then we know that the projections going forward, that we get updates from them, will be better for us to look at. Thank you. And so we can set up time with them, and I'll get with you guys, and we'll get that going.

any other suggestions or comments on the 4B? If you do, get with the auditor's office this week. The latest. Next on the agenda, I simply have council discussion. Any thoughts or observations or If you'd like to make it this time, just keep your powder dry and hold it for a budget hearing.

Eugene, any questions?

We've got a lot of work to do. And a lot of people across the county are going to have to tighten their belts and work within the means that we have. I need time to digest this. I wish the gentleman might have stayed just a little bit longer after our break to ask questions, but we can ask questions through other means besides here.

Yes, they will make themselves available, I'm sure.

I think Jason's going to be in town through the meeting this afternoon. I'm not sure about Scott because Paige is coming in as well.

I plan on attending there and asking a few questions there. Great. I do also appreciate the work that the committee has done. It's been a lot of effort put in just to get to this point. We've got a lot more to go.

This has really been a master class in local government finance. more and more in-depth information than I've seen before on the council. I'm very appreciative of all the work that went into it. Matt did a lot of the legwork to organize the presentations, and I appreciate all that the staff did in getting their section ready.

Well, just a couple things. We're going to compare and make sure our revenues matches what political policy analytics has and Baker Tilling. The information in OpenGov will not be correct. So there will be changes made now. So if you get pulled off exporting any data, you may see changes and you have to redo all your work. We'll put that as a priority and let you know as soon as we get that updated. Hopefully we can get that done within the next couple of days. Our goal would be to have your books by the 25th. That's one week from today. If I give you well over a week, we're going to have to take

That would be excellent. That would be excellent.

And I would like to get on OpenGov.

I think maybe if there are other council members, staff can arrange that to have that done.

I think right now we just have four people with access, which is just Eugene, Bill, Matt, and Jessica.

The CNAV thing, I thought it was the assessor. It turns out it's you. Is that being submitted, the certified NASA values?

We are waiting on a meeting with BLGF to be able to submit it. And that is tomorrow.

Thank you. Well, I would just in summary say thank you to everybody who's contributed to this, and thanks to Policy Analytics, who have been great to work with, and Baker Tilly as well. To Eugene's point, there is a lot more work to be done. The capital improvement planning, what's occurred here in the last week, and the unexpected expenses that are going to be coming as a result of that and whether or not we get reimbursed for some of those costs associated with the public safety tower or roads that we don't even know yet are going to require work, things of that nature. So I think we have to be conservative in our budgeting process this year, for sure.

Elected officials and department heads, any comments?

Stephen Brand from the county commissioner's office. If you guys can go to policy analytics presentation page 17, the lower left hand data chart. I know previously there was discussion about, hey, we're going to see a million dollars more in revenue than what was previously anticipated for next year. And this chart does indeed show that. It shows a little over a million dollars. But what's compelling about this chart is it only shows $100,000 increase in revenue year over year after that. So the million dollar windfall that we think there's a windfall for next year isn't so much of a windfall when you look out over the long term. And then when Baker Tilly gave their presentation in several places in there, they indicate that net assessed values are going to go down starting in 2027. So in addition to revenue going down, the net assessed values are also going to start going down, starting in 2027. That's indicated in several places throughout their chart. So just be careful with the million dollar windfall in 2027. Any questions for me or the commissioner's office?

Thank you. Other elected officials, departments? Any comment from the public? Anyone wish to speak? Other comments from council?

I'm just curious. Will the council members be here this afternoon?

Yes.

I plan on it.

I will be here.

I have some additional information to give you.

Thanks. I'll entertain a motion to adjourn.

So moved. Second.

Roll call, please.

Ms. Plankin? Yes. Ms. Wyatt? Yes. Ms. Mogul? Yes. Ms. Piper? Yes. Ms. Pance? Yes.

Yes. We're adjourned.