City Plan Commission - workshop

you

See ya.

Oh yeah.

It's crazy that a majority of the money is right there. Oh, it's...

I'm pretty sure

I think We need a guy actually. Thank you.

Chris, good job today.

right is Thank you.

Good afternoon, welcome to your Fort Worth City Council budget work session. I'm just gonna ensure that Councilmember Peebles can hear us okay. Deborah, can you hear us? Give me a thumbs up. No, I don't think she can hear us. Maybe not. Okay, if staff can maybe text with her and make sure she's okay to hear, that'd be helpful, thank you. Okay, I'll gavel us in. Welcome to work session and I will turn it over to Jay Chapa.

Mayor and council, good afternoon. I'm gonna start here just now and then I'm gonna move up to the podium, but I'm gonna kick off the presentation. And it's primary focus of my portion of the presentation is a general fund and all the issues that we've been talking about. And then I'll kick it over to Christy Ann who will go over the broader budget. and then also go into more detail on some of the general fund side of things. So I'm gonna move up to the podium to do the presentation.

No, see, I can't hear.

Can you hear me?

It's on.

I can't hear. Councilwoman, can you hear us?

Mm-hmm. I can't hear you.

No, don't turn me off camera. Yeah.

So OK, you just you just continue OK.

Are we ready?

Okay, go ahead, please.

Okay, as you know, Fort Worth continues to grow rapidly. Over the last 10 to 12 years, that growth has allowed the city to sustain and even improve the level of city services as we go forward. During most of those years, we've been able to lower the tax rate. Over that period of time, our residents have consistently approved bond packages on a four year cycle. The city council has increased funding for capital maintenance and has made impactful investments to services like incorporating the EMS into the fire department and furthering the city's open space and homelessness programs. Unfortunately, this year we have a different story. I'll use the keyboard. This year, we're faced with a different situation when it comes to the city's general fund. Our property tax revenues are not keeping pace with the city's expansion. This year's valuation landscape is unusually difficult as growth and a growing local economy is not translating into increased taxable value. Inflation and contractual obligations coupled with the lack of appraised value growth in Tarrant County has added uncertainty. affects both our operating budget and the long-term debt capacity the general budget general fund budget has proposed attempts to strike a balance between reducing costs and minimizing service levels with modest revenue increases that allow us to continue moving forward and enhance resources in the public safety to keep up with growth and council demands, and overall demands, not council demands. So, as we know, we have a deteriorating property tax landscape, and really the main reason for that is we had over $2 billion in new value to the tax rules, yet our overall valuation was basically flat because of the diminished existing valuations of the existing residential properties. So to be fiscally responsible, we have to, as I mentioned, we have to balance both expenditures and revenues. And this budget includes fee increases were needed to pay the cost of services. And all those reduced because of the reduction of the actual existing valuations. PAYGO is maintained at its current value. so that we can sustain our cash investments in infrastructure. The static debt service rate is also kept where it is in order to support our future bond capacity. Budget increases are tied in this budget to public safety departments primarily. The addition of personnel, and a placeholder for the new labor contract to meet the city's continued growth. Maintained investments in critical areas, including capital maintenance, neighborhood investment through our code compliance department, resident engagement, and critical support for state required public information process is also increased. And we attempt to minimize those service level impacts across the core city departments. So here before you is the general fund recommended budget. You can see it's a 4.6% overall increase in both revenues and expenditures, so it's balanced. The main increases on the revenue side is sales tax, which is almost 5% increase is our projection. And property tax with an increased property tax rate is 2.84% increase. The expenses driving that are really tied to salary and benefits, primarily tied to public safety, civil service positions, and to the health costs, the cost of health benefits for all employees. I won't belabor this, but you saw it last week. When you look at our July certified values, The final values were lower than we predicted or worse off than we predicted. And so our overall property tax income was basically flat. It was a 0.89% increase in values. That actually translates to fewer dollars when you use the current tax rate because of the projected loss of revenues during the tax year from litigation and additional, from litigation from companies and people that protest their values. So the overall FY2027 values are 130 million. I'm recommending a 3.2% increase in the tax rate. And I'll get into details here and how we got to this as well as the average tax bill. So this would take our tax rate from 67 cents to 70.2 cents. When you look at what that translates to, the 3.2 cents at the end of the day increases the overall base when you put it all together by $18 million. As you know, the tax rate is divided into two areas, the debt service rate and the operation and maintenance rate. The debt service rate is staying static. We're here in Fort Worth, we then break out the capital rate we call PAYGO and the operations portion, and the full 3.2 cents is being applied to the operations side, and PAYGO stays at the 7.25% tax rate. This chart depicts the history of our tax rate overall for the last 35 years, more or less, 36 years. You can see since 2015, we've basically seen a sharp decrease in our tax rate as we saw the growth of the city, the growth in values as we went through this whole process. The proposed increase takes us basically back to the 2023 tax rate. Also juxtaposed against this is the brown line that shows our population, the city's growth. So the average taxpayer in Fort Worth, when you apply all of the, you take the average home taxable value, which includes all the exemptions that would qualify for, last year that value was $246,000. This year, because of the reductions through The appraisal, the average is $232,000. So it's a reduction of over $13,000 in value. When you apply the new tax rate, you actually have about a $21 reduction in the overall city's portion of the tax bill when you talk about the average typical Fort Worth homestead property. This is not a goal that we set to start off, When we put together the tax rate, it actually came out right to almost exactly to what our current tax bill on the average home was. So I want to quickly go through the process of how we balanced the budget. You saw last week the $78.3 million gap that we brought forward with the July tax rate. So the original long-term forecast that you saw back in June and we used throughout the process with the city council is shown here and that gap was $49.3 million. As we went through the budget and scrubbed actual exact costs, the cost of contracts, the base growth, it actually reduced to 48.2 million. But then when we went through the process and worked with our departments on necessary increases in order to sustain services, We ended up increasing, made a decision to increase by $34.5 million related to public safety, PD, fire department, and emergency management services. We also added another 11.6 million to the other departments in the general fund, and I'll break out some of those specifically. That does include the increase in healthcare costs, which is about 13.6 million across the general fund. So if we would have known all these things to start the process would have been a $94 million gap. But as we went through the process, he went up and down, but we wanted to give you an idea. And I'm gonna go through and explain how we basically made up the difference. So the top bar here shows the overall budget for the general fund and the operations tax base tax rate. is basically 50% of the general fund revenue. On the bottom is the expenditure side. Public safety is about 57% of the dollars. PAYGO is at 86 million. And so all the other departments totaled 413 million. One of the goals that we had was to not impact public safety services and the delivery of public safety. So all of the reductions that we look to make were within that black portion of that bar. So that 94 million we were targeting to come out of basically $450 million. So about 23%. So as we went through the process, we started with the original 1% reduction that we asked departments to make. And that was $7.8 million. Public safety departments were asked to do the same but not include any civil service portion of their dollars. So it's not a full 1%. But the common reductions there were O&M expenditures like office supplies, copies, postage, those kind of things, dues and memberships, and shifting salaries or positions to other funds that they control when they could. Second piece was we asked all the departments to turn in 3% reduction packages. And again, that did not include any civil service tied funding in the general fund. And the common strategies there were to eliminate vacant positions, cut contracts deemed that were not essential, especially if they were repetitive to similar contracts that provided the same type of service. There was a reduction in capital maintenance. And then there was also the shifting of positions and cost to other funds were available and where it made sense and the actual work was eligible through that funding. The next step was what we call deeper reductions. This is when we thought our gap was gonna be about $50 million. We were thinking that we had solved the issue and originally it wasn't all the way to 28 million, but these included removing the, proposed 5% pay for performance for general employees and actually dropping it down to what ends up being a 1.5% by providing a 3% increase, but it not going into effect till April 1st. If you recall, the city had previously done a market study and the market study had been completed. So typically we use a 4% across the board average for general employees. We had bumped that to 5% to start making some of those adjustments on the paper performance plan. But due to the budget issues, we pulled that out completely. The idea behind leaving a 3% at halfway through the process is that so that general employees won't lose too much to the market as we go forward. We also are eliminating and or freezing vacancies. As you know, this year we had the issue of a shortfall tied to those protests and litigation mid-year. And so we used a freezing of vacancies as a way to fill that gap. This budget basically eliminates 51 positions, I believe it is, completely. And then we also freeze several positions for half a year and then others for a full year to create a $7.3 million savings. These will have a impact on service delivery, but we think we can manage that. And in fact, hopefully through the year, we'll find better ways to do things and ultimately become more efficient. I'm recommending reducing the economic development incentive fund contribution by 90%. So I'm moving it down to 500,000 instead of 5 million. So it's a reduction of 4.5 million. Constraining the pay-go growth to just the tax rate 7.25 cents and not adding any additional dollars, so it's an actual reduction of two million. And then across the general fund, all general fund departments, we pulled out 50% of the training dollars and we moved, the idea here is that we're gonna move the other 50% into non-departmental and then have every department request money back for, to only use for training that's needed for certifications and really required. So at this point, we had gotten to the point of looking at where we could potentially increase revenues. There is a $2 million from development service fee increases that you saw this summer do your workshops. And then one of the things that came through the process was Roger Venables in our aviation department brought forward the idea of having aviation pick up the eligible costs for the ARF stations at Meacham and Alliance. And this totals 3.4 million, so we were able to do the work to be able to have aviation transfer funds to the general fund to cover a portion, that $3.4 million cost from the fireside. Those are the two main, they don't total the 6.3 and then there's other, you saw a lot of those fee increases this summer. And then finally, we got to the point, as we worked in the management side, we had other things that we looked at to reduce. We thought there were gonna be pretty hard service level impacts like closing libraries, like closing community centers, those kind of things. And looking at the overall needs, I decided that we would move forward with the tax rate increase recommendation. So the overall increases in the significant budget decisions are there's no civil service personnel reductions. Currently, because we're still in the negotiation process, we have a placeholder that totals 8.5% for both steps and across the boards for the fire. That could change once we get through the process and if it goes up or down. Police officers pay is already contracted at 6% that includes steps and across the board. Based on the last evaluation, we're adding 77 police officers. This has no impact to the general fund because it's gonna be cadets and it'll start off in CCPD. So a portion of those will be ready for the next fiscal year in 28. Healthcare increases were approximately $14 million. Full funding of the Axon 911 project, which is the 911 call system that automatically translates like 181 different languages that sorts the calls from emergency, true emergency calls to 311 calls, those kind of things. That pilot really showed benefits, and so that was fully funded. And then funding both the net force program, not to the full amount but keeping it going, and then a growth in communications because there needs to be able to meet the demand that we're seeing from public information requests. Budget decreases, I mentioned a lot of those already, but here you see the elimination or freezing of vacant positions. We're eliminating 51 positions, freezing 91 positions for half year, and then another 29 positions for full year. So basically they're vacant. The ones that we are not eliminating completely, our departments thought that there were key positions we needed to keep for the long term, so if we can refund them next year, that's the idea. With TAD moving forward with appraisals in January, we're hoping that we'll see a different outcome from the evaluations next year. I mentioned the Economic Development Fund and PAYGO reduction. Other reductions that are tied in there are mowing cycles, extending those so that we could reduce some costs in contracts. That's not correct on the next one. It's eliminating the fire hope team. So it's not eliminating any positions. It's the four hope firefighters will return to just do firefighter work and we would be able to reduce costs associated. It was one of the recommendations that came through the 3% cuts from the fire department. And then shifting our vehicle replacement fund or replacement program to the debt service fund where we had some capacity to use short-term notes to fund that. And then finally, for the last several years, we've been paying incentives out of the general fund for HOT-related projects, some hotel projects. There's capacity in the HOT tax side to be able to cover those. Those projects or those incentives are at the end of their life. So it would just be for this year and next year. And so we move those dollars over. I mentioned the impact, there was an impact to the debt service fund. So the way the system works through the state and the truth in taxation and all the work that you have to put together, when you increase or decrease the property tax rate, the way the funding is spread out between debt service fund and operations fund is through a ratio. So choosing to move, the need was on the operations side, so the increase all goes to the operations side. So the debt service side actually gets hit by having a smaller ratio. And so because of the loss of the values and because of that ratio split, what you end up seeing is in the left side here is the original debt plan that we went forward with. That in 2030, still trying to keep to the four year debt plan. we'd have half a million, half a billion dollars to move forward with is our projection, was our original projection with another bond program. Based on what we know now, and making some assumptions that are, I would say, at the very best estimates, because we don't know how it's gonna work on Tad's side, is that we are moving forward with estimates that would have a 3% growth on the years where there is a valuation and zero growth on the years where there isn't a new appraisal valuation. That impact reduces or pushes out our next bond program to 2031. And again, this is right now just an estimate and drops the amount available to 458 million. So as we go forward under this new valuation, we have to get some more history behind us in order to be able to have a better idea on how to estimate and project what we can and can't do on the debt service one. The good news is by putting it together the way we have is we can move forward with our current debt service plan and it will be delivered over the five year timetable. The additional good news and we'll be putting out a statement at the end of the month or the end of the week, we received our ratings for our debt issuance and both the GO and the Dickey's debt have gone up in our overall ratings. Fitch moved us to AA plus for the general fund. So with that, I'll take any questions to me or we'll move on to have Christiane kind of do the full budget.

Thank you, Jay. Questions from council at this time in the presentation or do you want to keep going? Council Member Beck.

I have some questions and I think it might be easier if we just take it as we go, if you don't mind. My first question is for the travel and conferences, that kind of stuff. How does that impact our employees with professional degrees and professional licenses that they have to maintain?

That's where we're taking 50% and we're having every department tell us what that is specifically and that it would be put back into their budget from the other 50%.

I don't think I understand what you're telling me.

So there's basically when you totaled up the general fund for those, there's about $2 million. We reduced it by a million dollars and took the other million dollars and put it into non-departmental. Then every department, say the lawyers, they all have to get their continuing education. They will submit back to the lab those things that they have to spend those dollars on. And then before the process is completed, that money will be back into their budget.

Okay, so why wouldn't that money come out of the million dollars? So it sounds like we're just arbitrarily reducing it by half, but then saying we're keeping this other half over here in case we need it?

Right now, no. The million dollars that's being kept is for what is needed. We basically reduced the overall line item across all the departments by a million dollars. That's what they told me.

Okay, okay, gotcha. I'd like to know how freezing vacancies has impacted the service that the city provides, and I'm really concerned about our internal services. It's my understanding that we froze some positions at the James Service Center, and now we're having a hard time getting vehicles out in a timely manner. So I understand the austerity. for our security purposes, why we're freezing those positions. But my question is, is that negatively impacting us in the service, particularly in our internal services when we rely on those positions to keep us humming? If we don't have them, we have to outsource. My guess is outsourcing is probably gonna be more costly.

Right. So most of the positions, if not all, that are recommended for next year to remain open are just general fund They're less than we currently had this year, frozen. As we move forward and we've been able to close that gap, those positions are starting to be filled. We'll have a listing for you all of all of the positions that are being recommended to stay open and or cut, along with a little information of the potential impacts on the service side. And we have that for you to provide you. And they get completed till today.

It's not, but it's not in our packet today.

It's not in your packet. I think they completed it last night.

Okay, awesome. And then on the significant budget decreases page 23, you gave us for the decreases, you gave us how much that was getting us until that bottom bullet. And then I don't know how much reduction in mowing cycles, eliminating fire community risk reduction program, which is huge.

Yeah, all of those were that 28.6 altogether. We just kind of put the big ones on there. A lot of them are 600,000, 500,000. It's just different smaller amounts that end up getting to that level.

How much of our community risk reduction program is grant funded?

So originally, I think they used the wrong title. That's the actual Fire Hope Team, not the risk reduction program. So the four positions of the the firefighters would no longer be doing the HOPE work, they would return to do firefighting work. And so, idea there is that we can do the same type of work with the non-profit for a lot less funding.

But we're not doing that with the non-profit right now. So do we, I have real concerns about cutting the HOPE team given that homelessness seems to be a priority across the board here with all of us. It impacts all of our districts. Cutting any services that deal with the homeless community and are part of that network that is allowing us to not be inundated gives me a lot of pause in this.

Understood.

It's my understanding that the HOPE team is in large part grant funded, that we fund out of the general budget their salaries, but the operating costs and anything extra are all grant funded.

But we backfill the four positions at time and a half at the fire stations. That's where the savings comes from. So those four positions are being paid their full salaries to do that work. When no positions are eliminated, they're just moved back to their fire stations and would be doing firefighter work. the regular and we were able to reduce the overtime costs associated with backfilling that's where the savings comes from councilman i know that you said that it's a part of the 28 million but could you because i have the same question as she has could you say how much it's about 700 000 for the hope team savings from of overtime thank you a lot of these a lot of the costs that we have in here that are savings they're small amounts i'll add it together to make that bigger number We're trying to have as little impact to service delivery as possible.

Jay, since we're on the Hope Team conversation, hold on just a second, Debra, I'll come back to you. Okay. It sounds like you're interested in exploring other options for the Hope Team with other non-profits. But I would be curious, you may not have had time yet or your team to actually explore which non-profits were even capable of that type of work and whether it would be a cost savings to the city. And it's okay if you can't answer that yet. Maybe she said.

It was one of the items after we got the TAD valuations that we went back and went back through the 3% reductions that were recommended by departments that we didn't. Understood. And so it was one of those that were.

Okay. Well, maybe that's just something I know at the end we'll ask for additional budget questions. That'd be something to come back to.

I can have Bethany and Tara look into it.

Yeah, I think to Council Member Beck's point, I think a lot of people appreciate what the HOPE team does, and you've got some great institutional knowledge in that team as well. Council Member Peoples?

No, so... So thank you for that information on the whole team, because that was one of my questions. But Jay, have you all looked at the general employee pay for performance being reduced from 5% to 1.5%? Have you thought about the impact on employee retention? So are we looking at that? Because I'd hate to lose good city employees.

Yes. We actually... We actually had it down to no increases. I was here when that happened, a lot of people left. And so the idea, again, is to have a 3% across the board in April to at least try to keep up with the market. We also contemplated having furlough days. And in order to close the gap, talking to the directors, that was one of the lowest things on their list because of the impact to employees. And so... We did think about it. Any percentages that we go up about every percent for general employees, I believe every percent is a million dollars, is that correct? About a million dollars for every percent increase average on the general fund employees.

Yeah, well, and I just want us to look at that and I I know that you said you looked at it already that when we went to 0% a lot of people left, but I think we ought to go back and look at that and see how many people left. What kind of institutional knowledge we lost to see if it's worth doing this kind of reduction. And I know you said every percent is another million, but I just want to make sure that we're not. de-incentivizing general employees and we don't start losing some of that expertise.

My preference would be to do the 5% to move people up there. But at the same time, I'm trying to balance what the impact is to our citizens and businesses on the tax rate.

Councilor Hall and Councilor Flores.

To piggyback on Councilwoman Peebles' question with regards to the performance pay, was there any consideration for, I guess, I don't want to say classification of employee, but the impact to some employees versus another with regards to that pay? Does it have to be straight across the board that everyone would get one and a half percent as opposed to our hourly employees or our lower wage earners. Could there be- There's no rule.

This is just the amount that we came up with that we could fit into the overall numbers. There's not a strict rule for that.

Being that I've only been here for a year and I got to be a part of some of those performance pay decisions and saw the percentages, I think there should be some consideration for those who are more adversely impacted with that number versus those who are not.

Understood.

Council Member Flores.

Thank you, Mayor. I just have five questions, Jay, and again, if you want to defer to an individual staff member to give more fidelity to, we can do that. Phased funding, as it's mentioned, in relation to neighborhood services. Are we still funding only and intend to only fund one NIP per year?

Is that right? Yes, one additional NIP. And the idea there is that in the past, we funded all 4.2 million in the given year. But the program actually runs over three or four years. In the first year, we've never spent more than a million dollars. So in order to alleviate this next year's budget is that we are funding 1 million in the NIP with the idea is the rest of it would be be funded next year in the final year. So it would be now each new NIP would be kind of three year phased funding to try to reduce the impact on an individual year's budget.

Over that time period. Okay. Makes sense. All right. I've been told by parks that currently we're maintaining a 21 day mowing cycle. Is that what is suggested this time around or are we continuing to maintain 21 day?

No, the idea is to actually spread them further apart. I don't know the exact number of days. I think Christiane may be covering that. All right.

Okay. I'll wait until then. Under the category community safety, when it comes to covering fire fleet costs, rising fire fleet costs.

Rising what? Sorry.

Fire fleet costs. Thank you. Does that really mean, again, keeping the equipment that we have longer? Right, more maintenance to that equipment there.

It's increasing the amount of dollars that go toward maintenance. So one of the things that, and Christiane will go, you're gonna see a large increase in the fire department side. A portion of that is we moved the general fund subsidy, since EMS is part of the fire department, we moved that, which was 20 million this year, into their budget, and then whatever additional is in their budget. But above that, there's another 32 million that was added to the fire budget to better reflect the true cost of overtime and the true cost of fleet maintenance. On an annual basis, since I came back last year and then this year, those numbers have been over budget. I prefer to try to have a true budget so that the department knows the number versus they know they're gonna be over it regardless and it creates this back and forth. So the recommendation is to fully fund those at the levels that it should be. That's just where it should be. There's no way they could be less than that. So that's where the increases are. Okay.

I have two more. I think, well, you actually answered the next question I had, which is a follow-up to that one. Closing the Alliance PetSmart Adoption Center. what impacts to maintaining what capacity we have in our existing shelters with that impact. I mean, I'm concerned about that because again, certain times of the year, we have an increase in pets needing homes and our shelters are over capacity or at capacity.

It'll have an impact. It'll have an impact on our live release rate. I mean, there's no other way to say it. The question is, again, looking at all the needs we're trying to reduce, that was one of the items that kind of went to the top. Okay.

Will that impact our efforts to transport pets to other cities that do have adoption capacity?

I don't know that off the top of my head. I think I can ask Brian. We'll follow up with that.

Okay. That's what I have for now. Thank you.

Thank you, Jay. Okay, so starting on slide 17 and 18, one, I want to commend the staff for those common reduction strategies. That's just overall good business and something we should be doing regardless of a budget deficit. So thank you for that. When we look at dues and memberships, and I just wanted to get some clarity, Jay, I mean, we're spending $100,000 on sister cities trips. Are we going to reduce that by 50%? We're also spending $140,000 on conferences from the CMO's office, which is outside of professional licenses, which I understand we have to have professional memberships and dues and licenses. Those are two examples of areas that, I mean, what are we doing?

Everything was reduced by 50%.

That is the number, or are we going to reduce it again?

We can reduce it further, but we did reduce all those line items by 50%. Some of them were already taken under the 1%, and what was left was reduced by 50%. Okay.

So 10 conferences, is it per council office? Is that the 14,000?

Yes, I believe that's what we... We worked with Sister Cities after last year and what the travel was to have two Sister City trips for this year per council member, and that's how the funding was created. We're recommending reducing that in half to 50%.

Again, in 50%, so $50,000 or $100,000 for Sister Cities trips?

Closer to $50,000.

I'm just using those as two examples of just put that in the common strategies that we need to be producing our budget, but little things like that. Being a member of the French American Chamber of Commerce, I don't know much value that adds, but things like that I think we can do at a closer look at. I'm going to echo my colleagues' comments on the HOPE team. I mean, that to me is non-negotiable. We've got to figure that out, whether it's restaffing, reorganizing. But Cutting Hope and I'll use the Lake Marshalls again. I'm still getting noise about them. Any public safety is just non-negotiable to me. And then Carlos, the Humane Society, PetSmart, Alliance Projects. Those are the ones that we can work with our nonprofit partners like the Humane Society to help take those on. And they've expressed interest in wanting to work with us more. So to me, let's not cut it. Let's start working with those nonprofit partners to figure out the right solution.

Council Member Nettles, Council Member Beck.

Yes, I have, I guess, two questions. The first question is kind of talking about, it was page 19, and it said eliminated and freezing vacancies. And I think when you mentioned it, you also stated this will impact service provided. And you may not have that right now, but my concern is I wanna know what services will be impacted. And then with these individuals only getting a 3% raise. So hypothetically, are we saying that they're gonna make less or not get a raise and actually do more work?

They're gonna get a 3% raise starting in April. So the impact to the budget is equivalent to a one and a half percent raise. And so they will, the idea is that every general fund employee would get a 3% raise. Currently we've been under the hiring freeze. And so they'll, if most of these positions that we're freezing going into next year and or eliminating, we're already in the hiring freeze. So it'll be the same system or the same amount and the same impact that we're having now. Again, staff worked on putting together the impact by positions and the different departments. And we'll have that for you after the meeting. We could add all that back in. It just increases the overall need for additional funds or cutting somewhere else.

No, I agree.

And I think almost, I believe, every one of the positions that's being recommended to be eliminated and or frozen is vacant. So there's not a direct impact to any individuals.

Right, but it's an impact to the service provider. It is.

It's a service delivery impact.

Yeah, so maybe in the long term, because we get calls about maybe things that are not happening fast or quick enough, and maybe if we know what services may be impacted, it gives us a better opportunity to relate to them.

Yeah, we'll provide you that information.

Okay, and then my last question is kind of talking about the, I know we can't, how far can we project a deficit such that we're in? Because I know we've been talking about the tax rate around this table since we've all been here, and you mentioned that we have lowered the tax rate each year. Did we not see any of this coming this year? Because I know I have always mentioned that it is incumbent of us to really look at is it benefiting the city long term to keep on lowering the tax rate each and every year? I think last year we did a quarter cent. The year before that we did, was it a full cent or two? I'm not sure what it was the year before. Okay. for a small period of time, they felt the relief, which I think in your presentation today, they're still gonna receive that same relief because of the decrease in the property tax.

So really when you said could we not foresee it, last year there was no new appraisals by TAD, and our overall value still grew by almost 5%. Because we have so much new growth, we were expecting a similar increase set up this year, we actually were very conservative and our conservative numbers were not enough. We were estimating about a 2.13% increase and it actually went further down than per se. So, it's really tied to the way we have no history on how valuations are being done by TAD now that can provide us a trend so that we can look out further and be able to have a good adjustment. And so that's why That's one of the main reasons why we are where we are with the growth that we have.

Can you go back? You had mentioned about like the service center, the James Service Center goes over budget every year.

So looking back at history, it seemed like we did this in 2018 when I was over the police department. Police department was like going over on overtime every year and it would never get corrected in the budget. And so I pushed to, let's look at history, let's actually see what it costs and put that into the budget so that we can project correctly. That's basically what we did this year with the fire department. It wasn't because they're overspending, it's the amount they need to provide the service. It was just never budgeted at the level it needed to be. The recommendation this year, same thing for fleet on the fleet side and tied to fire. It's also a fleet side tied to police. So there's a lot of fleet increases that are tied to those bigger departments.

I hear you and I appreciate that. And I think we should have right-sized budgets because it's just good government. My question though is, We have pretty sophisticated folks here that set budgets, right? There's a lot of work that go into it. And so I hear you, we need to right-size the budget, but at the same time, I'm sitting here going, well, why aren't we holding departments accountable to their budget? If we laid out a budget a year in advance, I understand things happen.

Now I can. I didn't feel I could because they weren't right sized. How can you tell somebody to put their 16 size foot in a 12 size shoe? You can't. It was never right sized before and so if you tell them to manage their budget, we're not gonna be going out for calls, we're not gonna have firefighters in the stations, all those types of things. So the idea is right-sizing it so now Fire Chief now has some true ability to try to keep within budget because it's right-sized.

Yes, Council Member Hall. City Manager Chava can you explain for me reducing the EDIF contribution from four point I guess from five million to five hundred thousand? Yes. What that impact looks like or what that

So typically we've been doing about $5 million a year in the EDIF and general fund that goes into a fund that can be used for economic development. Typically projects that like say a corporate headquarters wants to move into downtown, they're not making a whole lot of improvements on the building. So there's not a lot of new taxes, but you're able then to provide an incentive out of that for the high paying jobs that you're trying to get here. or a redevelopment project needs some funds up front, you can use some of those dollars. So those are the type of uses for the money. What it does is basically just skipping a year. We're hoping, the reason I didn't completely eliminate it is because I didn't want to lose it from the line item. So next year, hopefully when we have new appraisals, we can bring back a semblance of the five million into the fund. The fund currently has, we can get you that figure, There are dollars currently in that, I wanna say it's between 15 and 20 million available from the past years. So skipping one year is not gonna totally kill us. And we wanna try to bring that back in future years as we go forward.

Okay. And then with regards to, I think healthcare, I think I read already that there's no increased healthcare costs being passed on to employees or is there?

Correct. The recommendation is that it all be covered by the city.

Any other questions on this section before we turn to Christine? Yeah, Councilman Larsdorf.

Thank you, Mayor. I know we brought up the service center a couple times and recently I sent an email. I know Marilyn and her team were working on it, but I think one of the things we really need to dig into more is like you look at a cost on July 10th when police department budget was charged $200, and I know we're talking small numbers compared to large budget, but these will all add up. For a pair of Wipers, wiper blades, $229 for labor and $16 for parts. And of course, I was charged against the PD budget, and that's just one of their many vehicles. But I think taking a much closer look at how our departments are being charged at the service center and what they're being charged, it's obviously going to contribute to their budgets because they're having to budget $240 for a pair of wiper blades for an hour and a half worth of labor that we all know should take five minutes, I think that's a larger problem that we need to take a look at, which is obviously gonna expand everyone's budget by a lot. So just food for thought.

Any other items for Jay? Yes, Council Member Hall.

And one more question, I'm sorry. No problem. With regards to the additional 77 officers, I know that you said that they would be cadets and that would be paid out of CCPD. So there would be no impact to the general fund at all in- FY27. FY27 at all from that? No, no.

When would they have the impact?

The first round of the cadets would probably come on board in 28. And I don't know if they've changed the number back. It used to be about 35 cadets at a time. They might do more than that now. But you wouldn't be able to do all 77 at once.

But it's all CCPD funded?

All CCPD funded.

Okay.

Any other questions? Two points of clarification, Jay, I think you pointed to this, that the discussion on a HOPE team, it's a misprint in this slide, correct? Yes. Okay, thank you. And the second thing, you mentioned 1% pay increase across the organization is equal to a million dollars?

For general employees.

Thank you.

That's only the general employees.

Right, okay, thank you. Any other questions at this point? Christiane, I think you're up, yes?

Okay, I feel like you guys asked a lot of questions that I was already gonna say. So maybe we're done. No, I'm gonna go over the whole budget, not just general fund, but we're gonna start with general fund again. So if it feels a little repetitive, then that's okay. Let's see, just waiting on, do I need to open that up? The, that presentation that has the wrong wording, there's some other things that are wrong, so they're opening me my new version, that's what, so it's my delay. Maybe. Okay, I'm just gonna start talking.

I may real quick. Do you think it'd be better if we ask questions? This is a really long presentation. As the presentation goes or wait to the end,

Christina, maybe I'll pose that to you. What's easier on you to ask along the way rather than wait until the end, section by section maybe?

I think now, since we are section by section, it's fine to ask questions as we go. And I do expect that, I know that we're like only one third of the way through. I do expect these last two thirds to go faster than the first third went because that was a lot of the foundation setting in detail. So, plus I just talk much faster. Yes, you do. Yeah. So you just, yeah. thanks christian to keep the energy going here we'll ask away thank you okay great so while they're um i am the one that caused the problem with the presentation so i'm gonna go while they're fixing it up um so the next part we're going to talk about is about um council priorities because when we go out and do the town halls and the public engagement that's kind of how we talk to the public so we tie the budget priorities to your strategic priorities are those overarching five things and so some of this will be a repeat but i'm going to kind of go through the highlights of the budget and this is the whole budget not just the general fund by council priority and so if you just follow along with me for a moment and then i bet they'll get it figured out So first priority, not in order, but community safety. You heard a lot about community safety already in the front part of this presentation. And so most of the budget highlights here are additions to the budget. The first bullet deals with elimination of the Fire Hope team. Again, the savings from that comes from the backfield overtime for those people. And we'll bring it back as a follow up from Bethany and Tara to sort of explore what other nonprofit partnerships could look like. That was a good note. We talked about right-sizing fire overtime and fire fleet, so I won't belabor that point. The 76 patrol officers for police in this section, it says 76, not 77. That's because those are the patrol positions. The way that we came up with that number is when Chief Garcia got here, he had some interest in revamping the latest version of their staffing study. The lab had the methodology for that study. We worked with Chief Garcia and his staff to come up with a number that meets the existing and continued growth of the city. And so this is to maintain response time goals and also to meet Chief Garcia and his staff's proactivity goals. And so 76 is kind of that magic number. Another thing that I don't think we've talked about yet that's actually an exciting addition to this budget is the creation of corporal positions in police. So it repurposes 30 officers to corporals in order to provide a career path in patrol. So I actually didn't really realize this even from working in the police department, but in order to promote to a corporal or detective you have to leave patrol and there are some police officers who really enjoy patrol like that's their passion and right now they have to go be a specialized unit corporal in some other operational unit or they have to be a detective right in an investigative unit or a CID So these 30 it's reclassifying officers to the corporal. So that's kind of the fiscal impact, but it creates a career path so that people can promote within patrol. Those corporals will also take over the field training aspect of the job. So rather than paying like incentive pay for officers to do that, they'll, they'll be part of that. So I think that's a, that's a really great idea that chief Garcia brought.

Christine, are those CCPD funded as well, or are they general fund?

Those corporals are general fund funded, yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, so those are existing officers, and the fiscal impact is the gap between the officer pay and the corporal pay. So it's just under a million for those 30, because it's just the difference in pay.

Okay. Is there a reason, since they're patrol, isn't that available for CCPD funding? So is there a reason why we chose not to?

So all, so no, patrol in CCPD is limited to overtime. So CCPD has patrol overtime support, but all our patrol functions are general fund funded.

And that policy, that overtime, is that something that we've set here by council?

I believe it's set annually like in the CCPD program scope that CCPD just does patrol overtime and not like patrol funded positions. Okay, thank you.

We're gonna discuss that at our next board meeting actually.

When I showed the increases in the public safety, that million dollars was part of that increase. Yes.

Christiane, I think it would be helpful, at least for myself, to see the type of fires that this fire hope team is extinguishing because I have called 911 or actually I think I called my MPO but the fire department came out for a fire that was behind in the alley and to be honest I probably could have kicked some dirt and it would have been out by just how many of those calls they've had at least throughout the last year and how at least the scale of the fire.

About the hope team. Yeah, so these four positions on the fire hope team are doing full funded hope activities So they're just working in the homeless corridor in those activities It's the back filled positions that then fill their spot like in fire suppression duties Eliminating that backfill by returning these four to fire suppression duties is what causes the projected savings of about six hundred and fifty thousand dollars Does that help I can simple data for you if you need but

No, I guess that would have been an emergency call, not, although it was related to a homeless camp.

And a question from a budget standpoint. If the council collectively decided they wanted to keep the Fire Hope program as is and leave firefighters in those positions, would then the decision be made by budget and by management to potentially increase staffing by those four firefighters and leave those permanent rather than the funny math that goes back and forth when we made the decision. Because Hope Team's been in place for how many years now?

I'm not sure.

Eight, six to eight. So we've been doing this for quite some time. That's just maybe a change we would need to make if you got direction from the council.

Yeah, and we would have to work with the contract as well. And it probably wouldn't impact that ability to do that for several years because you have to go through the whole recruitment and new positions and all those kind of things.

Even though, and generally you don't have to go too far, even though those are for experienced firefighters with this particular skill set and it's not an easy role, I'm just curious, you're not suggesting you would...

No, we could, but you'd recruit. It takes you a year to get folks on board.

I see. You're just talking about adding those four positions, but you could do that right now in the new contract.

Yeah, we could talk about it through the contract to make it happen, but the actual impact and the relief on the budget side would happen later. Way down the road, three or four years down the road.

Yeah, that's probably a safe assumption. Can I ask a question just to clarify something?

Maybe I misheard it, but currently as far as Fire Hope, team is concerned, we're talking a police officer and two firefighters, correct?

We are only talking about the fire side of the HOPE team, and that's for fire personnel.

I think that's three firefighters and a- Yeah, the police side is paid through CCPD, so it wasn't put up as one of the reductions by- Correct, yeah.

Okay.

Sorry, thank you.

Good. I can see the screen. Can we project? There we go. Hooray. So last bullet here, fully funds the Axon 911. This is the assistive call taking that they've been experimenting with slash piloting this year. It has some very successful metrics as far as saving workload hours. This is non-emergency triage. That's assistive technology. So the budget recommends funding that in full. It's just under half a million dollars. All right, moving on to infrastructure. So top bullet is sort of the sad news story, right? We talked about the static PAYGO tax rate. So again, we're at seven and a quarter for the PAYGO tax rate, but because of falling property tax values, that's producing less revenue. So this budget keeps that seven and a quarter, but it reduces PAYGO by 2.8 million from the current year funding. That is sort of across all the buckets. So think about streets, sidewalks, pavement, parks, and the other PAYGO categories.

I'm so sorry. It's going to be a rough one for you today.

It is not. I feel so happy to be here with you. It's fine.

Are you as ecstatic as we are about this budget?

I'm so pumped right now.

All right. Because we're reducing PAYGO, and that's going to dramatically impact what we're doing with our streets, and we heard that streets are a top priority. I know we have the Street Maintenance Fund, but since we're Robin from Paul over here, is there a discussion about adding to Peter in the form of that adjusting the recommended rate for that street maintenance fund to make up for the pay go that we are going to lose?

make this up, we'd have to increase the tax rate assigned to PAYGO. This is the direct impact. But to answer your question, further on she's going to talk about approving the street fee, but that wouldn't come into, doesn't actually take place until 2028. Okay. Because of the new water department system that's being put in place. And we didn't want to spend almost a million dollars to add the fee for one year and then the next year has to go into the new system. So that's an approval that gives us a year to educate the public about it, but it wouldn't start till 2028. Okay.

And then when we talk about, I understand you've listed streets, sidewalks, pavements. We can all read, I hope. But what I'm wondering is like, what does that actually mean? What does that actually mean? Like, what are we not funding? Are we not gonna do our street striping maintenance schedule or like, what is that actually getting us?

We can provide you the details on the specific items that are being eliminated.

And just, this might save all of us a bunch of time and me a bunch of questions. For those things that we are reducing, I think those specifics are important because I can maybe stomach some sidewalks, right? But I don't know that I can give up the street striping or what does that mean in our parks maintenance? Does that mean that a water fountain doesn't get fixed or a swing doesn't get fixed or we don't mow as often?

It includes facilities as well.

I'm sorry?

It includes city facilities as well.

Okay, yeah. that would be helpful tremendously to add on that I think um for me I guess absent an explanation on like how this is you know impacts further down the road with you know the growth of the city and the rate that we're growing and things of that nature when we make these type of cuts like what is the the year after year impact um I just would like to know more about the nuances of that

We can provide that information and we have it as best as we could put together specifically. But again, this new appraisal system, we're thinking next year it's gonna go back up and so it would only be a one year impact. And the idea is that then as we go forward, we try to figure out how we smooth that out so we don't have a year after year impact. But this is the first year of this situation.

Council Member Hall, would it help? Let me see if I want to do the right follow-up for you. Would it help if we do like an updated version of that long-term forecast that we've shown in here before that's like a five or seven year or maybe even a shorter, and then show kind of if we're growing from these reduced bases, like how that kind of compounds into the future? Right.

I mean, when I think about it, and maybe I'm way down the road, and granted, I understand this is the first iteration of this, so I don't want to get too deep in the weeds, but when i think about the reductions to pago and then i think about the areas who need those services or maintenance more so than others and i think about how even further down the road some of our communities are going to be when we make these type of cuts so rather complicated question but that's really what i'm trying to wrap my head around

Okay, I'm gonna move on. So we covered the street maintenance fee because like Jay mentioned of the water billing system implementation, this budget will authorize that in the fee ordinance and that allows staff to continue to prepare to implement that fee, but it will actually start, the fiscal part starts in fiscal year 28. And then we have some notes here on capital project delivery, just continuing to try to reduce the reliance on third party staffing and consultants in order to bring some in-house project management online. Tpw started that this year and they're having good results, so they made some similar recommendations, these are in the capital project service fund and then we have heard a presentation recently on water. The utility, including its substantial capital investments which include projects you're familiar with, like mary's creek and, like the cast iron replacement Program. So community investment is the third priority. Again, not in order. I would say this one bore some of the brunt of the general fund reductions because, again, these all fall into that non-public safety portion of the general fund, and often these are operating programs too, not necessarily PAYGO. So really the overall strategy here was to try to attempt to minimize service-level impacts through our strategies and to avoid widespread or permanent closures of libraries or community centers. If you follow sort of municipal news, you know that a lot of cities are struggling with Coffin, closures of those kinds of facilities and we of course don't want to do that as a as a permanent item. Coffin, We do recommend, I mean and I use that word like lightly right the the budget right now accounts for closing the alliance pet smart adoption Center. Coffin, This was a 3% reduction submitted by code, not that they want to do this, but in order to meet their 3% targets. This is about a $400,000 impact. I'm not saying that it's not worth the $400,000, but that's where we are with balancing. I think the adoption impact is about 1200 a year. And then I know we had a good smart question on like, what does that do for our shelters? And we can try to bring back some information from code about that. You might remember that in the current year, we increased the priority repair program to $2.5 million. This is a 3% reduction that was set forth by Neighborhood Services, again, as part of the reduction exercise. So it's 3% of the program, $75,000. Mobile tool shed program, we increased again in the current year after a successful pilot in fiscal year 25. So this is another 25% reduction that was part of their 3% balancing strategy and eliminates a longstanding Code Ranger program, which is like the volunteer program, think like Code Blue, but for code compliance. And there's one person that's attached to that that would be repurposed if that program went away. We talked a little bit already about the phased funding for the neighborhood improvement program. So one neighborhood with that lesser one year amount to kind of more accurately reflect what happens in the first year of that program with planning for the neighborhood, doing the listening sessions, you know, making all those plans. And then the ad here is dedicated personnel for the continuation of net force, the nuisance abatement program after this year's successful pilot. So that's sort of like the one ad that we highlight on this slide. Yes, Council Member Hall.

Do you know the cost of the employee related to the Code Ranger program? $76,000. $76,000. And then it can come back to us later from Code. I would assume then there's an attachment for that salary and employee, the volunteer opportunities would be drastically reduced if not completely eliminated if you don't have someone coordinating that. So what is the cost of service and opportunity for the city for us to kind of consider?

Yes, code will have that detail. They wrote some of the like metrics that that, you know, volunteer program's producing as far as, you know, like violations and letters and all those things that they notice out in the neighborhood. So I bet we could bring back some. Right, okay.

Thank you, Councilor Hall. Thank you, Mayor. I have the same question. And if you could also, if they could let us know where that impact is being felt in which of our districts or where that's happening.

Sure. Thank you. Councilor Beck. I just want to... not to create a chamber in here, but to echo what Mayor and Council Member Hall have said. I think looking at the overall benefit that it provides to the city, code complaints are something that I think we hear often about. And so reducing the Code Ranger program, essentially eliminating it, I think has an overall negative impact on the cleanliness and the repair of our city. I'm also... the mobile tool shed program and the priority repair programs, look, I get we're going through and trying to cut where we can and we are all coming back and saying, no, that's our sacred cow, we love it. I think those programs go a long way in also reducing the number of code violations that we have. And so are we shooting ourselves in the foot by eliminating that? What does that 25% reduction in the tool program look like? Does that mean that it's four houses that don't get the tools they need to make the repairs they need? And then does that mean code violations? I think it cascades. And so I'm reluctant to want to cut funding for programs that they were pilots they were wildly successful so we expanded them and now we're saying not so much so what's the i'd like to know the cost uh benefit and some more detail about this mobile tool shed program specifically cutting that

yeah we can bring that back just as the thing I do know standing here is that's again I think it's a four-person team and that's one again one position that would be repurposed perhaps and I think it's about 55 to 60 thousand dollars so again they're little reductions that have you know like doesn't eliminate the whole thing in that case right it keeps the program going um but trying to like minimize service level impact which is sort of the goal with this whole priority But we can also bring, yeah, we can bring some metrics around like how they're performing this year and kind of what that cascade would look like.

Yeah, I mean, I'd like to see how many code violations were cleaned up because of this program. That's, you know, a cost savings. Council Member Martinez and then Council Member Nettleson.

What percentage of the priority repair program is grant funded?

Well, $2.5 million is PAYGO, and I think that's all of it, right?

Okay.

So none of it? Oh, $2 million? Sorry, $2 million. Is grant funded? Oh, just kidding. $2.5 million in PAYGO and $2 million in grants.

Ooh. So we're reducing the PAYGO? The PAYGO portion, yeah.

Yes, I remember that because we bumped it a few years ago to help increase the capacity, I think, per repair. Yes, thank you.

Good question. Thank you. Council Member Adelson-Hill?

Oh.

No, go ahead. You're good.

So I had a question here, and I have this question only because I was at a neighborhood meeting the other day, and the bullet point that says about the community centers, I was at a neighborhood meeting, and they said that they're closing the community center on a Saturday. It's no longer going to be open. due to some of the budget shortfalls. My question is, if we're cutting hours at community centers, is it going to be citywide or just in certain locations? Because that's going to be a very tickle issue for me. And I mean, you might not have that. I mean, you budget, you don't. And so maybe the department heads, I guess when they're putting those budget cuts in, maybe when we come back, we kind of figure out where these cuts are actually happening.

Right, yeah, so this budget doesn't anticipate, like it doesn't recommend any kind of permanent closures or rotating out, go ahead.

Well, let me throw this in. I think it was a vacancy that's maybe not gonna be filled that's eliminating a position that may be causing why they're not able to open up on a Saturday.

I don't think we're closing, so as we went through this, and for employees' talk, I'm sure, we went through several iterations of potential budget cuts, like closing, whole community centers or whole libraries or closing libraries and community centers on certain days. So all that information was put together to see what the impacts were, see what the costs are. So somebody might have understood in the community center that that, because questions were probably being asked. So that's how it might've been fed to somebody that we're gonna close. Right now there's, this budget does not contemplate changing the hours. But it was probably part of a discussion that was had to try to understand the cost benefit analysis of each, depending how much we had to cut as we went through this process. If the council doesn't wanna increase the tax rate, for instance, we gotta find other cuts, it would be too late to try to start looking for those now. So we have done a lot of work to try to have those stacked behind us.

Council Member Peebles, do you have something?

Yeah, I was just going to ask her, and so I'm glad I'm not in the room so you all can throw something at me. But Jay, as we go through this and you all are making a list of all of the programs that are non-negotiable for us and we want to keep, would you all have to look at the tax rate?

We either have to look at the tax rate or find other cuts. we'd be looking at both and we would look for direction with the city council. At this point, this is my recommended budget. And so the idea is to try to get direction from the council on where you all are as a consensus on either side, either increasing the property tax rate higher or reducing in other areas.

Well, and the only reason I asked that, and I did, I know that we're all sitting here going through what's not negotiable for us. And I have my list and everybody has their list. And you're right. The budget is going to push it one way or another. Either we cut someplace else, and we've already said certain things are non-negotiable, like police and fire, public safety, or we have to find another way to fund it. And there are things that I agree. I mean, for me, and looking at what's happening in my community, a lot of these things, you know, I don't want to see them cut. But just my two cents.

Council Member Hill, did you have something? I apologize.

I wrote down the number for the alliance, PetSmart, but I think my number is wrong. What is the number for that? My note is $403,000. $403,000.

Okay, thank you.

Council Member Flores.

Along the lines of another... Category question. Adding personnel to water so that they continue their lead replacement line. I put up the GIS map to kind of get an overview of what's left. I find a concentration there off Curzon and Lavelle avenues. But again, I don't know if that's the entire picture. If we're adding personnel, How much of a duration left on that effort is there? I know that we have to act per federal requirements, probably state requirements as well. I'm just curious, is that a temporary hiring of employees so that we can finish this out? Or how much is left? Maybe that's two questions.

Maybe two questions, and I might have to bring it as a follow-up. The cast iron replacement program is part of their capital program, and then they're adding a position that's about something different, lead service line replacement. So I can bring a distinction between those two and explain.

Yeah, if I can just get some quantification of how much is left. Certainly.

Yeah, on cast iron, sure.

Well, lead. That is what I was asking.

Got it. Okay. Yeah, two things. Anything else? Okay. Keep going. Economic development, we talked about sort of the bigger ticket item here, which is the reduction in the transfer to the Economic Development Incentives Fund. It's a 90% reduction from $5 million to $500,000. This budget does continue the partnership with the chambers to develop and continue delivering the Small Business Development Program, which you heard an update on not long ago. I think we're all familiar with the budget transfer that's associated with the Will Rogers Memorial Complex and executing the Guindy Street Agreement. And then we do add a position in economic development to support the neighborhood revitalization efforts. This is a coordinator that will focus on those targeted revitalization areas. The responsible growth is always like one of those catch-all priorities, so we've highlighted a couple of things here. Lots could fit here. We shifted the funding for VRF, or vehicle and equipment replacement, out of the general fund and into available debt capacity and tax notes. And so that helps to relieve the general fund by $3.4 million. So here's some specific figures for those who are asking. We have increased the employer contributions for group health. So to, I think it's Council Member Hall's point, these are not employee contributions. This is on the city side. And that number was 40% across all departments to align with those rising costs of health claims. And you've had many Many presentations on that just for context that that increase in the general fund only was thirteen point seven million dollars So it's just quite a sizable So when we see in a few minutes the department kind of expense when you see people that are like flat or still falling That's even with that forty percent increase in the health care allocation. I We transitioned the open records or public information team from the city secretary's office to CPE. You'll see that shift how it looks funny in a few minutes, but that helps to continue providing support as those open records requests keep growing. We have inflationary increases in the budget for vehicles and equipment, which we talked a little bit about. That's not just FIRE, that's really across all funds. When you see fleets fund and their growth, that's the primary reason why. We'll talk about fee structures and then there was a reduction also in maintenance funding for City Hall facility and parking garage and lots. It was a more minor reduction as part of our 3% cuts. All right. See, now we're getting into the numbers. Finally, and I said this would go faster and so far it's not. Total operating budget. So operating budget, this is across all funds, $3.3 billion. General fund is about a third of that. So we've talked a lot about general fund already. The next biggest category is enterprise funds, and those are the ones that operate kind of more like a business and are paid for by the users and the rate payers. Special revenue follows. That includes CCPD and EMS, for instance. They're growing as a category just under 3%. And just to know, I think you all know this, but I'm just stating it kind of for the record. Outside of the general fund, you know, most of these funds have restricted purposes. So it's hard to look at the total operating budget across all these funds and say, like, you know, something is X percent of the operating budget, because really these are individual, like, fund groupings. It's not fluid to move things back and forth. So, for instance, we can't use, like, Water having a great year to fund a general fund shortfall. In fact, the state's really looking closely at those kinds of municipal actions. So just a reminder, General fund $1.15 billion, a number you've already seen. Jay showed this slide. The general fund, again, the largest fund within the city's operating budget. The revenue total is $1.15 billion, and so we balance the proposed expenditures to that total as required by state law. So you can see in the bottom row in blue, we are balanced. And total general fund budget growing about 4.6%, which is actually very similar to last year, which I found hard to believe when I was pulling history, because it's been such a different year for budget development, but it's actually similar growth to last year, but spread very differently. I think this is the only view that you have of general fund expenses by category, so just note here that in expenses, salary and benefits makes up about 70, it's like 69% of the general fund. So revenues, we've talked to death about property tax. So I'll skip to sales tax. Remember, property and sales tax together make up about 80% of the budget. So that's kind of the dynamic doer, the heavy hitters of the budget. Sales tax is the second largest revenue source. This comes from our one cent sales tax and we're projecting it to be $276 million. So we're seeing some nice growth in sales tax projected. We've had, I mean, really huge growth over the last 10 years in sales tax. It was like fiscal year 16 or 17, the sales tax budget was like 140 million. And so it's almost doubled, right? So we're still seeing nice growth. It's not like as crazy as it was when we were rebounding from COVID, but still healthy growth there that's helping to offset a little bit of the property tax issue. Other revenue categories you see here other tax or items like franchise fees so like utility telecom cable mixed beverage. And then we'll talk about fees and you see a lot of the fees show up in licenses and permits charges for services. fines and so you'll you'll be familiar with some of that, but you can see the revenue budget is really that's what drives what we're able to do on the expenditure side, so we really work. hard to forecast the revenue appropriately. But as you've seen, even when we do a very thorough job, things can happen externally or economically that, yeah. What is use of money? Yeah, so fiscal year 25, what you see and what you'll almost always see at this time of year, that's the appropriation of interest income, which we do not do in the budget, but we do, you know, later in the year. And so interest Yeah, so it's not budgeted that way. Like we budget a small amount of it for operating, but the city and it's best practice right to treat interest income as a one-time use. So we treat that as one-time money for capital, for building reserves and that kind of thing. But you see the appropriation in fiscal year 25 because it happens like later in the year, not in the budget. So, okay.

The, is that right? 29 million, it went from 29 million to 2.4 million?

Yes, because we don't adopt the budget for interest income. So you're seeing the final actuals from fiscal year 25, which have the appropriated amount like mid-year. And then you're seeing the adopted budget for fiscal year 26, which does not have the interest income appropriated. Does that make sense?

Uh, well, I mean, yes, it makes sense what you told me, but it doesn't make sense. why we do like I get we maybe don't know exactly what that number is and so it would behoove us not to use that as a hard number to budget against but if last year am I correct in assuming that we can anticipate a dollar amount similar to what we received last year?

You can anticipate a dollar amount similar. It all depends on the interest environment. I believe we'll bring a presentation on interest income. I don't remember when.

In a couple of weeks and we typically in Fort Worth what we've done is use that for one-time use to either shore up the budget like last year when we were short portion and then the rest of it into fund balance so that we can try to maintain as the budget grows to try to maintain the percent of fund balance for our bond rating.

I get why we did it last year.

That's what we've done every year.

Yeah, I get why we do that, but if we've got, I don't know. What math is that? That's $27 million extra coming in, and we know that we're $94 million short. Why would we not use this funding? Look, if you want to lowball it and say 20 million, I'm okay with that, but this is a large chunk of money that we could be factoring into the budget.

I'll give you an example of why we're conservative. This year, I think we're projections around 21 million.

Okay.

15 of that or so, or 12 of that, we'll be recommending to go into our healthcare fund balance that's underwater by 25 million and to try to shore that up. So typically it's used to fill in shortfalls in an unanticipated. Lots of times it's a risk fund, lots of times it's a healthcare fund. And then again, like I mentioned, we did get upgraded on our ratings. Part of that is our ability to keep the fund balance for the general fund at a constant level and not seeing it going down. If the interest rates change throughout the year when you're trying to make that projection and it goes down, we've had that happen where it's a sizable decrease. It's just so volatile. That's why we don't budget it to be.

Maybe I'll offer a suggestion, and that's a good point on Elizabeth's part. Because of the way the budget situation is this year, even just adding what you just stated and any other potential use of those funds, whether it's 21 or 27, put that somewhere here transparently so the public understands. Because we don't want the perception of you're hiding $21 million or whatever it may be. We have a really legitimate use we likely will recommend with those funds when that time comes.

I can do that.

Okay. You can do that. And then I had a question, Christiane, on the line item for revenues under charge for services. Off the top of your head, do you have a few examples of the increase there, what would have caused a $9 million increase?

Maybe development services fee increases and give me a moment and I'll tell you or I'll come back to you in a moment.

That's fine. You can come back if that's easier. No problem. Yeah. Council Member Hill.

Oh, yeah. Development services is a significant portion.

It's DJ's fault.

Yes.

Got it.

Although DJ was whispering to me earlier. I want you all to know this. I was sitting next to DJ. I didn't even invite him to sit by me. And then he sat by me anyway, and then he was like, hey. And he gave me his Molly pin, which was nice because I didn't have one. But then when it was new growth, how it's like balancing out the loss and existing growth, he was like, hey, I know you're busy, but like that's development.

You see? And look at his fancy socks he has on today. I see you, DJ. Okay.

All right. Christine, I had a quick question on sales tax. And I think just full transparency for the public, the sales tax line on here is not 100% of the sales tax collected, correct?

Correct. We also collect the half cent for CCPD. That's right. And then we have a portion that goes to Trinity Metro.

What are those two amounts that go to the CCPD and Trinity Metro?

It's not, yeah. So the one cent, the CCPD portion is not quite half. Let me, I'll pull up the detail and I'll tell you in just a moment.

Thank you.

But just for clarity, the number here is the entire sales tax revenue collected.

This is the one cent sales tax in general fund.

Thank you.

Yeah. And then when you see CCPD, that'll be the half cent. And then Trinity Metro's budget is also based on the other. But that's not included here. Right.

Thank you. Yeah. No problem.

Okay.

Let's see here.

All right, here's expenses by department. I don't think you've seen this yet. And this is in sort of a typical alphabetical department order. And it is a budget to budget comparison. So current year adopted to fiscal year 27 recommended. Remember, the amounts you see here include that 40% increase in the health care employer contribution, like that allocation, as well as internal service allocations for things like IT and fleet. So again, when you see budgets that are flat or even being reduced, that sort of they're being reduced past those increases. And I can answer any questions that you might have about specifics. I have another sort of graphic next that shows more dollar value growth that we can look at.

I want to mention that as well on the fire line item, it includes the moving the EMS subsidy out of non-departmental into fire, because the fire department kind of controls the expenses there. And it also, in the economic development side, the reduction of the EDIF fund. I was in that one.

So non-departmental, yeah, you'll see it going down by $20.9 million, and then that's offset by FIRE's growth of $52 million. So again, $20.9 million of that is the subsidy, and then the subsidy continued to grow in fiscal year 27. So we'll go over each of those. I'll mention the other one that looks kind of funny is CPE. And so... City Council Chambers, Even though we love public engagement, I don't want you to think they're like growing by 20% that's really the a couple of position moves. City Council Chambers, From city secretary to cp for public information, as well as the director position was actually still accounted for in the city manager's office so it's some position movement there. We can go over like the biggest ups and downs using this slide. Some people just prefer a graphic representation. So this is in dollar terms, so not percentages, but you can kind of see how it all falls. So like Jay mentioned, FIRE's budget, and we moved the subsidy for EMS into their budget. So that was 20.9 million, and then it grew by another eight or nine million. And then we did that overtime and fleet right sizing, which was about 8 million on the overtime, 3 million on the fleet. And then we have a placeholder, right, for the new agreement, new labor contract agreement, and then their normal step growth. So that's kind of how we walk up to the 52. Police's growth is primarily their meet and confer agreement. So the existing labor agreement that we are under with police. Let's see, emergency management and communications. Since they were a new department last year, they're actually taking on like IT and health allocations for the first time. So there's a little bit of growth because of those. And also that Exxon 911 project that I mentioned. And then I guess if we skip to the bottom, we can talk about sort of those big reductions. So on property management side, they're the holders of the VRF. So the vehicle and equipment shift out of general fund over to debt. That's a lot of the reduction that you see there. um economic development we talk we've talked about the transfer for economic development incentives and then neighborhood services that's primarily the neighborhood improvement program phasing so taking that budget from 4.2 down to one you'll see and then there's a lot of people in the middle that we can certainly provide detail on if anyone's particularly interested in one department story or another

Yeah, Councilman Reynolds. I do have a question about the economic development transfer. Are we talking about the incentives that we give businesses to come?

You want to talk about that?

It's the fund that was created a few years ago that provides cash since the city doesn't have a 4A or 4B sales tax component like other cities, provides cash into a fund that we can then use for incentives for projects cash projects or for in most cases the idea is uh we're trying to lure high-paying corporate jobs to fill the backfill an empty office building and they're we're competing with another city and they're looking for an incentive we would go to that fund to utilize it like i mentioned we can bring back to you what what the fund balance is in that fund but we have uh dollars available and so it would be the idea is to skip this one year hoping that When we get back to an appraised values, we'll be able to bring that back at some capacity going forward.

Yeah, so you basically, we have a balance of money in the fund already, so we can probably still do incentives if we eliminate or bring it down from $5 million to $500,000. Yes, for this one year.

And that's including like the 380s and the- Well, typically you utilize a 380 in order to give the grant. So it's not- we have incentives that we use when a project comes in, does a large development, makes a big investment, that we do a 380 agreement or a tax abatement that uses the taxes from that project. It's when we have a project that is not going to create a lot of taxes to have available itself for an incentive, that's when we go to this fund to use cash that we have.

I'll just throw out, when we were talking about the budget and neighborhood meeting, people asked about us giving incentives for jobs to come that maybe some of the residents are not getting those jobs. What is the benefit to the resident, which we know is the benefit to the city overall, but what is the benefit to the resident when we're also going to raise their taxes? That's just a comment that I've heard last week about incentives. Understood.

The jobs that come and the people that get the jobs and are paying into the economy is part of the benefit to the city overall.

That's why we do it. I'll just unsolicited add that when we talk about wanting to flip more of the tax base to be commercially supported so that the resident tax burden is less, that's the other piece. what were the i know i'm skipping to the next slide too on position movement parks and recreation 16 positions and a reduction of just over three hundred thousand dollars let's see 16 positions for parks these are reduced positions oh i don't have a note i'm going to ask staff to help me answer that question that's fine no problem yep and that can come later yeah

Sorry for Jay before we move on with the reduction of that EDF or the Economic Development Fund. I want to make sure that there's still a placeholder in it for the city's portion of the MID funding, the Medical Innovation District.

I believe all the projects that we have currently are labeled into the existing funds that are available.

Okay. Can you double check on that specific one for me? Thank you.

Okay, I'm standing here looking for the parks amount. Okay, I'm gonna get back to you on the parks amount. Someone's gonna teams me the answer. Okay, any others? Okay, yeah, so we jumped ahead. This is fine. So 91 new positions across the general fund. You see the department breakdown here. We've talked about the police positions, 76 in patrol. The one is nuisance abatement, so net force related. So that's the biggest chunk of the 91. Let's see, what else is a good story here? In the third column, you see transfer, I guess it's technically the fourth column, transferred positions. You might remember as sometimes as part of the 1% and particularly the 3% reductions, departments who can move things off the general fund tried to do that. So think about like police having some capacity in CCPD or perhaps environmental, like the portion of their budget that's in the general fund, if they could split positions like into solid waste or environmental as long as they were eligible positions and uses. So that's what you see in some of the transfer columns. So not just in between departments in the general fund, but also transferred off in order to relieve the general fund in a budget deficit. All right, going to keep going. We will bring you the position list. I actually have it with me, but I'm told that there might be an error, so I'm not gonna be able to pass it out. So I'll get it to you after this. But eliminations in the general fund, this chart represents the stage in which that happened. So we did have a little bit happening in the 1%. More departments put things up for elimination as part of their 3% balancing strategies. And then after our values came in and we had to keep reducing, you see the third column where we sort of took 15 more positions. And that's how they break down by department. And again, I'll give you all the position titles that are associated with these reductions. So 51 positions are recommended for reduction or elimination from the budget. These are vacant positions.

I do have a question on the police line. We're adding 77, but you're reducing six and another 10. I'm just trying to understand that math.

Yeah, let's see. I think we're adding civil service and reducing civilian positions that are vacant, that sometimes have high vacancy rate in areas like data reporting or things of that nature. But I'll get you the position listing. That'd be great. But it'd be civilian positions. Yeah, so sometimes when a department's been running at a high vacancy rate for a long time and they're not necessarily seeing service level impacts or they just have a ton of trouble getting to their full authorized strength, in this budget we've recommended let's just take off those extra two or extra three and remove the budget.

And to clarify that, is it y'all recommending it or the police department?

I mean, it just depends. So in this case, it was not the police department. It was the CMO staff in the final budget balancing since it's happening in that other column. Yeah, so the lab did a study of the vacancies in conjunction with the CMO and the ACMs, and we pulled how long things have been vacant, what is the turnover rate, what's the redundancy on the team, like is it one of two or is it one of 10, that kind of thing. And so we also have some service level impacts that we gathered from the departments once we were able to share which positions were up for elimination or freeze that we'll share. Okay. I have an answer on parks let's see these are athletic program assistance that are currently vacant, they are budgeted at a level that's been too low to attract quality candidates. And so that's produced like prolonged vacancies and so these are part time and it's in order to fund six at a higher FTE so that they can perhaps attract the right kind of candidate for the athletic program for parks that help. Great Thank you team. All right, let's see, vacancy freezes. Okay, so these are the half year and full year positions that will continue in the hiring freeze that we're in now. So as a reminder right now, pretty much all departments are in a hiring freeze, not civil service personnel, but everyone else, unless there's like a special circumstance of some kind. And so we are proposing to continue that freeze into fiscal year 27 for certain positions. Again, these went through that, they're a product of that same vacancy analysis that I just mentioned. And so you have 92 frozen for the first six months of the year. And that just functionally means we're only loading the budget for like half of the cost of the position. And then another 29 frozen for the full year. And so we have not funded those positions in the budget. So I think, I mean, ideally, like if we're performing better than we expect, then perhaps some of those full year freezes can be half year freezes or we can continue to revisit through the monthly financial reporting process. But right now that's what's creating the savings. Like I mentioned, we gathered service level impacts from departments and these are just some of the themes that emerged. These are the things that I'm sure that you're talking about when you say we get phone calls about these things. So longer wait times, increased backlog sort of across different lines of service. Certainly a lot of departments thought their customers would be potentially less satisfied because of those reasons. And then in some case it leads to a reduced span of control in certain field teams. And then on the internal side, we worry about overtime for civilian employees that are working past their hours to account for an increased workload and burnout. Sometimes regulatory risks come along with eliminating or freezing positions. We'd obviously work to mitigate all of those. Delay in revenue collection, so when we eliminate or freeze things like administrative technicians that do billing, perhaps there's a longer lead time on collecting revenue. And same thing with records. And this is just kind of another way to look at those themes. What I'd say here rather than reading it to you is that I think I try to skew things like to the positive even in this budget. And so I think a continuation of the budget work for fiscal year 27 will be the lab and the city manager's office working with departments to try to lean into process improvement and the use of technology to try to make ourselves more efficient where possible. But certainly most departments are indicating like, yeah, we don't love it, but we can probably manage for six months into continuing the freeze. extended vacancies and certainly eliminations start to create more of an impact. And when we talk about staffing in particular and service level impacts from cutting positions, we thought it might be helpful to sort of benchmark ourselves against other big cities in Texas in terms of staffing again. So CPE created this great graphic with some data that we pulled and it shows our staffing level compared to the cities in the table. The very last one is Houston. The logo, you can't tell exactly, but you can tell from the population probably that that's Houston. But if you look kind of at that fourth row, it's general fund staff per thousand residents, like kind of that per capita basis. So you see this is fiscal year 26 numbers, so prior to any kind of budget changes in any of these cities. And I think the story is that we run fairly lean for the size that we are. So if you look at Dallas, for instance, which is not very much bigger than us now, their general fund staff per thousand residents is 8.64 compared to our 5.44. So it's just a view, you know, a data view like we like to do to benchmark ourselves and kind of see where we sit.

I have a question.

Okay, so I appreciate the data and the comparison. But what does that really mean? And application? What is what does that look like for our residents? What does that look like for us as an organization? Yeah, what is that really communicating when you're comparing apples to apples?

Yeah, I mean, you can take a stab at this too. I think for us, we like to see, you know, if we hear in the news that Dallas is cutting 300 positions and like Fort Worth is freezing or cutting, you know, 150 positions, like what's the denominator of those two? So are we better off? Are we already running very lean with lean teams that are potentially more apt to burn out and like workload than some of our comparator cities where we compare our like our fees and our rates and that kind of thing? And so I think we just like to see the view of where we are and what the staff impacts might be if we continue to cut from a team that's already quite operationally efficient and lean.

What I hear you saying is we are already cut to the bone, so we shouldn't be looking at further cuts, but what does that mean on the day-to-day basis, just like if we're not looking from that as a budgetary standpoint, which I know is the basis of this conversation, but when we're talking about operationally, I mean, what does that mean? I mean, how does that translate?

I mentioned when I was doing my portion of the presentation where we stopped on the cuts, and part of that is that we from my perspective and from management's perspective, additional cuts are really gonna have a severe impact to service delivery. And this chart just kind of provides a macro look compared to other cities that basically do the same things that we do to determine how efficient are we operating compared to other cities. And from this view, we're extremely efficient. Just from that back row view, to ensure that we're not, if we were the other way, if we were seven, eight, then we're doing some things wrong and we gotta correct those. But that's the intent of this is just to show that we're already efficient. Additional cuts are gonna really have service level impacts that I think our citizens over the last 10 years especially have become accustomed to. to a certain level of service. And part of the whole budget that we tried to accomplish was to try to minimize that as much as possible. And at the end of the day, if we go from our perspective, if we go any further in the cuts, then we're gonna have severe impacts. I was here whenever recommendations were made to close libraries. At first, it was a good idea. Even the council thought it was a good idea until all the residents showed up that lived in the neighborhoods and all the libraries were put back into the budget, in the budget process. Um, so that's, that's all what this means to us. It's just another way of looking at it to determine whether or not are we, are we doing things? Are we in a good place or not? you can make an argument that we should be, that number should be higher.

That's the argument I want to make.

You can make that argument.

That's probably not the argument we made at this table at this time, but it does look comparatively, because either, to me, I can look at a converse and say, are we running too lean, right, as compared to other municipalities that are similar, not necessarily in size, per se, but definitely in type.

I agree. You could look at it from both ways. That's why we're providing the information so that you could see it and whatever perspective you would, you can either say we're running really efficiently and we're doing it well, or we're too lean and we're not providing the services we should.

i appreciate what you're trying to do here i think maybe adding on to what council member hall says this is great but i think it's missing metrics too of what i've seen a billion dollar budget in austin but what do they outsource versus what we outsource it's not really an apples to apples without some of those metrics i think too again i appreciate what you're trying to do but maybe they don't have ft's dedicated or we don't have ft's dedicated to something because we've outsourced it or something like that i just think there's

This is just general funding.

I know. I appreciate what I was trying to do. I think there's a lot of missing metrics to do an apples to apples comparison.

Any other comments or questions? On to enterprise funds. Let's do it. Okay.

enterprise funds um a quick note on fee changes here uh and i may have moved this slide so if it might be in your packet later i can't remember um we'll get to fee increases because we're about to go through all these things in enterprise and special revenue so there are nine departments recommending fee changes you heard the those like rates that affect every resident on the water bill you heard that presentation in june we'll still go over the information today but there are a number of other fees too, as you know that the city charges. We review those on an annual basis as part of budget development and present those to you and adopt them alongside the budget. We have a budget response teed up for next week that details these fees. It unfortunately is hundreds of pages long like it always is because It's these long tables of fees. But many departments have fees or rates. Some are governed at the state level in some kind of relevant code. Some we choose based on what the market is or the service we're trying to cover, that kind of thing. So there's a number of drivers that cause departments to re-evaluate fees. So enterprise funds are those that, again, operate kind of more like a business. They're providing the direct service or good to the consumer or the rate payer who pays. And so the city charges rates for these services, and then the revenue goes into these separate operating funds, which are restricted sort of for that purpose. We operate five funds on this basis, and you see those here growing by about 10% as a group. So water is our largest, and it is growing by 8.7%. Just a reminder, that does not translate to the increase in the rate. I know Chris is always careful to say that. But their budget increases are driven by operating and maintenance and capital costs. Obviously, you know the water utility is a regional utility and growing quickly. And so this budget funds major capital projects, which we talked about earlier, addresses water loss and fire lines, and continues to encourage conservation and water use by the way that they're building their tiered rate structure. And we will, just as a spoiler, look at the like kind of what the water bill or all the fees stack up and look like later. As a reminder from what we talked about in June. So solid waste, you're familiar with, funds all our residential solid waste collection, all the items that you see there. And this budget does increase rates for both residential and commercial solid waste services, as well as the landfill environmental fee. This helps to support not just annual rising costs, but also that long range planning function of solid waste. And I know I'm going quick through these, because I promised I'd be quick. But just stop me if you have a question. stormwater so stormwater management they are continuing on their they're doing another five percent fee increase to continue implementation of their capital program this is still focused on flood mitigation projects but but for fiscal year 27 in particular part of their five percent also expands their capacity to participate in partnership projects and expand channel inspections you may remember some of that from jennifer's presentation in june We have Aviation who runs our system of airports at Meacham and Sphinx and Perot Field. And so the new things in their budget aside from like their capital obligations are the transfer that Jay mentioned where they will be covering the cost of the eligible aircraft rescue and firefighting costs and fire. So that helps to relieve that cost from the general fund by transferring in their revenue per the FAA eligible costs. And then they're also adding a maintenance worker in their budget. This just helps as their operation continues to expand to continue with that consistent maintenance and inspection. And then our last enterprise fund is parking. This fund is also remaining self-supporting and operates and maintains all the city-owned parking assets. So the garages, the metered spaces, and the surface lots, their budget is investing in some capital technology for the garages. But other than that, it's just like O&M and a little bit capital-driven in that 11% growth.

Let's see. Christy Ann, going back to solid waste, and we had a whole presentation on the rates and the increase of the rate for residential and commercial solid waste services, that the rates that we're recommending today do not fully cover the cost of the service. Is that correct?

I believe that is correct. Yes. Val is giving me an emphatic nod. It does not cover the cost of service.

You probably don't have it off the top of your head, but what the deficit is?

No. We can... Okay.

Thank you.

I'll flip back into the budget book too and see if it's there. All right. Special revenue funds. See, we're moving right along. So these are funds that are, they're part of our governmental fund structure too, and they're used to account for revenues legally restricted, again, for specific purposes. The biggest of these is CCPD, and I know you all as CCPD board will hear more about that budget next week. We also have all the public events funds here, and EMS, those are sort of the top three. Growing, they always kind of grow at, or in this case, fall at varying rates. So total growth of this fund grouping is about 3%. CCBD is funded by that half cent sales tax. So Council Member Hill, this is the half cent revenue, 145. Well, it's not quite that because they have some other revenue sources too, but. That's the primary revenue source for CCPD.

Sorry, I'm gonna interrupt you real quick. Yeah, go ahead. So we can assume that's the same number for Trinity Metro. They're getting $145 million this year.

You should probably assume less because CCPD gets reimbursements from the school districts and stuff too. But if we pull just the sales tax portion of CCPD, you could assume that it's the same.

Okay, thank you.

CCPD is adding some people, so school resource officers to support Fort Worth ISD. I don't know what schools, and I was afraid you're gonna ask me that, so I'm just gonna tell you that I don't know what schools, but I will find out, or you'll hear about it next week. It also adds four traffic control technicians to staff these stinger trucks, or I think sometimes they call them blocker trucks, I think, which they serve as traffic barricades at accidents. This is a conversation ongoing between police and fire for that function, its dispatch, and the operation of those trucks. The CCPD budget's responsible for training and outfitting recruits, so those new positions you see in general fund are trained and outfitted here, and then upon graduating from the academy, they move into field training, and at that point, they're moving over to the general fund. So for the new ones, we won't see that impact until fiscal year 28 and beyond. And then the police department had a COPS hiring grant that was in the general fund, which is required by the grant. But we're also required to keep those positions as the grant expires. And so those seven positions are coming on to CCPD in fiscal year 27 since the grant is over.

Mr. Ann, may I ask a question? Under the bullet of adding two SRO officers to support Fort Worth ISD, When did that request come in?

I don't know.

And what I'm speaking of is relativistically. That is under Superintendent Molinar or the current superintendent?

Oh, I don't know. We can find out.

Here comes a police person. That came in during the spring, and I believe that was under the previous superintendent, but we're verifying now to ensure that's in line with the current superintendent's vision. So we're waiting for an answer on that. We'll have that before CCPD. Yes, sir. Great. Thank you, Chief Carville.

Mayor, if I may. Also, for CCPD, I know we have a presentation coming up, but Mayor and Michael, we were in the meeting this morning about the ranger program and enforcement program that was not included in this year's budget. But I think it's going to be very important because we are seeing a lot of increase in public safety concerns at the various parks, at least in District 11, I'm sure across the city. So I just was wondering why that wasn't approved. And if there was any way we can make that work.

All right. All right, moving on to public events. So public events, actually a number of funds, a group of funds that are the culture and tourism funds funded by primarily hotel tax and revenues from the convention center. This year, their budget is decreasing, as you would imagine, because of the transition of Will Rogers to third party management, the qualified management agreement, as well as the phase we're in on Fort Worth Convention Center is taking some of the main spaces offline. And so the revenues come down in fiscal year 27. So that's kind of the main story there. EMS, this budget includes that EMS subsidy from general fund fire. The subsidy amount coming in from the general fund is 30.2 million up from 20. And then we have some increases here for anticipated cost of overtime. And again, kind of similar theme, repair and maintenance of ambulances and other EMS fleet assets are included in this budget. And just as a reminder, this also includes the budget for Office of the Medical Director. There's some positions in FMS, HR, and an attorney that also supports and hits this budget. So there's multiple, in your budget book, there's multiple departments listed under EMS, similar to CCPD who has, you know, there's other departments who have pieces of it. EMS is adding two positions to help with financial or fiscal support, and another two in OMD for clinical care and coordination that Dr. Jarvis submitted in the budget.

Can I ask a question about overtime? I know that the use of overtime in our first responders is just a way that we do business because at some point it's cheaper to pay overtime than it is to hire a new employee, but $6.4 million seems like a lot in overtime. What are we doing? to right-size. I know we talked about right-sizing budgets, and I saw earlier you were talking about FIRE and right-sizing overtime, but simply capping overtime isn't the answer. It's reducing the amount of overtime needed, which is really an increase in employees.

It's really in this case, for EMS, it's reducing the amount of turnover. Part of the overtime projection is based on the turnover that we've had. So trying to reduce the amount of turnover that occurs on the EMS side through the, part of it through the contract on pay and positions and those kind of things.

So this overtime is intended to reduce turnover?

No, no, that's the estimate for the cost of overtime. based on the turnover that we've been- Gotcha. If we reduce turnover, then there's people filling those positions with regular pay versus overtime pay. That's how you reduce overtime as you go along, by having less vacant spots.

Sure. If we're adding it here, is this being added into the contract?

This is being added. It's not part of the contract. Overtime is a line item. It's an estimate for the budget.

Okay. But if we focused on reducing that turnover, and I think that there are some systemic issues, like pay is one of them. Right. And I know we're working on that.

That's what we address in the, if we address that in the contract and we're able to reduce the vacancy rate, this number will come down.

Okay. Okay. Thank you.

Or should come down.

All right, environmental protection, another special revenue fund. This is the fund that provides litter abatement, street sweeping, illegal dumping, environmental investigations. They're continuing on their course of increasing the environmental protection fee and really building the solvency of this fund. So as a reminder, this is just a flat amount per household and it's moving from 225 to 250. Their budget is mostly flat as you can see, but they'll continue to use Street sweepers will really enhance the use of that program litter control up spire crews and similar efforts that you're familiar with for litter abatement and environmental quality and In Gulf, we have Pecan Valley and Meadowbrook and Rockwood. And we have some growth here because they're adding positions for food and beverage, a sales associate, and a maintenance position. They also are planning to take over the food service in City Hall Kitchen down Oh wait, we are downstairs here. And so the budget reflects that plan. I think that's still being developed. And just as a reminder, the golf fund is no longer subsidized by the general fund. So if you've been around a minute, you know that for a while the general fund subsidized the golf fund, but they are now totally financed from their own charges for service. Way to go golfers. And then finally, our last little one is community tree planting. And the only change here is actually just the fact that we're debt funding VRF. And so their transfer out to VRF is going away. I'm gonna pause here for this recap. And again, we've shown some of this before, but it's a good reminder. This is a year over year comparison of the average, like in quotes, average taxpayer charges and how they might compare. Now, one of the reasons I had the city secretary change the presentation over is because I think your version has a little bit of a rounding error in the average tax bill. So I'm gonna forward you this one after, this is the correct version. So average tax bill with the recommended tax rate increase to 70.2 is reducing on an annual basis of 1670. So it's a little bit less than the number Jay showed earlier. And then you see the charges stacked up for stormwater, water and wastewater, solid waste and environmental. And sorry, I got lost. in my environmental fee. Did I misstate the environmental fee? Where's Cody? Maybe it's $3 and not $2.50, sorry. So annual variance on the tax bill reducing by $17, resident charges through the others stacked at $85. So total resident charges, you'll see the impact about $5.70 on a monthly basis. Now the tax bill is not divided by month, but just as far as apples to apples comparison. Okay, I think this is our last section, so hang in there with me. Internal service funds, as a reminder, they finance the services provided from one department to another in the city. So the departments utilize the service, and then there's interdepartmental billing that occurs. We have five funds operating on this basis, and as a group they're growing by about 12.5%. So, we've talked a lot about group health in the last six months or so. And so, you'll see the budget here growing by about 17 percent. This fund administers the health insurance for employees and their dependents, as well as life insurance. As a reminder, I don't know if I've said this, the 40 percent increase that's kind of flowing through the budget is after the other interventions that we've made on GLP-1s and some of the other strategies that Kristen's presenting. So, those are all a, like, combo strategy thing. The 40% is calculated as the need after those interventions, just as a note there. The increase in the 40% I mentioned on the general fund side was about $14 million. Across all funds, about $22.6 million. That's the impact of that 40%. In IT, they manage our infrastructure and systems and services related to IT. And their growth is mostly contractual. We see a lot of growth in IT contracts and some capital, but they are adding one position in the budget, which is due to a need for an addition to their existing team that's risk and security. Fleet, we talked about some of the fleet themes. So most of their growth here is budget on fuel and vehicle outside repairs, maintenance and parts. So we're just seeing a lot of inflation in that area. So of this 8.3 million growth, you see about 6.3 million is fleet maintenance, repair parts and fuel. They have some planned capital as well to improve the James Avenue Service Center. And then risk is responsible for maintaining the commercial and self-insurance programs and safety risks for the city. They are mostly flat, but they are adding some positions in both property and casualty. And then those workers' comp positions that are the two to assist in day-to-day processing.

And I think we're up.

almost done finally capital project service fund this is funded through or managed through the tpw department they provide engineering services for other city departments and so they are adding both some administrative and technical positions that will help strengthen the capital project delivery and try to again where possible shift our reliance on third-party staffing and consultants and so you see some position ads here those positions charge to the projects So similar table on position movement, but for all those other funds. And so you see how those break down here. So more new positions across these non-general funds. And then you see the reduction in public events, which is related to Will Rogers, and a couple of transfers here. We always update the capital improvement plan as part of the budget. So you'll see for fiscal year 27, the total capital improvement plan across all of the different CIPs is $1.03 billion. And here's PAYGO, so remember we have a reduction in PAYGO, 2.8 million tied to the static tax rate. The majority of PAYGO goes to TPW, 82%. You can see the blue line is 26 adopted and then the recommended budget. So TPW's actually slightly increased, mostly really flat, and then some of the reductions in the other buckets there. property management. You see the change for the NIP in neighborhood services. IT is up. They're actually funded not, they're funded kind of differently. Parks maintenance goes slightly down to 3.7 million and then we have that small bucket for community partnerships. So that's the total, I think. 3.3 billion in operating, 1.03 billion in capital for a $4.35 billion budget. My last notes, I think, are about our public hearings. So this year we are recommending to change our public hearing practice. So we'd be having our budget public hearing on August 25th. Now we'll still be in the middle of public engagement. So residents in Fort Worth are lucky. They have a lot of opportunities to speak up about the budget. But based on Texas Municipal League, like best practices and sort of what other cities do, we're just holding that hearing a bit earlier so that citizens have a chance or residents have a chance to comment on the budget in a way that we could actually act on their comments. In years past, we've had the budget public hearing right before the meeting to adopt the budget. So we'll be holding it on August 25th. The proposed tax rate again is 70.2 cents. When we notice the hearing, the typical practice is to notice at the highest allowable tax rate. So I just don't want anyone to think we're engaging in any trickery. This is because we maybe don't expect to adopt a rate higher than Jay's proposed rate. That will be up to you and your decisions. But we submit that hearing notice to reflect the highest tax rate. That's because whatever we notice, we can't go past it it would have it would trigger all the noticing requirements again and there's strict timing and so posting at that maximum allowable rate gives us the flexibility if for some reason council wanted to go up by a tenth of a penny and we noticed it at 70.2 we'd have to start all over again with the notice our taxpayer impact statement which is required by law will reflect the true proposed rate of 70.2 unless you know we're having to change that later down the line And then the public hearing on the tax rate will still be September 15th, and that's the day that we'll adopt the budget as well and the tax rate. We start budget community engagement tomorrow in District 7. These are in district order, so we'll do District 7 tomorrow, and then we pick up next Tuesday, and we have really one almost daily through that next week. All the content is on Connect Fort Worth, so feel free to send people there, and I'm sure CPE will be pushing out some information as well for you to use. The Fort Worth Labs budget page also has all of these videos from work sessions, even the ones we did before, like in April, May, and June. All the budget responses are public. They're all there kind of compiled in one place if you'd like to direct people there. On Connect Fort Worth, people can also submit questions about the budget and those come to CPE and get filtered to the lab and others. And then before, I just want to say thank you to the budget team and all of the fiscal coordinators who work on budget, not just during the season, but all year round. So I would say if you're a Fort Worth Lab budget person or even a fiscal coordinator in a department, maybe stand up. Just stand up and shake it out a little bit. Budget, budget. They all have their laptops on their lap. Nobody stood up. Everybody stand up. Right now, I'm directing you from the podium. Everyone can hear. Okay. And shake it out.

Oh, there you go.

We have a very dedicated team, and sometimes budget years are harder than others. This is certainly a more challenging budget year, but it does not negate their hard work and all of the work, I know you guys know this, all the work they do to get us to a very complex budget. So thanks for allowing me to thank them.

Thank you, Christiane, I appreciate that. Creston's from Council at this time.

Yes, Council Member Nettles. The $5.31 monthly is what the residents is gonna see different on their bill.

On the water bill?

Is that just the water bill?

Yeah. Let me see, let me get back to my spot.

What page are you on, Chris? I'm 61, but I think her is, Christiane may have been indifferent.

61? So yeah, it'll be 709. a $7.09 change for the average like sort of usage and average resident based on that taxable value up above. We just sort of offset it with the tax bill just for like a total picture. But obviously the tax bill is a separate, you know, a separate bill or separate entity than the water bill. So as far as resident charges that they get on the month to month basis, the monthly variance would be $7 more.

And the yearly is about $85? Correct. Okay, with also the tax bill being separate?

Yes, the tax bill, yeah, just comes once a year.

Anybody else?

Mary, if I could, I also, she beat me to the punch thanking staff and thanking all the department heads and CMO group. It's been a long process. in the last month especially, trying to put everything together to get to this balanced budget. And I want to thank you all for all the meetings that we had before to kind of get us here. And we look forward to working with you to come to a final conclusion. We have another budget workshop next Tuesday, and we've got one scheduled for the following Friday morning. So any feedback you'd like, y'all would like to provide on whether you think we need to have both, both workshops or if next Tuesday suffices, we can take the other ones off, give you back that time, so. Thank you.

And I know we had several budget responses today requested. There are likely more as you go through this, so just send that to staff so that they can prepare those in upcoming budget sessions, because they'll send them out to the entire council. Any other questions or comments to conclude today's budget work session? No, reiterate, thank you guys and the entire budget team for working so hard. We appreciate you getting us to this point and we'll keep working. Thank you so much. Meeting is adjourned. Thank you.

Amen.

What's up, y'all?

How are you? Where'd it go? Yeah. Thank you.

Do we have a quorum?

Oh, and then Martinez. So for the fleet record for Maryland, there's employees back there to be able to come up to the podium. Okay. Do we have

Okay, so the time is 325 and I call the Property Management and Environmental Services Committee to order. Our first agenda item is briefings and we will hear from Wendy Turpin, an overview of Brownfields Workshop held on April 23rd.

It's moved on me. Wendy Turpin, Environmental Services Assistant Director. I just wanted to share a wonderful experience that we were able to provide with our brownfields program. So our brownfield program uses a lot of grants from the EPA. And with that grant, we were able to provide a workshop and get about 70 attendees to come. And as part of this workshop regarding brownfields and teaching others how to access all of the programs, We were also able to share a tour of the convention center that is being abated right now with asbestos, especially in that saucer area. So we were able to take that and share it as a learning experience. It was a very good program. It was very well attended. And I just wanted to give a little kudos to the staff, especially the environmental program manager, Julie Ragland, who put that together with her team, and share with you the fabulous opportunities that we have sharing our knowledge of brownfields with the rest of the state of Texas and you can see, we had several attendees from out of state and they were wonderful to provide education to our our attendees it was a great program, so I just want to give them kudos.

Thank you, and the great job does anybody have any questions.

Just thank you Wendy, it is a wonderful program and event that your team put on for the Community and developers and thanks for your time and for staffs time.

Thank you for see this happening again next year.

We tried to do it every few years. Okay. Thank you.

We will move on to the overview of proposed changes to the Fort Worth city code chapter 12.5 presented by Dr. Wittenberg from environmental services. Dr. Wittenberg.

absolutely good afternoon and thank you for a few minutes to discuss our changes to 12.5 you hear of spring cleaning i call it summer scrubbing we take an opportunity to look at our existing code of ordinances and make some recommended changes for getting things back in alignment or from lessons we've learned recently so real quick slides So just real quick, we have chapter 12.5 is our environmental protection and compliance chapter within the overall city code. And going through each of these, there's multiple articles. And this does impact several different departments, TPW stormwater, water department, and several others, including environmental services. So as we work with our law department to make these modifications, these are just relatively straightforward text amendments. First thing, of course, is definitions. We just want to get those reorganized and put into the right sections rather than the overall chapter. With respect to Jennifer Dyke's team and the stormwater protection team, we also took this opportunity to remove some redundant definitions, update our notice to our new location at 100 Fort Worth Trail, and just clarify that TPW Stormwater does have the authority for stormwater utility services. Living right along, we have learned a lot of lessons about municipal setting designations, and we wanted to take an opportunity to build in some leeway as we work with developers and the community as these applications come forward. So you see a couple of time changes. Again, these applications come to the city before they move on to the TCEQ. And so we wanted to expand some opportunities for staff to engage with the public and the developer 45 to 90 for that comment period. And then also moving in 60 days to 120 days for the actual public hearing itself. Moving right along, we have the requirement for currently in the code, it says that there are unnecessary for six hard copies. In today's digital age, we just prefer that people bring an electronic format whenever they provide service. Also we're updating it so that whenever someone provides an application that goes to the city secretary's office as well as our office, and we moved away from the library as a place and really allowing our city secretary's office to make those notifications. The other component is we want to allow for more time for city staff to process these components and we want to make sure that our development community is fully ready when they come to the city for a letter of support from the city with an ordinance or a resolution. So we're asking for some opportunity for the developers to bring their full application for the TCQ ready before they approach the city and that they've also had time to meet with stakeholders. Moving right along in the water section, Chris is here if there's any specific questions, but I appreciate some alignment here. Working on the public drinking water side, they wanna really just lean into backflow prevention assembly and making sure that those technical components are in alignment and that those inspectors that are performing those services are fully registered with the city and that we have the opportunity to revoke those items if those individuals are not performing those inspections up to par. We also want to make some adjustments to industrial wastewater just to be in alignment as state and federal laws change. We don't want to have to go back into city code and make changes each time and really work to just make sure that all of those permittees know what they need to take care of with respect to wastewater permits. moving right along to solid waste and recycling again we have a existing city code that's in been in text for quite some time so there's items that are listed as acceptable for recycling that maybe at one time in the early 90s were acceptable but are no longer acceptable or vice versa so we took this opportunity to update that list of recycling components move into removing some obsolete waste yard waste language to allow for that full collection And then we also want to take an opportunity to clarify our environmental protection fee rate structure and classifications. As well as just honor some update to grant privilege, so if someone does not pay their their quarterly fee or does not pay a fee to us, we need that opportunity to go back and reclaim that as an offense. Last section is fill material. You can think of your favorite stockpile around the city perhaps as construction continues to boom and so we want to make sure we're working closely with DJ and Development Services for some alignment here. So you can see we're just working to clarify fill material, talk about maximum heights and maximum time limits for how long those stockpiles can exist outside of an active construction permit. or when the project is complete. We want the project to be completed and then we want that material to move on. And we also want to make sure there's alignment between our field material with respect to a permit requirement versus our grading requirements. So there's alignment there. And then finally make sure there's understanding that a permit is required. It's not simply a registration. So in closing, you'll see this a couple of additional times. So we're working with our law department to finalize text. We'll have an IR that comes back to detail some of this on August 25th in a couple of weeks. And then we'll also plan to bring that draft ordinance forward for adoption by full council vote on September 29th. An opportunity to present this.

Dr. Wittenberg, does anybody have any questions? All right. Well, if people don't know, this is an example of some of the text amendments that were included in the bond proposal so they can see firsthand what those are now.

Absolutely.

Thank you. Thank you. And we are going to move the staff recognitions for environmental services to the next property management meeting. And so now we will hear from Marilyn Marvin, property management staff recognitions. Marilyn.

And while she's coming up, I would say we appreciate having this time during committee meetings to recognize staff that we sometimes don't have the opportunity to recognize in a public setting. So I appreciate Marilyn bringing her team here for this today.

Marilyn Marvin, Director of Property Management. This is our facilities team led by Aaron. Raise your hand, Aaron. Most everybody thinks that our facilities team's just taking care of maintenance. What they don't realize is they do construction as well. so that we don't always have to go out to do construction. And we've had a lot of moving parts in the last many months. As we have the Monroe Street properties on the market, we've had to move people out. So they have, this team has renovated one of the storefronts in Taylor Street Garage to move sister cities out of 908 Monroe and give them a new home. We're moving Southside Community Center to Hazel Harvey Peace, and this team is who has renovated the second floor to move code up to the second floor, renovating the first floor to become the new Southside Community Center at Hazel Harvey Peace. They are renovating the second floor of 200 Texas Street for Central Patrol Division, and they are renovating the 18th floor to move Environmental Services from Monroe to the 18th floor in this building. And so I just wanted them to know how much I appreciate, this is extra work outside of their normal day-to-day job, and they are very rarely recognized. And so I wanted y'all to be aware of the great work that this team does.

Thank you guys. And thank you for the amazing work that you do across our city and for making our facilities look great also. And if we could take a picture. Council members, would you like to join us? All right, are there any future agenda items from? committee no i do have one though so i would like staff to look at establishing a vacant property registry to combat nuisance properties and power code enforcement and stimulate economic growth for the city of fort worth and so i have done some research and would like to propose what that might look like and share that with staff and so is there a need for executive session nope if not we are now adjourned at 3 36. thank you guys

Thank you.

Good afternoon, everybody. It is roughly 17 till 4 o'clock on August the 11th, and I call to order the Community Development Committee meeting to order. So, first item of business, the approval of the June 9th, 2026 meeting minutes. I'll move. Motion?

I'll move. Second. And a second from Deborah. Is that you, Deborah?

That's me. Okay. Any discussion? Corrections? Seeing and hearing none, all in favor decay by saying aye. Aye. All right, no nays. No nays, passes. Gets us to our briefings. Who's the lucky individual, Chris, to give us something along the lines of eager mitigation?

Can you hear me? Thank you, okay. So maybe we'll bring the tone down after that lengthy budget presentation, right?

Maybe not, because they're all over my neighborhood.

We will definitely get to that in the areas they are. So Mayor Portillo and Council Members, thank you for having us today. My name is Chris McAllister, Assistant Code Compliance Director, specifically for Animal Control. Behind me we have Teresa Thomason. She's the Deputy Director for Parks and Recreation. Her and I are going to be pitching this together.

So, move right in.

So here's a purpose overview. Today we're going to talk about seasonal e-grid impacts, how they affect the neighborhoods. We're going to summarize briefly the coordinated mitigation efforts, review some legal framework, what guides our response, and then highlight some activities that we've done for this 26th season. A little history. Each year the egrets fly in. Typically we'll see the night herons come in. They come in as scout birds. What they're doing is they're looking for the thick canopy trees, some water sources, and they will start nesting. And then the other egrets will come in and kind of follow suit. We typically see them come in around February, March. They will leave September, August timeframe. And then those that overstay their welcome leave around October. And so this year we are hoping to get them out sooner than later. they're attracted to again is the mature trees once they do nest our efforts our mitigation opportunities go down but the the impact of the neighborhoods that you see on the slide is the odors the noise the damage to private property and what we see with those is increased complaints from the citizens and the residents okay so moving on the legal framework So our response, the city's response is guided by state and federal framework. specifically the Federal Migratory Treaty Act, as well as the Texas Parks and Wildlife Code. Once they nest, which is eggs or hatchlings, again, our opportunities become limited. At that point, it is simply maintenance, if you will, much like we did in some properties for the 26th and the 25th season, which is why deterrence is always key. We do hold a federal permit. I have one person in the city, it's Christopher Lorette, And Animal Control, he is the only permit holder. Every year we apply for that permit and we receive it. Sometimes a little longer than we'd like to see, but we do receive the permit. And that establishes how many nests and eggs we can disrupt that year. Our goal is always deterrence. Our goal is never to allow the permit. Because what we'll find is what happened in a few years where we run out of the permit. You and I, sir, we had that conversation a year and a half ago. So again, even the federal government, when they're issuing these permits out, it's very clear in the application that deterrence is key. We can't get the permit unless we have deterrence plan in place. And so that's one of the things leading into this season, and you and I talked extensively, Councilman, End of last season, the 25 season, we determined that we didn't want to rinse and repeat, which we feel like we've been doing for years. And that rinse and repeat is we've been reactive. So this year we took a more proactive approach and we created a mitigation strategy. That strategy is a coordination between code, parks, environmental, and communications as well, as well as the residents. The residents play a big part of this. So we went into it with a mindset of deterrence. And so again, we partnered with the residents, specifically in D4 as a major help, because D4 is right on city property, which we're gonna get to some maps in a second. I'm gonna go ahead and get those now.

So Chris, before we move on, not being an expert like Charlie over here on Egrets, What number typically does the permit prescribe for us to disrupt their? Yes, I mean.

So every year it changes. And I actually brought the numbers because it's a pretty lengthy permit. What I'll tell you is some of them didn't change and some of them did change. And again, we can get in the specifics and I can give you the exact numbers. But again, historically, when we've relied on those permit numbers, regardless of what it is, the permit gets exhausted. Once that permit's exhausted, We have no more options. We can't scare them. We can't make the noises. We can't chase them away. We are just in maintenance mode, which we see cleaning streets, picking up limbs, dead birds. That becomes maintenance. We never want to get there. So a part of our education to the residents is we need to be preemptive on this. Keep your yard clean. Not getting nests out from the season that just ended. Keep your trees trimmed. You know, it's things like this that we educate on. And this year, part of our strategy is we created some deterrence kits. We put together 250 kits as a pilot program, and it's been a success with those kits as well. So, that answer your question, sir?

Yeah, I mean, you know, we can, I'm just curious about the numbers. You can share those offline. I know it's involved. And I can send it to you.

I have it all in an email. And again, if you'd like, we can discuss those here. It doesn't change that our primary goal is deterrence, always. So this is a map of the 26 rookeries, the nesting sites that were active. We had a number of calls from other locations in the city where we would get the calls that the birds are nesting, they're landing, and we respond to all of those. What we found in all of the cases is it might have been a bird or two in the tree, but they proactively called us, which is good, because if we saw any need for a deterrence, we would do it then, or education. But what you see here are the three active rookeries for this season. Six and 10 on Marco and Boaz, they are still active, but they are stabilized, meaning there's no new nests coming in.

Birds are leaving as the hatchlings leave the nest, we'll see the birds leaving.

So we expect six and 10 to start drawing down later this month in September. District four, city property, that's the one where we had a lot of tree trimming and pruning. I'll let Teresa cover that in a bit. That was, I think, district four on Teal and Chaco was a good example of the coordination of the plan. Because we, being that it's city property, we had a lot more latitude and flexibility to do things. We can go on private property with our permit. It just gets challenging. We have to have the permission of the property owner. If there's contractors, we have to be on site. It just gets a little challenging. So being that Tillichaco was city property, we were able to just kind of dump the plan at that problem.

But again, District 4 has all been vacated last time we were on site.

Again, 6 and 10 are still active and they are in maintenance mode. What we see, and I should have covered this two slides ago, the nesting period is about three to five months, right? And what's important to note is that just because you chase a bird away for an egret, from a nest that it's building, which you can still do as long as there's no eggs or hatchlings, you can disturb the nest, it's habitat mitigation, they will move to another site and they will start nesting again. Or if we take one through permit, like I take a nest with eggs, they're not just gonna fly somewhere else in Texas, they're gonna pick another tree, they're gonna start nesting again. So that's why... Oh, sorry. That's why continued deterrence is key here. That's what it is, it's Paul's fault. So now we're gonna get into the park. Part of the presentation, I'm gonna call up Theresa. If there's any questions that come up after, I can always come back.

Thank you. Hi, Theresa Chalmerson, Deputy Director for Parks. So here you have just a map of the completed tree pruning, I can't talk today, and identified egret root areas. So the highlighted in yellow is what we did here in 26 and what's in 25 last year. You left me with a remote that doesn't work.

Okay, here we go.

So our forestry crew were the ones that were responsible for going out and doing a great job doing the tree pruning this year and last year. We did, you can see between the two, increase the amount of trees pruned, but we also went a little deeper in the trees. So that's why it cost a little bit more, because we took a little bit more of the tree out to help kind of mitigate that problem. and expanded pruning into the targeted neighborhoods. So my sides are much easier than Chris's. So I guess we'll stand for any questions that you might have.

Well, here's one, and I'll relate it to the budget. I don't have my budget materials right in front of me, so I can't access them, but in your opinion, are there any suggested measures in our budget in terms of cuts that would affect tree pruning that could have an impact on our mitigation efforts.

I don't think that there's probably that much impact. We'll probably be okay to continue to do what we did. Joel's going to come up and take my place.

Chair and council members, Joel McElhinney, Assistant Director of Park and Recreation. No, we held on our recommended budget for hazard abatement. This falls under that umbrella of hazard abatement within our forestry section in the Park and Recreation Department. That does have an impact on going out and doing other higher priority hazard abatement of tree limbs or tree removal. So kind of keep that in mind. But we did not recommend reducing that line item.

Got it. Thank you, sir. Any questions, my board members? Charlie? You know I do on this one.

So not really any questions. I really just thank you for all the work done. I think this year in District 4, it was the power of the city and the communication and then the residents actually owning that they live there and that it takes constant action on their behalf. Just like I told them, anytime you depend wholly on the government for anything, you're probably going to be disappointed. And so they actually created a, their own dedicated Egret Busters Facebook group. They coordinated schedules. They used the kits provided by Parks as well as the kits that they bought on their own. They were out there all hours of the day, especially the night when they would typically start nesting. Enough so that... Other residents were calling police to make noise complaints, not realizing what they were actually out there doing, which was protecting the neighborhood. And so this year was a vast, vast difference from what we saw last year when there was really very little action from the neighborhood, despite all the communication from parks and, hey, you've got to take this into your own hands. And really, thank you, Teresa, as well, with all the help with the trees. That was a huge help. made a huge difference. As we know, Parkland and other areas of Fort Worth that are well developed and have large tree canopies, That's not an area we're going to be able to cut. Shout out to Michael Rodriguez from our office who drafted a letter that's going to be going to the USDA. Hopefully we'll have it signed by the city where we're actually petitioning for them to review this treaty that is really no longer needed. I mean, it's just way overdue, but it's easier to not do anything than it is for them to do something. but it lays out all the financial impacts it has on the city. From the city perspective, I believe it was actually closer to $100,000 in all that we'd spent on overall e-grid mitigation, which we wouldn't have to do if we had more power to take care of these issues. But huge thank you to your team for everything y'all did this year and for providing overtime staff to come out and help out with some of the noise making as well. Our residents, they noticed it and they certainly appreciate it. I know I certainly did too. So again, thank you so much.

Anybody else ever you mentioned earlier that you had some issues in your neighborhood I know if you wanted to elaborate on that a little.

There we have seen some egress but I haven't had a lot of complaints about the nest and so this was good for me to see where they've established rookery but we have seen ingress. in District 5, including in my yard. So we just have to keep our eye on it because let's hope they're not, they don't decide to settle between 4 and 6.

Yeah. So far, knock on wood, no concerns that I'm aware of in District 2. And it goes without saying we have good resources online, right, on our city webpage as far as migratory birds and efforts that the city is taking to mitigate Eager at effects.

Okay. Good.

Anybody else? All right. Thank you, Chris. All right. Any need for an executive session? Really disappointed that we don't.

Future agenda items?

Anybody? One's going twice. Seeing none, we'll see you all next time. We are adjourned at one minute before four.