City Plan Commission - Regular Meeting

Mic test check, one, two.

All right, we're a few minutes past 6 o'clock, so let's get started. Everyone's settled in. I think I see, let's see, one person signing in. Great. Thank you, everyone, for coming. It's hot out there. You don't want the camera, come on.

All right.

Is this better? Yeah, I got the lights in front of me. Okay, how's that? Is that good, Paul? All right, perfect. All right. Well, thanks everyone for being here. I'm Carlos Soros, a District 2 City Council member, and welcome to District 2's FY27 meeting on our city budget. This budget is a document that affects us all at the city level, at the resident level. And it determines really the course of action that the city is gonna take with the available amount of funding that we have. And each budget cycle is different. Certainly this one is a more challenging budget than what we've experienced in years past. And much of that resides in the way TAD has done its tax appraisals. It's held most of the residential properties fixed to the 2024 values and that affects us, especially when they alternate in taxing years and appraisal years. That's gonna have a bottom line impact on our general fund, which again, supplies necessary funding to many of the services and departments that the city has. And we're gonna get into more detail on that. What have we done leading up to this meeting? What the city has done is it's taken concerted efforts to hear and get feedback from its residents. How many here have done the surveys that went out electronically and responded to those, show of hands? A few of you, yes. We try to do that again. We've had input given at our neighborhood association meetings. Council members have taken that back and supplied it to Jay and his staff. And I know that Christiane Simmons, who's with our data and analytics department, with Fort Worth Lab as we call it, they've collected this data and have reduced it for council members to discern what's important to you all not just important to us but important to you all because ultimately this budget serves you and there were really five categories that came out after we did this budget started out with you know public safety policing you know was certainly at the top of that list followed by fire and EMS. Then we had streets and mobility being the third. We had a fourth category which pertained to parks and recreation. And then the fifth category, we had libraries. Those are the services, those categories that were important to you. And Jay and his staff will delve a little more deeply into what we're talking about, what we're proposing in this budget, but we sincerely want your input. Jay's taken a balanced approach. We're looking at not filling some outstanding positions that haven't been filled and that's very important to know. We're not eliminating people. We're eliminating positions that haven't been filled. That's a cost saver in itself. He's also proposing a 3.2 cent increase in our tax rate. We haven't had a tax rate increase in several years. It's been a policy that city council has followed. but to be realistic we cannot continue to deliver these services that you all expect and want from your city government unless we take a balanced approach we have certainly visited our expenditures cut back on those each department has submitted their own proposed cuts so we're doing what we can to get a blended approach to get us to where we need to be because jay and the staff need to submit a balanced budget you know under state statute so um I think that probably covers most of what I want to say. I don't want to get into too much detail, but before I hand the mic over to Jay, let's see, show of hands of staff members that are here. I just want residents to see, you are surrounded by city staff, every department from parks, water, TPW, economic development, finance is over there as well. We have fire as well. We have police in the back, Commander Molina and Lieutenant Hills here. We have Assistant Chief Horton from the fire department as well. You have a variety of good people that you can talk to from each department to get detailed answers of what you want. So I'm gonna hand the mic over to Jay and Jay's gonna step us through the aspects of our city budget, Jay.

Thank you, Councilman. He's covered the presentation, so we'll take questions. Actually, I'm I was just gonna I'm introducing Christiane Simmons. She's the director of what we call a forward lab, which is a budget data analytics and kind of performance for the city on the operation side. She's gonna go through this presentation as was mentioned. Under state law, we have to turn in a balanced budget. At the end of the day, we can't do deficit budgets like they do at the federal level. And one of the key roles of the city manager with his staff is to bring forward a recommended budget to the city council. That was done August 11th, proposed to the city council as mentioned. The budget has, the general fund budget has a 3.2 cent tax rate increase. The proposal, Christiane will explain the issues that are really kind of being caused by the way TAD has changed their appraisal system for us here in Tarrant County and the overall impact. But keep in mind, the general fund is only one third of the operating budget of the city council. The city's overall budget is $3.3 billion. General fund is $1.1 billion of that. One of the issues that people always ask, well, if you're short this much and you have $3.3 billion, why don't you just move money around? Well, you can't take dollars out of one fund under state law and under financial requirements from bonds and all these other things from one fund like, say, the water department. and use that for police and fire. It's not an eligible use. You wouldn't be able to, rate payers can't pay for those kind of costs. The golf fund, for instance, the money that gets collected from golfers goes back to the golf fund. Same thing with aviation. The dollars that come in from the airports stays with the airports. So we really have to work within the general fund, which is really, 80% of it is covered by sales tax and property taxes. And so the one lever that we have as a city when it comes to revenue, to raise revenues, the tax rate applied to an appraisal. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Kristi Ann. She'll run through these slides. I do wanna mention that the 3.2 cents is what I proposed. We've been going through the process with the city council. The goal is that on September 15th, we'll have the city council vote to approve a budget. As we've gone through the process so far, the city council has given us feedback that they didn't like some of the cuts associated with parks, with code, with the animal control side, with libraries. And so on Friday, we actually had a workshop with the city council where they discussed adding a little bit or increase to bring back some of those services. So this is a hybrid presentation. She'll cover the portion that was my proposed budget and then talk about the changes the council have asked to see, and then she'll go through the rest of it.

Ms. Christiane.

All right, thank you. Yeah, I don't know where I'm gonna stand. There we go. But I don't wanna be like a model either, like with the fan. So I'll just go right here. All right, so yes, my name's Christiane Simmons. And like Jay mentioned, I'm the director of the Fort Worth Lab, which is the city's budget and data analytics and performance department. It's my pleasure to be here talking budget with you on a hot week night. Thank you so much for coming out. Like the council member said, we really appreciate your engagement. Thank you for taking the survey. Thank you for taking time to be here and look forward to answering your questions. So every budget year is a little different. And the council member alluded to this. This has been a more challenging budget year, certainly because of the activities of TAD. So the theme sort of of this year's budget has been that the city's population growth and all the growth that you're likely observing is not necessarily translating cleanly to our property tax values and revenue. And that's a problem since about 60% of the general fund revenue comes from property tax. So we sit in four different appraisal districts, but Tarrant is the biggest, and we get about 92% of our value in property tax revenue from them. Some of you may know that a couple of years ago, Tarrant Appraisal District adopted a reappraisal plan by which they're only reappraising residential property every other year. So our values now on the resident side have been frozen for two years. This upcoming year will be the first time that they reappraise. And so we sort of knew, obviously we knew they adopted that plan and began to plan accordingly and forecast. So that's why we went into the budget season knowing we had a gap. So we were telling council back in January and then even into March and April that we were facing about a $49 million gap in revenues and expenditures. But then we got the certified values from TAD which happens at the end of July. So we pretty well had the balanced budget, you know, and then we got the values and we realized not only was it worse than our worst case scenario, we really had a bigger gap to close than we imagined. Part of that is not just the reappraisal plan, but really TAD is also granting protests and there's litigation like mid-year value loss that's at levels we have not seen before. So we really didn't have precedent for the amount of value that we we're losing. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. But I think sometimes Jay mentions this as an answer to a question, but last year we added about $2 billion, B billion in new growth to the city. So that kind of matches what you might think is happening. But the TAD reappraisal plan and the losses on the residential side wiped out pretty much all of that growth. And so we were projecting very conservatively, like 2% growth, and we came in under 1% across all new residential, commercial, all of it. So you can see that with that being the biggest source of our revenue, it's been really challenging. So we've tried to take a practical approach, as the council member mentioned, sort of a blended approach to balancing the budget. So revenue versus expenditures, we have to present a balanced budget. And what we really wanted to do was minimize service level impacts, continue to prioritize the things that we know that are important to residents and council, primarily public safety. This is just a, so if you've been at an earlier version of this, you may not have seen this slide, but we've added this in the last couple, because sometimes we present and people are like, I still don't understand exactly why the residential thing is such a big deal. So here are the last couple of years of Average taxable home value in each of these counties. So you can see Collin and Yellow at the top. Their appraisal district is working sort of as normal and as Tarrant used to. Annual appraisals, you can see a growing taxable value. Same story in Dallas, growing annual taxable or average taxable value. And then you see Tarrant relatively flat and now falling. So later when we talk about why your values... fall and we raise the tax rate and your tax bill is still lower, this is why, because the value is literally falling based on TAD's activities. So that's just a graphic representation of one issue that some people have found helpful. All right, we'll go through some numbers. So operating funds, $3.32 billion. That's the city's operating budget. And again, that's across all those different types of funds. So the biggest is the general fund. That's about a third, as Jay mentioned. So $1.15 billion. General fund is the city's main operating fund. So think of it as the primary source for police funding, fire, parks and libraries, code, transportation, a lot of those core city services, growing about 4.5%. The next biggest category of operating fund is enterprise funds. Those operate kind of like a business, so they're not paid for by taxes, but rather by user fees and rates. So the biggest, for example, is water. So the water department's funded by rate payers who are using water. And then the third biggest category is special revenue funds. So those are funds that have a restricted revenue source and a restricted use. So a good example of this is CCPD. Many of you are familiar with Crime Control and Prevention District. In that case, the restricted revenue source is sales tax, a dedicated half cent, which voters authorized last in 2020. And the restricted use is crime control and prevention. So activities funded by CCPD have to have that connection to crime control and prevention. So those are kind of the big three of the operating funds. And you can see there's lots of growth happening at varying levels, but about 7.5% growth across all of the budget from last year to next or this year to next. So when we presented the recommended budget on August 11th, we sort of walked council through the steps we took along the way. But if I was going to summarize it in one slide as if it like all happened at once, here's what it looked like. So again, we were forecasting a gap back in, you know, January, March, April. of 49 million, but through the process, you know, the gap changes. And so I would say at its peak, our gap was about $94 million. So that's after certified values, bad news for us, after we'd added in some contractual obligations from police and fire, which we'll talk about, that was kind of the peak of the gap. Now here are some things that we did along the way. The first thing, because we were projecting a problem, was we asked departments to cut their budgets by 1%. So we're talking general fund departments, because that's where our problem is. This was back in March or April. So the Fort Worth Lab creates target budgets for departments, and they have to meet that target. So when we did that, we reduced them by 1%. So we're going into next budget year with constrained budgets from the start. We also require them to submit 3% reductions on top of that 1%. So departments approach this in a number of ways. They get together and they say, where could we tighten our belt to equal 3% of our operating budget? So we did that. And so between those two items, we got about $22 million in savings just from that initial and proactive belt tightening. That's an important exercise to do. at any given time in the budget. When you have a multi-billion dollar budget, you can imagine like it's a good thing to look at the base and tighten up. So we did that. We also, even from the start, we're getting into some deeper reductions. But really when we got our certified values at the end of July, that's when those deeper reductions cuts and reductions really became required. So we looked at, though police and fire are getting contractual raises, what about the rest of the general employees? They're typically budgeted for a 4% performance raise. We cut that down to a 1.5% budget impact for next year as part of those deeper cuts. We also began freezing vacant positions, as the council member alluded to, and eliminating vacant positions where possible. So again, not filled positions, but looking at vacancies where teams are already used to working without them. And so those were a couple of deeper reductions along the way. We always look at fees and revenue as part of the budget. And we'll talk a little bit more about the fees and rates that you see on a regular basis. So that added some back to the pot. And then finally, we still had a $37 million gap. And so because of the blended approach we were trying to take where we didn't want to keep cutting service levels, Jay and staff recommended a tax rate increase to council. The tax rate increase is here, 3.2 cents. So current year's tax rate is 67 cents per $100 valuation on your property. This would be 70.2. And if you've engaged before on the budget or maybe in the bond, you may be familiar with this sort of tax rate breakout. So 70.2 cents breaks into sort of subcategories here. The O&M or operations rate is on top. That's what funds the general fund. And in the city of Fort Worth, we even break that out a little further. So top section 48.2 in the right, that's operations. So operating money for the general fund. salaries and benefits and operating costs for the departments I've mentioned, like police, fire code, transportation, parks, et cetera. The bottom says capital, that's pay go. So pay as you go, cash funding for capital maintenance. So rather than cash funding or rather than debt funding, what's more minor maintenance, right? So like minor street repairs and park maintenance or park enhancements, we do those things via the property tax rate so that we're not using debt to do those. And then the bottom part of the rate is debt. So the 14.75 is the debt rate, which supports our bond programs and other debt. That's the part of the rate that if you came to a bond meeting, we were like, we're not raising this part of the rate to do the 2026 bond. So you can see we did not raise it, but we have let it stay static as well as the capital rate, the 7.25 cents. We wanted to continue maintaining the PAYGO investment as well. So Jay mentioned that this is a hybrid presentation and here's why. So on Friday, the 21st, just the Friday that just passed, council reacted to some of our frozen positions and eliminations of positions that had really to do with service level impacts in public facing general fund departments. So, for example, on the left-hand side, you see a list of restorations. The first is the Alliance PetSmart location, which is the city's off-site adoption site. Our original recommended budget recommended closing that. That was one of Code's 3% reductions. Again, one of those things that's like, it's not great to do, but in order to balance the budget, here's something we could do. out those animals to the shelters, but we'll lose some adoptions. We'll probably lose our high live release rate that we've been talking about this whole year. Council was not comfortable as a majority with that cut. A couple of other items there, you'll see some of the positions that are in the department's listed code development, parks and libraries and transportation had service level impacts also that council was not excited about. So think about park maintenance, let's see, library staffing like pages and assistance, development services, that's customer service for people coming to pull permits and that kind of thing, code, additional neighborhood code inspectors. So a lot of the things that council hears about and that residents rely on a certain service level, they were concerned that cutting those positions would have a negative impact. And then a couple of council members also mentioned, you know, I told you that the general employee raises came down in the recommended budget. a lot of council members didn't like that police and fire are getting raises that's great i don't think anybody you know is arguing against that but general employees i think they're recognizing the value of those employees as well and would like to see performance raises reinstated so um we showed them these options on friday and the tax rate equivalent for restoring those things to the budget so instead of 70.2 cents it would be 70.56 cents so it's a like about a three tenths of one penny, it's a little funny to say. But that's about $4 million in sort of the calculus that we're showing is also, I mentioned because values are falling, I'll show you this later, the tax bill for next year, even with a tax rate increase is still less than this year. And even with the restorations, that's still the case. So as a spoiler alert, with our original recommended tax rate, your tax bill on an average value would be about $16 less year over year. With these restorations, it would be about $8 less year over year. So you're still like to the good, but just slightly less. So we'll talk more about that. But that's what we showed council. And so in that case, the tax rate increase would be 70 point or 3.56 cents for a total rate of 70.56 cents. And again, all that growth would still go toward the operations portion of the tax rate that we talked about. And then this is kind of like the updated process. So I walked you through each of these and then just to show this is like an ongoing thing. So you engaging at this time is great because the budget is not fully done and baked. We're still making real time changes. Again, this was literally just like one business day ago that we were talking with council about these. So I'll go through a couple budget highlights. We like to do these by council priority. So if you're not aware, council has five overarching strategic priorities. And so we like to group things in that order when we can. The first is community safety. And so most of the ads to this year's budget are in this category. And so there's one shift that occurs in the fiscal year 27 recommended budget which shifts the homeless outreach and prevention team that fire has. It continues those activities but does them with the EMS personnel instead of firefighting personnel. The reason this is a budget savings is anytime you're using firefighters for something that's not firefighting, you have to backfill those positions. That way, at any given time, they can jump onto a fire truck and go fight a fire. So when you have four people in this case that were doing full-time homeless outreach and prevention, it's causing the city to pay those salaries and backfilled overtime for people to do the fire suppression duties. So this budget, and council seems comfortable with this, shifts the HOPE team, is what we call them, from firefighters to EMS personnel. We're able to do that because when we acquired or merged with MedStar EMS, they have a mobile integrated health team that does a lot of this work. So we felt like that was a responsible budget move. Fire has some additions in overtime that better aligns their spending and their contractual obligations. They also have some additions in fleet because across the city we're seeing increased fleet repairs and maintenance and fuel costs. Fire has some of our more expensive vehicles so they needed additional budget to cover those costs. On the police side, we continue to evaluate police staffing as the city grows and make sure that they're right size for response time goals and proactivity goals. And so this budget recommends adding patrol officers, 76 of them, as well as some corporal positions, which will also be on the patrol side. As a fun side note, actually, and I keep telling people I didn't know this, even though I used to work in the police department. It's very difficult, you have to, if you want to promote, you start in patrol, you have to leave patrol to go be a detective or like a corporal in some other specialized unit. And so a lot of times people promote out of patrol and they're like a good ambitious police officer and then they go to another unit and it takes a long time for them to ever get back to patrol if they ever come back at all. So the chief really wanted to create a promotional path within patrol for people who really care for patrol and would like to stay. So that's another added benefit of adding those corporal positions in patrol. And then the other portion of public safety when we talk about it as a grouping is emergency communications. So think about 911 as well as emergency management. This budget recommends funding a technology that we were piloting this year, which is Axon 911 assistive call-taking technology. So that is AI... triage for non-emergency calls. So not like 911 emergency, but non-emergency. So that helps save workload for the human call takers who are really taking the calls and lets them work on those more complex issues. It had some really good results in the pilot, so this budget recommends funding it in total. All right, so moving on to infrastructure. I mentioned that we wanna maintain our PAYGO investment, so that's the seven and a quarter of the tax rate. But remember that our values are falling from the TAD perspective, remember the chart. So even though we maintain the tax rate at seven and a quarter, it creates less revenue than in the current year. And so we see a slight reduction in PAYGO, about 2.8 million. Most of that is coming from one place, Transportation and Public Works, and parks still maintain their investment of PAYGO, but I'll show you some detail in a moment. This budget also authorizes the pavement management fee. So some of you know this as the street maintenance fee, if you've been talking about it for a couple of years at some of these meetings. As we're getting closer to implementing it, we recommend the name pavement management because it's not just about reactive street maintenance and going to fix something, it's about overall life cycle management of the pavement in the city. This won't be on a water bill in fiscal year 27, but it allows the department's water and transportation public works to continue to create and implement that for the following year. And then this budget also continues with Waters' sizable capital program as the utility grows. There are major capital projects going on including cast iron replacement as well as the Mary's Creek water reclamation facility. So community investment, you see a strike through here because I mentioned we're in hybrid mode right now. So we are no longer recommending closing the Alliance PetSmart Adoption Center. But sort of this, I'll show you, but this, unfortunately, this priority is where a lot of reductions come from when you're prioritizing public safety. Public safety takes up a lot of the general fund budget. And so when you talk about what's left over to balance the budget, this is where some of that stuff falls. And so our attempts here were just to minimize service level impacts and try to be avoiding any widespread closures of things like libraries and community centers. So no longer recommending the PetSmart Adoption Center to go offline. But there are a couple of reductions here. Neighborhood Services runs a program called the Priority Repair Program. And that is taking a 3% reduction as part of those 3% reductions that departments turned in. It's a $2.5 million program and actually gets about $2 million more in grant funding. So this is not at all an elimination of that program, but it is a small reduction. The mobile tool shed program, I don't know if anybody's used that or recommended it. It's actually like new this year. We piloted it last year. And so this, again, not an elimination, but code is proposing to pivot one of the four people to a different job as part of budget reductions. And so there may be a slightly longer wait time for mobile tools that you order through that program. The Neighborhood Improvement Program, I want to talk about that because I think it comes up a few times through this presentation. So every year, the city selects through a data-driven process a neighborhood, and it's a three-year capital delivery program funded through PAYGO. And so every neighborhood needs different things, and it's like a mix of poverty and education levels, and it usually gets announced in the fall. And so council and the city staff don't want to recommend elimination of that program. But what we've noticed is in that three year delivery, we fund the whole it's $4 million expense upfront. But year one is always planning with the neighborhood and with the departments. And so we've never seen year one spend be more than 500,000 to a million dollars. And so what we've done, and you'll see it later in slides, is neighborhood service is gonna look like it's taking a big reduction from four million to one million, but it's really about smoothing the spend for that program. So we do like one million in year one, and then we'll kinda know what we're gonna do in that neighborhood. So then year two budget would be two or two and a half million, depending. And then year three, we'd be closing it out, and that'd be the flow of funds. So that was one balancing strategy that actually just aligns with what's already been happening in that department. And then this year we did a really successful pilot led by code compliance with other departmental partners called net force, which was nuisance abatement. And so the tagline that we were using was to become a nuisance to the nuisance properties. Um, and with the three pilot properties, we saw great results. And so this budget continues that investment. All right, we're moving right along. I've got two priorities left. So economic development, the reduction here is we have like a special project fund called the Economic Development Initiatives Fund. And the point of that fund is the city dedicates its sales tax to CCPD, but other cities in our region dedicate sales tax sometimes to economic development incentives and initiatives. Since we don't do that, a couple of years ago we started this other special project fund called the Economic Development Initiatives Fund. It does have a balance in it, and while we like to stay competitive in the economic development marketplace, we thought we could take a pause on the $5 million that General Fund sends over to that fund annually. So we've reduced it by 90% from $5 million to $500,000 in order to preserve funding in other places that have more of a direct facing service level impact. This budget does continue partnership with the local chambers, including the small business development program, which we've talked about a lot this year. We also are transitioning management of the Will Rogers Memorial Complex. Some of you might know that from recent news in the city. So the budget shows like how those people and funding will be changed over to a third party management agreement. And then finally, the city does have targeted neighborhood revitalization areas. And economic development did request and get added a position like a coordinator position because of that volume and workload across those areas to continue those efforts. And then responsible growth is the last priority, and it's kind of like a, I don't know, like a catch-all. There's a lot of things that could fit in responsible growth, so we've highlighted a couple things here. The first is we'll continue to replace vehicles and equipment, but we're just changing the funding strategy a bit and doing that through debt or tax notes instead of general fund operating, so it helps the operating portion of the budget. Group health, so the city's self-insured and the rising cost of health claims has been a problem for the group health fund. The city manager didn't want to pass those costs on to employees, and so the employer contributions went up by 40% in the next year's budget. And so when you see budgets growing or falling, you have to know that actually those people's budgets already went up because of 40% growth in group health. So you'll see that in a minute, like when you see budgets growth by department. We continue to see open records requests climbing year over year, and so the budget continues support for that state required timeline of responding to public information requests. We talked a little bit about funding the inflationary increases in vehicles and equipment. That's kind of a theme across the budget this year. We'll talk more about fee structures. And then on the City Hall side, we also looked at City Hall maintenance and parking garage maintenance and lots to ensure that we were being responsible with that funding. So we actually did a good reduction to the maintenance funding for the building and parking lots as well. Okay, so pausing on general fund. Again, that's kind of the focus of our presentation. We will go through a couple more things. So this is revenues and expenditures, nerdy finance things here. As you can see on the bottom, there's a zero because it's a balanced budget as required. So Jay mentioned, I think, that property and sales tax are about 80% of the general fund's budget, which is why it really affects us when property tax revenue is different than we're used to or that we have precedent for. So only about 2.8% growth in property tax. Sales tax is the other big portion of the general fund. We are seeing healthy growth there, which is great. Now after COVID and stuff, we saw like double digit sales tax and that was like a temporary bump. But it's a very steady, even though it's flattened a bit, very steady growth. So we're projecting about 5% growth there, which helps a little bit offset some of the property tax issues. On the expense side, the main storyline here is that salary and benefits are about 70% of the general fund. So think salary and benefits and a lot of that is police and fire salaries. So here's expenses by department. And I know it's a lot of numbers, so I'm gonna show you a graphic in a minute that'll help you see the increases and the decreases. But 4.6% growth across all departments in the general fund. See lots in parentheses there, which means they're reducing year over year. But this is just an alphabetical order comparison from this year's budget to next. So 1.105 billion to $1.156 billion in difference. This is a graph that just shows the concept of, I think we even got a question over the weekend that was like, why can't the city close a budget gap of 39 million or whatever out of a $3.3 billion budget? Well, the reason is the $3.3 billion budget, first of all, it's not where we have the problem. We have a problem in the middle, which is the general fund. A lot of the funds on the left-hand side are restricted funds. Jay mentioned that. So like he gave the example of you can't use water revenues to pay for police and fire salaries. That's just not an eligible use. Same with golf and aviation and a lot of the other funds that appear on the left. In the middle, you see the general fund. And 57% of the general fund is police and fire. Those departments are under contractual obligations for their civil service pay or their uniformed pay. So we have prescribed pay raises that we have to pay. And I haven't heard a lot of opposition to paying the police and fire raises. But what it means is that the rest of the general fund is only $413 million. And you can see all the departments that make that up on the right-hand side. And that's why when we talk about reductions or balancing the budget, what you see comes from the right-hand side in a lot of cases because we're prioritizing public safety, contractual obligations and growth. So we have to be creative with the right-hand side of the graphic there. And this is the other graph I mentioned that shows increases and decreases in fiscal year 27's budget. So you see fire and police there at the top. Now, to level set with fire, it looks like huge growth, 52 million, and it is a big number. 30 million of that is the general fund subsidy to EMS. So many of you know the city took on EMS in order to increase response times and provide a higher level of patient care. That happened July 1st of 2025, but it's not a self-sustaining service. And so the general fund is still subsidizing that. I think the city's intent is to try to close that gap as the years go by and we get creative with our revenue strategies. But right now, 30 million of that 52 is the EMS subsidy that goes from the general fund out to the EMS special revenue fund. We also have a placeholder there for contractual increases for the fire department We're negotiating with the fires union the 440 now you may have seen some of that in the news But we have a placeholder there for their raises and where we think they might land And then I mentioned some of the right sizing that happens with fires overtime and fleet budget where we really want to make sure that they have the right level of funding so that they can manage their budget appropriately Police, that $26 million is almost all tied to contractual pay increases as well as some of the new items that I mentioned. And then coming in, number three, emergency management and communications. Some of that is the Axon 911 pilot that I mentioned that we're funding in total. The bottom three, property management is at the bottom. That's the department that manages city facilities. And they look like they're taking a big decrease because we've moved the vehicle and equipment replacement funding out of their budget and onto tax notes. So I mentioned that difference in funding strategy. So not that big of a reduction for them. It just happens to live in that budget. So when we made that funding strategy shift, it makes them look like they're taking a big reduction. Economic development, that is tied to the pause in that transfer out to the economic development initiatives fund. And then neighborhood services is the one I warned you about where as we smooth the neighborhood improvement program year one, two, and three spend, it looks like they're taking quite a big reduction. But it's really about just, again, kind of like implementing the funding that they're already using year over year. And then you have a whole lot in the middle with small increases and decreases. And remember, anything that you see that's either flat or falling, that's already accounting for 40% higher health costs in those departments. So really, it's a little different than it seems here. Okay, so I'm gonna touch quickly on enterprise and special revenue funds, and then I'm gonna like land the plane so you can ask your questions. So enterprise funds, again, these are the ones that operate more like a business, so paid for not by taxes but by user fees and rates. The biggest of those is water. You see them at the top. That's 8.7% budget growth, so that's not the rate growth but just the budget growth of their operating and maintenance costs and their capital. Solid waste is another enterprise fund, so that's residential collection, drop-off stations, that kind of thing. Their budget is also increasing by about 15%. Again, not necessarily tied to the rate increase. I'll show you how all the fees stack up in a moment on the water bill. The solid waste group is planning for not just their contractual increases with waste management, our trash vendor, but also long-term planning, like eventual replacement of the landfill, for instance. So they're on like a plan plan. for all of that. Stormwater utility, we have a table for stormwater over there with Jennifer and they are an enterprise fund as well. This is a fee you see on your water bill and they continue their planned increases to that fee in order to increase the amount of capacity for mid-size flood mitigation projects as well as channel inspections and all the life safety work that comes with stormwater management. And then we have municipal airports and parking. So that's city airports and city owned garages and meters Airports looks like it's increasing quite a bit but I'll just give them a shout out because they're helping relieve the general fund a bit because there are two fire stations that actually are dedicated to airports and so the operating costs and salaries of those firefighters attached to the airport fire stations are eligible for paying out of aviation. And so aviation will start transferring funding into the general fund to cover those costs so that actually helps the general fund fire budget. Then the other of the big three, special revenue funds, CCPD, I mentioned they're seeing growth that's in line with our sales tax projections, 5%. They're adding a couple of school resource officers. They're also taking some personnel from the general fund and implementing them in CCPD. I think there's some bikes positions that will move on to CCPD from the general fund. Public events, that is culture and tourism, so their dedicated revenue source is hotel occupancy tax, and that's restricted to tourism-related activities. Their budget looks like it's going down, primarily because the Fort Worth Convention Center is expanding, and in fiscal year 27, some of the key spaces are actually offline, so they won't be able to bring conferences and those kinds of things in next budget year. Also reflecting the transition of Will Rogers Management. EMS, I feel like the fan's blowing my hair like crazy. Y'all tell me if it's like. Okay, EMS is the latest special revenue fund. So this is current year's like their first full budget year. And this 103.9 million reflects that $30 million subsidy. from the general fund. And they have a couple of different departments in there, not just fire. They also have the office of the medical director, a doctor who carries the licenses for the paramedics, EMTs. They have some support from legal and HR and finance for billing. So all of those are sort of rolled up into the EMS fund. Environmental protection is a fee that you see on your water bill. I think it's increasing by one quarter, so 225 to 250. That funds citywide litter abatement, camp cleanup, nuisance abatement, street sweepers. If you see the street sweepers, those all come from environmental. And then we have municipal golf, which again, not subsidized by the general fund, only paid for by the people who go play golf at the three city golf courses. They're seeing some good growth, and so they're adding some food and beverage staff, as well as I think a maintenance worker. And then community tree planting, I did have somebody at a meeting who was concerned about the trees, because it looks like a big reduction. So I'll just say for the group, it looks like it's going down because in the current budget year they bought some equipment and so now they don't need that money anymore and so we right sized the budget down for fiscal year 27. Every year when departments do their budget, they also look at fees. The city charges a number of fees for a number of scenarios. So if you really, like I told people, want to torture yourself, you can go look at the fee ordinance or the fee budget response that we did for council. It's quite long, like multiple hundreds of pages long. I think it's, I don't know, 200 pages. It's just because there's so many fees that the city can levy in a number of circumstances. So I think... Over half of that budget response is all about development services fees and the different situations that developers go in and pay for permit fees and that kind of thing. But there are nine different departments that recommend fee changes that could be anything from like fines or community center programs or all kinds of stuff. So there's only a few that we show at these meetings because they're the ones that affect really every resident. So I'll show you these. So top section is average home taxable value. And remember, it's falling, because of that chart I showed you, Tarrant, falling. So fiscal year 26, this is with a homestead exemption. If you're an average homeowner, you have a homestead exemption. 246,000 this year, 232,000 next year, we get this number from TAD. So as your values go down, even as we apply a higher tax rate, your annual bill is slightly decreased by about $16. In the bottom right, the little yellow box, I'll show you the difference in if the council does decide to go not with the 70.2, but with the 70.56 to restore some of those positions that they were concerned about. The annual variance instead of being $16 down would be $8 down. And then the bottom section is the fees that we mentioned through the enterprise funds and environmental that you see on our water bill. So current year adopted versus next year's recommended. So overall, all across the annual variance about $85, monthly difference of about $7. So when you net those two together, the month over month difference is about $5.70. Now we know that you don't pay your property tax bill on a monthly basis, but we like to show it just so you can see a little bit of the offset. This is a graphic that just attempts to explain that funny kind of counterintuitive balance about values falling and a higher tax rate. So on the left hand side, you see this year's value and tax rate and the city's portion of the property tax bill. Just as a reminder, that's just the city's portion. So if it looks like way low, it's because you also pay the school district and the county and maybe like another taxing entity. So that's the city's portion and the next year value higher tax rate and that's you can see that's why the value slightly or the tax bill slightly decreases. And again in the yellow box you see because it's a hybrid presentation what the situation would be at the that with a third of a penny added to the tax rate. Sorry that those are a little cut off. This is every year when we do the operating budget, we also refresh the five-year rolling capital plan. So we gather capital planning from all of the departments who are appropriate for that. You can't really read them, but it's aviation, environmental, and then there's a category for general departments. Water is the bottom, and you can see that of our $1.03 billion capital plan for fiscal year 27, they take up about $800 million of that. So Again, water has a significant capital plan as a regional utility. And then this is the last look at PAYGO. So again, the seven and a quarter cent part of the tax rate that funds PAYGO, this is how it kind of stacks up year over year. So the darker color is this current year, 26, green is 27. So you can see transportation and public works takes up about 82% of the PAYGO budget. That's streets and sidewalks and maintenance and for bridges and all the transportation related things that need capital maintenance. Their budget is not decreasing. Some people are usually concerned about parks maintenance. That budget is also pretty flat. The big reduction here is neighborhood services, and again, I told you this would come up a lot. Neighborhood improvement program, year one spending low, and then we'd bump it up for year two and then decrease for year three. So that's why it looks like a reduction, but it's really just kind of a smoothing of that budget. So total budget operating plus that capital plan that I showed you, $4.35 billion budget in fiscal year 27 as recommended by the city manager. This is the community engagement schedule, which you obviously saw somewhere, which is great. We're glad that you're here. You can come to any of the remaining meetings. I think this is number six of ten, and they're all streamed, and you can go back and listen to something that I've said or look at any of the other ones that we've done. They've all been slightly different, and residents have great questions that really vary across districts, so it's always interesting to know what's important to different districts. THE CITY HAS A BUDGET PUBLIC HEARING ON SEPTEMBER 1ST. THAT IS A SPECIAL CALLED COUNCIL MEETING WHERE ALL OF COUNCIL CAN HEAR THE COMMENTS OF ANY RESIDENTS THAT SIGN UP TO SPEAK. YOU HAVE A COUNCIL MEMBER HERE, BUT YOU'LL HAVE THEM ALL THERE. SO IT'S JUST ANOTHER TOUCH POINT IF YOU'D LIKE TO LOG COMMENTS WITH COUNCIL. AND THEN WE HAVE TAX RATE AND BUDGET SCHEDULED TO BE ADOPTED ON SEPTEMBER 15TH. THAT HELPS US MEET THE STATE REQUIRED TIMELINE FOR BUDGET ADOPTION. And then if you are a QR code person, you can scan the left-hand QR code to go to Connect Fort Worth, which is all things city engagement. Right now the budget's like the star of the show on Connect Fort Worth, so you can ask questions there and see documentation. And then on the right-hand side is the Fort Worth Labs budget page, and I have an excellent helper that loads every budget video, every budget response, all these slides, our big recommended budget slides, just everything you could ever want to know about the budget is there. in like date order. So it's really easy to navigate and look through. And that concludes my talking for the day presentation. So I really appreciate your attention. I know it's hard to listen to like a lengthy finance presentation on a weeknight, but I'm so appreciative that you did. And we're happy to answer any questions with staff and with Jay. So thank you so much. And we'll make you use the microphone if you ask a question, which I know sometimes makes people feel awkward, but it's because we're streaming, and so it helps people here. Oh and before Tony, that's Tony over there, I promised Tony I would tell you to visit the tables including the comp plan boards over there. So Citi's engaged right now in 2050 comprehensive plan, long range plan for the city and how it develops and the like place making strategies and all of that that's involved in the comp plan. So please do go visit the comp plan boards if you haven't. There Tony, give me my $20, I'm just kidding. All right so questions, who wants to be brave?

Yes. My name is Joe Ponce, Jr. I've lived here for over 50 years. And my wife, Arlene, she's lived here all her life. She was raised right here on Homer Street about a block away. But my question is, it seems like we're putting the blame, everything on the... on the property taxes. But it seems, I think a lot of this is the money shortfall is probably some of the mistakes that our city council's making. I know that, I think the Pier 1 building initially was in the 60-something million dollar range, and by the time it was supposed to be finished, it was supposed to be somewhere around 100 million. I don't know how high it is now, but it's probably over $300 million. Isn't it, Carlos?

You know?

It's around.

I think it's a little less than that, but Jay can talk to it about it, Joe, because there is inherent cost savings in the new city hall.

Okay, so there's $200 million wasted. That's three years. If you divide, if you times 80 million, that's almost three years that we could have made budget. The bridge on Main Street. Why did we spend millions of dollars on that bridge? That bridge goes up when it should have been built before the railroad tracks so we don't have to wait there. Well, that bridge was built. We still have to wait there. I spoke to Carlos about that one time, or I talked about it, and he said that the businesses there just did not want to sell. But this is a government entity.

He could have used the... If you're suggesting we could have used eminent domain, you're correct, Joe. But if you were an affected business, you probably wouldn't like the government coming in there and taking your property.

If they would have been residents instead of businesses, more than likely, y'all would have took that through eminent domain. And there's not really that many big businesses right in that spot, just that little extra spot. And so really a lot of this waste for that $80 million shortfall, I think it could be fixed by making better decisions. So, and another thing, I don't know where our money's going to. I know I have two commercial buildings, shops right there in our district and our house. And in about 10 years, I've probably paid over $100,000 in property tax. When Carlos first got elected, I helped him get elected. I did robocalls for him. But as soon as he got elected, I told him about the streets. I had been talking about it. Well, I'll get right on it. You know, it's been 10 years, almost 10 years. Those streets have not been fixed. They're a lot worse now. And this last election cycle, I ran against him, and I asked him about that before I ran, and he said, call it in and give me the paperwork, I'll get right on it. Same thing. So I just think there's better decisions that's gotta be made.

I do wanna say something to that point, Joe, when you were present at that public meeting. The Water Department has some work scheduled in your area specifically, and all along you forgot to mention what I told you. After I looked into it, there's a lot of older infrastructure underneath the roads that need to be replaced before the roads have any major work done. You yourself noticed the big water main break this weekend. I saw you posting about it on Ephraim and Jacksboro Highway. That's an example of that. We have to fix that infrastructure first. And you and your wife attended that meeting, and I'm glad that you did because staff told you. that those things are already programmed to happen. So they are happening, but we gotta replace that infrastructure first. I'm gonna give the mic to Jay. Jay, if you wanna talk about City Hall expenditures, please.

You can have a seat, sir. So, City Hall. The old City Hall that the city used was built in 1970, and the population of Fort Worth was about 410,000 people, and the city staff was about 4,000 people. So at the time, back in 2016, 2017, we were having discussions of expanding that city hall and building to the south parking lots. And the estimate back then for that new development was about $280 million. The Pier 1 building opportunity came along. So that building was actually purchased for 69 million. So you were close. You said 61. But all along, there was an estimate of about $100 million in improvements that were needed. Ultimately, there was an issue with a drainage part of the TRWD that came through there that added about $30 million to the project. So the project ended up being to about $220 million is what the ultimate cost. It was still cheaper than the city going forward to try to build an expansion to the old city hall. in order for us to house all the city employees. City employees were in a lot of leased buildings around town. We're spread all over the place. We're paying money on leases. We're now actually selling those buildings, the ones that we do own, to put them back on the tax rolls and to make money. So that was the logic behind that. Whether you agree with the decision or not, that was the logic. It wasn't just done out of thin air. The second question about that, the bridge, the city didn't pay for that bridge. the Northstein Bridge, that was part of the TRVA project. Those funds came in regionally from the North Texas Council of Governments, and so those funds were not, that were used for the bridge there was not city funding. Just thought we should have that cleared up so you don't believe that it was the city's dollars that went into it. I'm not gonna get into back to forth, this is about the budget. I just wanted to address the questions just to make sure that the information is correct that's out there in the public. Any other questions about the budget? Well, I want to thank you all for coming out on a 107 degree day. I guess it's better here than inside here. If you do have any questions, you can find all the budget information. As was mentioned, we're still working on the city's comprehensive plan. You have a question?

So you had the proposed increase in taxes for us, for the city of Fort Worth, like that general fund. could you just not make it higher and then not cut all of the other things in the reduction that you have there? And how far can you go to it? And if you wanna go over that, I know you have to do like triggers a vote or something. Why not do the vote? Why not leave it up to the people?

So the city council can choose to go up about nine cents. without having to go to a vote. So you can go to 76 point something, something as far as going without having to actually triggering the vote in November. So we would have a lot of funds. I don't know that we'd have to go to a vote. So my goal was twofold. One was to balance the budget, meet the priorities of the city council gave to us and that citizens have told us. Again, public safety has been the number one thing and try to minimize the impact of the services to the rest of the city citizens and not put a huge, a huge burden on the cost side. There's a lot of folks on fixed incomes, all those kind of things, right? So if you raise it up $0.09, it's going to have a really big difference in people's taxes when they go forward. So what we were trying to achieve is a balance between trying not to impact service levels that much and still end up with a budget that reflected somewhat to what folks with the fees and everything in. folks are gonna pay about seven, $8 more per month going forward. We just couldn't get to that full amount. So the council did talk about adding that a little bit to add some more. They could make a decision to increase that even more and put in the other, what is it about that's still left out there? you'd probably have to add two cents, two or three cents to get the rest of it back into the budget of the service cuts. But what we did is we talked to our departments that were taking the biggest impacts, libraries, parks, code compliance, development services, and we asked them, who are the positions and what are the things that could come in to even reduce those impacts even less where people wouldn't really see them. And so that's what we brought back on Friday. So the answer is yes, you can go higher. The question is for the elected officials and for overall, what will our citizens tolerate and then what do they want to do going forward? I don't know many elected officials that go back and are gonna run and somebody says they raised your taxes and they're gonna, they don't get reelected, so. You have a question? So if,

If you raise those taxes, or let's put it this way. So what did you get on your feedback, on your online feedback? What was the thing that most people wanted? Like what was the most thing that they wanted?

Number one was fire services and EMS. Two was police. Three was streets. Four was transportation. Five was parks. Libraries were next. Then it was The last one was economic development, that's why we cut $5 million in economic development. So we try to reflect what our residents were telling us in these surveys. And it's, when you talk to the city council about where they could stand seeing reductions, it's what they hear from the citizens as they're out and about. So, but number one, number two, number three are fire, EMS, police. It's like been consistent. I've been with the city, joined the city in 1994. This is my third time with the city. It's been consistent. Public safety is what everybody's always most worried about.

So when they say that, do they mean that they want more of those things or are they saying that they just don't want you to cut those things? and the survey.

So we didn't cut those things. We kept the service levels the same. So the addition of police actually don't hit the general fund this year because it's their cadet classes. It's because of our growth. In order to be able to maintain our current service levels, we had to add with that growth. What's happening with some of the other areas where we're not adding anything, it's like a cut in services because you can't provide the same amount of services to more people after a while. You can only do so much with technology. We're exploring those things. But they rank those things as the most important on their wants from the city. And the other thing we didn't want to cut was we talked about the pay-go, the pay-as-you-go maintenance. And that's because, like when I first came in the 90s, the city didn't spend much money on maintenance, the streets, and that's how the streets got really bad. And you don't want to use debt for that because when you do a maintenance to a street, say you're just maintaining the street to keep it, it's like using your 30-year mortgage to buy your car that's only going to be around for five years. You're paying debt on it for 30 years, right? You don't do that. So when you fix a maintenance, maintain a street, you might get a... improvement that improves the street for five to seven years you don't want to use 20-year debt on that so it's better to use cash so you're getting the the benefit of that cash and that maintenance to keep it from going into the really bad conditions that then you do have the issue big debt to fix it going forward so yes sir so as far as your plan is going going forward

I don't want to put judgment on or anything, but it seems like a band-aid because you have the biannual taxes from TAD. So what is your plan out looking past 2027? Because right now you're balancing the budget for now. So what about 2028, right? When the certified values come back out, wouldn't it be higher because they're going to be appraisal? So are we going to have a surplus of money because we've done all these reductions?

We hope so, because the next year it's going to go back down. So that's one of the issues, right? TAD's doing an appraisal, no appraisal this year, everything goes down because they take protests. Hopefully, I mean, we don't know what they're going to do, because we didn't predict what they were doing now. What ended up happening isn't what they told us how it was going to work. They said it was going to be frozen, and it actually went down because they took all these protests. So next year, it should get reappraised, so it's gonna go up. Under state law, they can't go on the appraised side more than 10%, right? So we're gonna have a 10% cap. People are gonna get their tax value, they're gonna see it as higher, they're gonna protest. So that's gonna come down some. We're thinking it's gonna be four, maybe 5% is what we'll get from that. So then we go to the next year, I'm city manager I'm not requesting to cut the tax rate I'm leaving it alone so we can put it in one-time use like more pay go so then the next year when it goes down I can move that one-time use money for operations so we don't cut positions again so that's we have to start thinking about it even though we don't like the state does biennium budgets we have to start thinking about that plan going forward like it's a biennium budget because of how TAD's running it, right?

You got another question?

We're not thinking just year to year.

I think it was 2024, we voted on it for BPP. Do you have any numbers on how much money the city actually lost on those exemptions? Because as a business owner, I went from not paying taxes from not paying taxes. I don't pay my fair share anymore at all. I don't contribute anything anymore. That seems great to a lot of people, but for me, I want more services. So I don't know, it feels like I've been priced out.

So the state, you're talking about the state, yeah, the city, didn't it? I know, they put an amendment for the Constitution to be able to make the BPP. We lost about $8 million this year. So that was because the state passed... Right. It was about $8 million. They moved the exemption from $2,500 to $125,000. Believe it or not, they started at $250,000. And because of lobbying from local entities, they brought it down to $125,000. If it would have been $250,000, I think we would have lost about close to $20 million. So that just from one year to the next, it's revenues that disappeared, not having to do with anything else. that anybody did differently. And the ones that really got the biggest benefit, they said it was for small businesses. The real benefit was like all the Walmarts across the state. Every Walmart sited individually and every one of their warehouses, they got that benefit all the way across the state. But anyway, I'll get off my soapbox. You have a question, sir?

This is again on that 80 million shortfall. It seems like we're putting it on, the cause on population growth. So we probably give, I would say, maybe 15 corporations around there tax incentives to come from out of state and under the guise of creating more jobs for our residents. Our residents aren't getting those jobs. My question is, is our city council still giving tax incentives for other companies to come here? Because if that's what's hurting us, Like I said, it's not coming, them jobs are not going to our residents. I believe it's all these other people that are coming from out of state that are getting them jobs, because I don't know of anybody that's gotten one of them jobs from one of them big corporations.

Happy to answer your question. So I'd love to see the data you have that shows that Fort Worth residents aren't getting the jobs, because I haven't seen it. But I'd love to see the data. Beyond that, the way the incentives work is a company is interested to come in to relocate or build a new plant or facility somewhere. They think Fort Worth might be a good place to do it. They find a site. They reach out to our economic development team, and they say, we want to build a $500 million project, and we're going to hire 500 people, but we want an incentive. They have a consultant usually that they work with that tells us that. And we ask them, well, where else are you looking? And they end up, they're looking at Plano, they're looking at Irving, they're looking at Austin. And so at the end of the day, we put together a package that says you build that $500 million facility, you hire the 500 people, and we'll provide, just off the top of my head, a 50% tax abatement. So they build it, they hire all those folks, we get all the information that they met all those requirements, they pay their taxes, and then we pay them 50% back. But they have to build it. The city doesn't use any of our tax dollars to give somebody money before they haven't contributed that taxes. If we don't offer them an incentive, they don't come to Fort Worth, we get zero dollars. They go to Irving, they go to Austin, they go wherever else who is offering it. So as city manager, I'd love that there were no incentives, ever. But that's not reality. In order for us to be in a competition with all the other cities around the country that are offering incentives, and we want some of these projects, like today we reviewed a project that, I don't know if they're gonna come here or not, where they're gonna spend $200 million. The average wage is $225,000. It's a high-skilled scientific company. That's the kind of company you want here. you don't provide if they're being offered incentives other places if we don't play that game they're not going to be here we're not better off because they're not here right because that piece of property might end up being a warehouse that pays 20 bucks an hour with no incentives and that's one tenth of the project with incentives so that's why we do it that's why it's a part of our policy it's one of the way we grow the economy But the city does not use our tax dollars up front for incentives. They have to deliver what they say they're gonna deliver, and then the incentive gets provided.

As council member, my fellow council members are very, we try to be very smart with what we do. We're very intentional. The companies that we're attracting here, we're trying to diversify our job base. And this will help the city whether uncertain economic times to come. We cannot rely on one industry and one industry only. That's only setting us up for failure. We would be foolish not to move and take advantage of companies that want to relocate to Texas and here to the city of Fort Worth. We're a growing city. We need that economic tax base. We're talking about taxes. The city council is still trying to switch from reliance on residential property taxes to commercial taxes. These motions that we make on the dais are, again, with a plan in mind when we consider incentives for companies to come. Jessica Rogers is back there. She heads that department. I invite you to talk to her because we're not giving away the farm, folks. We expect certain performances from these companies, a certain amount of jobs, and we can get into the weeds, and Jay can attest to this, during our sessions, we talk about what we as a council expect with the amount of money that these jobs are going to earn. So you have to think for future needs, not today's needs, not to save a penny now, but to make $100 later. And that's our approach to the city. We're a growing city. We have to think larger than what we are today.

I just have, and I'll get off the economic development side, but Lockheed, Lockheed Martin on the west side, F-35s, that's a good one? Do you know how many taxes they paid to the city of Fort Worth? Zero. Lockheed Project, and before them, Martin Marietta, is the biggest tax incentive ever in the history of Fort Worth or Tarrant County. They employ a lot of people, but they've never paid a single dollar in taxes to the city of Fort Worth, to Fort Worth ISD, to Tarrant County, because they're located on federal property, they're in a federal building, and they build federal equipment. So the inventory is federal. The planes are federal. The federal government doesn't pay taxes. But I've yet to find a single person that tells me that Lockheed being here hasn't been a positive impact to the economy of Fort Worth. It has. You even admit it. But that's the biggest incentive ever. They've never paid a single tax dollar to the Fort Worth. So I'm just saying the incentives sometimes make sense to work. I'm telling you, more people than you think. You said you don't know people. I'd like to see the data, but most of those companies are required. They try to hire folks from Fort Worth or the people in the... We probably stopped. We used to require a certain percentage, but most of the folks that work in those businesses live in Fort Worth. Even if they came from outside, they moved to Fort Worth because they don't want to be driving from Oklahoma or wherever. Yes, ma'am.

Hi. I just wanted to know, so how much of that budget for the libraries are you going to use to build a new library downtown? I mean, is that going to come up?

So none of this, this is the operation side of the budget. So the capital budget you saw at the end with all those numbers, that was embedded in that general fund capital budget. So that's a separate pot, not part of the 3.3 billion.

So on some of your fees that we have in the city, so like, or I guess like fines, so like what about like a hotel tax fine or like an Airbnb fine, where does that money go?

The money goes to the general fund, I believe, yeah. So we have a... Yeah, if you find them. We actually have a service that looks for those and tries to find them and those kind of things. But it has to come in through people complaining about them. Do you have a service? What's the service? The service that... Reggie, do you know the service that collects the Airbnb?

that finds them and to choose the citations and stuff, but I don't know, excuse me. Thank you, I don't know the name. This is the man.

Brian Docherty, Code Compliance Director. I believe it's Rentalscape we use that canvases that, and we use that information to then when we get complaints, go take enforcement and applicable notices and citations that we can. That's separate from the hotel occupancy tax, which is what the city also receives, so. No, no, no. If they're not allowed to be in the area or they're not permitted, yeah, there's citations issued. That's what I was getting at. Those fines are separate from the ones that are allowed to operate and are paying into their hotel occupancy tax.

But we also make sure that they're paying their hotel occupancy tax because sometimes they don't totally report it. Well, thank you all. Thank you for coming out on a Monday night.