City Government - Regular Meeting

We are so glad that you all are here to join us. We are going to start the night off with public comment on non-agenda items. If there's anyone here who has comment on non-agenda items, please feel free to come to the podium and we can give you your three minutes of time to share your thoughts. Going once, twice, three times, gone. Okay, and there was no one online?

Great, thank you, City Clerk.

All right, so again, thanks so much for everyone coming out tonight to learn a little bit about the ballot initiative. This is, again, a joint work session, and we are going to kick things off, get this started with, I believe, Director Wade, are you starting us off tonight? Just kidding. Not kidding. Assistant City Manager Wade, welcome.

Good evening, Honorable Vice Mayor. So the order of operations tonight is the joint work session, just the welcome from the governing bodies, and then presentations actually starting with Albany County, and then I'll be sandwiched in almost at the end, and then the Wyoming Taxpayers Association will close us out this evening.

Wonderful. Thank you very much. And would you like to say anything, or do you want to just get going?

I want to welcome everybody. Thank you. We need always need as much input from as many people as possible. So thank you very much for attending.

All right, so county come on up. Welcome. Thank you.

Good evening, Vice Chair and Chairwoman. My name is Chelsea Matthews and I am currently the Albany County Assessor. And I thank you for inviting me here tonight to talk about the history of our current property tax exemptions as well as the People's Initiative. I'm going to just start off explaining the history. So currently, Sorry, let me get this tech going. Currently we have five types of property tax exemptions. We have the veterans exemption, the residential exemption, the homeowners exemption, the long-term homeowners exemption, and the business personal property exemption. not going to spend a lot of time on all of these because that would be we would be here for hours so i'm just going to talk about the amount that each exemption is what the average benefit is for each property owner and then if you want more information i do have flyers back here on the back table where you signed in so the first one i'm going to talk about is the veterans this one is right here, $6,000 off of the assessed value of either your primary residence or your motor vehicle registration. The average amount of savings for those who use this exemption in 2026 was either $420 off of your primary residence or $120 off of your motor vehicle registration. The next one is the residential exemption, also known as the 4% cap. This one's a little bit harder to explain, but essentially, more than 4%, anything above that from the prior year is exempted. And this is on your primary residence and the associated land. So outbuildings are not included in this. And in 2026, the average savings for residential property owners was $148. That one you don't have to apply for, I do that automatically. So the next one is the homeowners exemption. This is 25% off of the fair market value of your residential structure and the associated land up to the first million dollars of the fair market value. So this exemption started in 2025. And due to the timing of legislation, we were actually instructed to apply this to all residential structures. So basically, everyone got this exemption in 2025. In 2026, it switched to owner occupied with a required application. And in 2026, the average savings for those who qualified was $770.

Thank you, Councilor Doherty.

I was wondering if you could explain the difference between the fair market value and the assessed value, because I usually kind of get mixed up with it. And I'm hoping that I'm not the only person or you know, so if you could, so that 6000 comes off of the assessed value, which is already less than the fair market. Could you explain? Thank you.

Yes, through you, Vice Chair, Counselor. Yes, so the fair market value is basically what your home is worth, what someone would pay, what a willing seller would sell the home for, and what a willing buyer would purchase it for. The assessed value is 9.5% of that. So we only tax on 9.5% of the fair market value in Wyoming.

is that good good counselor doherty follow up so that's six thousand off that's coming off of it's already reduced it's nine point five percent of the original and then it's six thousand off of that let's go through you vice chair yes that is correct for the veterans exemption it is six thousand dollars off of the

nine and a half percent of your fair market value. Great, thank you. Okay, so the long-term homeowners. This was also new in 2025. There are certain qualifications for this one. You have to be age 65 or older and you have to have paid Wyoming property taxes in the state of Wyoming for 25 years. I'm clarifying the eligibility requirements because I get asked this a lot. Those 25 years do not have to be the same home and nor do they have to be in the same town. So if you came from Sheridan, you live there for 10 years, and then you came to Laramie, lived here for 15, you would still qualify. But this one is 50% off the fair market value of the residential structure, the associated land up to 35 acres, and then up to the first $3 million of the fair market value. And those who received this benefit in 2026 saved an average of $1,388. So the last of the five is called the business personal property exemption. This is new for 2026 and it's no application needed. I apply automatically and it's $75,000 off of the fair market value of your business personal property. So those of you who own businesses, you know what that is, but basically your tax on everything or anything that you use to run your business. So that $75,000 comes off automatically. And another important note with these five exemptions, the veterans exemption is backfilled by the state of Wyoming. So that means that our counties get reimbursed for that exemption, whereas the other four are not. So all of our taxing authorities are not getting reimbursed for that. And while I'm up here, there are two refund programs. They're not run through my office, but they're worth mentioning. So the state of Wyoming also offered a property tax refund based on your income and your assets. Unfortunately, the deadline for a refund towards your 2025 taxes has passed. And as of right now, legislation hasn't funded this to continue, but it has been something that's been in existence for a number of years. and then Albany County is one of five counties throughout the state of Wyoming that opted in to do to mirror this refund program and applications are available now you can come see Tracy they're due October 12th and again they're based on your income and your assets okay thank you for whoever's flipping my slides I completely forgot Okay, so the people's initiative. This is kind of the hot ticket. This is where we're all asking questions and want some information. So this will appear on our ballots during the general election on November 3. And you can either vote yes or no. If it's passed statewide, it'll go into effect for tax year 2027. For this exemption, you do have to apply for it and the deadline is the fourth Monday in May. and you must claim it every year if it's passed. And you would do that with my office. This exemption is 50% off the assessed value of your primary residential structure only. So no land and no outbuildings. And I did some estimates off of our 2026 assessed values. And I'm saying estimated average of savings would be $918 per property owner. There are some eligibility requirements. The property must be used as your primary residence. So that with this exemption, you must live in the home six months out of the year. And you must also be a Wyoming resident for at least one year. So a lot of other questions that I get is how do all of these exemptions work together? So if you're a veteran and you're getting the veterans exemption, you can stack that on top of all of these other exemptions. The cap is applied regardless of any of the other exemptions you are claiming. You can still apply for any of the refund programs regardless of any of the exemptions that you're receiving. If the people's initiative is passed, you cannot claim the initiative along with the long term homeowners. So you can't get 50% off of your house and your land and then another 50% off your house. And you'll have to pick one or the other. And also with the long term homeowners, you can't claim that one with the 25% off you have to pick one or the other. And then if the People's Initiative is passed, we're not sure what will happen with the homeowner's exemption, which is, that's the 25% off. You'll have to pick one. And right now there is discussion about the homeowner's exemption being repealed. And so that one might go away altogether if the People's Initiative is passed.

If it doesn't pass, then the homeowner's exemption will remain as is.

And then just a side note, you cannot claim any of these exemptions on more than one home throughout the state of Wyoming. And we do work with the state to track that to make sure that people are being honest and we haven't had an issue. And then just a side note reminder, outbuildings are not included in any of these exemptions. Okay, so the next slide is really Just something I threw together, and I'll post this PowerPoint on my website, but it's just to show how these exemptions affect your tax dollars overall. So I gave three examples. One is a mobile home in Laramie that's in a park, so there's no land. One is a home in Laramie, just your typical home, no outbuildings. And then another is a home in Albany County that has an outbuilding. So just looking at this graph, you can see what your taxes would be with no exemptions, what it would be with just the cap. And then going down the list, what it would be with the 25% off, what it would be with the long-term homeowners, and then what it would be with the People's Initiative. And then the last column, I'm just reminding you that if you're a veteran, you can still stack that on top of these other exemptions. Okay, so now we're going to talk about the flip side of this. So we've talked about what the average savings is for all of property owners with all of these different exemptions. So now we're going to talk about what the effects have been so far across all taxing authorities. So as you can see, the first column, I'm just listing out the four exemptions. I didn't include the veterans because we get reimbursed for that. and then across the top you'll see tax year 2024 which was the first year for the cap that impact was pretty minimal moving to 2025 the cap went from 303 303 000 to 1.3 million because then that's when we started including the land and then again in 2026 it increased slightly The long-term homeowners didn't exist in 2024. In 2025, it was a little over 1.9 million with 1,456 applicants. And in 2026, it increased to 2.3 million. And that's because we received about 300 more applicants. The homeowners, again, it was brand new in 2025. And if you remember, everybody got this in 2025 due to timing. So that hit was $6.1 million. In 2026, it switched to owner occupied only. So it dropped to 1.7 million with 2,348 applicants. And then the personal property exemption was new for 2026 and it costs about 260,000. So total impact for 2026 was close to 5.9 million dollars and that's across all taxing authorities. So this next slide I pretty much touched on all this when I was talking earlier but if you go down towards the bottom I'm talking about the people's initiative and if it passes, I'm estimating an additional 4.9 to $2.4 million decrease across all taxing authorities. And that really just depends on how many people actually apply for it. Albany County has about 15,000 residential structures and about 50% of those are owner occupied. So in 2026, between the long term homeowners and the homeowners, we had 4116 applicants, which is about 55% of those who would qualify applied. I anticipate both of those programs will grow just as more awareness comes about. Last where I sit out all of our taxing told you how many mills each hello so is there a total for

and that pulls off of . For example, . and then second time i've so are lost

with the current expense, my people's initiative. And then I actually deducted out because I am assuming that that one is going to. So . And it should be noted that when I was reading the budget site, a little acting authorities had kind of a point in place for it to just follow the conditions.

That's all I have for today. Questions come in. All right, we can move to Tracy.

That's funny. There's impact for all of us there, just as there is for all of our constituents and citizens. as well. I'll see that. I have a friend and that we've used as our . That's when we quit our official self.

which on my end, we actually historically, we split it based on the historic meal before we went to this level funding plan with them, which I won't go into those details and confuse everybody. But for our total general fund impact, we're looking at about 668,000. And this chart here is solely based on who has the biggest budget in the county and who will feel the impacts of any kind of changes or revenue constraints. So, of course, our biggest budget at the county is the sheriff's office and the detention center. It takes a lot to operate all of those deputies of patrol vehicles, the miles they travel and not to mention the detention center with inmates and food costs. That food came in on a truck for one. and then the next thing is our general accounts within our general accounts that includes things that are mandatory for us to pay workers comp unemployment our health insurance fuel costs postage our auditor contract insurance which includes library our warm and cyber insurance copier leasing utilities so all the things we need to run our business as a county Um, so that 668,000, that really equates to 3.92% of our county general fund revenue budget, which I believe on social media. There's been some posts about our revenues being $33.9 million, which is our overall revenue budget. But that includes things like the county road fund, the specific purpose tax, and all our grants. We can't use any of those funds to offset any of our operational costs because it's just not legal to do so. All right. and then this is just another visual of what those impacts would look like if we do need to make any cuts this chart though does include all of the exemptions that assessor matthews just covered with the cap the long-term home owners and the business personal property and lastly Albany County is fortunate because we do have money set aside. We do have reserves. Most of these monies are earmarked for certain situations. We can, by Commissioner's resolution, un-earmark them and use them for specific purposes. If we needed to offset our general fund operations, they could take that employee compensation by resolution and decide they want to use it for operations. but they would need to take some form of official action to do so many of these things have been set aside to achieve long-term goals for the county one as the 2026 specific purpose excise tax just passed we are looking at doing a new administrative services building so we do have money set aside to help with that but there's a lot of these That are restricted currently, but yes, we, we can take from reserves to help offset any kind of issues that we could run into.

Yes, thank you. I have a question on the county building reserve, because that was voted in through the could it actually be used because voters have said that is how they wanted that is what they voted on. So is that is that 1.

allowable as a use to dip into? Vice Mayor through you yes that one is because it's our money that's not through the specific purpose tax that is money that we've set aside from other being frugal through the years or revenues that maybe came in higher than plan for instance like PILT the payment

Thank you, Vice Mayor, and thank you for the presentation.

Okay, thank you. I'll try to go quick. Could you just describe on a couple of slides back? You are anticipated the revenue people's initiatives past and that will hit and it's based on historic bills. Can you just describe that process?

Um, I think I think there's based on the historical meals. That is where we split the money with the library, the fairgrounds. It shows up on your pretty tax bills, but we separate it out. It's on before we. the county department um that would experience the most impact is the sheriff and center um these all the money goes into our county general fund and the kid commissioners would want to divide that since there is

on my list here. Okay.

Since the sheriff has 26.21% of our general fund budget, they could say, you know, the sheriff's got a lot of big things going on. Maybe it's only impacting 10%. And then everybody else could take that. Commissioners hold purse strings with the council. They can tell us how they participate. I do know that their preference would be not to affect personnel.

All right, thank you. All right. Up next now is to measure weight.

Good evening Honorable Vice Mayor and Honorable Chair Jones. Tonight what we're really attempting to do is present diverse perspectives. So you've heard from the County Assessor, the County Treasurer. I love the information from the Assessor tonight because I think it helps make sense of to the property tax. It often feels like it's really hard to keep up and I'm super grateful for the that's been presented before me this evening. What I'm going to do is spend time talking about property taxes impact on government services at the city and so tonight There's a really big difference, and I forget whose slide it was in. I think it may have been Sister Matthews. She showed the impacts and problems on the various budgets of different governmental entities in town. And for the city, it's significantly smaller than the county. But being smaller doesn't mean that it has no impact, and I'll spend a fair amount of time talking about that this evening. So, City Clerk, if you could do the next slide.

Thank you.

We're just going to go to the slides as they load, and we'll sit in silence if we need to. So what I've done, I'm experimenting a lot with how I present information. I'm purely graphic, because I think that on top of the info concepts, you know, it makes people's eyes close up, right? And so I hope that I'm providing just a tiny bit of respite in the middle. I also would love feedback on things that I'm experimenting. So if you'd like, if you don't think it's clear, give me some feedback about learning that and really just things. We listened to our advisory quite a bit. Some of the consistent feedback we've heard is really simplify and just split down.

No, it's fine.

All right, cool. So one of the things that we will want, I actually think this is an older version of the presentation, but we'll go with it. So what we should remember about property taxes in Laramie is like the county, property taxes entirely support the general fund. And this is important to remember because a lot that folks will often ask is, what are property taxes used for? And I believe that they find the answer frustrating when we say, well, they're used to fund essential government services in the city's general fund. But that is the truth of the matter. And if you've listened to me present before, you'll know that we spend a fair amount of time talking about different types of funds that a government has. Treasurer Fletcher mentioned that earlier too. It's absolutely false that you can use money in any fund for any purpose in another fund. There are some ways that fund activity can co-mingle if it's for the same purposes, but we have to be careful about that to make sure that we don't have any issues there. So these property taxes in general support the city's general fund. And if we increase the property tax revenue at the city of Laramie, we know it's for one of the reasons. Either there's been a change in the underlying valuation of the property, or perhaps a change in tax rate, call that a mill. So just the tax rate, the city of Laramie, of course, not the tax rate, and county is a great job of spelling out those earlier on for the city of Laramie did not increase through actions of our over 20 years so for over 20 years And so all the increases in property tax revenue that you have seen for the city, some of those later, are actually due to changes in the underlying asset value. That's a lot of the conversations at the state level about property tax changes. Next slide, please. So the general fund, the elusive general fund. It's the hardest fund to fund because going on. All many of the core services that you think about in government actually That's police, fire, consolidated dispatch operations, animal control, streets, the much talked about surface water drainage, the level of service that we have. All these functions are in the general fund along with administrative services, along with community and economic development, parks, the thing people love in Laramie, recreation, all of these functions receive funding in general. And so with something like property power, when we say it goes to support general fund services, the gap is really big, and the services that this fund provides are really important to communities across the country. The general fund is a government's primary offering fund. Next slide. So when we talk about the general fund and we're thinking like the question of how general fund resources are used, if we can't pin down all the restricted or this, we should talk about the amount of money that is spent in the general fund on the purposes and expenses that the classes propose for me. larger services, where we spend the most money. And that's really in three categories. So that's things like street maintenance, but certainly not water, wastewater, solid waste. Those are enterprise funds. So most of this comes in the form of street investment, parks investment, things of that nature.

following closely behind the point of view, and public works behind.

And that's public works, things like engineering, things that are non-capital. It's a really important part of how we deliver governmental services. Next slide. Let's talk about the impact to the city of Mary. In 2027, after the reductions of 2020 and some projected decreases for 2027, if the people most people claim that exemption, of all forecasted revenue in general, even after all of these reductions, total is not a small amount. When you think about the statistics that we just reviewed that are being funded in the DELWP fund, And the other exemptions that are in play based on these presentations are $500,000, if you want to compare it to our total budget of something around $44 million, it's a small percentage. When you are trying to fund a lot of key priorities and essential purposes, $500,000 is an amount that matters, a significant amount. That's a significant project or some street improvements. So those really do matter. And as we look at what we've seen with pre-tax revenue from 2020 to 2026, we've seen the reductions that are in place right now lagging about 3% behind inflation versus the power. And so I wanted to focus on from this perspective. The way it's more and can grow our starts to widen and it means that we are further restrained in terms of being able to find those budgetary resource from the. Please. So let's talk about one of the other questions that we hear a lot is what are we going to cut? And we heard this a lot last year. And now, what are you going to cut because of the 25% exemption or ? And our answer is, you know, we never forecast. standpoint, we didn't have to cut personnel because we have a commitment to our personnel. And we like to manage in ways that should serve us in a way that they can rely on and expect. And so because we have grown that revenue source, we funded the budget conservatively. We've been able to avoid those cuts to service that are more in your face, the kinds of things that have splashed. We've had firefighters. I know that impact, but we really don't need that situation. So we've kept that running so slow, but it's really working in a town like Laramie. I'll talk about this a little bit more later. It's just for capital maintenance. And so if you've driven around Penn, then it's awesome to have millions of dollars of work on the streets. And then, I mean, it's a hassle to pause into the paths afterwards, those smooth roads. There's that go around. And we know that in Laramie, streets are something We need to invest more in it. We're able to do that right now because we have a lot of one-time revenue from development. I'll talk about that a little bit more. And then you think, oh, these property tax reductions don't matter, but they would very much matter more if we didn't have wind right now. And so I think it's really important to realize life is so much more complex than we ever want it to be, right? And property tax is a really good example of that. And you also see us deploying resources into the community in ways that may be alarming because the magnitude is big. It doesn't mean that underlying that that property tax reductions aren't going to end up hurting our budget, and I'm going to tell you why. So some of you know, many of you may know that for decades, for as long as I can remember in city service, Albany County, one of the lowest per capita in sales and use tax collections. That affects both the city and the county. Really affects the city because most of our revenue sources in the general fund are actually sales and use tax collections. So we have this really low per capita sales and use tax collections rate that started to change a little bit in 21, 2022, as we got wind energy development, which we know is not going to be ongoing. And we're really hoping to make improvements working with partners in the economy to increase the health of that underlying tax base. But we're still going to struggle with things like having a major tax exempt institutions in town And that's smaller than normal tax base. And so right now things look great, right? Thank you, wind. But in another five years, are they going to look so great? And that's one of the things that I fear in some of the narratives that I hear is that that really is getting lost because right now for Albany County, for the city of Laramie is a pretty good time.

Kelsora Doherty. I just would like you to clarify the wind, the wind revenue, that's for the construction of the turbines. It's not ongoing, right? That's why it's a one time.

Much of it, through you, Vice Mayor, to Councilmember O'Doherty, much of it is one time. There will be small sections of it that are ongoing. But even in 2026, we saw some contraction there that was a little bit shocking to me. And so I think the predictions that we all talk about in city council meetings are kind of coming to fruition, that you'll see some small growth in that underlying tax base, but nothing that is going to deliver the amount of resources that we've seen since 2021, 2022.

Thank you. And Assistant Vice Manager, on the previous slide, just in looking at the, there was the growth of the lag in purchasing power in the 3%, and that is stopping there at 2026. And when we're thinking about how we use these dollars and the $470,000 last year, over time, What do you anticipate? You said right now we are handling that, we've prepped for that, but what do you anticipate over time with a continued cut like this?

Vice Mayor, that's a great question. I think I would say it depends on how many people claim the exemption. It depends on how assessed values change. It depends on if the legislature has any additional action on top of the people's initiative. So if the assessed value goes from 9.5% to 8.3% or things like that, that start to affect that revenue base in a different way, it could end up being much more material. But if we're only considering the exemptions to date and the people's initiative unamended as approved by voters, then we are well positioned to be able to use some of these one-time resources to get through for a while. And then hopefully the changes in assessed valuation over time will kind of study that through when those one-time resources are reduced. But it definitely, it still erodes at that underlying revenue base. And that is something in a low per capita sales and use tax community like we are that we don't really want to see because those are some of our core operating revenue sources.

Go ahead, Councillor Dougherty.

Thank you. That inflation does that include like health insurance? I know those costs go up a lot.

Vice Mayor through you to Councilmember O'Doherty. So what I did, because I'm big on people being able to replicate my work is I actually just used the CPI index from so not these are not our actual costs. This is a CPI index inflation so that people can benchmark back to it if they want to, based on our actual revenue.

Thank you.

Okay. Can you go back one slide? So one of the things we really believe in in Laramie is having this conservative approach. And you might argue we've had to believe in it because when you're at the bottom of the pack in terms of the revenue you collect, you better know how to plan and you better know how to budget around that. And it creates that kind of practice that folks buy into. And you know, that practice, even though we have more revenue than we are used to having is still underlying those budgeting and planning processes. And having that mindset and that conservative outlook are really what help us get through that. And I just don't want that point to be lost in some of the details that I gave on this slide. Next slide. So let's talk a little bit about the value of Laramie. So one of the questions that our budget advisory committee has asked us, and I know our council knows this, is basically, how do we know you don't waste money? Because one of the fears I think around government, and it's a really normal fear, I don't think we should be afraid of talking about it, is that governments are inherently wasteful. And I will say that I am a big proponent that things can always be improved, and I very much have that mindset. But what I can tell you is based on my opinion, I believe that Laramie provides a very good value to the community. And one of the measures that you can look at, I think you'd look at a multitude of these measures, is you can look at the cost of government reports that the Department of Audit publishes each year. And they present the comparative cost of government for various cities in Wyoming. And so I've thrown a list of comparative cities up here. These are all full service cities, which means they all deliver about the same set of services to their community. They have different economies of scale, they have different local economies, but we're all trying to deliver about the same types of services. Laramie consistently provides its services at one of the lowest cost of governments in Wyoming. Now there's two ways you can look at that. You could say, well, of course it does because you have very limited revenue. So what choice would you have? Well, I mean, I guess I could see that argument maybe, but that doesn't necessarily mean we would have a low cost of government for a small community like Laramie with not a lot of economies of scale. That wouldn't necessarily result in that unless there was good budget and planning underlying it. You also could say, well, why is this something to brag about, Laramie, because wouldn't you love to have more money to do more good with? Yeah, sure, I totally would. And if we had that, I would like to know that we would still do it with a low cost of government. But the thing about these comparative measures is none of them are perfect, and they're only just a slice of the way that you might look at something And I do think that this indicator, total cost across the entire government, tells you something about what communities spend and how that stacks up in relationship to each other, because these questions tend to be more about spending than they are about the use of revenue. We are able to do this in Laramie, again, because I think our level of resources has really forced us to have really sustainable financial planning. And one of the cornerstones of that planning process is that we do only use ongoing revenue to fund ongoing expenses. So let's talk about ongoing expenses. Firefighters, police officers' salaries, those are ongoing expenses. We don't want to be using revenue that's going to go away for those kinds of things because we're just kicking the can down the road and we're going to have a budget cut in the future, right? And I don't think that's what our community wants from us. And so when we get one, when we know property tax reductions are coming and you see in our budget that we've got this low number for revenue in, that's because that's the number we're relying on to fund our ongoing cost. Anything above and beyond that, we're sweeping into that one-time resource pool and we're gonna deploy that for some type of limited term investment, most likely capital, but this year, One of the things you see us doing in the budget is actually using that for some limited-term personnel authorizations because there's so much pressure and so much expectation around getting additional work done. And so we've come up with this strategy to be able to use those resources to provide some more services, but with no expectation that that's going to continue forever because we just can't do that in Laramie. And that's one of the ways that we're able to deliver the breadth of services to our community with the level of resources that we have. Okay. Next slide. So here's what I want you to take away for the city of Laramie in particular. So even though property taxes are only 7% of our budget in 2027, and even though the cut is only 1% of our total budget, if you look at it from an extent standpoint in 2027, these taxes are to help deliver key governmental services. And so we're still in that millions of dollars in terms of total revenue, and the cut to date has still been almost $500,000 and that really matters. The direct impact for people who really want that is in deferred capital maintenance because, you know, one day we are probably going to be not receiving some wind revenue and we're going to be looking harder for where to find some of that capital funding and then it's going to be tighter when these core revenue sources start to contract and we'll be having different conversations as a community about what we want to pay for and how we want to pay for it. Those are good conversations to have, but we want to have those proactively and we don't want to be reactionary about them. Finally, those cuts potentially already compound some underlying problems we have in the tax base in Laramie, which are not going away, even though things look good. And hopefully you feel like, based on some of the information I presented tonight, we have a history of knowing how to manage and stretch the public's dollar in a way that creates some confidence or at least some curiosity. And you feel like you want to maybe ask some more questions about that.

Thank you, Assistant Vice Manager. Assistant city manager. I don't know why I called you vice manager. Apparently everyone's a vice tonight. So there we go. Questions from council or county commission. All right. Oh, yes. Comments too, please. Councilor Rowling.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. Thank you, Assistant City Manager. I'm still getting used to that, Jen. And also to Assessor Matthews and Treasurer Fletcher. First of all, I think I just want to commend all three of you for being able to distill very difficult and dense information into something that's palatable. That is not a skill that everyone has. And I think we really rely on our city employees and our county counterparts to make sure that that. is realistic and i've just been thinking a little bit about this number of five hundred thousand dollars and reminded that you know just at the beginning of this year the council was faced with the decision to in an emergency replace the chiller at the ice and event center to the tune of about five hundred thousand dollars which was an unanticipated expense but without it we would have no ice And then probably a pretty larger building disaster on our hands. And that just kind of puts that in context for me. So when I think about some of the potential impacts or something like this, just... Two days ago alone, I had four or five different people come up to tell me just how amazing the bike park was, how much their kids have been at the bike park, how it's such an incredible community asset and that people are so grateful for it. And so when I think about the long-term ramifications of this, if there's something that goes wrong with the pump track or one of the ramps, And that means that there is deferred maintenance on that as a recreational facility. That's an impact that is to me communicable. And I can talk to someone about that because I know that they will have An emotional resonating, like, touchstone to that. It's easy to say that for streets and a lot of other things, but I think, you know, and I'm speaking personally here, this is, it's important for me to start to think about what those measurable stories could be that will, I know, directly affect my neighbors, their families, my friends. Thank you.

indulge me um i actually that's an older version of my presentation that i think i uploaded in error and so i forgot to um speak on a key point and if it's okay with you i'd really like to make sure i say it just please um so one of the things that i find a little bit concerning is that there's been in wrapped up in this property tax narrative, I think there's a lot of focus on reserves and reserves growing and reserves and reserves and reserves. And I do think it's really good for communities for governing bodies to ask questions about the amount of reserves a governing body holds. But the reason for holding those reserves, the meaning behind that is every bit as important as the number. And the way that those reserves are diced by fund is equally as important. And in some of the narrative I hear, all of that gets lost. And it's just one number and it feels more like shock value to me. In Laramie, and I assume in Albany County, right now our reserves are much higher than they are used to being in the general fund. And there are some very good reasons for that. Those sales and use tax collections from wind energy development, planning for those property tax reductions in advance and getting some accumulated fund balance, those are all very good reasons why we have more on hand than is normal for us. But what we are trying to do, which I think has been modeled successfully by the state of Wyoming over many, many years of conservative financial management, is not just spend those reserves right now, to really think about how to deploy those reserves long term for the betterment of our community to really make the biggest impact And I feel like based on some of the narrative I hear, we are very much being criticized for that. And it's really surprising to me because at the state level, this is one of the things that we've built, like knowing that minerals one day will go away, being able to plan for that, that has worked very well for Wyoming. And so if a local government is in a situation where they have a surplus, where they're trying to do good, and then that is then turned against them, even in something like a Department of Audit dashboard, it's not very helpful. And so I do really encourage these conversations. I think they're an important piece of how governments manage their finances. But if I didn't talk about that tonight, I would really be remiss. I'm sorry I missed it earlier, but it's so linked into this narrative that I think it has to be said.

Thank you. And following up with that as well, those reserves we have plans for, right? So we know something is going to cost, you know, $50 million. We are saving those dollars so we can plan for that project that we are doing. So many of those are earmarked for things that we have coming forth.

absolutely and and i thought that um treasurer fletcher did a really good job talking about that from the county perspective um but you know the magnitude of city reserves in the general fund right now is really unprecedented they're also at least 20 million of them are committed for things like spet and current capital projects and so i think it's just sometimes that these numbers are so big these numbers are not numbers that we're all used to working with as individuals So when we see them on a government's balance sheet, they have that kind of shock value. But when you think about how much a street costs to construct, how much a chiller replacement costs at an ICE and event center, and you start to really think about the work of government when you drive down the street, all of the things that government pays for, those numbers start to make a lot more sense.

Great. Thank you. Oh, Kelsey Frieden.

Thank you, vice mayor. Thank you. This is city manager. Wade. Going back to, I don't know, Nancy. Look at that. I'm over here. I'll just keep zooming around. One of the things you talked about earlier in your presentation was that we're a full-service city and we provide different things for folks. We have a dump here. We have water. And I think what I've heard in this conversation too is things get thrown around like we make money off all those things. But could you just talk about being a full-service city, we're not getting revenue from our citizens, are we? And that's not a big factor in terms of getting revenue from that.

Assistant city manager.

Vice mayor through you to council member Freed. That's a really great question. Is it okay if I lean on making money off of something? Okay. So first and foremost, we are not a business. We do not accumulate profits for shareholders or for owners or whatever that structure may look like. We do sometimes accumulate a surplus for things like major capital investment. And when you are dealing with major capital investment to the tunes of hundreds of, you know, let's look at water, right? I mean, I think water is really easy to comprehend that there might be $6 million a year necessary in something like a water utility just for basic maintenance. and you times that by 10 years, and that's $60 million you're having to come up with funding for, it's not all on the rate payer. In fact, you're going to do that with grants and loans. Some of those loans, hopefully they're the state loans that we love so much that are preferential financing. Sometimes you may need to do it with bonding if you're looking at managing rates in a way that really works for your community. But at no point are you looking at building that surplus to return it to any set of benefactors other than the people that put in that money for those infrastructure services.

Yeah. Thank you. For real this time, Wyoming Taxpayers Association. Welcome, Hank Hoverland. While we're waiting for that to come up, just a big thank you for coming over and joining us in Laramie to share all your wealth of knowledge. Thanks so much.

Yeah, Madam Vice Mayor, Madam Chair, members, thank you for having me. Appreciate this opportunity to present. So my presentation will just kind of go over property taxes and Wyoming's tax structure a little bit in the state of Wyoming. And then we'll talk about Albany County and then talk more about the initiative, what we're here for. Onto the next slide, just quick overview. We'll talk about, I think I want to start by zooming out. We went really deep into the weeds here to start today, but want to talk about the importance of taxes, a little bit about my organization, the Wyoming Taxpayers Association, as you noted, then go into Wyoming, Albany County, some other impacts that have helped relieve the property tax burden on citizens here in Albany County that Assessor Matthews had mentioned, but didn't give numbers to, and then talk about Prop 1. So moving on to the next slide, what are taxes? I always like to start my presentations out about this to kind of, again, zoom out and talk about, I think there's a disconnect in some of the rhetoric around taxes and this property tax initiative. Taxes pay for services. We know that and you deal with that day in and day out at the local government level. And so taxes are the structure by which we as citizens pool our resources together to pay for infrastructure. We couldn't afford on our own and just talks a little bit about the goal of that. But I think I want to think about that if we didn't have taxes, if we didn't have a broad base and low rates. what would you be paying if you didn't have taxes? It's an insurance premium on fire or on police services to come to your house. And even with some of these property tax cuts, we've seen increases in fire insurance premiums. And so I think if we don't have this way to fund these critical services and infrastructure, you're going to see that cost elsewhere. And we'll talk about that a little more later. Moving on, what is the Wyoming Taxpayers Association? So we're not the Department of Revenue. We're a private organization, a membership organization. We have 150 plus members throughout the state, and we represent taxpayers of all types. That includes individual taxpayers, small main street businesses, large mineral companies, and everything in between, including ag producers. What our mission is, is to advocate sound tax policy for a healthy Wyoming economy that benefits not only businesses, but the workers and citizens that live in our communities. And what we know moving on to the next slide about Wyoming's tax structure is that companies really do pay a large share of taxes here in the state of Wyoming. And we'll get into that later through our Cowboy family. So onto the next slide. Going back 25 plus years to the tax reform 2000, this was a committee that was put together by the state legislature advocated for by the Wyoming Taxpayers Association at that time, we've been around for almost 90 years. And it wanted to look at Wyoming's tax structure and say, What does Wyoming's tax structure look like right now? And if it were to be torn down and built back up, what should we do? Well, in doing that first part, they found that Wyoming's tax structure is regressive. It's inequitable. Lower income households pay a larger percentage of their income in excise and property taxes than households with higher income. It's unstable. We've felt this in the past just through COVID, but also 2017-18 time period. We rely heavily on minerals. And so I think that talks about it lacks balance in that same way. Moving forward to now, a lot of this remains true. The legislature has taken some steps that were recommended by the Tax Reform 2000 Committee, but I think a lot of these core things of Wyoming's tax structure being inequitable and unstable and lacking balance still holds true today. So this slide is from the tax foundation. The graphic is, and this just shows the state and local tax burden by state for citizens. And so Wyoming consistently ranks number two on this, but we rank number one in state tax competitiveness index from the tax foundation. We have no personal income tax. We have no corporate income tax. We're second on this state and local tax burden only to Alaska. Alaska also has mineral reserves, but they use that and pay dividends back to citizens. Here in Wyoming, we invest that. We get revenue that offsets the tax burden that'd be required by individuals otherwise. So I think that's always important to point out. And I think Assistant City Manager Wade talked about reserves. And I think we'll get into this at the end about state reserves and some of the rhetoric around that. So what is the major state and local tax revenues here in Wyoming? We have three primary ones. I like to put this graphic up because I think of it as a three-legged stool. We have severance taxes. Those are mainly go to the state. Those are paid by mineral companies, oil and gas, coal. and things of the sorts we have sales and use taxes that's shared between the state and local governments it actually ends up about 50 50 after all specific purpose excise taxes general purposes it's about 50 50 between the state and local governments and then we have property taxes property taxes are wholly a local tax it goes to local governments like the city the county, but it also funds schools. And I think we'll get into that a little later of that breakout. But I think it's important to note here that property tax is wholly local. It stays in the communities in where it's paid. And I think that's one of the benefits of property taxes is you have that local control. You're able to go to your city council meetings. You're able to go to the county commission meetings and they meet more often than the legislature does in Cheyenne. And so you have more of a direct say in that government As I mentioned, two summers ago, the Wyoming Taxpayers Association put out the Cowboy Family. Report what what we aim to do with this is to show Wyoming families their state and local tax burden and then the services they receive back from the state and local governments where they live. What we found in this, the Cowboy family, this is a family of four, a $370,000 home, a combined income of $125,000. They pay approximately $4,400 in state and local taxes each year. Over half of that is property tax. I think that's why we're here. We've talked about it. We had rising assessed values. Not a lot of mill levies were increasing, but the assessed values were increasing. And so tax bills ended up going for folks. And I don't want to discount that. And I think Assessor Matthews talked about a lot of the programs that the legislature put into place to respond to these constituents that were feeling this, the pain of that. another a little over a quarter goes to sales and use taxes uh 17 percent goes to fuel taxes and less than one percent goes to excise taxes what you'll notice though on this chart is that the total state taxes paid uh state local taxes paid by the cowboy family doesn't even pay for their lowest amount of services uh statewide at the county level um so That has to be made up somewhere. So in total, every dollar of taxes paid by the cowboy family, they received $13.83 in services. So there's a gap of $12.83. Who makes that up? Minerals make up a little less than half of that. And then non-minerals, which includes investments. Well, that investment income came from minerals. And so they make up that other portion that the cowboy family does not pay for, but receives back in services. Going into property taxes specifically, this is just a sample calculation of your property tax bill and showing the impact of the homeowner's exemption that Assessor Matthews talked about. So for a $400,000 home, it could be up to nearly $700 a year. On the right, you'll see that property tax classes currently in statute. Wyoming has three classes. We have mine mineral products. Those are assessed at 100% of their value. So they pay on 100% of their production value. Industrial property is at 11.5%. And then, as Assessor Matthews stated, we pay on less than 10% of our home's value each year. And so we get a pretty good bang for our buck. And that can be shown. One thing before we move the slide. I think a benefit of property tax is not only on that local control, but it's transparent. In April, you got your notice of valuation. And if you disagreed with that, you had every right to appeal that to the county assessor and to the county board of equalization. Then coming up next month in October, you'll get your tax bill from the treasurer in your mail. You can see where each cent of your tax dollars went to these taxing entities. So you can see that it went to K through 12 public schools. It went to your county, city government, but also special districts. And I think that's what's kind of been a little bit left out tonight. Special districts have either been voted on by the people or or they were approved by the county commissioners who were also voted on by the people. And they levy mills to make up for some of those services. So conservation and weed and pest districts try and keep our natural resources and our landscapes beautiful. for the citizens of Wyoming to come. Healthcare, an important topic. We heard the question about health insurance and healthcare in a rural state like this is so important. And so some of that funding only just makes up for uncompensated care at hospitals. And so it's super important. Moving on to the next slide. Again, this only is on property taxes. So what it shows is that Wyoming ranks number 37, meaning we're about 13th lowest in property taxes throughout the country. Our neighbors to the east, South Dakota, are like us. They don't have an income tax. However, they pay almost two times what we do in property taxes year over year. Nebraska has an income tax, also has property taxes, almost three times what we pay here in Wyoming. I think it's important to put this into context. Again, I don't want to diminish what people felt in their budgets monthly or at the time that taxes were due, but I think it's important to show we don't have corporate or personal income taxes. Overall, we try and keep a low tax rate with a broad base, and I think that's an important goal of taxation. Statewide, this is 2024, so the next three slides will be who the taxpayers are and who the recipients are. And so you can see in 2024, this was before a lot of exemptions went into place. We only had the 4% cap at this point. The total collection statewide from property taxes were a little over $2 billion. Minerals paid almost half of that, right? We talked about that already. They paid almost a billion dollars in 2024. Residential made up about a third of that pie at $650 million. And then industrial, commercial, and agriculture made up the remaining about 20%. Where does that go? Over two-thirds goes to K-12 education. Counties make up the next 17%. Special districts, again, those important things that people have voted on, make up 8% or $167 million. Community colleges and then municipalities make up that remaining 2%. In 2025, this went down by almost $200 million. Not all $200 million of that was from residential property tax exemptions. Some of that was based on the mineral values. We don't have a lot of say over that, what the mineral markets look like. So that number went down. But residential property tax cuts also contributed to that. Notably, though, commercial and industrial taxes went up. So they made up more of that share of that pie. And agricultural stayed flat. Once again, though, that year, the pie, the percentage looked the same just with lower numbers because less taxes were coming in. And finally, estimated 2026. Again, we see mineral values reducing again. Residential went up because not everyone applied for those taxes. And so I think Assessor Matthews did a good job of laying out how you can apply and those programs are out there. And so again, those are the responses that the legislature had to some of these increasing assessed values. Industrial and commercial again made up almost 25%. Agriculture was at 2% again. And once again, slightly larger numbers. This was an increase of a little less than $50 million from 25 to 26, but the percentages stayed mainly the same. Now let's go to Albany County. Yeah, you can connect to the next slide. What does this look like? So this was 2026. What is who pays the taxes here? This looks a lot different than Wyoming or than Wyoming statewide as a whole. Residents make up over half of the taxes paid here in Albany County industrial. Takes up a quarter of that pie commercial and then little mineral wealth or agricultural taxes paid. So you can see the differences, right? Every county is going to have to deal with this differently. Every municipality will. And so I think this shows a good portion of that. But it also shows the importance that residential property taxes have to local governments. Moving on, it goes again, mainly mirrors what we have at the state level with K through 12 education, getting a little over two thirds county at 17% specific districts at 9%. And then with no community colleges, uh, actually service, you have a service area here, but they don't collect taxes for that. Um, from L triple C, uh, some municipalities make up that last 6%. And then, um, before we move on, um, Oh no, you can go to the next slide, sorry. So Assessor Matthews talked about the savings from the exemption programs. We also have other relief that the state, and she talked about these, but in 2025, 855 veterans got assessed value reductions on just their residential properties. And this totaled a little over 300, almost $362,000. So that went directly back into their pockets. That was backfilled. We also have the state refund program that's, uses state money and this benefited another 565 residents for a total of $556,000 in refunds back to folks that had paid their property taxes and qualified for this program. So I think it's also important to highlight these because they don't show up on your tax bill, but you can apply for them and would encourage people to if they qualify to sign up for them to feel that relief. What is on the horizon? What do we see coming next? I want to start with the joint revenue committee quickly to talk about what's at the legislature. Obviously, we had primary elections and so we don't really have answers on what this will look like. But we do have some ideas of what they're looking at. So their first bill, and as Assessor Matthews talked about this, was to repeal the homeowner's exemption, that 25% on your first million dollars of fair market value if the initiative passes. That's just a draft bill. It has been forwarded to session yet, and we don't know the fiscal impact from that. But it would obviously be a slight revenue increase over the status quo, because right now you can take both the 25% exemption and the initiative should it pass. Now that's not gonna equal 75% off your property tax bill. It's gonna be closer to probably 60%, but that matters as you're making these budgets. And so we have a bill for that. We also have acquisition value that we've talked about a lot in the past with an unknown fiscal impact. When I talked about that property tax bill, there's three classes of property in statute. voters in last november or november of 2024 passed a constitutional amendment to actually create a fourth class of property so that the legislature could really target residential properties because right now they're included with commercial agriculture and other personal property uh as their class and so they brought that out and allowed it to be a subclass of property for owner occupied so really targeting wyoming residents who live here and so that The legislature, they did pass this bill and so we'll see it in session, but it would implement that in statute and then lower the assessment ratio from nine point five percent as it currently stands to eight point three percent. And so that that does have an impact. Twelve, twelve and a half percent savings to every residential homeowner. in the state of Wyoming. That would reduce, and I apologize, I couldn't get municipal numbers, but almost $600,000 for Albany County, if that were to pass by my projections. We also have reducing the industrial assessment ratio from 11 and a half to nine and a half percent. So at 20, almost 15 to 20% tax savings, that would reduce Albany County property taxes by almost 400,000. And then motor vehicle registration fee calculation that changed that that's a large impact because that is distributed like property taxes um i didn't have that broken down by county but it's 120 million dollars statewide but would also target um more people than these exemptions have right this is on owner occupied and so renters and i think i'll talk about this on the next slide but renters haven't felt a lot of this um relief so far their monthly rent is based on the market and so it stays the same uh and And so maybe a motor vehicle registration fee, that was their idea with that to target those people a little bit more. So lastly, talking about Prop 1, and I think you got a lot of good information on this already, hearing what it is and its impact. But I think it's important to note for everyone here that in Wyoming, we have balanced budgets. You know that you deal with that year in and year out and just got done setting those budgets. We're not Washington DC and I don't think we wanna be. So if we do make this property pass this initiative, there's two choices we have. we can either cut services our revenues going down and so we're gonna have to cut expenses somehow and what those services that are going to be cut are is up to you all up on the dais or we can increase taxes. Hard for you to do at the local government level, so that's gonna have to come from Cheyenne. What does that look like? Well, we've seen proposals to increase sales taxes. Well, once again, who does this hurt? It's not only a tax increase on business, it's a tax increase on renters too, right? They're not owner occupied properties, so they're not gonna get reductions in that property tax or reductions in rent, but they're gonna go buy goods and services that will cost more. These cut services could be road and bridge like you talked about like the assistant city manager talked about fire protection districts infrastructure Community colleges and others that we talked about healthcare that receive property taxes. These one size fit all approaches does not value the local control that is in each community. There has been enough, there have been cuts from the legislature and we've talked about that. There's no backfill. And I think that's where I wanted to go with the reserve. Here in Wyoming, we do have reserves, and the number that's floated is somewhere in the $30 billion range. Well, much of that is in a permanent fund that can't constitutionally be touched by the legislature. What is that doing that's generating income that taxpayers like you and I, individuals, don't have to pay? Other of that is just cash reserves that they have to pay operating expenses, like those cash funds and agency pool. sustainably backfill can't be done by the state. A lot of their revenue comes from minerals. And as we're cutting residential property taxes, it creates an imbalance where not everyone has skin in the game. And so I would just leave with that. And I think you talked about it since city manager talked about it. You have to go to Cheyenne for a lot of funding. grants, loans, all of the sorts of things. I don't know that we want to be placing more power in Cheyenne for that. And maybe having local control and allowing communities to make those decisions for themselves would be the best. And so with that, I would stand for questions if there are any.

Great. Thank you. Any questions? Councilor Doherty?

Can you remind me where vehicle taxes go? Do they go to the general fund of the county or does that go for roads?

So, Councilor Doherty, fuel taxes have to go to roads, but more to vehicle registration fees so that you get your license plate or your tags each year are distributed like property taxes. calculated a little differently. It's just 3% times your car's value instead of like that multiplication of the mill levy and the assessment ratio times the value. And so that actually results in higher registration fees, but those are distributed like property taxes. There's a state fee. I think it's a flat fee of every car for $50 that goes to the highway fund. But that actual registration fee of the 3% times your car's value goes distributed like property taxes.

Other questions? Thank you. We appreciate you coming over. Just in thinking about the presentation, Mr. Hopesland talked about the special districts. And I know we have some folks in here who are funded through those mills. And I hope we hear from them tonight because, again, while the city and the county may be kind of well positioned to kind of get through this in the next few years, I think our special districts are often working on a much much smaller budget and those hits they are already being they're already working in a very tight budgetary landscape and so if any of those folks are here I really hope you come forward and share what those will look like because I think often we think about these property taxes and we think about them at the city and the county level but there are so many more layers that all these mills go toward paying so

anywho any other oh counselor bowling please thank you vice mayor that just um your your notice about uh special districts just reminded me that we're talking about 68 of taxes in albany county going to k-12 education 35 million dollars 2026. and um that it would also be helpful for us to you know at some point be in conversation with the trustees or um with some administrators at the district level because i mean i'm i'm assuming that there's a number of people in this room with children in k-12 public schools here in alamany county and you know that is that's a serious ramification that we're going to want to consider

I just want to bring up just to be clear that the state is constitutionally mandated to pay for education. So that will get paid for, but again, we're just shifting pots of money, right? So if it's cut somewhere, we can say, oh, don't worry about education because the state is mandated to pay for that. It's in the constitution, but they have to take it from somewhere. And those revenues are, I mean, everything's getting... You just got to look at all of it. As it was noted before, it's kind of complicated and not always super straightforward. So I appreciate you bringing that up. Other thoughts, comments from Council? Commissioner Hoff?

Um, just to give you some background information, the counties. Each year do self reporting and how many county operates at the lowest cost to its constituents constituency of all 23 counties. I know. Assistant city manager wait, I had to write it down pointed out that the city operates the county likewise operates that same level. So I just wanted to bring that to everyone's attention and then know that. If you participate in our budget process, we see a lot of large numbers, but a lot of it is not ours. The county treasurer is the taxing authority in Albany County. And so a lot of that is passed through money or grant opportunities that have to be facilitated by a government agency. And we have a really great grants department as well. So a lot of those funds that you see sitting in our accounts are not our own or we're not entitled to spend. So thank you.

Other comments, questions from Commission or Council? City Manager.

Before we make the change of public comment, I just wanted to take a few moments to thank the county commissioners and city council for taking this work session on. I mean, it's important, as you can see from tonight's information, and I think our panelists tonight deserve a round of applause from Treasurer Fletcher, Assessor Matthews, Assistant City Manager Wade, and Executive Director, Paul Rezende, for what they're doing. I also want to point out that in the audience tonight, we have some state representation and Senator Crum, Senator Raffis and Representative Chesnick. So we're glad to have them there here and means a lot to everybody that's come out. We appreciate all the community input and everybody that's shown up and I'm excited to hear the conversation that goes further. Thank you.

Thank you. all right now we will open up to public comment and sign we'll go those folks who are signed up first and then anyone can come on up and participate we encourage it so first up is mr gruber come on up jerry welcome good evening everyone i appreciate the time to visit with you a little bit pardon my voice i've had a larynx problem here lately

So what I want to say is I am a proponent of the property tax initiative, as probably many of you know, okay? And what I'm really concerned about is some of our elected officials and candidates are kind of scare tactics on people. We're just gonna bankrupt the county, gonna bankrupt the city, and we're gonna have to lay off all these massive layoffs. So let's look at the numbers. So where are my numbers come from tonight? My data source is the Wyoming Department of Revenue. That'd be a good source. the Wyoming Department of Audit, and the Albany County website itself. So let's look at some of the facts. The 50% reduction is of the residential assessed value used to calculate the tax, not the actual tax itself. People are afraid that that's the tax of the assessed value, 50% reduction of the assessed value. The residential property tax revenue has increased 68% in the last five years. That's a little over 13% per year. The Albany County total revenue is $208 million during that same five-year period of time. The residential property tax revenue is almost $30 million during that same period of time. That equals 14% of the income comes from the residential property taxes. Okay, well, 50% of that and 14% is 7% when we've heard that number tonight. In the last, in 2024, 2025, the total revenue of Albany County was almost $34 million and expenditures were a little over $31 million. So that equals a $2.7 million over tax collected. So we collected more than what we actually spent during that same period of time. 7% of that $33 million is $2.3 million. So that would be our loss on that. Even after the tax reduction based on the 2.7 minus the $2.3 million, that's $347,000 of excess taxes collected. Over that same period of time, the five-year period of time, the county has collected over $30 million of excess taxes over the one we spent, revenue minus expenses. so the albany county cash reserves is 51 million dollars as i'll show you in a minute however not all that's available to us i understand that some is unassigned cash non-spendable fund balance restricted fund balance committed fund balance assigned fund balance and unassigned fund balance so let's take a look exactly what came from the albany county website and the financial highlights As of June 30th, 2025, Alberta County had $51.7 million in cash and investments. This excludes amounts held in fiduciary funds and belonging to other entities. in addition the county owns capital assets property equipment valued at thirty four point thirty six point four million dollars of accumulated and depreciated amortization sorry to interrupt you the three minutes are finished so if you can wrap it up and then email us to your information i got two paragraphs here if you wouldn't mind go for it okay this about includes the infrastructure roads and bridges as well as land buildings and equipment The county had $2.9 million of other assets, which exists primarily of prepaid funds, inventory, property taxes, interest, and intergovernmental receivables. The county had liabilities, not including the pension liability and unearned revenues, $3.6 million. Therefore, the county recognized 7.6 million of the net pension liability along with 5.6 million of unearned revenue. The Albany County exceeded liabilities, assets of the county exceeded liabilities by $73.2 million of net position at the close of fiscal year 2025. Of this amount, $20.4 million may be used to meet the county's general obligations to citizens, creditors, and unrestricted positions. $35.1 million.

Okay, sorry, I'm going to interrupt you one more time because I gave you an extra minute. All right. And I don't want to cut into other folks' time.

All right.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks, Mr. Gruber. Next up, anyone? Oh, sorry. We've got Representative Testic. Thank you.

Welcome, Representative. Thank you, Madam Vice Chair and members of council and commissioners. I've heard Assessor Matthews give the presentation several times about the exemptions and how they work. And I appreciate how thorough and accurate she is with that. But I also feel like I have to apologize to her every time we should give us that because it's so complicated. It's so crazy. And that's our fault. We have made mincemeat of the assessment system to the point where I think the entire system is in danger of being declared unconstitutional. It's not uniform anymore, and it's getting more and more un-uniform as time goes on. The reason for in our defense, the reason we made mincemeat of it was because a couple years ago, there was a giant spike in property values, which resulted in a lot of tax increases for a lot of counties, some counties much worse than other counties. But so these tax increases happen without a single human vote. Nobody voted for these tax increases. They just happened. How did that happen? Because the Wyoming Constitution requires assessed values to be based on the full value of property. Well, value of property is not set by human beings. It's set by the invisible hand of the market. When the market goes up, taxes go up, and nobody votes for that. So that's the problem that we're trying to solve. We've tried to solve it because we don't have a lot of tools that we can use to solve the problem. So we've come up with these exemptions and different programs, and it's getting so complicated and so bizarre that I really fear that the whole system is in danger of being declared unconstitutional. So how do we fix it? Well, if the problem is the Constitution, let's fix the Constitution. And so what I'm going to be watching for, and it sounds like from the Revenue Committee that Hank was talking about some of the bills that they're sponsoring, there's going to be more tinkering going on in the next session. So we have more things, more moving parts, and it's just going to get even more complicated. What I'm thinking, what I'm hoping to be able to do is propose a constitutional amendment, but it's, that's a huge lift, a gigantic lift that we can only do after some study. So for the next interim, for next summer, I'm hoping that, you know, we'll do whatever we're going to do in the next session. There will be some bills that come forward. Some will probably pass and some things will change. We'll know what the, where the people's initiative goes, so it fails or passes. We'll know that. in January, but by next summer, we should think about changing the constitution to allow more local control, make sure that tax increases are voted on by human beings. The problem right now is that the legislature can cut revenue and you can't raise revenue. You have to cut services. Your ability to raise revenue to make it for our cuts is very limited. So what I want to do with the Constitutional Amendment is find a way to put the spending power and the revenue power back in the same hands, and that should be your hands, the local governments, because you know what the services are needed in your communities.

more so sorry to interrupt you representative um and your time is also up i apologize uh thank you and if you have additional information please email that to us thank you thank you just so folks in the room know i probably should have set this up front three you get a whopping three minutes and it goes by quite quickly while you're up there so just a heads up all right so we are through the folks who signed up um so if there's anyone in the room who would like to come forward and speak on this issue please we invite you Welcome, Mr. Wyatt.

Thank you. First of all, thank you to Assistant City Manager Wade and to Treasurer Matthews and to Assessor Treasurer Fletcher and Assessor Matthews for the presentation. It was outstanding. Something I like to bring up is I have a savings account and I like to see my savings account grow and I work hard to see that grow. I appreciate the fact that the city and the county has reserves because they have those for a rainy day. And I thank you for being responsible for the money that I spend. I just, some people don't realize. So we had the Mullen fire in 2020. The cost for containment and suppression of that fire was $33 million. Fortunately, we got a fire management assistant grant from the federal government to help pay for that. But if we didn't, we'd be on the hook for that. So just when people are criticizing our government for having reserves, think about what it'll be used for. And I appreciate all of you in the room and I appreciate our legislators that are here. So thank you very much.

Thank you. Yeah, go for it.

And this is important. The Laramie Police Department and the Albany County Sheriff's Office have the exact same number of personnel. But the budget for the Laramie Police Department is $8,660,129. And the budget for the Albany County Sheriff's Office is $5,406,489. Significant difference for the exact same number of personnel. So thanks. We're not wasting money. Thank you.

All right, anyone else? Come on up. Welcome, Ms. Crocker. We have three minutes. If you can state your name, that would be great. Sorry, the other thing I keep forgetting to tell people. Thanks, Nancy.

Hi, good evening. My name is Rachel Crocker and I am the director of the Albany County Public Library. Not quite a special district, but another one of those where the impact on the mills impacts us a little bit different. And so I thought I'd give you a rundown of what that impact would look like from the library level. So if you look at our budget this year, 82% of our funding came from property taxes, came from mill. We use 95% of our mill to fund personnel. We have trend, the rest of that funding, most of our funding comes, our funding for items outside of personnel come from 1% taxes from the county and from the city. They come from our friends organization. They come from our foundation. They come from grants. So we rely on mill to cover our personnel. We've trimmed where we can trim. We've taken 6% cuts in the last couple of years. We have personnel left. So something like this passes additional property. We are looking at people. So right now we have about 18 FTE and our staff a 15% reduction, which I think and my colleagues can correct me, but I think that's probably ultimately what we would be looking at for our mill. So we'd be looking at a reduction of three FTE in our staff. That is easily a full day of service for the library. So we're open six days a week. We would immediately need to go to five, if not fewer. It would reduce our programming. It would reduce all the services that we have today. An amazing conversation with an employee about how we could expand outreach services, how we could go deliver books and who else we could reach out to. And immediately said, if the people's initiative passes, this conversation stops. We're locked in where we're at. We can't expand anymore. So to me, we're on the edge. We have so many exciting ideas. And I think this is true of the county and the city as well, right? And all of our departments, as we look at about the ways that we can grow and expand and what more we can do. And then when we look at cuts, it locks us into not even just staying where we're at, but how do we shrink what we're doing for our community? We had our best summer reading this year. We saw over 500 people a day. coming through our doors um we want to be open so that we can continue to serve our community in those ways um and and that takes funding thank you miss crocker anyone else in the room come on up katie

Hi, everyone. Good evening. My name is Katie Winn. I'm the district manager for Laramie Rivers Conservation District. So we are a special district. I wanted to share a little bit about LRCD and our program. Since we do receive the mill levy, we receive one mill. Our budget is just about $737,000 and the revenue that we receive from the mill levy is nearly our entire revenue. We pay salaries for three full-time employees as well as one part-time employee. We cover our annual operating costs and then we've got a number of different programs that we pay for from the mill levy. Our different programs include a community enhancement grant. So we work with local nonprofit organizations and help them complete projects related to natural resources. We have an analysis cost share program. So we work with landowners to help offset the cost of getting their soil, water, and forage tested. We've got a rural cost share program which helps landowners in things like cross fencing, livestock water development, forestry management for fire mitigation, And we also do countless county scale projects. So these are like the river restoration projects that we're really known for. We do those larger projects by leveraging the small amount that we can contribute from the mill levy, and then using that as match funding to go after really large grants. So that helps us get some big projects completed that are like multimillion dollar projects. The only way that we're able to complete the work that we are able to complete is by having a tenacious small team, really dedicated partners, and by the mill levy contribution that we receive. We take using public dollars with the utmost seriousness, and we put these dollars back on the ground in the form of conservation projects. So for example, one project that we're pretty known for is cleaning up the old refinery site that's now the Napa Auto Parts store on North Cedar Street. Last week, I gave a presentation up in Centennial and I was talking a lot about some of our programs. And I said, I feel like we at the Conservation District, we kind of do it all. We manage the community gardens at Levante Park. We've got these kind of small scale projects that we work on with private landowners. And we do these large county scale projects and everything in between. And one of the folks in the audience said, Katie, if a conservation district didn't do this work, no one would. And that really struck me. Any cuts to property taxes means a smaller revenue for us, which means our impact is a lot less. You know, I like to say these are really not easy times to be alive, but they're amazing times to be of service. And for us at the conservation district, I think we're able to provide a lot of necessary services to the community. I'd like to just invite everyone to our public board meetings there every month. The dates are on our website. We go through the budget every month. Thank you.

Thank you. Welcome. You can share your name. We'd sure appreciate it.

My name is Mark Armstrong. Thank you for this time. I'd like to take a reality check here. This may not pass in Albany County, probably going to pass in the state. So we need to start thinking about cuts. Let's look at Albany County. Plate number five means when that those plates were given to us, we were the fifth richest county in the state. Now we have the highest poverty level in the state, twice the national average. This is a beautiful building. I believe the initial assessment was move in ready at $4 million. Final pay, $34 million. Government needs to start having some common sense. The county pays $70,000 a year to lease a copy machine. They pay $50,000 a year to belong to the Clerks Association. While government is funded very well, we have mothers that struggle to feed their children. So, I believe the government has enough money. And the reason this is on the ballot is because the people believe the government has enough money. I have no dog in this fight. I've been in Wyoming for 20 years. I'm over 65. I receive a 50% reduction on my own now. I have no dog in this fight. It's gonna pass statewide. So I think we need to start thinking about how we are going to feed that child, not build another building. All right. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. Anyone else in the audience?

Yes please. You've heard from a couple folks that have a mill and I want to explain a mill for you real quick. It's a tenth of a percent and in Albany County this year a mill is worth, if I'm not screwing this up, $743,000. Last year was worth $668,000. So when Ms. Winn is talking about the conservation district, that's the one mill that's all she gets that's determined by the assessor and it's based on fair market values of assessed property in albany county um the hospital receives three mills for indigent care um the county is capped at 12. um just just so you know what that value is so when somebody when and i will speak to the library as well they don't get it's a percentage it's actually Oh, thanks. It's actually a determined formula for how it gets split between the fairgrounds and the library. They're not getting a whole mill or we're not sending $700,000 to the fairgrounds. I don't have the breakdown on what everybody gets. I know it's been sent out. I can't get on the county stuff right now. So, just just so everybody's clear on what a mill is, though, and what it goes to support. So it's it's quick math. It's over 700,000 dollars. So, the school district receiving 25 mills, it's easy math to calculate. So, I just want to make that clear for everybody in case anybody's wondering, because it will. We're always in meetings and people are trying to figure out how much money that is. And that's how it's formulated. Thank you.

Thank you for that additional information, Commissioner. And one additional note to that, those mills have all been voted on by people in the community. So these are special districts, things like that. The community has said they wanted, they think that those are important and that is why they are in place. Are anyone else in the audience? Come on forward. Welcome. Please say your name.

There we go. Chairs, chair, commissioners and council members. I'm Chris Cleven. Wasn't planning to come in to talk tonight. However, Ms. Richardson, you asked a very direct question about improvement districts. There are actually two or different statutory developments, I guess you could say, of how they're built. Things like road improvement districts can be taxed differently than just straight mills than the conservation district. Where I come up with that is with the road district. When Ms. Fletcher put the slide up there, not all of our special districts in our county are listed on there. One of them in particular is the one that I helped form, and that is a base rate. really what we need to be looking at as well is the idea of thinking ahead and that made me with all this discussion tonight made me think about that getting together with these special districts we already get information from the department of audit the department of revenue about different trainings what we probably need to do is sit down with some of these different special districts that have the legal authority if they're looking at mill levies right now Are they able to change that to a base fee rate? Depends on what type of special district it is. The road district that I'm a part of is a straight base fee based upon every half mile that you drive down the road. The more the road you drive on, the more there's a fee. Makes it very simple. And so I just wanted to answer that question specifically for you guys. If you have any follow up to that. I don't think that all of our elected people that showed up tonight. I appreciate it.

Thank you. Right, anyone else in the audience? And I am if the group is okay with it. We had Lindsay here with Weed and Pest who had to leave early and left her notes with Katie Wynn. And so if you all are okay with me re-inviting Katie Wynn up to represent Weed and Pest, I would sure appreciate it.

Is that all right with everyone?

Great. Come on back. Thank you, Ms. Wynn. Can you remind us of Lindsay's last name as well as you? Thank you.

Yeah, so Lindsay is the manager for Albany County Weed and Pest. They have two full-time employees and they have one part-time employee, and then they employ different seasonals. Most of their work is conducted during the field season, but they're out in the field like eight months out of the year. They also, like the conservation district, they receive one mill. Lindsay was comfortable with me speaking on behalf of County Weed and Pest because we partner really closely on different things. Because we're both shoestring with our budgets with staffing right now, we really partner very closely. She's out in the field even as their manager doing like 14 hour field days. I asked her this evening. how much of her budget she estimates that she spends on just chemical, so just pesticide and herbicide, and she estimated about a fifth of her budget, so almost 20% of her budget just goes to chemical. In addition, they've got old equipment, they're already operating off of the bare minimum, and their insurance is extremely expensive because of the nature of the work that they do. She's working in the field such long days and so often that she doesn't have the ability to even apply for grants. So us at the conservation district, you know, I've done some of that work for her. So we're really just trying to partner and maximize our total impact because their mission is so closely aligned with ours. And their acreage of impact is reduced. So right now, one big project that we're working on together is the perennial pepperweed. It creates monocultures. It reduces native forage, native plants. So it's affecting wildlife habitat. It's affecting livestock feed. And their acreage is impacted, their impact acreage is reduced because they have such limited staff. So they're looking at contractors, but there's limits in terms of getting different contractors available, and then the cost alone to hire contractors. they don't even have the same funding that we have to be able to apply for match dollars. So it requires a lot of creative problem solving when we do support them and try to get grant funding, because they can't even chip in a certain amount to apply as match dollars. I always tell folks in the community and elected officials, you know, if you want to know the group that does the most with the least in this county, I really believe it's County Weed and Pest.

Thank you. Thank you very much for sharing. Anyone else in the audience who would like to come forward? Anyone online, city clerk? Okay, last chance. Audience. Anybody dying to speak?

Okay.

All right, so that concludes, well, actually public comment, I mean, council and commission comment, if we wanna finish up with any comment before we close up here. All right, just again, a huge thank you to everyone who came out and shared this information. I encourage each of you to continue to talk to folks about this and talk to those special districts, talk to the fairgrounds, talk to anyone who you know might be impacted. Thank you all for coming out. We have a little bit of business to do on the council side. So we'll just take a quick, maybe three minute break and come back for council to finish up. And thank you commissioners for taking the time to join us tonight. Sure, appreciate it. Do you have any words, Commissioner Jones?

i want to thank um the council as well hold on sorry folks thank you all very much

Go for it, Councilor Newman.

I've been gone for two weeks, so yeah.

Councilor, Mayor Cumby.

I've been on leave, bereavement leave for two weeks. And I want to thank everybody for the tremendous outpouring of support and love and concern and the great meals. And it's just been amazing. So thank you all very much.

And you would do the very same for us. So thank you. I attended an LCBA meeting, Laramie Chamber Business Association meeting for Mayor Cumbee and kind of came on a tail end of it because I was at another meeting prior to that. But a lot of good conversation around just businesses coming in, thinking about different properties. So that was really informative. The Main Street met and they talked about, went over the kind of the information from the Brewfest. They are talking about just the activities moving forward for the fall. There will be some things that are happening on that side. And then I can't recall if I reported on DDA last time or not. but they are moving forward with the downtown development plan and gaining feedback on that plan, and we'll be putting that out. And then Pilot Hill is tomorrow, and Councilor Freed is covering that for me, so thank you. Councilor Bolling.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. Just a few updates. On Tuesday the 1st, we had Police Advisory Board Um, it was a, um, a long meeting that was mostly about, uh. Procedures resolutions and amendments to, uh, rules of procedure. Um, but all of that is really good. Um, also, um, uh, in our next. work session next month, we will be voting on and approving a special op ed about the fifth penny, its importance and how that affects public safety. So please be on the lookout for that. And then later that evening on the 1st, no, I'm sorry this the next day was intended to be our 1st Laramie youth council regular meeting. But because we had just. approved the remaining body of that the evening before there wasn't enough time to get that information out so um that first youth council regular meeting um has been postponed to october 7th if i'm correct nancy thank you very much um and um if uh counselor shumway and newman if you have not yet gotten that information um i'll keep you in the loop and uh counselor bowling you also hosted the west siders again to talk about yes thank you yeah no thank you uh counselor richardson uh yes also on the first we had a another meeting um with uh the west side overlay task force um this time I'm furthering some sort of updates to codifications in like current procedure, but that can be sort of like codified more properly in a text amendment that is about, you know, issues around. um uh flood prevention and mitigation um and some and have are making some positive steps um forward on some action items for that so uh that group is is going back to do some work specifically on that and then we have another meeting set for i think the 14th of september um so um i will keep you guys updated as to as to how that plays out

And because I said I was going to do this and almost forgot, you all should have gotten an email about signing up to do the fun stuff with fire. If you haven't responded yet, let them know if you want to participate in all the burn. Do you want to share all the stuff? Yes, because City Manager Fieser was almost a firefighter. I don't know if all of you know this or not. Okay. Yes, please. Yeah. You got to promote this. Yeah. Oh, you can do right here. You're good. Either way.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. Chase Bridgman, Laramie Fire Department. B shift shift commander. I appreciate the opportunity. We're doing kind of a PR day for you guys and any city dignitaries. We have the opportunity of a burn, a live burn. You're more than welcome to sit in with bunker gear and SCBA. Unfortunately, you'll probably have to shave your beards or at least trim them. If you're interested in going inside the building, we'll get you fit tested and put on bunker gear. We're also going to do a rescue off the building, off the drill tower south of town, and you're more than welcome to participate in that as well. What was the third one? The extrication, the vehicle extrication. And so that one will also be kind of just a spectator. The big one would be if you want to get inside the burn building and watch fire go over your head or watch the development of fire. We just have to get you in a little bit early to get the mask fit tested and get you guys fit for bunker gear. And we can schedule that if there's a handful interested or just one or two. Yeah. Any questions?

Thank you, Chief Commander Bridgman. And so just look for that email from him if you haven't responded and you're interested. Okay, perfect. Sorry. Now onward to Councilor Shumway.

I know you're supposed to trim your beard, but would I trim my mustache if I were to volunteer?

You would make it.

I wanna thank Councilor Boling for all the work that he did on getting the Laramie Youth Council ready to go. I know the first meeting is now in October. Looking forward to meeting with them when they meet. That's all I have.

It works. Okay, thank you. Councilor Newman and I sat in on interviews for the parking task force and we were originally thinking two people, but I spoke with city manager cause we'd like four and he said, do it. So we have four community citizens that we'd like to appoint to that. And then I also had help from councilor bowling this last week for, uh, uh an individual be put on the ura and so we interviewed two and there's one that we're really really excited about so and then the other one we think could be good but elsewhere maybe so but they were very interesting and fun to talk about too 15 minutes turned into at least half hour 35 minutes each because they were so good to talk to so and that's all i have on updates

um thanks mr locker counselor locker um no meetings in the last two weeks but this week have a whole bunch pilot hill for vice mayor richard send us tomorrow parks trees and rec board if we have a quorum we'll meet tomorrow um then we'll have traffic safety commission and railroad depot board meeting on thursday So those should be some good updates. And then I guess just another update, city manager sent an email, or forwarded an email, but the County's Planning and Zoning Commission is meeting tomorrow at five o'clock, and one of their agenda items is industrial park zoning. So going back to data centers, if folks are interested and they're watching this, five o'clock at the courthouse or in the commissioner's room. That's it. Great.

Thank you, Council. Okay, on to agenda review. Does anyone see anything that they would like removed or moved to the regular agenda from the Consent Agenda besides?

Not a move, but I just want the Public Works Director to let us know what kind of pickup we're getting because it's always a touch of truck and opportunity.

Perfect. Maybe he can add the detail. I bet it's in the report. You might be able to see it then. Yes, Councilor Lockhart.

I'm along the same lines, except from what I remember most of the times, anytime there's been an award that we've put that on the regular agenda as a yes, no, because I'd like to know, maybe it'll be in the report. Who did we get the truck from? Who was the bids? Things of that nature, since... So it's just nice to know that. So I don't know if we need to put that in the regular agenda or not. Thoughts, but that's just one of my concerns.

I'm interested in that too. Well, yeah, because typically that should be over the amount that would be on the consent agenda normally, right?

As well.

You could help us with that.

Yeah. Honorable Mayor, Council, between you or through you. I believe that the award is under 100,000, and that's why it's on the consent agenda. And that's kind of that number that we do to vacillate that. If you certainly would like it pulled off, we can, but I'll reach out to Jay and make sure that I get more information to you guys.

I'd like to pull it because I heard a rumor that it's hybrid.

Okay. Excited. So pulling that one. City Clerk, did you get that?

Okay.

Okay, great. um right then any questions otherwise on the agenda okay oh yes assistant city manager not assistant vice anything i i i actually wanted to giggle but i couldn't because we were presenting

There's four budget amendments on this next agenda and they're separated for a reason because I think they're going to be easier to talk about. The first item on that, the first budget amendment is going to be to final out the administrative process of repealing the surface water drainage fund. And so I just want to draw your attention to that in the event that it draws people who want to comment on that issue one last time. I'm doing the best I can to write about that in a way that is very transparent and reflects your actions. And in the resolution, I've been very careful to make sure that I put those steps in place. But I do just want to draw your attention to that item.

Yeah.

All right. Anything else? Okay. Thanks, everyone. We are adjourned.

oh and next