City Council - workshop

I won't want to be that guy, but I'll probably get up here and look.

I would now like to call the September 15th, 2026 Longmont City Council study session to order. The live stream of this meeting can be viewed at the city's YouTube channel, longmontpublicmedia.org forward slash watch, or Comcast channels 8 or 880. Let's begin with roll call. Go ahead, Michelle.

Mayor Hidalgo-Ferring. Present. Mayor Pro Tem McCoy.

Present.

Council Member Christ? Present. Council Member Kahlkofer? Present. Council Member Marsing? Here. Council Member Popkin? Here. Council Member Prieto? Present. Mayor, you have a quorum. Great, let's stand for the pledge.

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

Okay, anyone wishing to speak at public invited to be heard will need to add their name to the speaker list outside the council chambers. Only those on the list will be invited to speak at public invited to be heard. Each speaker is limited to three minutes. Do we have any motions to direct the city manager to add agenda items to future agendas? Council member Kalkhofer.

Thank you, Mayor. So in speaking with staff about the meeting on the 29th, I looked at the schedule for when I'm going to be gone. And I can't actually do remote on the 29th. So I make a motion that I can participate on the September 29th meeting virtually.

Great.

OK.

So the motion was made to ask of council to approve virtual attendance on the September 29th. Is that a regular session meeting? Study session. Study session, thank you. And that was seconded by Councilmember Popkin. Do we have any discussion on the matter? Nope. Okay, let's go ahead and vote. Oops, I refreshed my screen and I didn't need to. Okay, that carries unanimously. We are now on to special reports and presentation. Oh, nope, never mind.

I was going to skip public invited to be heard. I did not mean to do that.

We are now on public invited to be heard. First name on the list is Esperanza Ortiz. Come on down, and you have three minutes.

I'll be fast since public speaking isn't my forte. My name is Esperanza and I'm the face behind the landing pad, the cannabis lounge that I'm trying to bring to Longmont. Matthew, thank you for coming to the space station and talking to me in my natural habitat. I really appreciated the conversation and you brought up some really valid concerns. I put a lot of work into finding solutions to those concerns. And I've been asking the community what they think. Yeah, I put out a survey, and I found out that there's a lot of transportation options, and people are actually willing to use Uber and Rideshare instead of driving. I've been working on the odor, the ventilation, security, and the responsible consumption. So I just wanted to show up, let you know that I'm still here, still listening to your concerns. I'm doing everything that I need to do to address your guys' concerns. What started as a crazy dream really feels like something that's like the community really believes in. So you came into my environment to hear me out and I'm just asking for the opportunity to come into your guys' environment and be able to go over any concerns that you guys have and anything that might be holding back the consumption license. Thank you. Thank you.

Next speaker, Hal Morrison.

Good evening, Mayor, Councillors, and city staff. My name is Hal Morrison. I live at 236 Sunset Street. Our home is within the Bond Farm neighborhood, which is an active part of the City of Longmont's Neighborhood Group Leaders Association, also known as NGLA. Our independent classified neighborhood comprising more than 400 households located between 1st to 3rd and Bowen to Sunset requests a neighborhood activity fund grant each year for our annual Spruce Avenue block party. However, some years we like to mix things up. This year, partly due to the hot and dry weather, it has been planned for a fall festival in mid-November. As November can be cold and snowy, the event is planned for indoors. Unlike many larger HOA neighborhoods within NGLA, our non-HOA neighborhood has no community space and no activity budget. Therefore, as with the handful of past events over the years, we were planning to use the wonderful Isaac Walton Clubhouse. Although NGLA neighborhoods previously were offered the use of various city event spaces at no cost, a recent policy change has ended this benefit. Instead, park shelters are now the only no-cost event spaces offered to NGLA. Because park shelters are unsuitable for a mid-November family-oriented neighborhood event, here's our conundrum. The maximum grant we can receive for our event is insufficient to cover the rental costs for the Isaac Walton Clubhouse. With our entire annual grant having to cover the facility rental, even a minimal potluck event becomes unaffordable. So with the way things now stand, we may be forced to cancel the Bond Farms annual event this year because of insufficient funds. If there are concerns with every NGLA neighborhood booking no cost city event space, a free to all policy doesn't have to be the only solution. with an annual budget for the neighborhood activity fund grants and a limited supply of party resources for the events. When these have been fully allocated, that's it, no more. Likewise, the city could designate a limited number of no-cost event spaces annually. Once allocated, no more. Thank you for whatever solutions you can offer the Bond Farm neighborhood and other NJLA neighborhoods.

Thank you. Lance Whitaker.

I'm doing something unusual today. I'm working from my phone. Today is National IT Professional Day. National Double Cheeseburger Day. Oh, I forgot to say who I am. My name is Lance Whitaker, 1750 Collier Street, Longmont, Colorado, 47 years. National Double Cheeseburger Day. National Cheese Toast Day. So it looks like we're having a lot of cheese. You know what that means. National Online Learning Day. And National Leguini Day, National Nurses Day, National Crème de Menthe Day, National Tackle Kids Cancer Day. I guess that's the most important, huh? Again, I like to advocate for fruit trees in Longmont. House Bill 19-0123, which you all know, you've already done all the work, so let's see what we can do about it before even more people start showing up for it. I heard last week we had a sign issue. And I'd like to say something about signs. Signs are okay if they're advocating for one thing, but if you keep posting signs that express your opinion while someone else is talking, that seems a little rude. That would be almost like me going behind someone's back and signing You know, so maybe we can just limit it to one idea or purpose. And that's all I've got to say. Thank you and have a good day.

Thank you, Lance. Meg Thornberry.

Hello, everybody. Meg Thornberry here. We just had a lovely social last night for Visible Government League and wanted to invite everybody again to our next meeting, which is going to be the fourth Monday, so it'll be the 28th. And we will still be at the St. Bray Insidery from 7 to 9. So if you are interested, we would love to have you there. We also, I wanted to do a shout out to Rank Choice Voting as well. They are going to be having a town hall with the mayor and Senator Katie Wallace, who was also at our Visible Government League meeting a month ago. So that is going to be this Sunday on the 20th from 11 to noon. So please go to that if you are interested and have any questions. I know there's definitely some misconceptions around there, but I really do believe that ranked choice voting is one of the best ways that we can actually get a representative democracy in a way that also sort of successfully bypasses gerrymandering. So big fan of that. um so i hope people are able to go join there um in terms of um you know the way that everything's been going on um i've just been constantly grateful for how cutting edge longmont has been again and again whether it's ranked choice voting whether it was getting rid of flock whether it was making a tech board all of these things are so exciting to be in like the top 10 first places to do that that's so cool As somebody who grew up here, it's amazing to keep on telling all of these new people here. It's like, isn't it awesome? Isn't it the best? It's so cool. So I just want to say I'm really grateful for that, and I hope that we can also apply that energy when it comes to public safety. I know we used to have a very, very strongly rated core team here, and we'd love to continue to get that back going. So one of the things that I would love to see is just like, if we were to operate public safety from a mental health first perspective, a standpoint, how would that change staffing numbers? If we were going to be doing it from a fire first standpoint, how would that change staffing numbers? So just sort of with all of this and with the wider thing of we need to be thinking outside of the box in general, I would just love to see instead of it's either this or that, Can you give me a rainbow of options, please? Can I have more than three things? Once again, ranked choice voting, more than two options. So I would just love to see Longmont be able to have a way that we are able to progressively be really conscientious about how we are orienting our public safety department in terms of what our goals and values are as a city. So anyway, thank you so much. It's so cool to live here. Thanks.

Thank you. Seeing no one else on the list, I will now close public invited to be heard. We are now on to special reports and presentations, and there are no special reports and presentations. We are now on to item six, study session items, the 2027 proposed budget presentation.

I mean, we get both screen control. Well, thank you. Well, that didn't work.

Well, you got to get out of the X.

Control F L L. Maybe we'll just use this. All right, I think I'm ready. Good evening, Mayor and Council. Theresa Malloy, Chief Financial Officer. And this evening, we have five topics to go through with you. We do have a fair amount of slides. They are broken down into these categories, and we will certainly stop between each topic to allow you all to ask some questions. I am going to turn it over to Sandra who is actually going to kick us off this evening.

Good evening, Mayor and City Council. Sandra Cifuentes, Budget Manager. So before we get into the 2027 budget summary, we thought it would be a good idea to walk you through the 2026 budget just to show you how the budget can change over time from when we first proposed it in 2025 to when it got adopted and then finally to today. So in August of last year, we came to council and we proposed the budget. This is what the figures were. We had projected revenue up $476.3 million, proposed expenses at $520.2 million, which resulted in the need of use of fund balance of $43.8 million. We came to council the month of September and October with presentations, also received information from the Boulder County. So ultimately, the revised and adopted budget changed. The projected revenues changed to $475.8 million. That was a difference of $525,000. And that was largely due to our reduction from one-time property tax revenue. The adopted expenses, those went to 519.8. That was a difference of 433,000 from the proposed in August. And again, that was tied to those unallocated one-time expenses tied to that revenue, as well as some pay changes. Ultimately, there was a need for use of fund balance of $43.9 million, which is a $91,000 difference. The information that's very hard to read down below is just more detail of those changes by funding source. the 26 adopted budget became effective january 1st and as you know we do come to you on a monthly basis usually following the year end with additional appropriations these are adopted by you all by ordinance and there are really two types of additional appropriations we bring to you The first and the largest is the carryover appropriation, which we brought to you in May. This is due to our charter that states that our appropriations lapse at the end of the year. We do have to bring the appropriation to carry over the budget that is still needing to be spent in the current year. So that's the carryover. We also have new appropriations that you see these monthly. These can be appropriations that have fund balance contributions. It could be for grants that were awarded and approved by council. It could also include unanticipated unbudgeted revenues such as donations or reimbursements, as well as CIP amendments to increase the budget and capital projects. these could also be from either fund balance or grants so we do bring those quite often So we, since August of this year, we've brought to you and you've all approved 11 additional appropriations so far this year. This does include the carryover appropriation in May, and that brings our 26 revised budget to $755.4 million. That is $235.6 million above the adopted budget. So that's a 45.3% increase. Of that 235.6, 182.2 was carryover, and then the remainder, which is 53.3 million, that's for new appropriations. And this chart here shows you the carryover and new appropriations through the years from 2011 to 2026. As you can see, the orange line is significantly higher and that's representative of the carryover. And then the blue line is new appropriations. Major carryover items that were included in the 26th carryover this year included bond funds, capital improvement projects, since these take multiple years to complete, recovery programs, and grants that cover multi-year awards. So that's just a quick summary of how it can change. It changes quite significantly since we present it to you. So for 2027, the proposed budget, showing it in a very similar manner, we have proposed revenue at 513 million. proposed expenses at 547.4 million which results in a the use of fund balance of 34.3 million that's a 5.32 increase over the 2026 adopted budget and of this amount 95 million is for capital improvement programs and with that i'll pass it on to teresa

I just wanted to touch really briefly on the major revenues in the budget, and I know we have talked about this with you previously, but this is our projection for sales and use tax. As you all know, five funds. I also added to this slide what our 26 budget is, relatively a flat budget. We are seeing or we're projecting at the time we were putting our budget together a growth in sales tax but a decrease in use tax but overall it was a just a minor increase in combined sales and use tax. Our 27 budget is based on performance through June. We now have received performance through July and Surprisingly, pleasantly surprisingly, our sales tax is remaining very strong. Our use tax did kind of start out a little slow, but then, as you all know, one significant project, development project, changes that significantly. We are starting to see that number come back down. Performance through July for use tax was below the level of use tax in 25. But when you look at it combined, we are holding pretty good. at a 4.2% overall increase through mid-year. When I was putting together the projections for, again, for 27, did a projection for how I felt like we would end the year, I basically stuck with the budget. I now believe that We will hopefully, and slightly surpass that. It is kind of trending down. I do think it will continue to trend down a little bit in total. So I am hopeful that we'll meet and actually surpass our budget for 26. What we are proposing to you all for 25 is a total overall increase of 3.5%.

Anything you wanted to add there?

I keep turning the microphone off instead of advancing the slide. Property tax. So we have spoken to you about our property tax for our 27 proposed budget. It is, at this point, what we had received very preliminary from the county assessors was a million dollar reduction in property tax from our 26 revenues. Our August assessments, preliminary assessed valuations indicates that we're gonna lose another 500,000. And we will not get final certifications until December. So we could lose even more than that. We do have to come back to you with a revision in our property tax, and we are exploring some options. We have started those conversations, and we don't want to be premature, I guess, in proposing what those reductions will look like just yet. And so what we are wanting to suggest to you all is that at your September 29th meeting, we will bring those back. So in another two weeks, we will bring back the revision that we will have to make to our 27 budget to accommodate this reduction in property tax. I did it again. And one other significant revenue stream in the proposed budget is revenue from permits. So not only do we get a use tax on those permits, but we also get permit revenue itself off of these permits. And again, I've included the 26 adopted budget, combined permits in our 26 adopted budget was 1394, broken out between single family, townhome, condo, ADUs and multifamily as shown on the screen. The projections that we received from development services, They are indicating that we will not meet those projections. We will fall short of those and they are really only projecting a total of 936 permits for this year. The 27 budget is built based on 1,456 permits. And as you may recall, we have a financial policy. It's our incremental development revenue policy that basically says anything over a base threshold of 300 new dwelling units is considered incremental development revenue. It is revenue that we will use from an ongoing perspective, but only for ongoing expenses that are related to development type activities that we know could be reduced if and when that level of permits falls at or below that 300 new dwelling unit threshold. And so that's the incremental development revenue. And on this slide and in your council packet is the incremental development rate revenue in our 27 proposed budget. It's about 450, some 52,000. And we are funding a fair amount of positions or portions of positions with this incremental development revenue. And that goes all the way back to 2015. So the positions that are listed 2015, 2016, 2017 have been funded for a number of years from incremental development revenue. In 2026, we did add the fixed term revitalization manager redevelopment and revitalization manager however for 2027 what we are proposing is rather than fund that from incremental development revenue we are funding that from one-time funding in the general fund And to replace that amount, we are adding two additional positions. So those are the positions that you see that say added in 2027. And then there's a smaller amount of temp wages and some overtime in the building inspection development service area that makes up the rest of the incremental development revenue uses.

So Theresa, can we hold right there? One of the things that Theresa included in your packet is information that was requested by Councilmember Christ and are you pulling that up later or no?

That was not something I was planning on going over.

So I wanted to kind of dig into, if you can go back, I wanted to dig into this a little bit, especially because a lot of you all are new to the budget process, had some good questions in terms of what does this look like and how do we put it together. So a few things that we're starting to see that we talked about early on, and I wanted to spend some time in this. So if you look at the information that was in your packet regarding the available land and the percentages that existed, what that's really showing us is when you look at all the categories and we say what's the available land to develop, what you're seeing is it's a pretty small percentage in each one of those categories. What comes into play, and I'm going to start tying some things together on this, is when we look at the permit revenues that we're estimating, those are based on projects that are in the hopper, meaning they have come in through the DRC process. Those are things that we can count on, or we think we can count on. There's still some inherent risk on this, as we saw during different economic conditions. When interest rates blew up, projects stalled, it started slowing down on the use tax. One of the things that comes into play that we often don't have, you know, the projects that tend to generate the most revenue are projects that come in that are really in the economic commercial development space, typically because their values are higher, and they also generate additional sales and use tax. Those are harder to predict because sometimes we don't necessarily see them in the system until they're ready to go. And we're seeing a couple that we've been made aware of in the last week that we're starting to assess. So that comes into play in this. One of the things that is also impacting, I think, the number of permits that we're seeing is when we look at the undeveloped property in our community, there's also a reason why it's the undeveloped property. It's because many of those parcels have a lot of challenges in terms of development from core infrastructure issues to some cases it may be more brownfield that we're seeing. And so what that does is start adding to the cost of development. which is a different challenge that we're having to deal with. Um, and, and so, um, that really also then is starting to align with, um, the comment that we made when we said we are, we are maturing as a community. And what that really means is that we have less developable land available. for projects, and it means that where we're going to tend to see revenue coming in is probably more likely in the redevelopment world as we continue in the future. And what was really interesting is today at the Longmont Economic Development Partnership, Dr. Capuchin presented on the school issues. What was interesting is we're both experiencing the same thing, but we're experiencing it and seeing it in different ways. So when they talk about student enrollment, they're impacted by birth rates, which it's gone from 1.7 to 0.7. And really talked about when you look at St. Vrain Valley, the growth in the population for St. Vrain Valley is is actually more connected to areas to the east of Longmont versus Longmont itself. What she said was I think really important is for the longest time Longmont was supporting the other schools. Now these other areas are sliding in and that's really a product of the developable land that we have in place. One of the board members asked her the question, well, we're seeing Boulder Valley go through very similar issues. What's the difference between St. Vrain and Boulder Valley and why is it not as significant? And her answer actually then created an answer for me in that Boulder Valley doesn't have any space to add any more homes. And so in addition to birth rate going down, they also have no space to build more homes, which is exacerbating their problems. We're not there, but what we're starting to see is that we are getting into that point where we're experiencing the same thing. So from the school district's perspective, what that is doing is impacting students. From our perspective, it's impacting revenue because of the sales and use tax that came in through that process. So for the longest time, we were seeing fairly significant single family developments coming through the system. And what we've seen is that has decreased over time, which is then now impacting permit fee revenue. It's also impacting ourselves in use tax. And as we have less land available, that's going to continue to be a more significant issue in terms of a revenue projection. and how we look at that into the future. So I wanted to kind of dig into this a little bit and answer any questions that council may have.

Council Member Popkin.

Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Teresa and Sandra and Harold. A question for Harold on that, and then maybe a question back to Teresa and Sandra on the earlier part of this part of the presentation. If I'm reading between the lines of what you were just speaking about in terms of the redevelopment, the budget challenges and kind of development fees and revenue that we're getting, would it be fair to say, looking back at, like I said, the last five, ten years for the city, We haven't been swimming in cash, but there have been tight budgets. But we've been able to kind of make do with the development revenue that has come in almost more organically at a market level. Now what we're seeing, and this is timely because we just came from an urban renewal meeting. we are having conversations about first in Maine and potentially the sugar mill in the not too distant future and the mixed use innovation and redevelopment zone. Are you saying that we have to be much more intentional about prompting that development in general in order for us to see that same level of revenue that was allowing us to sustain kind of even the tight budget worlds? Am I misrepresenting that in some way? I just want to make sure I'm clear on the financial, like the cycles here.

Yeah, I think... To give you some perspective, in the mid-90s and the 2000s, there was a significant amount of revenue growth coming in from residential developments and those types of things. When I got here in 2013, we actually started seeing the slowdown. We were still seeing residential growth, but not at the same pace that we were before. So we've been stepping into this and seeing it come forward. So it's, it's really the trend and it's available space. I mean, you can say, I mean, that's kind of a big variable in this. We knew it, we knew this was coming to your point. We've been able to manage it. I think. where what I'm really pointing out is two things. One, I think we're gonna continue on that trajectory from a revenue perspective, simply because every time a parcel is developed, then that's one less parcel that you have in the future. And when we look at the commercial parcels, the commercial industrial parcels, I can name the three big ones for you, where most of that space is really being held. And so you get into the ownership component of that. I can also name the large parcels that are available for residential development and I can tell you clearly some have some really big problems. So there is a point I think where we have to be intentional when we start looking at this topic in the future and really understand what we're trying to do and how we're trying to create resiliency from a financial perspective. as we look to the future and be really mindful of how we're approaching those things because it's going to be a challenge.

Gotcha. And so just to take that to the logical extent, if we don't do that, we're going to see less revenue, right? Most likely we'll see less revenue and therefore we'll have to figure out what we are either cutting or figuring out what kind of expenses we can restructure. Yeah.

Yeah, so typically when you see communities that hit this point, and I think we see Boulder, Boulder's been going through this for a few years in their budget, where what they have is that they have really high values on the property. So that offsets it a little bit. But as those values have flattened, then it's created other issues. And this isn't just on the general fund. So when we think about it, and you'll hear this when we get into our utility funds, One of the things that actually moderates rate increases is growth. So if you bring on new customers, then that moderates the growth in the rates that you need. As you're bringing on fewer customers and you don't have that balancing, the pressures on there. So when inflation is exceeding the revenue, then what that really means is that you're focusing what you need to do from a rate perspective on, you know, the rate payers that you have on your existing customers. It's the same thing that we're seeing on the general fund. And so that's part of the challenge. And when you see communities get into that space, I think one of the things that you really have to start looking to is, and I do think this is part of our thought process on first in Maine is how are you diversifying your revenue stream? And in that a part of it is having people come into your community and shop in your community because that you're augmenting that revenue stream with a different source than you currently have. So as we're thinking through these things, it's not the same thing. This is the way we've always been doing it. It really is. We're seeing a new paradigm being created. Now, I'm not going to be chicken little, the sky's falling. It's going to happen right away. But I think this is part of the preparation for what's really going to come in the future. Great.

Thank you. And then just a hopefully quick question to Sandra and Teresa. When we're talking about the carryover funds and we're talking about the fund balance deltas, I heard maybe, and this is my second year going through the budget presentations, but I heard like, wow, we had this like 40-something million dollar gap between what we were projecting and what we needed to meet. And then we're like, oh, but we just have like 150 million or whatever the number is of carryover funds that we'll just pull through. It feels like we're just like pulling money through thin air, and that's obviously not what's happening. Can you just... plain language-ify that a little bit and say what are carryover funds truly? Is it like a savings account for the city or is it committed funds that we are just making sure that we're spending in the year they have to? Like what's actually happening there?

So I'll start and then Sandra you can add to this. So legally by charter all of our appropriations lapse at the end of the year. and have to be reappropriated by you all in order for those intended uses for the appropriation to carry forward and complete the intended uses. So Sandra mentioned CIP projects. That is a really classic example of the carryover and probably the largest component of carryover funding. Because we have to, another charter requirement is, it's in our purchasing part of the code, we have to have the full appropriation in place before we can award a contract. So if you think about CIP projects, they are multiyear or could be potentially multiyear construction projects. We have to have the full appropriation in place at the time we're awarding a contract, even though we realize that only a portion of the funds that we have appropriated will be spent in one year because that construction contract is going to span multiple years. So what we have to do because our charter lapses those appropriations, we have to carry those funds that was appropriated by you all for that project, we have to carry that portion over. so we can continue to meet the obligation of the contract.

We can give you a really good example that you're going to deal with in a couple of weeks. Please. So what you don't see in this budget proposal is the first and main transit station because it's actually occurring this year. And so we're having to put together the capital to fund the transit station. Part of that's going to be a debt issuance. So Teresa is going to be bringing in appropriation first part of October that is going to be in the neighborhood of $45 million.

Somewhere in that neighborhood.

In the neighborhood of $45 million. We're still fine-tuning the numbers. We know we're only going to maybe spend about $5 million of that in the last quarter of this year. we're going to have to carry that over into next year's budget, which will mean you're going to see a $40 million carry over just based on that one project. So when you have large infrastructure projects, wastewater plants, water plants, large street projects that very quickly takes the carry over into what you're seeing in big numbers, they were really big during the flood recovery process. But that's a practical example that you're going to get into.

So as you were talking about carryover appropriations, I was trying to visualize in my head. So going back to slide seven, is that kind of is that. So if we look at the graph, I think it was slide seven. Yeah, so looking at because per our policy, then we, that new appropriations, we would kind of see it more flat line, more stable, just like this blue line. Is that why it's just flat or close to? It's kind of toggling around the same.

Correct. And what this graph really shows you is that at the end 2013 with the flood, that's when that carry over really started increasing. Um, and, and, tapered off for a little while and then in 2017 2018 i'm guessing those are probably some bond dollars that that ballooned that carryover up until we start spending it down so every year what is not spent of those very large construction projects. And it doesn't have to be construction projects. It could just be one time funding for a specific purpose or maybe non-construction CIP related project. But we know the expenses are not going to all happen in one year. And those are the types of funds that have to be carried over.

Okay. Okay. So, you know, in looking at the increase of the carryover dollar, that's not necessarily – I know what I often hear, and I do – I'm guilty of this, too, is kind of go to a negative, you know, just like a deficit – Perspective. Okay. Well, what are we missing here that it can't be better or But really this would be the trajectory that we would see as dollars get carried over from one year to the yet Next especially as big projects like first in main station and part of it is actually being driven by the market, too Okay, so for for example, I

10 years ago when you needed to order a transformer for a substation okay yeah you would fund it and you would get the transformer in a year now when you need to get a transformer, it takes three years to get it, but you have to have the money on the front end in order to, to procure it.

Okay.

And then you pay it down gradually over time. And what we're seeing really are in more areas now than we used to is that's now impacting this on fire trucks. So we had to drop, um, four and a half million on fire trucks, well, we're not getting those fire trucks for three years, but we still had to have the money on the front end. And that's really the supply chain that's now starting to change the carryover based on how they're producing the product. So there's also things we can't control that's actually influencing this, too.

Got it.

Okay, thank you.

And I would just add one, maybe way to think about this is carryover is appropriations that you all have already passed at some point in the past. Could be last year, could be carryover from all the way back in 2018. Bond dollars is a really good example. We'll appropriate those bond dollars all at once with the intention of full well knowing we won't be spending them for five years maybe. So carryover is things that you all have already acted on from an appropriation perspective. The new appropriations are those new things that we are adding to the budget. You haven't seen them, you haven't acted on them yet. Those are like grants or any additional revenues that we may get.

Thank you. Council Member Prieto.

On the last slide that you stopped at, Theresa, you folks were talking about taking one of the positions, moving it to one time, and then replacing that with two other positions. I know that the city has really been pushing to not use one time funding for ongoing staffing. Could you talk about why that would be different? Because I've seen a large push with us making sure that we're not staffing those positions with one time.

Yeah.

So when you see a position like that, what we're saying is that we think the work is limited to a term and we don't see that need being in perpetuity within the budget. So we're utilizing that funding source.

Makes sense. Thank you.

If it's all, if it's in perpetuity, it's going ongoing. If it's a term position, we're using one time funding and we do that for a couple of reasons. One, we, we want to be very transparent when we post the positions. So folks do know that their term positions versus thinking it's an ongoing and then it's not. But it is really driven by the scope of work and whether we think the work will continue.

Okay, so that makes sense because we did talk about that last time. So it just comes as like we see something like that. It means that work is potentially coming to an end. And then that was the conversation. Last council where you said we usually find other departments to move people into in the event that happens.

Yeah, we try to really work with attrition when we're dealing with that.

Thank you. Thank you. Go ahead. Yeah. No, we're good.

So I do want to go back to this slide because one of the things that I did not mention, so this slide was all about the incremental development revenue, which again is permit revenue, permit and plan review revenue that we will get on new dwelling units. Anything above the 300 base level is incremental development. Anything below that or up to that is part of the base and is in our ongoing, just regular ongoing general fund revenue. what's also in our general fund ongoing revenue that is permit related is um is commercial so any new commercial our incremental development revenue is is um does not take into account anything on commercial permits. It also does not include any of the remodels or those, you know, just smaller permits that may happen. That's all in our base general fund revenue, not part of the incremental development revenue calculation. Okay, so I wanted to spend a little bit of time with you on marijuana revenue. So as you all know, we have three sources of marijuana revenue, or we did have three sources of marijuana revenue, I should say. The city sales tax, and that gets allocated across all five sales tax supported funds. And the state share back so so prior to July of 25 the state would share back to local governments who have dispensaries a portion of their sales tax. And prior to July of 25, they shared back 10% of their revenue. And then in July of 25, they reduced that to 3%. And then in July of this year, we stopped getting it all together. So the city now only has two sources of revenue from marijuana. And the second one is the special retail tax. And the ballot language that voters voted on when this tax was put in place specified that half of the special retail marijuana tax would go to affordable housing. And so we transfer one half of the revenue to the affordable housing fund. And then after the ballot passed, the council at that time decided that they wanted the second half of that tax to be spent on mental health and addiction programs. So we transfer the other half of that tax to the general fund for that purpose. And, uh, this, um, chart here, um, basically shows you the revenue collection, um, over a five year, six year periods from, from 2021, um, to our 27 proposed budget. Um, and, and our marijuana revenue really peaked in 22. And since that time, it has been declining as we have indicated before. So on the right side, what the dashed lines represent, so the green dashed line is the state share back. The red dash line is the special marijuana tax that gets allocated to the affordable housing and the general fund. And then the blue line is our sales tax on it. The purple line at the top is all three of those revenues combined. And so you can really clearly see the peak in 22, and since that time, this source of revenue has been declining. the the 2026 estimate that is in both the chart and in the graph does include uh the two new stores that that were um annexed into the city um we have uh I believe I am projecting about seven months of revenue from those two stores in 26 and a full year of revenue from the stores in 27. And I think you can clearly see that it has basically stop the decline. We see a little bit of growth from the new stores, but it certainly is nothing that is gonna bounce us back to any level that we were seeing in 22.

I think the one thing I'll add is seeing various articles, this is not unique to Longmont. I think this is something that we're seeing across the state.

Yeah. And then are you going to the next topic or because I have a question in the queue and I think we can certainly take a question. Okay. Go ahead. Council Member Marcy. I just wanted to make sure it was a good time.

Thank you very quick question. We heard a little bit earlier tonight and I know you know the conversation was had in the previous council about marijuana hospitality licenses. Just for my clarification, if this council were to look at that, would that be classified in the city sales tax side, or would that be a separate category? If, let's say, council were to reconsider that topic at some point in the future, would, for accounting purposes, that be clarified in that city sales tax side for marijuana revenue? And do we have any memory about, for example, how close that would potentially get us to getting back to those 22 levels? And if the answer is no, you need to go look. That's fine. But would we, yeah.

Yeah, I'm not able to answer that question for you this evening. I would have to get back to you.

Yeah, I appreciate it. I'd be curious about what that picture would look like. Thanks.

I don't think it was a major boost. But I think it was kind of putting a finger in the current trend. Okay, thank you.

All right, so just to summarize, the 2027 proposed budget does have a total of 547.4 million in sources of funds. Some of the major sources that make up this amount come from charges for services, those are at 47%, taxes at 30.2%, as well as contribution from fund balance at 6.3%. This is for all funds combined. and the sales and use tax projections you see to the right these are part of that 30.2 percent this is how much we're projecting to collect in 2027 from both sales and use tax So looking at the expense budget, the proposed budget shows also $547.4 million. We do have to give you a balanced budget, which is why it matches. The pie chart on the left, this gives you the major funds that make up this total. And then the bar graph underneath kind of breaks this out by categories. So 34% of the total budget and all funds is towards personnel costs. This includes salaries and benefits. 39% is for operating and maintenance. 7% is for non-operating. This is transfers to other funds. And then 21% of this is for CIP, which equates to roughly about that $95 million. The chart to the right, this gives you by category the percentage of total for CIP. I do want to point out that that bar graph is for all funds. So if you were to look at that same information for different funds, it's going to look very different. For example, in electric and broadband, we would show more in operating due to the purchase power, less in personnel. And in another fund like the public improvement fund, you'd see very little personnel and a lot in capital due to the capital infrastructure projects. And this table here gives you a summary and a comparison between the 2026 adopted and the 27 proposed budget. So these funds make up about 94.5% of the total expense. And we'll leave it up here for a little bit so you guys can look at it and see the comparison and see if you have any questions on any of these.

Does anyone have any questions? Let's continue on.

So let's move on to FTEs. So the 27 proposed budget does propose adding 20 new FTE positions. These are all full time, but they are broken out and split between different funds, which is why you see a different, you know, a split. I won't read through these, but some of them include the firefighters, these are in the general fund. some senior ground maintenance, admin analysts, tree trimmers, just to name a few. This, if approved, the 20 FTE would bring our total FTE count in 2027 to about 1,184 FTEs. We also, so these positions that you see listed here, they're small, but these are positions that were moved from ongoing to one time, and this was just to better align their fixed term status. So these are fixed term positions, they're not changing, but rather than funding them with ongoing, we're funding them with one time. I see a question. Council Member Kullcoffer.

Thank you, Mayor. For these eight employees, would they just be absorbed into some new positions, or do they know that they're term limited?

A, when we post it, they know that the position's term limited. So that occurs in the hiring process. And then what we talk about is really when we talk about attrition is when we're developing staff in these positions, it actually creates a good pipeline to bring people into open positions where their skill sets align. We've actually found this is a really good tool. We really kind of started doing this in flood recovery. Um, and a couple of folks that we brought in, just for example, that we brought in, um, in as term positions that are now full time, uh, once Molly, um, where she started as a term position and stayed another is, um, Peter Gibbons, who is still actively working in flood recovery. So pretty intentional when we're working with it and developing skill sets. We can never promise anything, but intentional in trying to keep people as part of the organization. So attempt to hire with an asterisk. Yeah. And then we've seen some term positions that have been more problematic simply because you may bring someone in for a term position and and let's say the term position's three years, and in two years they fold into the organization, filling that term position for one year becomes more difficult. Understood, thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Prieto.

Just a quick question for our city manager, Harold. Looking at these positions, the ongoing and then the term limited, I'm noticing that a lot of them are just core services, which is our focus as a council, as a city, making sure that we can just function. But what is the rationale behind, like, how do we, like, I just want to make sure that we're also paying attention to kind of those human service positions. Is it that there's not a need in those departments? Is it that we absolutely have to just prioritize these core positions first and foremost? Is there... Is there something that we follow where we do make some space for some of the requests from like senior services, youth center, and other kind of housing and human services based departments?

Yeah, so if you look at it over time, specifically I can talk about two areas. So one in senior services, when we started seeing the time it takes on the resource component increasing, we did add some senior services positions three or four years ago. And we made a couple of runs at that to manage it. On the youth, children, youth and family services is part of the rewind program that we created in conjunction. So that's a police, children, youth and family services and municipal court where they're working together on the rewind program. When we started seeing some upticks and issues related to juveniles, we added some positions. That was done in a period where we actually had revenue. This is slightly different because of the lack of revenue that we have coming into play. Specifically, if you want to look at the nine firefighter positions, that's really, and I think I've said this a couple of times, that's a cost control perspective because You're either paying time and a half for overtime or you're paying for the position to absorb some of that overtime. So that's helping us avoid that 0.5 overtime expense. When we look at the parks positions, what we're really finding is they not only maintain parks, but they maintain right-of-ways. And that's a component of the street fund and stormwater fund and other issues. So in that case, one of those positions is funded out of other funds. And then one of those positions is funded out of the conservation trust fund. to then free up general fund dollars so that we can have that position work. And it's primarily for the downtown corridor based on the work that we've done at Kauffman Street. And so, yes, I mean, it really is pretty intentional of looking at core functions. and then when we have more funding available we do assess that now there is a space in this whereas we're looking at it so let's say we saw a need I mean we would and I had this question earlier if we saw like a significant need jumping somewhere let's say let's use the youth again. We saw that really start exploding on us. We would dig into the budget and say, based on the need and the overall impact to the community, we may come in and make recommendations of saying we need to cut over here to fund over here. But what we're also trying to do is balance the service level that we're providing across the board. Because when you look at our FTE numbers that we presented, we're lean. Um, and so when you look at, our staffing compared to Boulder. They have a lot more staff. We actually provide more services. So what that really means is when you get into the point of you're having to cut your budget, you're directly impacting a program somewhere. And the question is, what's the trade off in impacting that program? And that would be a more lengthy conversation with the council.

Thank you. Yeah, so what I'm hearing is it's kind of a combo of There's positions that may have already been funded previous years to my service on council that we're not necessarily identifying in this budget. And then also really with the tight budget this year, looking at things like... tree trimmers i i volunteer for yard ground maintenance i'm like the ground maintenance manager for my church that has a huge and yeah that's i mean i could totally see like just maintenance of parks and rec um is definitely a need um i think if i can add to that the arborist function is interesting because we we have different funding sources that we can use to fund the arborist

And you will also see arborists show in our LPC budget because they also have tree trimming activities that they need to do on the electric. So it doesn't necessarily mean that it's just parks. It can be in different areas based on our operational need.

And I just want to make sure that we are. being proactive too when it comes to human services and needs in our community and that we don't end up kind of like in the situation with we that we are not necessarily it's a direct comparison but with like public safety where we find that we're not funding it enough and then necessarily get to a point where there's a bunch of needs in our community and our community is struggling in certain areas and we didn't necessarily make room or prioritize the budget for those. So just something I noticed that I wanted to ask you about. Thank you.

And then I do have, so as I look at these positions, I look at how, you know, and we had agreed that we would be funding the firefighter and paramedic through the general fund. But looking at other electric fund, sanitation fund, like those are monies that we cannot just like decide, I'm going to pick this up and throw it to fund another

correct yeah so there has to be a clear nexus yes on the work being performed with the fund where we're utilizing those revenues and if there's not a clear nexus then we we can't make that transfer that's why when we talk about the parks positions we're very clearly saying it's no removal it's maintaining the the rights of way in those issues and and so that's an important test because that's actually been litigated in terms of how we can use funds. It's even more important for us, because I believe it's within charter, if it's electric and water, Theresa, if that happens, then you can't raise the rates, because any utility, it's considered a loan. And so you have to repay it. So there's parameters that are guiding where funds can be utilized.

Sure, okay, thank you for that clarification. Okay. Yes.

So I guess that, thank you, Mayor, for that, because I think that makes a lot of sense and really helps paint the picture. And it looks like a lot of the positions that are being funded, you know, when we talk about electric or waste services, like those are all... And new positions. Yeah, yeah. These are existing. Those are all coming from buckets where there's like a revenue generation stream, which makes sense why there would be room to fund these new positions. Now when we talk about like... The library or youth center or even senior center, those are not necessarily organizations or places that generate funding. And so then I guess my question for you is, does the city primarily depend on grants and different things like that for programming? Is that the direction that we go as far as that goes?

No, we try to build that in our ongoing operational fund because what you don't want to do is focus on positions with grant funding and then what do you do when the grants go away? And honestly, I think if you look at a lot of challenges that organizations around us have actually had, is because they have funded positions with grant dollars, and then the grant dollars went away. So part of that ongoing funding component is something that we're really focused on. And when you think about this, when you think about the general fund, I think the general fund is 74% people. So, when you look at the overall general fund budget, 74% are people that are performing work. That's much different than the electric fund where you have a big chunk that goes into purchase power and capital. When you're challenged in a budget situation, it's easier to adjust capital expenditures. You can delay projects. You can do these things. when you're in a general fund and it's primarily staffing, then that becomes much more difficult to deal with. And so it has been, it's tough when you go into these conversations. I think we probably have 50 positions requested. You know, it's everything from facilities technicians to custodians to senior resource specialists to librarians. And within the general fund, all of those compete with each other. And then if you think about it on the public safety side, one of the things that the public safety sales tax is that it actually takes one variable out of competition. that used to be in competition with that. And even at that point, based on the way it's drafted, around 44 or 42% of the expenses within the general fund are in the public safety fund. And that's why then everything's really reactive to then the funding that's coming in based on sales and use tax and property tax. in the general fund in the general fund and so you know that's the mix so every time you go into a budget process there's inherent competition between these positions and there's a lot of things we look at you know kind of with the fire is there an inherent cost containment strategy in this is there an issue where we're seeing significant challenges in the community that are having an impact on more than just that operation. So if you think about the example with when we were having issues with our youth, those things were impacting vandalism. They were impacting public safety. It was bleeding out into many different areas, and we needed to really work with CYF to try to manage a situation from the public safety component and the family component, but it also was allowing us to get our arms around some of the other issues that were also creating additional cost.

That would be your third time. No, just kidding.

No, it's just kind of for public's, I guess, knowledge because I didn't think about it this way. So although I'm not seeing a bunch of human service positions being funded, a lot of what's funded is through our human service funding, which then we award organizations who then fund human service positions that then actually are working within the community giving back to the community so it's not necessarily seen here but more so maybe in that fund and we have people all over the city working and helping people so I guess that's yeah that's a good way to think about it too so one of the things on the human service funding when I got here it was a 2% of total to 2% I think

They started at 1%, somewhere it was 1.75 or 2%, maybe even 1.75. Over time, we've actually increased that to 3% of revenues. So what that means is even when you have growth in revenue, before anything is taken off to look at all of these issues, 3% comes off the top of that revenue to go into human service agency funding, which then accomplishes what you're talking about.

And let me just clarify, so it's not all general fund revenues, it's 3% of our tax revenue.

Continue.

Okay, so this slide, to help us close the gap that we had in the general fund, we did a review of positions and identified nexus on some of these where we could possibly update the split and remove the general fund component to a qualifying funding source. And we also eliminated one position. I'm not going to reach through these, but these changes to generate ongoing savings to the general fund of a little over $560,000. This is part of your attachment H. You will see it listed as savings from moving positions or portions of positions out of the general fund.

And just so you know, the position we're eliminating is through attrition. So there's a retirement and balancing and restructuring. That's why we were doing that.

Let's go on.

Okay.

All right, we are going to move on to the general fund summary then. And as Sandra mentioned, attachment H does lay out all the changes that increases and decreases both in revenue and expenses for the general fund. But in total, our general fund proposed budget is $133.72 million. which is 2.36% or a little over $3 million greater than 26. And it does use 6.22 million of fund balance for one-time needs. The ongoing general fund budget is $127 million of that $133, and that is almost $3.7 million greater than last year or than 26's budget. And so really quickly, I'm gonna go through at a very high level attachment H with you, because as I mentioned, there are increases in revenues, decreases in revenues, increases in expenses, and decreases in expenses that happened to present to you a balanced budget for the general fund. And so this is our ongoing, revenues. Um, we did reduce, uh, we do have reductions in ongoing revenue of, of, uh, 1.3, 5 million, but we also have increases in ongoing revenue of over 5 million to get us to the 127, um, in ongoing revenue. And really quickly, these are the decreases in ongoing revenue that are laid out in attachment H. Property tax, so as we have mentioned a couple times, the total reduction that we that we built into the proposed budget was just a little over a million dollars. We know that it's ultimately over 1.5 million, but what's in the proposed budget is a million dollars. 769 of that, 769,000 of that was ongoing revenue from property taxes that we were relying on to cover ongoing expenses. The rest of it, an additional $233,000 was property tax revenue that we were budgeted in 2026 to cover one-time expenses. So that's how we get to the full million dollars. I spoke a little bit about IDR building permit revenue. And the IDR component of the building permit revenue is a reduction. And on the next slide, you're going to see the base permit revenue is actually increasing in the proposed budget. We're also seeing a reduction in our natural gas franchise to the tune of $100,000. And I will tell you, this has also been going down. And natural gas franchise is not the easiest to project because it is so weather, really weather related. But we did reduce it in the 26 budget. We're reducing it again in the 27 budget. There's the state marijuana revenue reduction that we spoke about earlier. We're also seeing a decline in the cable television franchise revenue. And again, this is another revenue that we have historically year over year been seeing a trending down in this revenue source. Another state revenue that the state has pulled back to use to address their own budget concerns is the severance tax that they share back with municipalities. We're losing that revenue as well as the marijuana. Other minor revenues detailed in attachment H make up the rest of the reductions. And then on the flip side.

One of the things that I forgot to talk about is when we talk about the changes that the state's making. Over my career, there's two things that we have to watch. Typically, when a state government is having budget issues and they're making the reductions and reducing the funding sources, there's also a corresponding operational adjustment. In a lot of cases, that's when we tend to see things pushed down to the local level that would have normally been taken on by the state. we can see a double hit in this in terms of what we're having to deal with through that process. And it typically shows itself a year after, year or two after.

Okay. And so we did, as I mentioned, had a little over $5 million in increases in revenue. The biggest one here, of course, is in sales and use tax. And this is only the general fund. This portion on the slide is only the general fund component of the sales and use tax. We are seeing an increase in the electric franchise revenue. and in the base building permit revenue, as I mentioned earlier. We're also projecting an increase in the administrative transfer fees, and this is when we have increases in expenses, predominantly salary and benefit related type increases in expenses. Our administrative transfer fee does usually go up, will go up, because it is built based on those budgets for the services that are being provided. So as we're seeing those types of increases, we will see the revenue offset increase as well. We have some increases in the museum fees, and you are going to hear from Eric about that a little later this evening. Plan check fees, again, this is another development-related revenue. This is the base portion of the plan check fee. That is going up as well. And then another just under $800,000 of other revenues combined detailed in attachment H for you. And then when we look at the expense side of the general fund, it balances, because we're talking about the ongoing expenses here, it balances to that 127 million that you saw on the revenue slide, but it is also some reductions, some increases. And so I wanted to go through the decreases for you really quickly, and then the next slide will have the increases. So as Harold mentioned, we added the nine firefighters as a cost containment really strategy. And while we know that over time, adding those additional FTE will reduce the amount of overtime that we have to spend, what we have done is take this overtime that we are projecting we will see eventually in a reduction in overtime due to the staffing increases and moved it from ongoing to one time. We didn't want to eliminate it altogether because it is gonna take them a period of time to get those nine positions filled, to get them fully trained, and to get them online. So we are taking that ongoing overtime and moving it to one time with the intention of eventually it will be eliminated. May not happen Certainly won't happen in 27 may not happen. It'll happen gradually. So so we may need to continue to fund Some level of one time over time for fire for another two or so years And then as Sandra had mentioned we had those positions that were moved to other funds the five hundred and sixty one thousand and This is where that the one position that was eliminated. This is where that cost is We also have the positions that we moved from ongoing to one time and We did a fair amount of reductions to several budget services to tighten up their budgets and reduce some discretionary budgets that they had. The work comp, we had talked to you all about that previously. 382,000 is the general fund portion of that transfer that we were able to reduce from the operating funds to our workers' compensation fund. And Molly actually mentioned this, the affordable housing fund transfer to you on the first night that we did the budget presentation when she was going over the need to change our policy around the affordable housing cap. That is allowing us then to reduce our transfer that we have been making to the affordable housing fund to cover staffing. What is still included in the budget is that million dollar transfer for affordable housing programs and then some other ancillary minor other reductions. And then the increases are a little over $6 million. Ongoing level one of 1.1 million. And this is, a reduction in actually in the amount of ongoing level one budget requests that we got. Sandra, how much did we actually get in budget requests for level one? We asked departments to really go back and relook at this and make sure and determine whether or not it was absolutely something we knew we were going to have to pay or were they able to absorb it in their budget. So we reduced this from the amount of requests that we actually got.

What was that number, Sandra, do you have the initial request?

Can we take a question while she's looking that up? Go ahead, Councilmember Kullcoffer.

Thank you, Mayor. Can you go back to slide 26? So for property tax, can you help explain, we've all seen our property taxes going up, but we're also seeing that property tax collection is going down. So how does that work, that we're paying more, but we're getting less?

So the property tax to the city will be less. What I What I don't really have a good answer or a real specific example to give you is I think the reason that you all as homeowners are seeing increases in your property taxes is because, well, one, the assessment ratio on residential for the school district is different than the city. So they are certainly not going to see the reduction that we are. And two, what I can tell you is if there are new mill levies put in place by taxing entities such as Boulder County, that will of course impact you know, a homeowner's property tax that they're paying.

Gotcha. Thank you. And a very quick comment. The increase is two point something percent. It's pretty in line with inflation. So congratulations, because I know in supply chain, we're not seeing a two percent or two and a half percent cost increase. So seeing the budget only increase by two and a fraction of a percent is a big kudos.

It's probably going to go down because we still have to cut the additional amount that we talked about. And so that will be coming to you in a couple of weeks.

Thank you. Did you find?

Wonderful. Let me go back to that slide. So here.

Yes of the the original level one ongoing request totaled 1.7 million. So of that 1.1 got funded.

Thank you. When we talked about zero-based budgeting and the work that we're going to be doing between January and March, if not May, it is a deeper dive in terms of what we did in the level one request. And to be clear, I think that is going to be a strategy. that we look at in terms of managing that gap because we don't want to get too aggressive in a short period of time because mistakes will happen. So we're looking at options to really push that into the zero-based component to let us be more methodical in that process.

So I know that we have mentioned to you all previously that we funded very, very few level two budget requests. This $200,000 is predominantly related to the positions that were added, the firefighter positions, the parks positions. So it's the ongoing component of ancillary costs associated with those positions, things like training for the positions, things like overtime, those types of costs outside of the salary and benefits. And then the transfer to the technology services fund. So, we're looking at when we created the Technology Services Fund in the 26th budget, we did indicate that over time, we would start moving services out of the other funds and into the Technology Services Fund. And what we did in 26, was mainly just fund in the technology services fund. The costs associated with the implementation and maintenance, I guess, if you will, of the sales force system. And so we're basically into year two, 2027 will be year two of the technology services fund. And what we are proposing in this budget is that we move some staff into this fund that are directly related to the data and and analytics budget service that was previously split across multiple funding funds the general fund being one of them. And so when you move those staff into the technology services fund, coupled with the expenses that were already there from 26 that will also be funded there in 27, because this is an internal service fund, the revenue to support now those expenses in that fund has to come from all the other operating funds of the city. And so this is the general fund's share of the expenses in the technology services fund. As I said, when our taxes go up, our human service agency funding 3% also goes up, so that's the increase in that area. We spoke quite a bit about fleet lease early on in the first presentation with you, and This is the O&M, the operating and maintenance component of that fleet lease. So the general fund, and it is just the incremental increase over what is, the base was already in the 26 budget. And what we, did was offset the incremental increase for the depreciation by the auction proceeds. So this really is a very pared back request or increase for fleet lease. Because we had a pretty healthy Auction proceeds that we could offset the depreciation with Collective bargaining increases pay related in items and then non collective bargain pay related items and then other minor ancillary increases and

No, the fleet lease component. Um, we did talk to you all about looking at a different model, so we're going to be digging into that and that's part of a more longterm cost control strategy, but that's top of our list in terms of work that we're going to get into next year.

And then I wanted to spend just a little bit of time on the general fund reserve. So what's in the top part of this chart is the policy targets. So the TABOR reserve is always the first thing we have to fund. That is the state-imposed reserve that essentially is an untouchable reserve. If by any chance we actually had to use it, state statute requires that we replace it by the end of the year. So that essentially makes it pretty much an untouchable reserve. And so that is the first thing that has to come off the top of our fund balance. And then we have an 8% emergency reserve target and a stabilization reserve target between 3% and 8%. The bottom half of the chart up here is how this is actually funded. So fully funded for the Tabor reserve, fully funded for the emergency reserve, and funded at 6.62% for the stabilization reserve. So this $7 million is the reduction, includes the reduction that we had previously spoken to you all about, that we did need to tap into to bridge that gap due to sales and use tax underperformance in last year, 2025.

And Teresa, I think just for this council, the stabilization reserve is relatively new. I think when did we start implementing that?

We have been building it. We have been contributing to it for probably... maybe four years now. But it was the last portion that we started funding. We needed to get the 8% for the emergency reserve fully funded. That took us a number of years. And then we moved into gradually funding up to the 6.62% for the stabilization.

And the reason why I bring that up is because I know we had to get pretty focused on this because they weren't where we needed them to be. So we've been pushing money into reserves. The stabilization reserve is really important because what we were finding is that the restrictions that you have on the utilization of the Tabor Reserve and even the emergency reserve are problematic. we needed to create the third reserve so we could use it like we did last year in terms of a balancing issue because if you use the tabor reserve you have to pay it back within the year so it's not really much of a reserve and so that's why we actually created the stabilization reserve because we needed something that was more liquid that didn't have restrictions on it in the event we get into a bad situation yeah

So this is a good point to pause and see if you all have other questions.

Do we have any questions? Council Member Prieto.

Just a quick question. So if we spend out of, so I know we don't spend out of the TABOR because like you said, we would have to replace it within a year. But for like the emergency or stabilization, are we required to like fund that back to where it was or like whatever we use and then we can kind of restart and it doesn't have to necessarily, it's not like a carryover on top of a percentage goal each year?

That is correct. So unlike the Tabor Reserve, where that is a state mandated, these other ones are set by you all, by our financial policies. And if we tap into them as Harold had indicated. Part of our policy does not say you have to replace this by X number of years. We will just gradually grow back into it.

One of the things that I have seen, and this really, I think we saw it show itself after 2008, so this was before I was here, is one of the things that you have to be careful with on your emergency reserve is that it is possible that if you draw down on it and you have a bond rating, the rating agencies may actually not see that as a positive. And what you'll end up seeing is your bond rating will be reduced based on drawing down on reserves. So there's other things that you have to manage because then that impacts the cost of debt when you go out and issue it. It's like using a credit card.

And one other thing about the emergency reserve, so unlike the stabilization reserve where we can use it to bridge economic downturns, the emergency reserve by policy is only used if and when we have to declare an actual emergency.

Okay, thank you. Council Member Christ.

Thank you, Mayor. And let me say thank you for scaring up that information regarding vacant commercial sites as well as vacant residential sites. I don't know when is a better time to bring this up. So I will say that I agree that one of the problems we have is we don't have a lot of land left. And so we have to be intentional as city manager sorry i'm throwing things city manager um spoke about i think um that's a good approach but um one of the other comments that you you made mr dominguez is about um having people shop in our town so i'm just going to throw out two ideas that keep coming to mind for me one is If we feel commercial sites that are already existing with businesses. It doesn't necessarily change our property tax immediately, but it often brings more sales tax. And then I would add that we had a commercial realtor came and spoke to us about having, I would say, craftsman type establishments. And there needed to be some zoning changes to have that happen. And I don't know if that's going to ever come back before council, but that would probably, a lot of it had to do with equipment, having equipment in commercial sites. that would probably increase use tax as well. So I'm just looking at things that would work. And then additional to that is we had a conversation about ARPA funds that were originally earmarked for small business. Do you remember? I'm bringing it up again. No, I thought Sandy brought that up. Slightly different. Yeah. And I think the last time we talked about it, we said, let's talk about it during budgeting. So I'm just throwing it out now, and we can continue to talk about it.

Did you put that in the info?

Do you want me to repeat what I said? Yeah. Hi, Mayor. Members of Council, Sandy Cedar, Assistant City Manager. Council Member Christ is correct. She asked those questions about, it turned out it wasn't ARPA funding. It turns out it was CDBGDR funds, which were disaster funds also. But it wasn't part of the ARPA. It wasn't a COVID recovery. It was part of the flood recovery that there was $200,000 that was allocated The city council changed that as part of their normal planning for CDBG resources and turned it into a housing resource at the time. And so that closed. All of those grants are done. Now we're on to ARPA. And I was able to give you some money that we do have some ARPA funds that are there that are the interest income. Right, the unencumbered interest income. Unencumbered interest income, which currently just plays into the revenue, the base revenue numbers that you're seeing. So if you did want to do something different with that, I think at this point it's played into the revenue, right? We'd have to kind of cut something else at this point? I guess I'm not sure how they dealt with it. It's still sitting there in ARPA interest?

Yeah, I think it's in ARPA interest. And I think we put that in Council Comm. Yes, we did. And wanting to see direction from council on that. We'll send that back out.

Have we seen that already? Yeah, about six weeks ago. Oh, OK. In the info items. I'm happy to pull it back out. But essentially, you were right. There were funds that were dedicated for small business and then reallocated by the council at the time. That entire grant is closed. But there is still some ARPA interest income that is available if you wanted to allocate it for that. The other information in that info item is that we are

doing a small business program at this point that's just kicking off so i'll find the council item and bring it back to y'all okay so and i see that um both eric mason and julia jacobs are here probably to speak to us i've been talking with um Scott Cook about the SBDC, which they have at the chamber. They have one small office. You only have room to speak one-on-one with business people. But since I'm on the library board, library has the computers, they have the meeting spaces, and they actually also have a business librarian. So we had been talking about having some business-related classes for people to get their businesses up and going. You know, websites. There's a lot to starting a business. And I've seen this work in other towns and cities bigger than ours, too. So I've just wondered if, I'm not saying you would have to earmark all of it all at once. We could pilot something and come up with some good numbers for you. Because all the equipment and space is there. We're talking tens of thousands of dollars, not millions of dollars for sure, and not the $200,000 right away. I'm just saying, getting small businesses up and going would help fill those commercial sites. And the more business you have, the more people come and spend money in your town. We're just trying to increase sales tax over the year. And sales tax supports public safety. It supports a lot. So we incrementally kind of fell back with the sales tax and we can incrementally grow back up the ladder. just as from my perspective so anyway we're gonna hear from library and we're gonna hear from Museum all of which are core services as far as I'm concerned so just wanted to throw that in I didn't want your one would be a good time all right thank you okay let's go ahead all right I am gonna turn it over to Christina and she's gonna cover a couple topics with you

Good evening, Mayor Hidalgo-Ferring and members of council. I'm Christina Pacheco, Human Services Director. I'm here to cover human services agency funding and marijuana revenue relative to mental health services. So the proposed 2027 budget includes a little over 2.9 million for human services agency funding. This funding supports nonprofits who provide services in the six impact areas listed on your slide. These six areas also align with our social determinants of health. We also allocate specific funding to directly support our unhoused community. If you remember, we came to you on June 9th and provided an update on where we were with the Human Services revamp work because what we discovered is need is outpacing available funding. So far, we have set a $10,000 minimum grant floor and a ceiling of no more than 30% of funding that will be awarded for any given project. Furthermore, what we're going to do is align the funding to your council priorities and utilize that two-tiered approach that we talked about in setting a minimum score for eligibility for funding and implying a standard deviation that meets the threshold. So we're currently in the 2027 grant hearing process with our Longmont Housing and Human Services Advisory Board. And the intent of the work on revamp is that it will narrow the focus of the funds and align with the priorities council has identified. We are gonna bring that final funding recommendation back to you at your December 15th meeting for your final approval. So now I want to talk about marijuana revenue. In your council packet, you are provided background on where we are in terms of revenue and Sandra and Teresa covered that in depth. I want to focus a little more on some background at the service level. So, a portion of the marijuana tax revenue funds housing and community wellness area in the Human Services Department. HCW provides trauma informed services to individuals and groups to support community wellness and housing stability. So we're in the process of scaling that program and aligning our resources to meet the most need possible. We're looking at how we can provide group services and where we need individual therapeutic intervention and clinical case management. This is all part of our Mental Health Center of Excellence framework, and we're really focusing on historically underserved populations, and the current focus is on LHA sites, voucher holders, and those with barriers to mental health access. Hilda Samora-Hirsch, our Assistant Human Services Director, is also here tonight, and we're happy to answer any specific questions you might have about any of the services that we provide.

I do want to add something about the Mental Health Center of Excellence. And I think, and Christina, you might want to go over this. One of the things that when we were looking at CORE and the work that they were doing, and we were looking at the work that Christina was doing, there was difficulty in balancing the two. And I think one of the things that we're seeing when we're looking at how do we manage what we're doing as an organization, and and how do we really increase the number of people that we can help by working with each other across the organization so when we talk about the mental health center of excellence that's not just christina's division one of the biggest breakthroughs that i think we've had is really the interplay between public safety and christina and hilda and the amount of partnerships that you all don't see in the op on the front end, but operationally there is a strong connection now between public safety and Christina's group. I would also add the housing group that's in play. And so they're working as a collective. And so we're not treating these as individual pods. We're actually working this as a collective in the mental health center of excellence. And so they're constantly interplaying with each other and,

to the point that HILDA's now the... Providing clinical consultation to core clinicians. And so when you look at the Mental Health Center of Excellence, it really is meant to work on a continuum from prevention to crisis. And so what this model helps us do is really have our core clinicians that are the highest level of intervention really work in the area that is intended. There is a lot of collaboration between a call out for core services and then follow up in terms of then connecting those same individuals with other people. on that continuum. So it has really helped to bring all of these services under one umbrella and really build out that continuum. We're able to do so much more with the services that we have.

Operationally, what this looks like, because I've been involved with this group recently on a couple. So what'll happen is if we start seeing calls coming in to public safety that are directed to CORE, they then reach out to Christina and her group. And then we bring the clinicians in. And what we try to do is work it from the clinicians versus having core responding, because if they can deal with it, then we actually create capacity here. Um, in the case that we just went through, it took all of that group, the housing group, Christina, Molly, um, and eventually I slid into it to try to help manage the situation. They managed it in a very short period of time. I would tell you that three, four years ago, it would have taken much longer. Um, and it really is that interplay in that partnership across the organization. And I wanted to bring this up because those are the types of things we want to really highlight as we're looking at this, because it's a cost avoidance strategy, it's productivity improvement, but at the end of the day, it's serving the community at a higher level.

Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. I was going to, so you read my mind. I was like this is great because I was just about to talk about. So I sit on the steering committee for the core and leads team. I was a little confused as to this idea that we're scaling back, because there is no scaling back on core. It's how it's handled operationally to get, I'd say, the biggest bang for our buck, and really tapping into the people with the skill set, like you and Hilda and your team, that actually have that expertise within these fields. So it's looking at enhancing and making the... the program stronger is what I've seen, at least as we talk through. And then as changes happen at the state level that impact our funding mechanism or even how it looks like being housed under public safety, what can we do to make it more effective? which is more effective for our community. So thank you. I was like, you read my mind. Very good. And yeah, no, and I just, I think about the pre-core as well as school, the score, sorry, the school core team. We also have that and that is fairly new. So looking at how the progression over the years as far as how CORE is becoming more effective, especially around follow-up. And I think about our own personal experiences, seeing, okay, early on we didn't really have that follow-up. So being able to have those conversations like, hey, you know, we're seeing this is missing here and what can we do? Because that follow-up and hand-holding is essential.

You may have had a different experience had that unfolded now with the collaboration and Hilda provides clinical consultation to our license score provider and then at her level she really is able to then tie in the rewind piece of things. as she works with school resource officers as well to say this kiddo is coming up on our radar. What can we do to make sure that they don't progress into the juvenile justice system?

And it's taking that proactive approach.

Absolutely.

Prevention to crisis. To crisis. Absolutely. Thank you. Council Member Popkin.

Thank you, Mayor. Last year, I recall when I did a ride along with our core team, actually, and then had some subsequent discussions, I recall there was an intention that I think got paused last year to actually host a training for other police departments and cities across the state on effectively deploying a core type of program. Did that ever get picked up?

I think it was a national group that was going to come here. And they got caught in the shutdown. Or we were going to go somewhere. I thought we were going to host something. I think we were going to host it.

But I thought we were going to host and have folks do something.

It was a weird thing that happened with shutdowns and everything else.

Won't deny that there wasn't some weird stuff that may have happened around that. But two things that I liked from the intention, the reason I bring it up, are one, I believe some of our officers and professionals were going to be involved in some of the training, and that was going to help them level up their skills. And it might have also offered an opportunity for revenue into our program that could then be reinvested into these services further. So I'm just curious where that lives. Is that still something on the table? What do you need from council contingency to reactivate that?

Council Member Popkin, Zach Artist, Assistant City Manager of Public Safety. You are correct. We were going to run a training regionally to bring in other CORE teams across the Denver metro area. Again, to work through best practices, there is a national conference, as Mr. Dominguez did mention, that CORE does still go to. I apologize. I don't remember why we had to delay that. It is certainly a conversation we can continue to have, maybe moving into 2027. Mm-hmm. I think it really has been on the forefront of what we want to do with CORE. As to the mayor's comments earlier is we needed to look at some operational changes, how we could partner our resources with Christina and her group, and then organizationally, internally, how to deploy CORE differently than what we had been in the last five years that I've been here to really get, I don't like the expression, your bang for your buck.

Yeah.

and using that to really be able to impact lives. So certainly I think that's part of a continued conversation, but I think it would be a bigger conversation moving forward in 27 to include Christina and her group and what that might look like, not just for core teams, but across case managers at large to include core teams and how we are doing things maybe differently than other areas are.

Yeah, thanks. And look, honestly, I am really encouraged by what we're doing here in this regard. I'd be even more encouraged if we're able to help spread that knowledge and operational strategy to others and help them improve their services and understand where these synergies come out of. So the extent that this kind of thing is possible looking into the next year, and if you do need some startup capital to get that going and create that kind of revenue stream to sustain that that trains our professionals, I think you... We have council contingency for purposes that are aligned with our priorities. I'm excited.

This is recorded, so we will certainly save that.

I set it on the record for a reason.

I do want to say that Longmont has been a leader in this area way before I got here, and my predecessor and a lot of work that he did to envision this mental health crisis that's here. So Longmont has been that leader, and I think that's why we've got such a positive response when we talked about doing that about a year ago, is because where we sit here in the West regionally and the leaders we have been. And so we'll continue to look at how to partner with Christina and her group and continue to be leaders beyond just core and how we can help impact all of those around us and then how we can learn from them also.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you.

Continue, or are you done? I'm done. OK. Thank you.

I'm done. I think next up is Eric.

OK. And then as he's making his way down, Council Member Christ.

Thank you, Mayor. Christina, I just wanted to say thank you. i think it was last year or maybe even the year before where we talked about resource sharing and you operationalize that and thank you so much and it seems like it's really worked for you yeah thank you excellent appreciate it yeah i think the point in this i don't want to miss this opportunity the point in this is when you have revenue that's flat and expenses that are going up

you have to look at it from you have to shift your operational framework and create different models so that you can increase capacity without increasing cost and they've done a really good job now does that mean it's going to be this way forever no we're going to need to add capacity to the question that came up earlier but they've been able to manage through this tough budgetary world that we've been in the last two to three years looks brilliant thank you thank you

Come on down. Eric Mason, Director of the Longmont Museum. Just have a brief presentation on the projected increase in revenue coming about from the reopening of the museum's galleries and our increase in admission fees. The museum will be reopening on October 17th with 70% more gallery space, including Dream Lab at Lila's Children's Gallery, which is a dedicated interactive space designed to engage children ages two to five. And at the same time, we'll be opening two special exhibitions in our feature gallery, Frida Kahlo, An Intimate Portrait, and Women Artists, Four Centuries of Creativity, And then our third gallery will not open until January of 2027. That will be our history gallery, which will have collected Longmont's history and 100 objects. We are projecting increased attendance when we reopen, based on the popularity of previous hands-on exhibitions, such as LEGO, as well as the ability to attract higher profile and larger exhibits with our larger feature gallery. These new spaces combined with the fact that we have not increased admission fees in 12 years have led us to increasing exhibit admission when we reopen in October. As you can see in this slide, we are projecting an increase in admission revenue. In 2027, we are projecting up to $180,000 in admission revenue. But we've budgeted $170,000, being a little conservative on that. In the last few years, each year, we've exceeded our budgeted projections. This increase in revenue will support some part time staff to help maintain the dream lab exhibition. I do want to note that it is very important to us that admission prices are not a barrier to attending the museum. And we have multiple programs, including the Library Discovery Pass program, as well as the Museums for All program and our free Saturdays to ensure that everyone in the community has the capability of accessing the museum. We look forward to welcoming the community back into the museum's galleries on October 17th and are grateful to the city and our many community partners for their support. I'm glad to answer any questions.

Council Member Marcin.

Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Eric. And I just, you know, having the chance to work with you a little bit since I've been on council, the work that's been done in the museum space for my council teammates who have not seen the new galleries, have not had a chance to go down the slide at the Dream Lab like I did the other night, Maybe a mistake. Really should. I think that this is an incredible thing that the community is about to experience, and I'm very excited about it. I did kind of just want to flag a couple things, and it's more informational, and it maybe speaks to kind of process generally for Harold and staff, because understanding budget prioritization and all these pieces when i think about the future of the museum i am thinking a lot about dream lab and about bringing families with young kids in and making it truly a community and cultural center i know we can't prioritize or fund every single budget request that comes forward there was some i i noticed one of the requests was uh that was not funded for the museum if i'm correct was uh basically sensory time in the Dream Lab, like a sensory guide of some, if I'm correct, and then additionally not fully funding the guide for the Dream Lab. How many hours roughly in the current budget process are we talking about where there would not be someone in the Dream Lab, roughly?

So Council Member Marsing, the museum is open 56 hours a week. And with the current proposed budget, we would be able to have a staff member in Dream Lab for 44 hours a week. And then we're still looking at options to kind of reallocate some funds because we think it's certainly critical to do that. But that would mean probably pulling staff out of other areas to do that.

And we're talking about an $18,000-ish gap somewhere around there, if I remember correctly.

That's correct.

Okay, I appreciate that. And again, the museum is a revenue generating organization, which it has a friends group and several other funding revenue sources. But I just wanted to make sure that I was clear on that. But again, I'm really excited. And I can't wait for October for the community to see it. And thanks. Thanks, Eric.

Thank you. Thank you. Oh, and you know what? Actually, I should ask. I'm really bad at this. Does anybody need a break? Okay, before this one. We're going to take a five-minute break. Okay, are you all ready for us now? Perfect, okay, let's continue on, public safety fund and budget summary.

Um, so we don't have a public safety fund presentation or a public safety presentation for you as part of this 2027 proposed budget, simply because we spent a fair amount of time presenting the needs in public safety leading up to, um, you know, the development of, of the ballot question that you all gave us final direction on. What we do want to touch on very briefly, though, is the Public Safety Fund and the 2027 budget. So I'll go through this fairly quickly with you.

Well, I think if there's any other broader questions, we have Zach and Dave here that can answer questions.

Yes, yeah, for sure. And Sandra is going to touch on one-time expenses in the Public Safety Fund a little later in our presentation as well. So, the public safety tax, original public safety tax was approved in 2006, as we have mentioned previously. It was then increased in 2017. In our 2027 proposed budget, we are using that 0.58% tax to put together this proposed budget since we don't yet know the outcome of the ballot question in November. Should that pass? We will come back to you all with a revision for this public safety fund ahead of adopting the budget for 2027 then in December. So the 2027 budget using under the existing tax is 22.19 million. It is an increase of a little over 1.4 million from our 2026 adopted budget. The ongoing component is 21.3 million Also, an increase over our 26th adopted budget, and there is $872,000 of one-time expenses in the proposed budget in the Public Safety Fund. And again, Sandra is going to go through those with you in a little bit. Wanted to really quickly go through the major ongoing revenues and expenses We do have a proposed increase for sales and use tax similar to the increase in the general fund so total Sales and use tax and the proposed budget is eighteen point eight million There is one point eight seven million of intergovernmental revenue in the Public Safety Fund and this is predominantly revenue from St. Vrain Valley School District for the SRO program. And then we have a little over 160,000 of revenue coming from the firing range. And our major ongoing expenses is $189,000 of level one. Some fleet lease increases. Again, this is for the O&M portion of the fleet lease. And then about $885,000 of fleet lease increases. pay increases per the collective bargaining agreements that were recently negotiated and will be brought to you for final adoption later this month. We want to talk a little bit about future budgets with this fund because this is a very constrained fund as we have spoken to you about previously. Simply due to sales and use tax being the primary revenue source for this fund and that is directly tied to the health of the economy. Over 80% of the total expenses are salary and benefit related. 81% of the total ongoing expenses are salary and benefit related. So very heavily concentrated in pay and benefits for staff. The attachment I in your packet is a very conservative pro forma. It does show we balanced over the 10-year period, but that We know that that is not realistic. We are using a 3% projection for sales and use tax, which that is probably realistic over that 10-year period. What is not realistic is a very, very conservative projection for operating increases between 1% and 2%. And we know that that is realistic. Certainly not something that, in order to balance the fund at actual projected salary and benefit increases that we have seen historically, that's more along the lines of three to four percent. We know we would have to make reductions in this fund to continue to balance it on a go-forward basis. When we were bringing you the costs of the staffing needs for the additional staff that public safety needs, as part of that, I also did include about $2 million over that 10-year period just to keep this fund in the black using more realistic salary and benefit expenses. So if that tax passes, some of that additional tax will be used to offset what we really will be seeing in current staffing increases, salary and benefit increases, not the number of staff. And that really is what I wanted to cover on the public safety fund.

Okay, do we have any questions from council? Okay, Council Member Marcin.

Thank you so much, Teresa. I actually think my questions are for Zach or for Chief Moore, but I know finance would be really appreciative. It's great to have you. Thank you for that information. I know we've spent a lot of time talking about public safety's budget generally. I have a couple of questions about just going through the budget presentation about a couple specific line items that I just wanted to to look at, and really it is about understanding a little bit better, specifically wanted to look at draft one, which I know we've heard about publicly, all those things. I actually wanted to narrow a little bit down into, there was some back and forth with staff and just kind of understanding it. Can you... So in the past, based on the feedback we've gotten from staff, Draft 1 has been a pilot program that we've incorporated over the last several years. Can the public safety team, in terms of their budget request, just speak a little bit to why they felt now was the right time to move from the pilot phase of that program into fully operationalizing that as an ongoing expenditure? Just to help us understand how that rolls, and help me understand, just because why now?

Can you hear me now? councilman marsing zack artist public safety assistant manager of public safety i want to be clear we we ran a pilot program there's been some communications between public safety and city council this uh today we ran a pilot program i believe in 2024 to understand it we then had to pay for the software just like we would pay for tasers just like we pay for body cameras so we've implemented that operationally for the last two years so it's been department-wide yeah so it's been running already operationally what we did was we came back this year and we were able to do one contract with everything under it so we had rangers who had tasers they were under a different contract we had different contracts for our body cameras with ending dates we had different contracts for tasers a wide variety of different things that we use for axon and so what we've done is we pulled everything under one contract And that is the 10-year contract that Council, well, approved and looked at for us to move forward with Axon. So while we ran a pilot program to understand what it was, we then have implemented it operationally since in 25 and then all the way through 26. So we've paid for those. We paid for it as one-time dollars because that's the way that we could fund it at the time instead of ongoing revenue. Moving forward with the contract, it will be ongoing because of the contract that's signed.

Okay. I appreciate that. Can you... Once it is embedded into the ongoing contract and it becomes an ongoing expenditure, this is more of a community concern question, one that I have, too. What... I mean, obviously, through the budget process, we theoretically check it right or have a conversation if we find out there are errors or we're consistently getting... But what... What future council checkpoints exist if there are any? If, you know, beyond us, you know, bringing it back up, is it just through the budget process typically? Because once it becomes ongoing, my understanding would be that it just kind of is a part of our ongoing operational expenses within the department, correct?

You are correct. It's part of like tasers, like body cameras, it's like our software. I guess my question would come, you're going to have to expand a little bit, meaning that what checkpoints are you referring to and what would you want brought back to council?

I guess the question is if in the event there's a specific issue once we roll this, because if it's one-time dollars that we're consistently looking at over the last two years to fund this specific program. if we were to discover over the course of time, and it sounds like this won't be the case, right? It sounds like the program is working effectively for the department. But if in the event that we discover that down the road, there become serious issues, there are errors that are consistently happening, not that would happen. I'm throwing out hypotheticals here, right? When it goes to ongoing expenditures, in my thinking, it becomes a lot more challenging for, policymakers which in in our system is this body to say hey we need to address this unless we are specific like if it's an ongoing expenditure there's no process it once it becomes a recurring expenditure for us to say hey let's check this a little bit and and regulate or or get input from the incoming technology advisory board or any of those pieces so oh go ahead

operational yeah and so on the operational side that's under kind of the the operation component of this and so one of the things that we're constantly watching on everything that we do is are we using technology appropriately Are we getting the value out of it? Those types of issues, whether it's one-time or ongoing. If it's not working, I will eliminate it for different reasons. I think that's the piece that really fits there based on the nuances and what we're trying to achieve from an operational perspective. not unlike almost everything else that really sits in that realm. I think that then ties into the concept of zero-based budgeting because we need to be in a constant state of evaluation in everything that we're doing. Just because we're doing it doesn't mean that the world's not changing and things aren't there. We have made those adjustments. If something's happening and it's not working, we'll deal with it. on the operational side. And when we talk about components in terms of things like our employees misusing it, that's clearly within the charter on the operational side. Those types of issues sit there in terms of managing it. And the best analogy I can give you is when the employee advisory group was created, it was actually created if you read the documents based on me appointing that because the charter is so specific in terms of employee issues sits squarely on the operational side i guess it's i appreciate that that that answer i'm thinking along the lines of at what point

does, and I trust staff, obviously, that if there are operational issues that are happening, but of issues of, and maybe this is more general, too, in the public safety realm, issues of community concern generally, at what point do they become policy questions in terms of how these tools are being used and rolled over rather than operational?

So I think, let me, and I'm gonna jump in here.

And then I have one more very specific question. Sure, absolutely.

I think it's number one, I think it's important just either for public safety, the community, or either for council to understand what the technology is and what it does. I think there's a lot of things, we saw that with ALPRs, there's a lot of misinformation, we sat down with Council and showed you what it was and answered a lot of questions and brought some clarity to that I think there's space to have that same conversation with City Council to sit down and look at what actually draft one is Yeah, how we use it and really that it doesn't have like personal information. It doesn't it doesn't work like an ALPR It's not it's not these things that you may hear or may think it it is So I think I think we need to understand the technology first What I will tell you is that we are constantly reevaluating operationally whether or not we're being good stewards of the money and whether the technology is what we need. Because again, we've had conversations collectively between public safety and this council that when there is a moment in opportunity and technology goes beyond what we're currently comfortable doing, that's a broader conversation with the city council for policy direction. What I believe is once we sit down and have a conversation about with this council, what axon draft one is, it will be like, okay, this is like creating a chat GBT document. And here's how it's all stored. Here's how it's all kept. Here's how we have redundancy built in. Here's our audit trails. Here are all the things that we have. And it's not collecting people's locations. It's not collecting those types of things that are typically brought up with those conversations with ALPRs.

And so I do want to also, so I go back to my frame of reference in that, okay, we as public school educators, AI technology is a type of technology that we are able to use. The school board has acknowledged that we have those, it's permissible per policy. However, they are not coming in and saying, you will use it this way or isolating a certain department. So I do want us to be careful because public safety isn't the only department that's using AI technologies. Is that correct?

Correct.

And so there are, hold on. And so how many departments do we have that are using?

Is Becky back there?

All of the departments. Yeah, I saw some hands raised back there. And so I do want us, you know, so as we're looking, you know, I heard that you had referenced, you know, the technology board. So, you know, we are... If we do it to one department, we also need to realize that we then should be doing it to all departments and having that. So it is a slippery slope. The other thing is when I asked about draft one, what is it? How does that work? Can you speak a little bit to even just how it operates?

Yeah, I'm going to ask Chief Moore, who knows the operational pieces and how it applies to and what it does, just to give a brief overview for council. Again, happy to have broader conversations with that. And Council Member Martin, we certainly can come back and talk a little bit more about that.

If I can answer the policy question, I think it is... It's dependent on what we're talking about and what that looks like because when we get into any employee in the organization using or misusing anything that we do, that's an employment issue. And so on the employment issue side, that is very clear where that sits. And so I think, you know, there's gray in this. And when we're looking at it, it's hard to answer the question hypothetically. in terms of what does that look like because it depends on the topic that we're talking about I think the question that I would say is I always go to what is the problem we're trying to solve and what is the issue at hand and I think typically clearly if we can identify those two things then actually the answer to your question becomes more apparent because that then helps us decide, oh, this is a policy issue or this is a operational issue. And I think that's the level of detail in the conversation.

So at our level, let's look at, you know, operate. Okay, so looking at operationally, what's working, what's not working. Okay, what needs to happen at the policy level? So when we say, you know, AI technologies is permissible per our policy. Do we need then to refine that policy to look at the whole scope to see where the guardrails need to happen instead of just like individual situations and contracts as they occur? And so that's what I'm trying to bring us back to.

I appreciate that, and I'll wrap up my time. I appreciate the point, Mayor, and I appreciate the point, because I think public safety does get scrutinized quite a bit in this AI space when I'm sure it's being used across the organization. I think that's right, though, quite honestly, because public safety is the only department in our organization that has the ability to restrict individual liberty or take it away, fundamentally, if AI screws up. And, you know, for whatever reason, so I think as a policy maker, what I'm trying to figure out is where does the check exist for us if we run into issues? And what I'm hearing is there once, and what I'm concerned about is once we create this ongoing expenditure of this technology, then that check goes away. So that's really my concern. It's not about any individual program necessarily. But I did have one very specific question, and this may be, and then I'll yield, and I know Chief wants to talk about it. So this may be for Teresa or maybe for public safety. In some of the communications we got today, it was my understanding that this, basically the bundled nature of the acts on contract, makes it so that you can't necessarily take one without the other or say, hey, we're going to put this over here. I did notice, though, just in the funding request, that it looks like we're funding the acts on contract increase, that $127,495 from general fund, but the actual draft one piece from the public safety funds. Wouldn't that be two separate expenditures that we could theoretically Are they two separate expenditures? Are they one? Is that just an accounting piece? That's generally just trying to understand that.

I would argue it's an accounting piece, meaning you're pulling funds out of two different accounts to pay for one thing. I do want to go back, and I want to touch on it. So I think it's critically important, because you used the word about if AI, and we've got to protect several liberties, and AI does this and AI does that. Again, I want to be very specific. If we're going to talk about draft one, let's talk about draft one. If we're going to talk about AI as general and how public safety uses it, that's a different conversation because I think what you're – I guess I want to understand where you're coming from when you say it is a mechanism that takes – body camera audio, uses that to draft, the officer has to then go in, verify it, rewrite the report, it creates an outline of the report for them, and then they put that into the system. Now, it's no different than the officer sitting there writing a report. A lot of times what we find is that the body camera, because we're required by state law to wear those, that the audio in the report catches details that the officer probably would not have remembered. for the report, and so we're finding that the reports are more accurate and better for court purposes. So again, you make comments like, well, it's going to create, if AI screws up or AI does this and people are gonna lose their civil liberties, I would like to clarify that a little bit more about acts on draft one. Now, we certainly can talk about that with other AI technology that exists out there in the world, But I guess particularly about Axon, since we're talking about Axon Draft 1, what do you see as being the challenge or the issue with having the software help write reports or help draft reports?

So for me, I'm not asking whether there's an issue or not. I've obviously not used it, and I totally could understand it. Somebody who sat next to my dad while he had to write reports 15 years ago, right? I completely understand what the benefit would be, especially as we've talked about as state and local and federal regulation for law enforcement has dramatically increased the amount of processing time. I completely understand the benefit. My concern as a policymaker has less to do with the with the issue with where the check exists for us as elected policymakers if an issue arises. And if we're going to move from one-time expenditure into ongoing expense as part of the bedrock of the department, what that means for us as policymakers. That's all I'm trying to understand.

It's not that I'm fighting the technology. And Mayor Fulton's timer went off for time. I apologize. I was answering the question and I'm done. Thank you.

I just want to tell you, I appreciate your comments. I think that's the piece that we're trying to understand. I think because if we understand where each of our positions is coming from, we certainly, I think, can discuss and talk through this. And I think what I'm hoping for a public safety standpoint is we talk about all this emerging technology that is there. And what we anticipate is probably going to look like in the next five years will be completely different than what we're talking about today. Mm-hmm. as a policy center, what I'm hoping is you will give us that big, broader 30,000 foot view picture. And as the technology emerges, and again, to your point, public safety is moving very fast and so is a lot of areas. But as we're getting exposed to new technology and opportunities, if you've set the guardrails and said, okay, you work within these guardrails, this bigger, this highway to work on, It gives us opportunities to come back and reengage council. We're like, hey, we think those guardrails might need to be considered a little bit wider. We need to go from two lanes to four lanes because here's something we can do. And I think that creates a more of a conversation piece operationally. I don't look at your losing control by simply funding something that we've been using because we have policies in place. We have accountability already built in. we hold our folks accountable so those things already exist whether we're using this draft one or whether we're using ncic which is a lot more you know pertinent or has a lot more critical information that again people will be charged sent to jail lose their jobs those types of accountability are already built within the system the culture of public safety i think what we're looking for public safety when you ask about that accountability when does it come back to city council is that you set that that big picture and you set those guard rails and you allow us to operate within those guard rails when we need to look expanding those guard rails we're coming back and having a broader conversation not only council but the community going hey what about this piece what about this thing and what about doing this and then having those those conversations to see what the next steps are

Yeah, and I think I can answer the question now that I understand what the question is. Every budget year, council has the ability to choose not to fund something if something arises. Just because it's in an ongoing budget doesn't mean that it continues in perpetuity. Just like I can make a recommendation to the council about ceasing funding based on it, if there's issues council can have the same conversation in the budget process so that actually occurs every year in in that process and so that's kind of where i was getting as if i can understand it i can answer the question and that's really that's one form of control that council has frankly, another form of control that council has is me. In the sense that you all hire me to do a job and if things are happening and I'm not doing it, you all can make a decision on any Tuesday night to make a change. And so I say that because I think understanding the question is now very clear in that a any budget process council can change it frankly any tuesday night if we're not managing that policy administration role in bringing the questions council has the ultimate authority in that you can just say see that's the reality of my position i've always known that um And I think to Zach's question is, I think the more we have, I call them, when I talk to staff, I talk about sideboards. I'm going to give you the sideboards of where I want you to move. they better stay within those sideboards based on the policy direction that you all are giving me and what you're doing and i do think that's probably the type of conversation is at 30 000 feet what are the sideboards really get into what are we concerned what's the problem we're trying to solve um what are our worst fears and what are our best hopes and i think if we can identify those things I think it makes it easier to have that conversation.

And the other thing I want to also, you know, because it was stated publicly, and I want to clarify this, just because it's approved doesn't mean the checks and balances go away. It is always being monitored, evaluated, and if we need to go back to the table and, you know, ask any kind of project or... personnel, that those checks and balances are always happening. It's not just once it's checked off and then we forget about it.

Yeah, and I think something that we're moving into is, and this is a broader budget conversation, as we're moving into the zero-based budgeting and we're changing budget software systems, we're going to really refine our performance measures and how we measure what we're doing because it's not just this topic. It's anything we're doing. Are we achieving the results that we expect? And if we're not achieving the results that we expect, then we need to retool what we're doing and what we're doing or try something new because we see the financial position. But I would I would reiterate that every budget cycle we can. It's the same conversation. And I think Looking at sideboards clear policy direction. Where do you want me to operate in? Allows us to better provide you all with information as a policy board to ensure that we're not crossing that line Great.

Thank you councilmember Popkin

Thank you, Mayor. Harold, you probably already put a fine enough point on where I was going to go with this, but I'll just see if I can make this even more crystal clear. When we're defining in a budgeting sense, one time versus ongoing expense, what we're really saying is that an ongoing expense is something we are going to try to plan for and budget for consistently so that we know that there should be funding for something, whether it's a staff position, whether it's a service, whether it's a technology. that is something to be planning for on an annual basis. If there is a policy change, and correct me if I'm wrong here, if there's a policy change from council,

an ongoing something that something that was an ongoing expense no longer maybe right right i mean so an example because actually this question came up of when do we start seeing the policy components come in into the budget process this year is a bit of an anomaly simply because it came in so close to the budget process but what i would say is based on the goals that council set absolutely in the next product well if we have funding I mean there's a different piece if we have funding it'll be more readily apparent in in that process if we don't have funding and it looks like it's the same way we're gonna have a different conversation with council leading into the budget saying here are your goals mm-hmm here are the funding restrictions. If we do this, do we do this? And really get into the service delivery component of it.

And so the reciprocal is also true, right? If we, from a policy body, say, you know what? We want to see a double core team. And we might say, okay, we're going to fund that this year with one-time funds, but we want to see that consistently. That's a policy signal to then say, okay, this is going to be something we want to plan for from an ongoing expense. The same logic applies in that direction in terms of where the policy direction interacts with the budget direction.

And part of it, just so you, my logic on one-time funding too, and I was pretty explicit, you know, as we're moving through this, there were some core questions that I wanted answered in this specific case in terms of draft one. Does it work? Because if it doesn't work, then we don't need to do it. does it actually save time? Um, because if that doesn't happen, then why are we spending the money on it? Um, are we learning more out of it and are we getting more specific information? Because for me, operationally to the question, if any of those things, if I get no, no, no, no. My question is why are we doing this? And we need to stop because At its core, what it's about is freeing up capacity. And if we're not freeing up capacity, then this thing's not working. And so I have a different operational criteria that I apply. So a lot of times when you see one-time requests, it really is about testing concepts. And does it work? And then once we get through it and we realize it works, then that's when you'll see them move into the ongoing funding.

Thank you.

thank you council member call copper thank you mayor um so i love my ride-alongs with different departments and i've seen a lot of work and paperwork that the police department has to do is that from state requirements and how much more has the budget increased due to these state requirements i'm going to need dave and or zach to answer it i i think it may not

It's a capacity question that starts coming in when you look at all the additional requirements that are being placed on officers. And frankly, how much time are they actually able to be on the street? Because the amount of paperwork and reports and what they have to provide to the district attorney and all of this that eats their time, which then means that's time where we don't have somebody on the street. So let's take a ride on a time machine.

If we were to go back 20 years, because I was not here, um, sitting in this role and thinking about the police in this capacity 20 years ago, um, how much time would an officer have to spend doing this clerical stuff compared to now?

So Mayor, members of council, if you recall, we did present some numbers. I don't have those at my disposal right now. But we saw a significant increase in the amount of time it takes to investigate just a medium level call. upwards of 50, 60% more time, so additional hours for each call. What used to take maybe an hour, hour and a half, now takes three to five hours to complete an investigation on. When it comes to quantifying the cost of certain legislation and how it's caused increases in our cost, One of the biggest parts of the Axon contract is our body cameras. And as you know, those were a requirement by legislation. What goes along with that is now we have to label all our evidence in the body cameras. That's additional time. We're having to do a lot more reports for courts when we present anything in court. As you know, part of the legislation issue as a result of the 217, it's increased our lawsuits. Lawsuits are defended through proper and effective report writing. So it's hard to quantify exactly what the cost of doing business now is based on legislation, but it is significantly increased.

So we're trying to do more with less, and some of these tools are to help us be more efficient or productive. Correct. Is there anything that we can do as a council body to help advocate on the state level to show them some of these requirements? that's where I see you know me helping the city as much as I can is advocating saying like these are these unintended consequences because it is hurting our budget the money's not coming from the state and they're putting more restrictions on what we need to do or guidelines or requirements for what we have to do so is there anything that you all can think of that we can do as a body to assist with some of these additional requirements

Yeah, I think one of the things council member and the mayor and I had a conversation a few months ago and then she spoke to the governor is we've seen some local grants go away. So some of the mental health components that we think are critical to the community, we've had to make drastic cuts because we couldn't accept some of those grants this year based on the tighter restrictions that were changed on us in the middle of a budget cycle. And so really, really trying to expand and keep those mental health programs that I think are critically important because, again, a police officer and a firefighter is not going to solve all of your problems. And really having the right tools and right resources to send to those calls are critical. And I think as a legislative body for the city of Longmont, you know hitting up our legislators and hitting up the governor and those types of folks to encourage in the next budget cycle to find the funding so we can put those programs back into our community that are critically important because again i will be the first to tell you that the police officer and firefighter is not always the right resources you need when someone is in mental health crisis and having those resources are critically important to our community so when you ask about those things those are the types of things that i think that i would ask this council if you could help help in that way is really try to get that support it's financial support that we need in order to get those grants and get those opportunities back for our community.

Great. Yes, sir. Sign me up for the demo, please. For the pilot programs, when we do these pilot programs, was this a small group or was it the entire department that was participating in this pilot program?

So you want to talk about it?

So initially we started with a smaller group. If you can imagine essentially what draft one is, is a dictation tool. So what it's doing is taking your body camera and it's dictating and Axon also produces a transcript of the entire conversation, uses that transcript to then put it into a draft form narrative ask the officer some leading questions to clarify some information, gender, names, sometimes some things that it doesn't find in the report. Once those questions are answered, it goes into that draft mode, but in that draft mode, there are several sections that the officer must answer and clarify before you can even copy that text to what then becomes and for clarification axon is is not a report writing system falcon is so that that report does not stay in axon it then moves to falcon where the the officer finalizes that report and then submits it for approval by a supervisor

Gotcha, sorry, my question was, was the program transitioned to the whole department for the test?

So my point in saying all that is there's a learning curve. And so we started with a select group that could learn it and then teach other people that. And it eventually did go to the entire department as a trial. So we're seeing more officers use it now. We have transitioned to teaching it in our FTO program. so that the new recruits are getting it from the start, but what we don't do is just have them do draft one. They also have to write reports the old-fashioned way, not quite writing it on paper, but they have to type a narrative from start to finish. What we're seeing with draft one, though, is it's presenting an example of what a good flowing, police report looks like, and then they apply that to their handwritten one, so they're doing both through the FTO program, but there is a learning curve to it, so now we're able to start earlier, because we have been doing this for over two years, we're starting with the new recruits.

Thanks, Chief Moore. Last question, Harold. This is probably for you. For anything that goes from a one-time pilot program to an ongoing, is there an evaluation for any software, whether it's this or something else? How do you determine or your teams determine the benefit of this program to move it from a one-time to reoccurring?

So it depended on the software. So basically, any software is one tool of many that we use. And so it really actually, and this is where Becky's here, because Becky and her group have been on the forefront of this. The first question that we ask is, what problem are we trying to solve? Because if we can't clearly identify what we're trying to solve with software, then you're almost inherently getting into a situation where you're buying software for the sake of buying software. So identifying the problem that we're trying to do, we now have a project management office of which they get in and create charters for this. And we identify what we're hoping to see as the end result. And then as we're going through the testing, as we're trying this out, then we're assessing, are we achieving our end result? based on what problem we're trying to solve and if we're not then you know what i say to them is fell fast because i don't want to spend a lot of time on doing something that doesn't work and so high level that's what we're looking at in some cases where it's highly technical Think of our SCADA systems and things like that. We're not necessarily evaluating the same criteria. We're evaluating security. We're evaluating is it shifting the valves or the breakers in the way that we want to. That's a very specific performance criteria when we're evaluating those systems. When it's a billing system, We're evaluating a lot of pieces in terms of is it going to work. And so every piece of software brings its own criteria based on what are we trying to achieve and why are we utilizing that software.

So pretty robust. And I'm assuming that this particular piece of software also went through that evaluation.

So a few of the things we looked at, if I may, was does it save time? um which we've seen about a 50 reduction in time it takes to to write a report does it produce an effective report and where we look to for guidance on that as we got with the district attorney for 20th judicial d.a doherty and made sure that they were going to see quality reports coming out and that the courts would accept those reports. So those were two of the main things that we were looking at with this. Does it save time, get officers back on the street to answer calls for service? And is it acceptable and effective in court?

Great. Awesome. And please sign me up for a demo. Thank you.

Thanks. Council Member Prieto.

Just a quick question. It could be for our city managers, public safety, or maybe communications. I don't know. One of you guys can answer it. Could you guys speak to some of the community outreach and education campaigns that are going to take place before the election to just educate the public on why we are asking for an increase in public safety?

We can't. We can only talk about the factual components of it. and and so we're very limited in what we can say once the council called that question we're we're pretty limited in what we can say and how we can say it so someone can ask the question of can you come and present to us and you know it's like here's what we're asking for this is why we're asking for it here are the pros here are the cons sandy can talk about that information

Yeah, thanks, Harold. Sandy Cedar, Assistant City Manager. I'm writing this right now, actually. So basically, as Harold mentioned, we can only give factual summaries, which have to include a pro and a con statement. The communications plan is to send all residents a postcard, like a five-by-seven postcard that says the City of Longmont has three ballot issues, I guess four ballot issues, and two-parter. And so if you'd like to educate yourself on these different issues, go ahead and click on this website. And then when they do so, they'll be taken to An election page, which also gives information about how to register to vote, make sure people are participating. But then we'll also give the factual summaries, pros and cons, and detailed information about each of the ballot issues. But to your point, we can't advertise it, we can't advocate, we don't market for it. But we do want to make sure that voters are very educated in what it is that they vote. We'll be seeing so the public safety tax particularly shows what it is We're asking for how much that cost residents how much that cost residents on a I think it's a thousand dollar purchase on a five hundred thousand dollar home it shows the equipment that we'll be Planning to purchase as well as all the staffing It also gives some of the basic crime statistics of what's happened over the last 20 years So that's what that particular one looks like right now. I

That answers my question, thank you.

Great, thank you. And then I do have a quick question. What's all left in our presentation?

So Mayor, we have some slides on our one time funding and then financial policies. Okay, thank you.

Continue.

All right, so moving on to one-time expenses. So for the purposes of the presentation, we have categorized the requests that you have in your packet and attachment J, K and L into four different categories. The first one being capital equipment. So this is for requests that exceed our threshold or capital threshold of 10,000 or more for 2027. We have a category for IT equipment and technology improvements. Example of these are laptops, software, things of that nature. We have non-capital small equipment supplies. These are more consumables, things like supplies, small printers, scanners, things like that. And then we have one-time services or expenses. So this is everything else that would qualify as a one-time expense. including professional and contracted services expenses. So what you're seeing on your screen is the summary for the general fund one time. For capital, we have 1.2 million. You have the complete list in the council packet, but for public's knowledge, I'll mention a few examples of these for each fund. This category includes 629,000 in public safety radio replacements. In the IT equipment or technology improvements, this totals $383,000. Some items that were included in this category for the general fund include vehicle docking stations at $86,000, microphone replacements for the council chambers at $25,000. The other one, so the next category is non-capital small equipment. This includes replacement chairs and tables also for the council chambers. So that's exciting. And that's about 17,000 combined. And then for that 4.7 million in one time services and other expenses. Some examples of these include the transfer to the attainable housing of 1 million and the 300,000 transfer to affordable housing. Some of these, the one-time requests are offset by one-time revenues, which total 491,000, leaving 6.2 coming from undesignated fund balance. So again, the complete list is an attachment, Jay, for the general fund, but that's just a quick summary.

I do on the affordable housing fund, because we're putting $1 million in the attainable, we're utilizing one-time funds because that was a change that we actually had to make in the last time we had a budget crisis. actually last year. That did have, I think we're around 600,000 or 700,000 of ongoing and 300,000 one-time. To balance that, we've moved the attainable housing fund to one-time. The general fund actually had a million dollars ongoing. It currently has 700,000 of ongoing for affordable housing and 300,000 one-time. So those were in the last budget process and things that we had to adjust to deal with different issues.

So we're gonna touch some of the public safety one time, same four categories. For capital, we have 486,000. Some items included in this category are also the PC, not PC, public safety radio replacements. That was close to 283,000. A cardiac monitor replacement, that was a little over $200,000. For the IT equipment, the next category, we have about $76,000 designated for these types of expenses. This also includes multiple vehicle docking stations at $37,000. Salesforce, Care Net, Pacific Point Support, that's $36,000. The next category is the non-capital small equipment. This was $72,000, and that full amount is for ballistic vest replacements. and then the last category for one-time services or expenses this includes 56 000 for the transfer to the tech services fund in 2027. we also have a cip that is funded in the gen not the general fund the public safety fund for 160 000 and that's pbf 109 which is the municipal facility parking lot rehab

So one of the things I want to touch on that showed itself in the general fund and the public safety fund, and Sandra mentioned it, it's the Zoll cardiac monitors. And so part of the question of where you see some of the funding in the general fund and some of the funding in the public safety fund is that's really attached to the person and where the person is funded. So if you think of the body camera, the in-car camera, the taser, those types of things, if the position is funded in the general fund, then we use general fund dollars to pay for those expenses. If the position is funded in the public safety fund, we use public safety fund because there's a restriction on the public safety fund that it can only be used for added level of services. So we watch that pretty close. So that's where you'll see the Zoll cardiac monitors in the general fund, and you see one in the public safety fund. I think in aggregate, the expense to replace those, Sandra, is closer to a million dollars.

I'd have to look, but it sounds close.

And what happened in that, that's a change in market conditions. So at one point they were letting you lease them. And that's how we were managing the cost. They quit the leasing program and we needed to replace them. So that created a different issue that we needed to deal with. And if any of us are ever in a position where we need a Zoll cardiac monitor, we want, the new ones the ones that we know that works and so that's an example of where we were kind of hit with something because the market shifted in terms of how they were selling it to us and i just pulled it up it was 756 000 in total uh 551 in general fund and then the 204 in the public safety fund

And then for all other fund one-time requests for capital equipment, we have 8.2 million. The vast majority of this includes vehicle replacements in the fleet fund. That's at 5.7 million roughly. We have vehicles of 275,000 for a utility bucket truck. That's going to be funded out of the electric fund. For the next category, IT equipment, $926,000. A large portion of this is PC replacements for utilities. That totals $395,000 roughly. And then for one-time services or expenses, we have those totaling $3.1 million. And that includes items such as purchase of land that came in at $500,000, an electrical UN transformation support. Those are services also at $500,000. And transfer, again, to the tech services fund from various utility funds at $393,000. In other funds, we exclude CIP. Those are also one-time costs. But detail is an attachment out of your council packet. Are there any questions on one-time expenses?

I don't see any. Great. Go on.

We're going to move on to the financial policies. Staff does review financial policies on an annual basis. These are scheduled to be adopted by resolution on December 1st this year, which is a little later than usual. Once approved, they will become effective January 1st of 2027. Complete list of these financial policies can be found in attachment M of the council packet. Tonight we're just going to do a highlight of some new policies, a policy we're proposing to eliminate, as well as any changes to existing policies that could change the intent of the policy itself. So we'll start with new policies. There is one new policy that's being proposed, and that's an airport fund reserve policy. The airport fund reserve states that the fund would have at least 90 days of operating and maintenance costs. And this is really fund balance that has built within the fund over time. And it would be for cases of an emergency that would impact the airport to be able to operate at least 90 days.

Any questions on that?

Yeah. Councilmember Kalkhofer. We do. Thank you.

Just very quickly. Thanks, Mayor. Can you go back? For that 90-day operating and maintenance costs, so like the taxiway, would that trigger that or no? No.

As we've been having the conversations with council, and I think we talked about this when we went over the pro forma once, one of the things that we've inherently been doing is holding fund balance within the fund in the event that something happens. Similar to what we did on the other side with the housing authority in that budget when we realized they didn't have it, I really think we need the 90-day fund balance in the event that there is an emergency because the airport generates all its revenue from an isolated location. If you have a well-placed natural disaster, you're still going to have ongoing operating expenses that will probably impact the revenue. And so we really need a dedicated reserve policy to get us through a situation where something like that could happen. Otherwise we're likely to spend the fund balance down too deep. And then if something happens, you don't have that money available.

Would the event be like the mouse that got caught in the electric gate?

Could be.

Yeah, okay.

I was kind of thinking tornado, high wind event, fire, you know. Decomposing in the crevice of the gate. It's something like that because the analogy for you all, when we had the flood, we didn't need it, but it was very, because it was such a specific area, it didn't impact our overall revenue stream. This revenue stream can be impacted directly.

Okay, sounds good, thank you. Council Member Popkin.

Is that going to be the title of your short story, the mouse that got stuck in the electric gate?

It's the story of my life.

Are you ready? A question regarding this fund and maybe some broader operational budget, and I'll use the airport as an example here, but it's certainly not exhaustive to this. When there is a grant that gets paused, held up, not awarded, clawed back, I mean, cities have been dealing with a lot of things over the last couple years. And just to take an example near and dear to us, in July we kind of hit pause on an FAA grant for a couple weeks to reevaluate that in multiple ways. What happens on the back end from a financial management standpoint? What does that trigger in terms of staff and what contingency planning starts to happen and how does this fund kind of factor into that?

So the first thing that we ask, is it work that we have to do based on safety issues or anything? And this is anywhere, right? It is. We kind of go through a have to need to want to exercise of where does it sit? And so if it sits in the area, that's a have to. then what we start doing is looking within the fund itself and going, okay, if we cash flow it, what does that look like? What's the fund perspective on it? And then depending on the nature of whatever it is, we may have to look to the general fund because the general fund is the only one that can really put money into other projects.

And so then you look at what would that displace in the general fund as well?

So what is that displace that if we have to adjust it? it's in the need to want to we really dig into it to go can we delay it and if we can delay it what's the impact of delaying it or do we not even do it and and and so those are all questions that come in on the specific project and one that you will see in the public improvement fund is Centennial Park. Well, those are safety issues. And so even when we were having challenges balancing that public improvement fund, that was one that we knew we really couldn't touch because we need to deal with those issues. Once we're aware of them, we need to deal with it. It really depends on what we're trying to solve. Sure. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Go ahead.

All right, the elimination of one financial policy is also being proposed for 2027, and that's the public educational and governmental access television services. So these services are now handled in a contract that is approved by council. The contract is based on the work proposed rather than a percentage of the franchise fee, so staff believes this policy is no longer necessary. And then the next set of policies are updates. So the first one was a request from purchasing to update the collection agency relationship. And this is being updated to require a contract every time the city solicits a collection business agency services rather than only when staff deems it appropriate. And this is to ensure that appropriate legal oversight is in place. The next couple we talked to you about on the September 1st meeting, this is the affordable housing. As discussed, the affordable housing policy has been updated to remove the 20% cap for administrative expenses in the affordable housing fund. So this strikes that through that policy. The next one is very similar, the attainable housing. Staff is requesting that the attainable housing policy also be updated to remove the 20% cap on administrative expenses, and this is really to match the edits that are proposed in the affordable housing fund, so for consistency, and also to avoid similar issues in the future. This one, the investment philosophy. So staff is requesting that this policy be updated to maintain consistency with the full policy that council approved back in May of 2025. And then lastly, this is the franchise fee. We also discussed this in the September 1st council meeting and staff is requesting to update the policy to calculate the fee based on the budget's year projected gross revenues rather than on actual revenue. And this would allow for more predictable budgeting and also consistency across other franchise fee policies. And that does summarize the changes included in the financial policy. Do you have any questions on these or any other policies that we didn't cover tonight?

I don't see any names in the queue. So go ahead. Great.

Yep.

So that concludes the presentation for tonight. For next week, on the September 2nd, we do have the transportation funding presentation along with utility budget summaries. So please let us know if there's any questions. There was a lot of attachments in your council packet. So if there's anything that we didn't discuss today that you want to discuss further or have any questions, just let us know. Great. Thank you very much.

Thanks. Go get some water for you. That was a lot of talking. Council Member Popkin.

Thank you, Mayor. Harold and Teresa and Sandra, a few weeks ago you brought a few policy questions to us to kind of give you a direction one way or another to kind of shape up, firm up the budget here. Are there more of those coming, or were those kind of the core things? I mean, I know we have to revisit one that –

i believe is coming up in a week or two um those were the core questions as part of the budget process okay okay thank you thank you okay so we are now on to mayor and council comments council member or i'm sorry mayor pro tem mccoy

Thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to call out the museum for their Sunset Sortie. It was a great event and the art walk was wonderful as well. And I just wanted to point out that Longwood is such an awesome community and just a great place to live, work, and play.

Thank you. Council Member Kalkhofer.

I also echo the comments about the soiree. It was great. But I also want to shout out Adriana and also Sarah Arne for helping with some very challenging conversations and helping with some mediation. And then also shout out to Meals on Wheels. I did a ride-along today with Ruth. And if people don't know that service in the Senior Center, it's great. And it was nice to see some of our residents that can't make it out of their house.

Thank you very much. So this Saturday we have Level Up Longmont for your gaming enthusiasts. And this year it's going to be at the museum, is that correct? Did I read that right on our calendar? Yes. So last year it was outside the Civic Center, kind of conjoined with Longmont Public Media. It looks like it's going to be at the museum this time around. So, yeah, check location before you head out there.

And, yeah, and then I think...

what else do we have I there's something else there's so much that goes on and I wanted to make sure folks folks have it yep if you want to go visit your Council people who has coffee with Council this Saturday raise your hand there and then where's Hearthstone so at our LHA property on 18th and Hover and yeah that is it so Councilmember Popkin

Thank you, Mayor. First of all, I just wanted to thank council for the really thoughtful discussion with the senior citizen advisory board that came to present a couple weeks ago. They actually played that discussion back in their meeting for members who couldn't watch live or attend and had a brief discussion based on some of the conversation and the very questions that this group asked. So they're highly engaged and are really trying to figure out how to best support the senior population, the senior center, and work to implement council direction and help inform us. On that topic or related, as I alluded to before, I think at the end of last meeting, the Transportation Advisory Board was also interested in potentially presenting to council and having a brief discussion with council. i don't know if that's best suited for a pre-session or if that's best suited for a meeting like the senior board um we don't have to make a judgment call entirely to harold about that as well yeah i think that would be welcome they've and we have a lot of transportation related projects going on uh this year as i think all of you are aware of so Just wanted to flag that for future consideration. Thank you.

And then I did remember what it was, September 21st, 6 p.m. It looks like it's here in the study session room, our joint meeting with Boulder County Commissioners. So this is open to the public, so anyone who wants to attend, that is Monday from 6 to 8 p.m. And that is all. City Manager remarks?

No comments, Mayor, Council.

City Attorney remarks?

No comments, Mayor.

Very good. Okay, we have a motion to adjourn and it is seconded by Mayor Pro Tem McCoy and seconded by Council Member Prieto. All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? So we have adjourned.

What? We're done.