City Plan Commission - Regular Meeting

Yep.

The budget meeting tomorrow is like the furthest one away. It takes an hour to get through.

Do you have a capable staff?

Y'all ready?

Okay. I gotta use this even though I don't normally need it.

Hey, everybody. Thanks for coming out. Michael Crane. I'm the District 3 rep. This is the District 3 meeting, but you don't have to live in District 3 to be here. I see a lot of friendly faces. Thanks for being here. This is a whole presentation. We'll get quickly to it so you can ask your questions. Understand that this process for the budget that's being presented started... this time last year. So it was a whole year of going through what are priorities for the city, listening to residents, listening to us as a council, setting priorities. And then the staff all go off and work and see what the priorities are from there. And then there's a whole, he'll go through this, Jay Choppa, the city manager will go through that process. This wasn't something just done overnight and put together, but it's a whole process that takes a year. And there's a lot of staff here tonight and there's a lot of staff that work with them that aren't here tonight. So understanding that this is a full court press with the city. And so thanks again for letting me represent you on the city council. It's fast and furious. We're growing at a very fast pace and you'll see from this budget how those priorities are put out and what that looks like. So again, we'll kick it off and Jay, it's all yours.

Good evening. Thank you all for being here today. I'm gonna just give a little overview, then I'm gonna turn it over to Christiane Simmons. There she is. She's the director of what we call the Fort Worth Lab, which is the department that's responsible for budget data analytics and kind of performance for the city overall. So as most of you probably know, in Texas and Fort Worth, the cities in Texas are required to have a balanced budget. So when we put a budget together, the process with the city manager, former government, the city manager and the staff come up with the budget and we present the proposed budget to the city council. That was done on August 11th, presentation was made. This is going to be a presentation that Christiane will go through that basically covers the recommendations from my office to the city council. As I mentioned, they have to be a balanced budget. The overall operating budget for the city is $3.3 billion. That's all funds. So the city is basically like a conglomerate, right? It has a whole bunch of different lines of business. the water utilities, waste collection, golf fund, aviation, your general fund, which is the largest fund that most people think about when you think about cities. That's what pays for police, fire, transportation, public works, parks, libraries, code enforcement, all those kind of things. And that's also the fund that's connected to your property taxes and sales tax. One of the things that people always wonder when you have a shortfall somewhere, and they say, well, you have a $3.3 billion budget. Why can't you find $50 million or $90 million in savings in it? Well, it's because you can't take money from the water department, for instance, and use it for the firefighters, or you can't take money from the golf fund and use it for police. Each one of those funds is segregated, and it has to stay within... that area. So you'll see when Christy goes through the slides, kind of explains one of the issues that we had is how Tarrant Appraisal District changed the way appraisals are done for residential properties in Tarrant County, where they froze not doing appraisals every year. They went two years without doing appraisals. And we knew that was coming. We thought we had an idea of what was going to happen. What we didn't take into account is that even though they didn't reappraise for two years, they did take protests. And so we saw a decline in residential property values, which created a bigger gap than we thought we were dealing with. So Christiane will go into the details. I'm going to turn it over to her. As she goes along, feel free to raise your hand if you have a question. We'll bring you a mic. This is being live streamed. Thanks for everybody that made it here. We've been finding that between 200 and 250 people are watching this live stream. This is the ninth of 10 meetings. And so there are folks out there. So if you raise your hand, we want to get you the mic so they can hear what you're saying. So thank you all.

All right. Am I on? Yes. Good evening again. Thank you so much for being here on a weeknight, a hot weeknight to talk about budget. That's like not the most exciting of topics, but I'm very glad you're here. My name is Christiane Simmons, like was mentioned. I'm the director of the Fort Worth Lab. So budget data performance. So I have my budget hat on today and happy to talk with you about budget. if you've engaged in any of the rest of the budget process whether it be another meeting or the budget priorities survey we really want to say thank you for that your engagement is very important to us and so we appreciate you taking advantage of those opportunities So, yes, I have what is not the shortest of presentations, but we'll try to keep it moving. But feel free to ask questions as you go, and I'll hand you a microphone. But we want to start a little bit with budget themes. So every year's budget has themes that emerge. And I would say the primary theme of this year's fiscal year 27 budget development has been the interplay that Jay mentioned between Tarrant Appraisal District's reappraisal plan and our property values and the fact that the city's widespread population growth isn't necessarily translating to property tax values and revenue. And so Jay mentioned this, but I'll say it again. So TAD two years ago adopted a reappraisal plan by which they're only reappraising residential property every other year. And so we knew that, and we've been frozen. They took like a break in year one, and then this last year was like the first freeze year. And so this coming year, we'll get the first round of reappraisals under that plan. And so we knew that was coming. And so starting in April, when we began to meet with council about the budget, we said we're facing a $49 million gap because of property tax. And so we were planning for that. We get our certified values from the appraisal districts in July, the end of July, the 25th. And we sit in four appraisal districts, but Tarrant is by far our biggest. About 92% of our properties are in Tarrant. So our other appraisal districts are chugging along, but Tarrant has this other plan in place. And what we came to realize is that because they were granting really big numbers of protests, and there's also a lot of mid-year litigation that leads to value loss, our very conservative estimates that we thought was not conservative enough. So we'd projected to grow about 2% in property tax revenue or value, and we only grew 0.89% in value. So put another way, one figure we've stated at a couple other meetings, we added $2 billion worth of value to our tax rolls this year. So all the development that you see. And on the TAD side, we lost $1.8 billion in value on that residential side. So it wiped out pretty much all that new development. So that's another way to think about it. so we've been trying to close this bigger budget gap since the end of july and we have a balanced budget to present to you that we presented to council really trying to minimize service level impacts and look at revenue and fee increases and have a good balance there So this is just one little graph that we kind of put in about halfway through our budget meetings to help explain the problem. This is average taxable home value in Collin County, Dallas County, and Tarrant County over the last couple of years. So you can see in Collin County and Dallas County, as they grow, those taxable home values are also growing. And in Tarrant, you can see that we're flat. And then in fiscal year 27, that taxable value is falling. So that's why it doesn't mean that this might mean their plan is working exactly as predicted. So I'm not saying that it's not working as predicted, but this is just the truth of what we're facing here under the tier and appraisal district. And so later when you see the tax rate increase, you're gonna see that even with a tax rate increase, because the taxable home value is falling, you're actually still paying less next year on your city portion of your bill. So we'll talk more about that. But this is just a, for some people has been a helpful visual. So we'll go through some numbers here. The operating budget is 3.3 billion. Jay mentioned that figure, I believe. And the biggest of that is the general fund. So that's like the city's main operating fund, pays for police, fire, transportation, parks and libraries, code, a lot of those core city services that you think of. And our second biggest grouping of operating funds is the enterprise service funds. Those are the funds that operate more like a business. They're not paid for by property taxes or sales taxes, but rather user fees and rates. So the biggest of those, for example, is the water department, whose operations are funded by water rate payers. And then the third kind of the trio of big operating categories is special revenue funds. Those are funds that have a restricted revenue source and a restricted purpose or like a dedicated source of revenue that can only be used on certain functions. So a good example of this is CCPD. So many of you are familiar with the crime control and prevention district. In that case, the dedicated revenue source is the half cent sales tax. And then the restricted use is crime control and prevention. So anything funded in CCPD has to have that clear connection to crime control and prevention. So those are the kind of the big three. And you can see our budget growth 7.5% across all the operating funds, including the general fund. This is kind of like if I just put the whole process on one slide, this is what it looked like. And of course, it's actually like a multi-month process as the council member mentioned. But at the biggest, like highest peak in the process, our gap was $94 million. So I mentioned the 49 million that we were projecting in April. Then we began to do budget development, which includes adding expenses too, particularly for police and fire, contractual pay raises, that kind of thing. And then we got our really bad values and the gap grew even more. So this was kind of the peak of the story. Along the way, we were also obviously reducing the budget. And so the way that process began was in April. The Fort Worth Lab, my department, delivers target budgets. to departments to meet in the general fund. So we say, here's your bucket of money, budget it, right? And so when we delivered their target budget, we had already reduced them from the current year by 1%. So we gave them like a smaller kind of container to work within from the beginning. So just that initial belt tightening. So we saved $7.8 million from that 1% target reduction. We also require general fund departments to submit another 3% in reductions. That way we had, you know, like a menu of options as far as minimizing service levels. How can we save three more percent? Because again, we knew we were facing a gap. So we saved another 14 and a half million from those kinds of decisions, which did begin to affect service levels in slivers here and there for departments. Where we really saw service level impacts was when we had to turn back to deeper reductions after our gap was worse than we thought. That's when we talked about all kinds of strategies, including furlough days, which are not currently in the budget, a reduced pay for performance program for general employees, so less employee raises for general employees, and freezing or eliminating vacant positions. Those are some examples of the deeper reductions that have made it into the budget. We always look at revenue increases along the way. So we do have some revenue and fee increases in the budget. And after all of that, we were still facing about $37 million gap. And that's when the city manager decided in order to counteract what the Tarrant Appraisal District sort of has done this year, we'll recommend a tax rate increase, which is 3.2 cents. So current year is 67 cents per $100 valuation. This would raise it by 3.2 cents. And this was at the time that we recommended the budget August 11th. You may be familiar with this chart if you've engaged with the budget or the bond. This is how our tax rate breaks out in the city of Fort Worth. So 70.2 cents broken into operations and maintenance. So think of that as the main funding source for the general fund. And in Fort Worth, we actually further break out that O&M or operations and maintenance category into operations and then capital. So operations pays for salaries and benefits and loans. like contracts and equipment, those kinds of things. And then capital, we call that pay go or pay as you go capital, seven and a quarter cents on the tax rate. And that helps us cash fund capital maintenance rather than doing that maintenance with debt funding. So we wanted to maintain our investment in that capital funding as well. We also maintain our investment in the debt rate since that supports bond programs and other debt capacity into the future for the city. So all of our growth in the tax rate goes into that operations category. So this is a work in progress. We're getting close to the end, but there have been some council work sessions along the way, and I'd encourage you to watch any of those. I'll QR code the location for you to watch those at the end of this. But in particular, one work session like two Fridays ago now, council was... fairly uncomfortable i think at that time a majority with some of the things we took out of the budget to balance it so an example of what they asked us to to look at restoring was um in the original recommended budget we'd recommended closing the pet smart alliance location this was a um code compliance is that is the department over that and it was one of their three percent reduction so maybe not one that they were super excited about but like one of the options right because we have other shelters that we can push the animals to, and maybe there's a service level impact there. It would affect the live release rate, which we've been excited about this year, but it was an option. Well, the majority of council did not like that idea. So they said, what would it cost to put that back into the budget? Some other things they wanted to put back were some of the frozen positions. These are all positions that are vacant now, but have a service level impact. They were particularly concerned about freezing code inspectors. When I say freezing, I mean we're not funding them or hiring them next year. They're still in the books, but they're not being funded or hired. Code compliance, code inspector positions, development services has customer service positions for people coming in to pull permits and that kind of thing. Library, staff in libraries, parks and recreation, maintenance workers, recreation assistants, people who really do work on programs, and then a couple of positions in transportation. Each director of those five departments was asked, you know, if you could put anything back into the budget, what would it be and which programs would they be associated with? And so the total, you'll see the employee totals there for each. And so council also wanted to know the impact of that, as well as I mentioned that we'd cut employee pay in the general fund. So that's not civil service, so not police and fire, but all other general employees. The recommended budget had them getting a 3% raise mid-year, so 1.5% for the budget year. They typically get four at the beginning of the year, and it's a merit raise, but it's kind of the only mechanism by which we raise employee salaries. Council also was not comfortable with that level of reduction in doing it at the mid-year, so the new restored budget has them at 4.5% or 4%, still middle of the year, but restored to the other, more original level. Okay, so all that to say, the cost of all of that that council asked us to run was $4.09 million. And that would push the tax rate from 70.2 cents as recommended to 70.565 cents. So it's another one third of one penny on the tax rate. And then we'll talk again about the average household bill, but some of council seem to be comfortable because it still means that the tax bill next year is less than your tax bill this year. So even with that third of a penny, you're still $8.20 less than current year because of those taxable values falling. I'll show you more about that shortly. So that's kind of where we stand as of today is the 70.565 tax rate, all the growth still going to the operations portion of the general fund. And this just kind of shows that we're continuing to work in progress here. Council recommended $4 million more, and so we're balancing that through the tax rate. The City Council has five strategic priorities and this is kind of how we like to communicate about budget so that we're always making that tie between strategic priorities and workload metrics and budget. So the first is community safety and this is where you see the only real additions to the budget for the most part are in community safety. We continuously, when we survey community every other year and when we did like the budget priority survey, and I think what council hears is that community safety is the top priority for nearly all residents that we hear from. So that's police, fire, emergency management and communication. So like when you call 911, you want someone to answer, you want someone to come to your emergency. And so the additions to the budget are really concentrated in this area. One thing that had some council questions that I just want to clarify is bullet number one, which is about the Fire Hope Team. So some of you might be familiar with the Hope Team. It is homeless outreach prevention and education. There's a police component and there's a fire component. This budget recommends shifting the fire component away from civil service or uniformed firefighters into the mobile integrated health team on the EMS side. And the reason that creates a budget savings is because when you have firefighters who are trained in fire suppression, but they're not fire suppressing all day and then said they're doing hope work, you have to backfill their positions in the fire stations or on the fire truck. So that's those are backfilled on overtime. So by shifting those firefighters back into fire stations and then letting the mobile integrated health team and EMS do the hope work, we maintain the service level, but we're also saving on that backfilled overtime. So that's one that's like a reduction, but in a shift in services, but not necessarily a change in the service level there. We've also added funding to FIRE's budget, and you'll see some detail in a moment, but we wanted to appropriately fund their overtime budget. A lot of their overtime is contractually obligated through their labor agreement, and we also have rising fleet costs across the city. FIRE just happens to have some of our more expensive vehicles, and they've been unable to absorb those costs, so we want to make sure that they're right-sized appropriately. On the police side, we continuously study police staffing as the city grows because we don't want to fall behind in the number of patrol officers. And so we revamped the police staffing study this year and found that we needed to add 76 officers in patrol. So those will be spread around the city according to the needs of the department and the community. Those actually won't hit the general fund budget in fiscal year 27, but this enables them to start hiring and training those officers. That's 76 officers in patrol. We're also creating corporal positions in patrol. This is actually promoting 30 officers to corporals, which is the next rank up. This will allow a promotional path in police that doesn't exist today and still leaves them operational within patrol. Right now, if you want to promote as a police officer, you have to leave patrol and go be a detective or a corporal in a specialized unit. This allows people that really love patrol to stay there and have a career. It allows more consistent field training for officers as well. And then on the emergency communication side, this year we piloted a program with Axon 911, which is assistive call-taking technology. So if you call non-emergency, your call is triaged by AI, basically, like not a human, to get to the right place. Not 911, but non-emergency. And they've seen some good workload metrics with letting their call takers really do the more complex 911 call answering, which is, of course, a very stressful job with a lot of turnover. And so we're going to fully fund that pilot next year because they've seen some good results from that technology. All right, we're moving right along. So now we're gonna move into the other priorities where we do see more reductions than we saw in community safety. The first is infrastructure, not so much reduction here except that I told you we maintained that PAYGO portion of the tax rate at seven and a quarter cents. But remember the values are falling, remember the chart. So having the same tax rate actually produces less revenue for PAYGO next year. It's a $2.8 million reduction. So pay goes about $80 million. So it's not like a catastrophic reduction, but it is a minor reduction there. And I'll show you later where it comes from. It does not come from transportation, and it doesn't really come from park either. It comes from a couple of other areas. This budget also authorizes the pavement management fee for full implementation in the following budget year. So we're authorizing it now via ordinance. This used to be called the street maintenance fee. If you've been engaged in those conversations over the last few years, now that we're getting closer to implementing it, we're calling it the pavement management fee, which is really meant to reflect that it's not like a a reactive like oh we're going to go out and quickly like maintain and repair streets it's really about like full life cycle planning for pavement and the management of that pavement across the city um in a proactive manner and lane is over at the pavement management fee table wave your hand good job And I always say she's a very smart engineer, and she can talk to you all about pavement and street things that you don't want to ask me. So we will continue to work toward implementing that fee. It will begin to appear on the water bills in fiscal year 28, maybe even mid-year fiscal year 28. It all depends on the timing of when we can get that worked into the water billing system. But this enables that work to continue. What else? And then water. As water is a regional, they're a city department, but they're a regional utility. So as the city continues to grow, their budget is also growing. And this budget continues their sizable capital program, including cast iron replacement and the Marys Creek Water Reclamation Facility. Community investment is an area where this is like where we were really focused on. We have to balance, but also minimizing service level impacts because this is not public safety, but these are typically forward facing programs. So you can see already my strike through on Alliance Pet Smart Adoption Center because the first like three or four times I presented this, it was still in the budget and now it's not. Or I guess opposite. It was out of the budget and now it's in. But we were also trying to avoid widespread closures of any libraries or community centers. If you follow municipal news, you know a lot of cities are struggling with, do we close? Do we stagger our openings? Do we change the hours? And we really wanted to avoid any widespread impacts in those two areas. We do have a minor reduction to the priority repair program, which comes out of neighborhood services. This is a 3% reduction, so the whole program's $2.5 million. They actually get another $2 million in grants. So this $75,000, while it may cause like five or seven less houses to be done, these are like minor repairs to help people stay in their homes. It's not like a catastrophic reduction. Again, it's not, and it's definitely not like an elimination of that program, which nobody wanted. We also reduce, there's a program out of code called the Mobile Tool Shed Program. This is actually a pretty new program for us. We piloted it in fiscal year 25 and invested in it again this year in fiscal year 26. Again, this is what we feel is a manageable reduction which helps balance the budget. It's one of code's 3% reductions. but does repurpose one of the four team members back to regular code inspections. So this might cause a slight delay in getting tools to people who reserve them. So in this program, people reserve tools if they don't have access to like a lawnmower, maybe like a weed eater or something to help them stay in compliance. And then code delivers those tools and teaches people how to use them. So there could be a longer wait time with this reduction, but didn't want to get rid of the program that we just invested in and that we've gotten positive feedback on. The Neighborhood Improvement Program, I want to spend one minute here because it comes up in the presentation like two more times. And so Neighborhood Improvement Program, we do one neighborhood a year. The neighborhood is selected through this data-driven process about the neighborhood statistics like poverty and education and access to, I don't know, crime rates and access to workforce and all kinds of things. There's a bunch of criteria. And it's usually announced in the fall. I think it's about 10 years old we've been doing a neighborhood a year. What we see is it's a three-year program delivery, and it's paid for in PAYGO, because most of the work is capital maintenance. So think of things like a neighborhood might want a sidewalk that connects to the park better, so their kids can get safely to a park. Or maybe a neighborhood needs more lighting in a certain area. So depending on the neighborhood, the program delivery looks different. What happens is we fund the whole $4 million, is how much it costs, in the first year. And then they spend it down over the three years. But they're never really spending the whole four in year one. So for this year, what we decided to do is decrease the budget to more accurately reflect that first year of planning. So the first year is like a lot of planning activities and they never spend more than $1 million. And then we'll flow through the budget next year to accurately like pay for what they've wanted to do. this helps because again tad's reappraisal plan is kind of this every other year thing so we think by staggering the delivery of the neighborhood improvement program it will reflect what they're already doing and allow us to keep doing it so that's kind of the idea there And then finally, in this year, we did a program called Net Force. This came out of code compliance as well, but had help from other departments like police and fire and environmental. This was nuisance enforcement, and we had three pilot properties, and the city's sort of tagline for it was to become a nuisance to the nuisance properties. And so we've presented that to council a couple of times. We did have success in each of those three instances at clearing out other different violations and those sorts of things. And so we would like to continue that program in next year's budget. On economic development, the primary reduction here, it has to do with a transfer that we make from the general fund to another special revenue fund called the Economic Development Initiatives Fund. So we do that year over year to keep funding available for business attraction strategies. In some cities that we compete with, they have dedicated sales tax for economic development, for instance, through a 4A, 4B situation. We don't have that. We dedicate our sales tax to CCPD, for instance. So this is kind of our hybrid solution for keeping some funding available for business attraction and initiatives. But because it's not a forward facing program and we do have a small balance in that fund, we decided for this year we could take that one time reduction, hopefully one time reduction. So we reduced it by 90% from 5 million to 500,000 just to keep something flowing into that fund. The budget does continue partnership with our local chambers, including small business development program. We transition management of the Will Rogers Memorial Complex in this budget. Some of you may be familiar with that transition that's coming. The budget reflects that. And we do have a position coming online in economic development that will help support the city's targeted neighborhood revitalization areas and delivering and coordinating projects across those areas. Okay, this is my last one of priorities. Responsible growth. This is like a catch-all category, frankly. We could put a lot of things in here because we try to be responsible. But these are just a few highlights. So we'll continue to replace vehicles and equipment, but we're going to fund it in a different way. So right now, in a minute, you'll see department budgets and you'll see property management. Property management's budget looks like it's taking a big reduction. That's because right now in their budget, they transfer money for vehicle and equipment replacement. So we're going to do that out of tax notes instead. Bless you. Tax notes instead, which makes an impact on the debt portion of the tax rate rather than the operating portion of the tax rate. So it's just a shifted strategy there. But it looks crazy in property management, which you'll see. The city has seen over the last few years rising costs of health claims in the group health fund, so we're self-insured and continue to see rising costs, particularly on the pharmacy side of things. So we have a multi-faceted plan to help get the group health fund right-sized again and get back to their levels of reserve. Part of that plan, we had to increase employer contributions across all the departments into that fund to help pay for that. And so we didn't want to pass on the cost to the employees. So it's employer contributions going up by 40%. And again, we're taking some other strategies and methods to help, but that's one piece of it. So when you see departments in a minute that are actually like flat or falling, that's actually with the 40% in health costs already added. So that'll tell you that some departments are falling, decreasing faster than you can see. what else we continue to see open records requests public information requests come into the city and want to continue to support that state required process and so this budget continues to support that moving that function from the city secretary's office to the communications office to help deliver those those answers for residents and groups who are asking for information from the city we've talked a little bit about vehicles and maintenance inflationary increases like fire we have that across the city and some other funds too We will talk more about fee structures. And then at City Hall for our facility and parking, we also reduced our own maintenance funding to, you know, again, not a front facing like service delivery. So in trying to minimize service level impacts, we've tried to equitably balance some reductions there. All right, general fund. Look, you guys are still hanging in there, good job. $1.15 billion is the general fund budget. Again, this is the city's biggest operating fund. And so this is revenues versus expenditures. And you can see at the bottom row, it's zero, because again, we're balanced budget here. So property tax, we've talked a little bit about. It's the biggest revenue source for the general funds. You can see when things go squirrelly with property tax, then it affects the general fund a lot. So 2.8% growth there. Sales tax is the second biggest source. Those two together make up about 80%. So sales tax is growing about five, which is great. We had some double digit sales tax years after COVID. We knew those wouldn't like last too long, but this is still very healthy sales tax growth and helps a little bit to counteract the property tax issue. But of course, not nearly as big of a source there. On the expense side, the main thing to point out here is that salary and benefits are about 70% of the general fund. And of course, a lot of that is police and fire. This is expenses by department, which I have a graphic in a minute that might be easier to take in. But if you like the alphabetical order, you can look at it this way. So this is every general fund department. And it's current year budget versus next year's recommended budget. 4.6% growth across the general fund. But you can see a wide range of growth and then reductions, kind of like up and down the departments. Maybe in a typical year, we might see 4% growth spread across. This year, we're all over the place because of all those different reductions we took along the way. I'm going to pause here and just reiterate once more what Jay mentioned, which is we do get the question, and it's a good question, rightfully so, about if I have such a big budget, why can you not close a $49 million gap? And this, I hope, helps to illustrate why. On the left-hand side is the total operating budget, $3.3 billion. Most of these funds are restricted to specific purposes, either by their revenue source or by law and finance policy and that kind of thing. Jay gave the example about you can't use water revenues to fund fire salaries. I think he said you can't use golf to do police and all of that is true. So you break out the general fund, and that goes into the middle. So the middle is $1.15 billion general fund. Of that, 57% is public safety. So think police, fire, and emergency management communications. Those are groups that are largely salary and benefit driven, and those salary and benefits are driven by labor contract. So like you may have seen in the news right now, we're in negotiations with the fires union, which is called the 440, to try to get their next four-year contract done and negotiated. So we have like contractually obligated pay raises that have to be built into the budget each year. So where does that leave us when it comes to finding budget reductions? It leaves you on the right hand side, which is all the other general fund departments, 413 million. So you see all the lists there. I think it's in descending order. Transportation and public works, parks and libraries are numbers one, two, and three. And so that's why we get into community investment reductions and that kind of thing. So that's the balance we've been trying to strike. Here's the actual growth and reduction of departments in the general fund. So you can see fire and police there on top. I know fire's number's big, so I'll walk you through some of the big rocks there. 52.6 million 30 million dollars of that 52 is the subsidy that the general fund provides to the ems fund so when the city took on medstar ems on july 1st of 2025 this has been our first full budget year with them and we did a subsidy in this year too um and so that subsidy continues because ems as a as a fund and as a service is not totally self-supporting we'd love for it to be and we're certainly trying to you know brainstorm revenue strategies and work toward that But right now it's only about two-thirds covered by its own billing. So the general fund subsidizes that service in the EMS fund. Better patient outcomes, better response times, but this is the cost of doing that at this time. So that's 30 of the 52.6. another piece of that is the placeholder for what we think the fire agreement will end up being so that's a ten and a half million dollars in that in that figure we also have all their regularly programmed step increases because every year you get like bumped up in fire and police too depending on your years of service and then I mentioned that we were what we call right sizing or kind of adding to their budget for fleet and overtime costs to more accurately reflect their spend and their contractual obligations in those areas. And that together is 11 million. So those are sort of the big ticket items in FIRE. Police, that 26 million is almost all their contractual increases, like all but a million of it is just their regularly scheduled pay increases. And then emergency management number three, some of that is the Axon Pilot that I mentioned, that's the assistive call taking technology. And then some of it, they're actually a department for the first time this year, so they're taking on some IT and group health, which we mentioned, some of those allocations that other departments have covered. the bottom three we've talked about the big rocks of each of these two but i'll just remind you property management looks like they're taking a big reduction because we're shifting vehicle and equipment replacement funding out of the general fund and into tax notes so that it's about four and a half million of that 5.7 i mentioned city hall maintenance going down to that that's um nested into that number Economic development, that's almost all that transfer that I mentioned that we're pausing or that we reduced by 90% to that other initiatives fund. And then neighborhood services, that is because of the smoothing, smoothing, it's like a roller coaster, smoothing of the neighborhood improvement program. So again, in year one, they typically don't spend like all of their four. So we've reduced it by 3.4 million. So that's almost all that. So there's the bottom three. And then you see everybody else in the middle. And I'm happy to answer any questions now or later about any of the rest. Okay, so wrapping up, that's general fund. I'll wrap up on just a couple more. Enterprise funds are the ones that operate more like a business. I mentioned those. So water is the biggest. You see them at the top. Growing about 8.7%. That's not their rate growth. That's just their budget growth. So increasing operating costs as well as capital growth. Solid waste, we'll show you how all these, like the actual rates stack in a minute too. Solid waste growing about 15%. Solid waste is residential garbage collection, drop-off stations. Their costs are going up based on their contracts with waste management. They're also doing some long-term capital planning, including replacement of the landfill, which will meet its end of life in the next, is it like 12 years or 11 years, something like that. Storm Water Utility also has a table over there in the corner. Hey, Jennifer. Hey, girl. Storm Water Utility is continuing a planned rate increase or fee increase schedule in order to continue their own capital plan, which includes more midsize flood mitigation projects as well as more channel inspections. So really the lifesaving work that comes with. flood prevention. And then we have municipal airports and parking. So these are the city-owned airports. So that's Spinks, Meacham, and Perot Field. And then municipal parking is the city-owned garages, lots, meters. I'll tell you that airports are doing great, but they're really reason that they're looking like they're growing. Remember, we talked about restricted uses and how those funds on the left-hand side often can't really help the general fund. In this case, aviation is able to transfer some revenue into the general fund, which is great, because two fire stations are directly associated with the airports. And so those become an eligible cost like from the FAA's perspective. And so aviation is able to help the general fund a little bit in this case because they can transfer salary and benefits and O&M costs for those fire stations that are associated directly with the airport. So that's kind of a cool thing. And then special revenue kind of rounds out our top three. These are, again, the funds that have a dedicated revenue source and then a restricted use. So I mentioned CCPD earlier. CCPD's dedicated sales tax is their revenue source. So they're growing at about the rate of the sales tax, 5%. They're adding school resource officers at the request of Fort Worth ISD in this budget. They've also moved some general fund expenses over to CCPD. I think some bike unit officers are moving over. That's in an attempt to also help relieve the general fund with expenses that are CCPD eligible. Public events, that's actually a grouping of funds that have to do with culture and tourism. Their dedicated revenue source is hotel occupancy tax. and then their restricted uses like tourism-related activities. Their budget looks like it's going down, not just Will Rogers, but really the big thing here is that because of the convention center expansion and the timing of that, they'll have some key spaces offline, so they won't be making as much revenue. So their budget goes down a bit just for fiscal year 27. EMS, we talked about, is our newest special revenue fund, and this $103.9 million includes that $30 million subsidy from the general fund. In that fund, they have not just FIRE, but also the Office of the Medical Director is there, who holds the licensures for paramedics. They also have some attorney and finance support in that fund, but primarily FIRE. Environmental protection is a fee that you do see on your water bill. They do air quality and soil quality, but you're probably most familiar with them because of street sweepers and citywide litter abatement and illegal camp cleanup. All of that falls within that fund and that fee. They're pretty much a flat budget for next year. Golf, so this is city-owned golf courses, so not taxpayer-funded. Again, I like to say this on golf specifically because people are like, somebody's like, I don't play golf, so I don't want my taxes to go to that. These are not your taxes. This is funded by the people who play golf. So when you see growth in golf, it's because there's more golfers golfing. How many times can I say golf in one sentence? um so they're adding a maintenance worker and some food and beverage positions because they again have some growing demand there and then we have a small fund for community tree planting and it looks like it's taking a big reduction but it's actually because their current year budget's inflated because they needed like a vehicle or a piece of equipment this year that now they don't need for next year okay our first question next slide 26 25.

So my question is in regards to the city auditor's position. How many do we currently have and why reduce the city auditor's quote unquote budget?

This is an unprecedented question that I haven't gotten in any of the other meetings. I think, do you want to talk about it? I can look up the actual detail.

So we have a city auditor that's hired by the city council. Yep. but they have a staff and what she's proposed and she's been working on is part of the city auditor's front end function is to do some data analysis. She's been working with, believe it or not, AI on automating some of that front end analysis. because she had some vacant positions and she decided she didn't have to fill those because she's been able to use technology to do that front-end analysis to point her to where the audits need to go. And so that's where the savings is coming from.

That's correct. I have fact-checked the city manager and it does match what's in the budget book. Just so you guys know.

Okay. Oh, yep.

Thank you.

I was wondering about the tree planting. Many of the trees just up and down on Camp Bowie are dying, and that just seems to be a little waste, perhaps.

I'm thinking the city provided the trees. I think Camp Bowie Inc. provides the watering. The problem, I think it's just the drought, right? If there were the lack of water. But I think Camp Bowie Inc. is, they oversee the medians. The environmental department?

Well, the people that dictate the trees and everything.

Because they want more trees than our environment actually naturally would create. And they make you put trees. But I think Camp Bowie Inc. is the nonprofit organization that kind of manages Camp Bowie itself. And so those trees are typically watered by them. And so that's... Yes, that's the medium. Yes, ma'am. And up and down the side of the streets. Yes. Yes. Yes.

When was the last time we raised the city sales tax? And why don't we raise it a little bit and take some strain off the property owners?

So state tax is, we don't have control of the state tax. That's the state law that caps it. The city's sales tax is set by the state. And so the city, the overall cap across the state is 8.25%. 6.25 goes to the state. And then the city has a one cent general tax. We can't change it. We have a cent that goes to CCPD. So we just, we don't have the power to do that. I think everybody would want it, but...

Yeah, I think that question has been coming up at the state level to like there was their property tax related hearings yesterday where they were trying to determine how much would we have to raise the state sales tax in order to like change the property tax. And so it's a good question.

It was about 24 cents in sales tax to replace property taxes.

He's coming. Yep.

Regarding the, I kind of missed some of it, but with the growth, and I know Tad has changed a lot of, has changed when homes are being...

Appraised, yeah.

Thank you. Wouldn't we kind of catch up, and like within two years or next year, with all the homes that are being built and the property taxes? Yes.

Well, so this past year, we added $2 billion of new development, including all the new homes for this past year. But the reduction on the residential side from TAD wiped out $1.8 billion of that. So basically, we had no growth on our overall values. Next year, when they reappraise, We hope we're going to see a bump, but under state law, we're capped at 10% increase. And Tad has said they're going to cap it at 5%. And then if they take protests like they did this year, so we really don't know, because there's no precedent. And so until we get a couple of these cycles under our belt, we can have a better understanding. So we're... We're a little bit trying to figure out how this is going to happen as we go forward, especially when you think about it. I mean, everybody individually is facing higher prices with gasoline and goods and everything else, right? So the city's got the same type of pressures, right? Vehicle, a lot of the costs associated with budgets has to do, you know, police, fire, TPW, those groups that have a lot of vehicles. the price of gas is up, all those kind of things. And so trying to figure out how you're going to do this when you have an appraisal one year, you don't have it the next year, but they take protests, and so it goes further down. We're working on different scenarios on how to try to figure out a plan to hopefully be able to smooth out that, what we're looking at going forward. Should we go along?

Okay, good. All right, I have like just a few more, and then we'll do more questions.

Before you go, I got to answer Adrian. You left. I was going to answer your question from yesterday. You said, how much is that convention center costing our taxpayers? The answer is zero, because the convention center expansion is all paid with hotel taxes that are paid by people that stay at the hotels. So unless... The whole thing is being paid by hot taxes. So unless you stayed at a staycation, stayed at a hotel, then you're not helping.

Take a staycation. Yeah, good. Good follow up. OK, last couple of slides here. So I mentioned as part of the budget process, we also look at fees each year. So departments, there's a number of fees and rates that are charged across the city. So you're familiar. most likely with the ones that hit your water bill, but of course there are a lot. And we did quite a long budget response for council on all of the different fees and fines and all of that that the city charges, if you'd like to look at the detail. But there are nine departments that are recommending fee changes in fiscal year 27. Sometimes they go up, mostly they go up, but sometimes they go down. There are like 40 that are going down. So the departments look at the market studies and sometimes we're trying to recover more costs depending on what it is. Sometimes we're long-term capital planning, like I mentioned, the landfill replacement, for instance. So there's a number of drivers that make departments look at their fees. And council adopts a fee ordinance alongside the budget ordinance on the 15th. But the ones you're most familiar with and that most people like to see, based on all of the activity that I showed you in the previous slides, this is sort of the average taxpayer impact. So at the top here, you have average taxable value for home, and this, of course, would have a homestead applied. This is that number that we get from TAD. And so current year, $246,541, but again, it's falling a bit. Remember that chart. So a little bit less taxable value. And then you apply that tax rate that's 3.2 cents higher or maybe 3.5 cents higher based on those restorations we talked about. And you'll see you have a savings on your tax bill, minor savings next year. And we know you don't pay that month over month, but we just like to draw that apples to apples comparison. So that's just that. I'll show you this really quick, and then we'll go back. This funny kind of counterintuitive balance with the property value decreasing, the tax rate increasing, and how you still come out just a bit ahead. And this is the city's portion of the tax bill, because remember, you pay other taxing entities on your tax bill, too, like the school district and the county tax. And then the bottom section is based on average usage or typical usage across stormwater, water, and wastewater, solid waste, and environmental. And the proposed increases in those areas, an annual variance of $85, which is about $7 a month. So if you kind of offset it with that average tax bill decrease, you're looking at about a $5.70 monthly variance. And again, I know those are two different mechanisms by which you pay those, but just for a comparison. Let's see, I covered all of that and this. So last couple slides here. I think I keep saying that, but for real this time. Fiscal year 27 capital plan. So every time we do the operating budget, we also refresh the rolling five-year capital program. And so for next year, we're at a $1.03 billion capital program. Water takes up the majority of that, almost $800 million. And then over the five years, we're looking at about $3.8 billion in capital delivery across the city. So if you hear the budget for the city expressed in terms of like $4 billion something, it's because it's operating and capital. This is the last look at PAYGO. So this is that portion of the property tax rate that's seven and a quarter that funds cash, you know, capital maintenance instead of doing it in debt. I mentioned it's about 80 million, so it's actually 85 million with that decrease from keeping the rate static. Transportation and public works, the lion's share of PAYGO. So that's street maintenance and sidewalks and signals and bridge maintenance, parking. AND RECREATION HAS A PIECE OF IT. THEY'RE MOSTLY FLAT OVER NEXT YEAR. THE BIG REDUCTION THAT HERE COMES FROM NEIGHBORHOOD SERVICES, AND I SHOULD POP QUIZ YOU BECAUSE THIS IS THE NEIGHBORHOOD IMPROVEMENT PROGRAM THAT WE'VE TALKED ABOUT WHERE IT'S NOT REALLY A SERVICE LEVEL CHANGE, BUT IT'S THAT SMOOTHING OF THE FUNDING FOR YEAR ONE PLANNING. SO TOTAL BUDGET, 4.35 BILLION COMPARED TO THIS YEAR'S BUDGET, JUST A LITTLE BIT LESS ON THE CAPITAL SIDE FOR FISCAL YEAR 27. This is the community engagement schedule, which you clearly saw at some point. And we're happy that you did and that you're here. We have one more meeting tomorrow if you want to drive far north to District 10. And we had a public hearing yesterday on the budget at 2 PM, where council members could hear public comment. They're scheduled to adopt the budget on September 15 alongside the tax rate and the fee ordinance. So that is coming up soon. We don't have any more scheduled budget work sessions with council at this time, but certainly still share feedback with your council member. You can also look back at any of these meetings via like they've all been live streamed and you can see different questions from around the city. You can do that at the QR code on the right, which is all the budget information, including these live streams, all of our budget work sessions, all of our written responses to council. On the left is Connect Fort Worth, which is all things city engagement, a great thing to stay in touch with throughout the year. Right now, it's very budget heavy, but there are other things that pop on all through the year, including the comprehensive plan. Do they have tables here today? There he is. He was like, you're going to forget me. The comprehensive plan often has activities on Connect Fort Worth, so we're in the middle of a 2050 long-range planning effort. that Ari here would love for you to engage in. But I'll leave it here, and that concludes the slides, and we're happy to do additional Q&A. So thank you so much for your attention.

Okay, so this question is in regards to the... Help me if I'm saying it incorrectly. Exxon? Exxon 911 assisted... Sure. Call taking. I just don't want us to... It's cool to give it consideration in the trial, but I don't want us to throw dollars at it if it's not working. What are we doing to recruit in these crucial departments that need people? Sure. Like, 911 is one. I know it's hard to get people in that position. Sure. What are we doing to recruit people?

Thank you. So one of the things... 9-1-1 call takers, as traditionally in any big city, it's hard to keep a full complement of the positions that you have. So we typically have somewhere between 10 and 15 vacant positions constantly rolling. So we're always recruiting. That's one of the areas in the city where we're constantly, it's almost like an arms race for the wages. You're constantly moving the wages up because you'll hire people in Fort Worth, we'll get them on board, they get trained, but then pick a Kennedale who has two or three, they'll lose one and they'll offer more money and the person will go over there because they don't have as much work. What this system is actually allowing us to do as we continue to grow, is helping us not have to add people because you'd be amazed with some of the calls we get to 911, right? Like the closest pizza place to my, you know, they're just taking up phone lines. And so this system triages all those things that aren't real emergency calls and either sends them to our 311 program And that way, the 911 call takers can deal with 911 calls. And so it's actually reduced the amount of time that we're getting to those calls and getting those things done. And it also interprets, I think, like 172 languages. So as a person speaks, it gets typed out in English, and they hear it in English. And as a person speaks back in English, it goes in that language back to them.

I had a question for a friend who's not able to be here tonight. I didn't see it on the slides, but there is a fleet of helicopters for surveillance that we use and we're starting to use drones, is that correct? And what is the budget difference in those?

So we have two helicopters. I think the police department's had a helicopter since the 1970s or 60s. I mean, it's been around. So we just replaced one last year. And the helicopters will be called out by patrol officers when they're needed. We are creating a lot of departments are on responses with using drones so that you can get to a spot quicker to be able to understand what the patrol officer is coming up to? And that's kind of CCPD. I don't know, William, do you know the, that we had, we've been testing them. I don't know that we've actually moved forward with the full implementation.

William D. We have not moved forward with the full implementation, but we're exploring a pilot that would allow drones to be kind of first responders to get to the scene quicker so that we have situational awareness as those officers are moving in to do whatever they need to do.

They're not going to be used for surveillance. It's more for a response when there's an issue so that the police officer gets real-time information about what they're, or firefighters, what they're coming into when they get there, if there's a person with a gun or if there's a fire or whatever the situation is. So it's not for surveillance. It's for more of a response activity. It should. What it should do is maybe reduce the amount of, as we continue to grow, as we saw, we're adding 76 police officers. That's to keep our, because we're growing so much, be able to have the response time staying the same. So that should be kind of a force multiplier to keep us from having to add as many people as we go forward. Yes, ma'am. I'm hearing that, sorry.

I'm hearing that we are short on officers, so I'm wondering if we're short, how are we gonna fill 76 more positions?

We don't have any problems getting folks into the academy. We have people lined up. Now they have to pass the tests and all those kind of things. But the 76 officers will be, the positions will be in CCPD as cadets. And so they'll be filling those spots as we go forward. They won't actually go into the general fund until next year when they come out of the academy and become full officers. I'm sure we have some vacancies in the police department overall, but those academies, there are across the country and even across the region, there are police departments that are having trouble recruiting. I think Fort Worth gets a lot of folks that want to become police officers. It's a matter of people passing background checks and passing the requirements to get into the academy.

Oh, you're going to hold it. I just got a text. My wife said dinner's ready, so I'm fixing to leave. Jay, just to you, compliments to you and the leadership team. This is a good budget. This is a strategic budget. I went through the thing. And, yeah, there's some hurt in there, but we're going to be in this situation. And I was reminiscing with Dave. When I started and we started, it was the same thing. So it's going to run for a while. You've got a class and comp study that's been done, and so you're addressing that to some degree, but you're going to do a slow roll. So everybody's got to understand, all employees, all employees of the city of Fort Worth, we've got to take care of all of them. Your general fund budget, you've got 75%, 80% in payroll, $50 million in the gap. is right there. It's your health benefits going up $18 million, which the city is covering, not making the employees cover, which is a good thing. So hats off to you guys. It's going to be a while. The only thing I saw in there is I know that city manager's budget didn't drop a lot, but I think There's been some suggestion that at least the council aides wanted the position to be frozen or eliminated. So I'd like to see the council kick in a little bit. And I'm sitting right here next to mine. So 3160 text, if anything happens tonight, that's where I'll live.

Thanks, Richard. Enjoy dinner.

Hi, I'm going to take a differing opinion about this. I think y'all have done a tremendous job, but I think the budget is way too low. This is about cost versus services. You either reduce your cost and you reduce your services or you expand both of them. I would like to see us use the tools that we have. We can go up to over 77 cents instead of the 70 cents that you're providing that would allow us to continue to grow. We've grown by over $2 billion a year in value for a decade. That's great. We've been using that consistently to lower our tax burden. The problem with doing that is that the cost of services during that time, you have a huge expansion of services. Impact fees cover some of the roads, but it doesn't cover all of the new police officers, all the new firemen, all the stations that they have to run in, all of the equipment that has to be there, all of the new parks, all of the new libraries. So instead of expanding our services to meet the needs that our citizens want, we've given a tax break to people that has been roughly $50 to $60 a year, every year. Sounds great. except it's hurting us. Where we're seeing it in this year's budget is, again, I'm glad that you're finally raising the tax rate. If values go down, your rate should go up. Period, point blank, that's how math works. It should have been happening all along. The legislature allows us to not call a tax rate an increase, if you're generating the exact same amount of tax every year. It's called the no new revenue tax rate. They also allow you to go up 3.5%. It's called the voter approved tax rate. Well, we know our costs are going up greater than 3.5%. If 75% of your budget, of general fund budget, is salaries, and fires getting eight and a half percent raises and police are getting six percent raises that means the rest of it are service cuts you are doing service cuts you're trying council listen to a number of these town halls and have done a good job of increasing a little bit to restore some of it and i'm speaking directly to to mr crane and he's well aware of my position on this But it continues to be cut. So one of the methods that you used this time was moving vehicles over to the debt side. Great. I think vehicles probably should be used for debt. That's how we buy most cars in our own business. But what that means is streets aren't being built. Libraries aren't being maintained. That's where that money's coming from. Police and fire aren't seeing the hurt in this. It's all of our other services that we as citizens want that make this city as livable, as wonderful as it is. And we want to continue to see that. As we continue to grow, we need to expand not just the service level, right? So this time you have a budget increase in the general fund of 4.6%. Again, that's not expanding any services. That's contracting some services. That's expanding the payroll that has to be there. That's expanding our current contracts for inflation. I know none of us want to see our taxes increase, but I'd rather see my taxes increase by a small amount to see the services that I want to have.

All those in favor say aye. I'm kidding. Thank you for the feedback. Any other questions? Yes, ma'am.

I was wondering if there's any kind of plan or program or anything in the budget to improve Camp Bowie. I mean, it's very sad. The buildings are You know, falling down, there's people sleeping on the sidewalks and living in the streets. And I was just wondering, is anybody going to do anything? Like West Camp Bowie? Yes.

So there's one position added for what we call targeted revitalization areas. It's the old commercial corridors like East Lancaster, West Kambui, parts of Rosedale, Horn Street. The idea is to work with the neighborhood associations and or if there are any business associations to try to do a little bit more focus today. In fact, we're looking at council members have brought up THE WE'RE SEEING A LOT OF VACANT BUILDINGS RIGHT THAT HAVE BEEN SITTING THERE AND THEN THE OWNERS DON'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT AND WHAT CAN WE BRING FORWARD IS A NEW ORDINANCE TO HAVE MORE TEETH THE THING ABOUT DOING SOMETHING LIKE THAT IS THAT WE HAVE TO GOES BACK TO WHAT HE WAS SAYING WE HAVE TO HAVE THE RESOURCES AND THE PEOPLE THAT WERE ENFORCED IT RIGHT SO SO THAT WE'RE ACTUALLY IN EXPLORING SOME NEW WAYS AND DIFFERENT WAYS MAYBE BRING TO THE COUNCIL an ordinance that would deal with that. It would also come with some kind of costs associated with adding more code folks to be able to address that. But we are trying to move forward with some of those initiatives that would force, especially absentee owners of those buildings, you know, that are sitting there, and we'll send them fines, and then you never hear from them, and we put liens on it, but they never do anything with it anyway. So see what we can do under state law to enforce more of what we, you know, create an ordinance that allows us more teeth into the system.

Are you talking about Altamir West, that piece?

Are you talking about Altamir West? I think you should understand, I mean, just, we have NES, the NES that's over neighborhood empowerment zones that are part of that revitalization. That part, too, unlike, you know, you go from a very pretty bricks part, and then you go to the next part, and it gets a little worse. That's controlled by TxDOT. We did a lot of stuff where we want to do some beautification down there, but we can't because TxDOT owns that street. The Camp Bowie District, that was another piece of it. Seven, eight years ago, a lot of those businesses pulled out of the Camp Bowie District. So, therefore, no taxes. They aren't charged taxes because, like the other parts of the Camp Bowie that do all the median beautification and other of that. That's not exactly addressing you, but I think that's part of this is the beautification piece of it. You should also know there's a homeless population. I'm sure you see that. We spend millions of dollars in your tax dollars for homeless services. If people want help, we can figure out how to get them help. And so there's money in this budget. We also have a really good continuum of care here through Partnership Home. I get text messages all the time from people like, this person's out here homeless, what can we do? We'll send people over to talk to them. We also have initiatives that don't give to them. People feel guilty and start giving them things. Don't do it. We can go through Presbyterian night shelter, et cetera. There's been a lot of effort, as you may know too, put in the Las Vegas Trail area because we can really, contains not the right word I'm looking for here, but that's a captured area that we know there are issues and problems. And we see already that, that that's helping and bleeding out in other parts. And I see Spencer back there shaking his head because I know he spent a lot of time there, too, of making sure people are safe, first of all. And so you'll see a lot of police and fire there, too. And then making sure people can get services. And the idea there is, like, it'll start bleeding out. You've got Barry Hudson here from Westman Hills North Neighborhood Association in that there's just a lot of good work going on that could bleed out into that corridor. And that's the hope. We also need good folks to step up and businesses to reinvest in that area. The other piece is, too, shutting down businesses, as he talked about, too. There's a couple of businesses that are sexually oriented. Well, they're bars that have turned into sexually oriented businesses. Let's just say that, that we're fighting so they don't get their TABC license and trying to shut that part down. So there's a lot of efforts. What I'll say to you is if you see something, tell us about it. If you don't have the MyFortWorth app, Get it, everybody. Because those are the metrics. When I come to these guys and say, I need help here, they'll go look and say, but we don't have any of those metrics. What's really happening here? And it's not just me yelling the loudest at this point. It's they've got to have the metrics behind it. So whatever that is, a light out or missed trash, if you see something, homeless, whatever, then when I go ask for the resources, the metrics are there to back it up. And believe me, he yells loud. I just talk loud. That's different.

Any other questions? Yes, sir.

I had questions about the debt. I feel like we talked about it a lot. That feels like something that is passing the buck down the road.

The debt?

Right. I mean, debt comes with interest, right? So then we're just paying more later. I would rather personally pay more now than have to pay even more later down the road to account for things like that.

So what we're talking about primarily today is operating budget. That is no debt tied to it. So when she showed the breakout of the tax rate, the 14.75 cents, for debt service. That's been the same debt rate that we've had for years. And in a city that's growing like Fort Worth, if you're going to build a $40, $50 million road that's going to last you 30 years, you don't want to use cash on that. Just like when you buy your house that you're going to live in forever, you use a mortgage and you buy it with debt service and you pay it over time. so that you can spread the cost out over the years that the life of the road is. And so, so like this building was built with bonds and debt, right? But the operations in the building, that's cash. That's the services that are being provided. And so our debt service, we talked about moving some of the, typically buy as many vehicles as we can with cash. We moved, because of the budget issues, we moved some to debt because we had some tax notes. The tax notes are seven-year notes, so it's like having a seven-year car payment, right? But we only put the vehicles that are going to last at least 10 years in there so that you're paying them over with the life of the deal. So it's not... You can't use debt service tax rate for operations and vice versa. So it's kind of segregated, and it's only for the citizens voted for the bond, you all passed the bonds back in May, and so that tax rate is what pays for those bonds that get issued for the new fire station or the new roads and all that. The pay go, which you saw, we call pay as you go, that is maintenance operational dollars for maintenance of streets, maintenance of buildings that is more capital. Like if you have to replace an HVAC system, you don't want to use debt. You just replace it with cash. Yes, sir.

I had a question. What department projects how much you're going to pay in materials costs? Because I know I'm paying more in materials costs for certain things than I was last year, and I expect those to keep going up and up and up, whether you go to Home Depot or Lowe's or wherever to get your stuff. Asphalt, I'm sure prices have gone up because it's an oil-based product. What department projects that, and how do they do the... how are they doing these projected increases that you're going to have in 2027?

So we have both analysts in what we call the Fort Worth lab, but also each department has their analysts that deal with the specific areas that they work in. And so when we look at the costs for next year, typically some of those items we have under contract. So we'll go out and if the transportation public works, for instance, we'll put out an RFP, a request for proposals, to have for asphalt up to X amount of dollars. These are contracts that Adrian always sees and he says, I don't understand how this is going to be. They'll have it out there and we're going to buy up to $10 million in asphalt over the next three years. The vendors turn it in. Then based on the cost per uh... toner whatever however it's measured then we end up taking the lowest bidder and then as we use it we have them the ability to go up to that amount as that gets bought and it comes from that we lock in in cost for on an out west as with their fuel prices exactly on and it's it depends on sometimes we'll have a contract that'll be it'll be for a year but with two extensions for instance And so we typically, those are the kind of things that we know we're gonna use all the time. When it comes to repairing a building, we'll have what the job order contracts that we put out for plumbers or plumbing company or a repair company so that when you do have a issue with a building like this in the HVAC, you already have fixed costs that you call that company that's giving you a discounted price because you have this standby contract with them.