City Council - Regular Meeting

To order. It is the provost Provo Municipal Council, Provo RDA governing board, and the Provo Stormwater District governing board. It's 05/05/2026 at 05:31PM. We will do a roll call of elected officials. We have Marsha Judkins with us, and we have Gary Garrett, myself, Patrice McKay, Becky Bogdan, and counselor Jeff Whitlock. Is anyone on Zoom, Kevin? Others are on their way, and we do have Rachel Whipple and Craig Christensen excused today. And we will have a opening prayer by Julie Rose.

Dear father in heaven, we are grateful for this chance that we had to gather as a community. We're grateful for the service of our city council members and our administration. And we ask the guidance of thy spirit as we I know that our leaders seek to make decisions in the best interest of the residents of Provo. We're grateful for this beautiful city that we live in. We say this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Amen. Thanks, Julie. We'll have the pledge of allegiance by Councilor Whitlock. Alright. First of all, we're gonna have a presentation of the tentative budget for Provo City for the fiscal year beginning 07/01/2026 and ending 06/30/2027. And it will be presented by mayor Marcia Judkins and then Kelsey Zarbach, our budget officer.

Thank you. Dear members of the Provost City Council, I'm happy to provide the mayor's proposal for the tentative Provost City budget for fiscal year 2027. I'm proud to deliver a balanced budget that does not include a property tax increase. As you know, I began my service as mayor in January, and we got to work immediately with our finance team to review sales tax projections, discuss supplemental requests, and hone in on the details to ensure we delivered on one goal, a balanced budget that improves Provo residents' quality of life. The proposed budget successfully achieves this goal by focusing on fiscal discipline, operational efficiency, and long term investments.

I was consistently impressed by the dedication of our department directors, our outstanding finance team, Dan Follett, Kelsey Zarbach, and Andrea Wright, and CAO, Scott Henderson. I appreciated their willingness to explain the process, think creatively, and ask important questions. As we spent hours together, I appreciated the opportunity to find efficiencies and employ best practices throughout Provo City. One important directive we utilized was to approach supplemental appropriations with greater discipline. Rather than simply submitting requests, department directors were asked to identify potential funding sources for every proposed project.

This innovation saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in general fund expenses and encouraged creative problem solving across departments. We applied that same discipline to major cost centers like our vehicle fleet. By establishing a defined annual fleet budget for the first time, we're ensuring these resources are managed with the same accountability and prioritization as the rest of the general fund. We addressed consistent operational overtime within the fire department. Working closely with fire chief Hedman, we added positions to improve coverage and reduce reliance on overtime.

These increased positions improved quality of service without a cost increase to taxpayers. We continue to benefit from our general fund transfer from our utilities. Absorbing the risk of running public utilities comes with a 12.5% dividend to Provo residents, making us making up approximately 18% of overall general fund expenses. These transfers help maintain one of the lowest property tax rates in the state while also presenting some of the lowest utility fees. It's a key reason we were able to avoid a tax increase this year.

This budget also makes strategic investments in areas where we know we need to do more. Cybersecurity is one of them. Provo has only one time one full time cybersecurity professional. For a city of our size, that opens us up to greater threats, even with excellent staffing. To prioritize safety more directly, our budget funds another full time position. We're also continuing our focus on making Provo more business friendly. Improving the building permitting process has been

a priority since day one. This budget adds a building inspector at no cost

to the general fund. We're also investing in technology to better monitor processes, identify bottlenecks, and improve efficiency at a fraction of the cost of adding additional staff. The hard work of each department to identify efficiencies allowed us to prioritize our employees who are the heartbeat of Provo City. We funded a 2% cost of living adjustment, providing support for each Provo City employee during a time of rising costs and global uncertainty. We also extended parental leave for new parents, showing our commit commitment to be family friendly and maintaining a healthy work life balance.

Finally, this budget reflects your priorities as members of the city council. We work together to prioritize investments in your key priorities, increasing homeownership, improving provost economic development, and optimizing investments in code enforcement. Our team worked tirelessly to deliver fast turnaround on each of these council priorities and with your help secured appropriations which allowed us to fund some of them this fiscal year, generating savings for the FY '27 budget. By making strategic investments across these areas, we are delivering long term savings while improving quality of life for those who live, work, and play in Provo. I could not be more excited for the year ahead and the opportunities we have to strengthen Provo. Thank you for your partnership and collaboration. I'm gonna turn the time over to Kelsey.

Thank you, mayor. I'm Kelsey Zarbaugh, the budget officer for Provost City. And as the mayor, already said, we're pleased to submit the proposed budget for the city for fiscal year fiscal year beginning 07/01/2026 and going through 06/30/2027. The budget is a result of many hours of contributions from the council. Thank you for sitting through so many budget presentations during your work meetings.

Also, city staff, we've had department directors very involved with budgets. Their staff have been integral to getting all the numbers put together. And then, of course, city leadership in the mayor's office with Scott and mayor Jed Kitson, deputy mayor Kyle Fryent, helping us through the whole process. Dan Follett is the administrative services director who is integral in leading the process and also, providing invaluable feedback. He's at a conference this week. Otherwise, he would be here. But we're very grateful for Dan's support. And then I have to give a major shout out to Andrea Wright, our budget analyst. She is absolutely invaluable. She is very good at digging into details, asking hard questions, working with the departments, and she put the whole budget book together.

So thank you, Andrea. I want to just tonight is the delivery of the tentative budget to the council. The tentative budget is kind the state code's way of saying proposed budget. So this is not the final budget by any means. I want to give a timeline of what that's going to look like just so the public and the council are all aware. So tonight is the delivery of the proposed budget. It's available online now. I'll go to that in a minute. May 12, next council meeting, the council will tentatively adopt the tentative budget. Again, it's just a fancy state code way of saying the council is acknowledging through a resolution that they've received the mayor's proposed budget.

It's still not the final budget next week. Okay? Then we skip ahead to June 9. There's a public hearing for the budget on June 9. And then there's a second public hearing on June 23. And that June 23 meeting is most likely when the budget would be adopted. June 30 is the state deadline for actually making sure that budget is adopted and ready to go for the July 1 start of the fiscal year. So there's still seven weeks of time to review the budget, get public input. It's not final. But we are very proud of the work that we've done, and it is a balanced budget.

And we're excited for everyone to dive in and look at it. Now how do you access the tentative budget now that it's available? You can go to provo.gov. And just straight from the home page, there's a transparency portal link. You click on that, and there's a financial section. It's the second dropdown. From there, you can go to budget and financial reporting. It's an icon with a bar graph. And then you can see the annual budget section. And under there, there's a link for the 2027 tentative budget.

So it's there. And mayor's letter that she just read is included in that document. There's a budget highlights section that finance puts together starting on page 19 of the tentative budget. It's a six page summary that basically captures the bulk of what is included in the budget in terms of new changes, new requests that were added, any fee updates, and so on. And I just kind of want to walk through a few of the categories in the budget highlights.

I'm not going to read the whole letter, but just thought it would be useful for people to know what they can find in there as a starting point. So it goes through funding sources. It identifies oh, thank you, Kevin. This is page 19. I think, actually, page 20 is where you can, like, see where the fees it talks about fees and how you can access a summary of fee changes in the appendix, the very back of the budget sheet. That appendix is on page 40 one page one forty nine. So feel free to dive into there. You don't have to go to that page right now, Kevin. But it just summarizes all the changes. So if you have questions about fees after reading that, we're happy to answer any questions.

But we tried to go through and show what the impact is and what the reason for fee changes were. The budget highlights talks about utility rate changes. It talks about property taxes, which, to emphasize what the mayor already said, there are no recommended property tax increases in the budget. That applies to property taxes that contribute to general operations in the general fund, and it also applies to property taxes that contribute to the library. So no recommended property tax increases in the proposed budget.

It talks about personnel elements that are funded. And then if you go to page 22, there are some tables that start to talk about the funded supplemental requests. So the mayor talked about this. Any any department that had a need for increased budget needed to submit what we call a supplemental request. And that was basically saying, here's our need.

Here's the cost. And this was a big push this year from the mayor's office was to make sure that any requests included proposals for offsetting the cost increases. And so the tables that you can you can see on the bottom of that page, there's a few different columns. There's a column that shows what department or division made the request, what the request was, the amount, the proposed funding source, the benefit, and then if there is a full time equivalent impact in terms of personnel. So, hopefully, that's a great place to start looking and seeing what requests were funded.

And just know that there were a lot of requests that were granted because departments were able to successfully identify offsets to those funding increases, whether that was through strategic cuts in their budgets that they already had or through some identified revenue sources. Ultimately, we welcome you and encourage you to carefully review the budget highlights and the entire budget document. We welcome the input of Provo residents as we proceed through the process of adopting the city's annual budget. And as always, finance staff is at your disposal to respond to questions and assist the council in any way you'd like over the next several weeks. We believe that you'll find this budget responsive to your concerns and aspirations and forward thinking as we plan for the future of the Provo community.

And with that, we give you the FY27 budget. Thank you.

Thank you, Kelsey. I know there's a lot of, work that goes into this. Is there any council discussion on this item?

Just a couple of questions.

Councilor Garrett.

Kelsey, you reported in our work session last Tuesday that the estimated increase in sales tax and other revenue was about 6,200,000, but that that estimate had not been was two months old.

Mhmm.

And we would anticipate the current estimate by this week. I see here you're showing an increase in sales tax revenue of 3.6. Where did that figure land overall? Did it go from 6.2 to 3.6, or were there other revenues included?

I think I am trying to remember the 6.2 number. I know that sales tax we had originally projected higher, but just based on what we were seeing, we wanted to make it a little bit more conservative.

Higher than 3.6 where it landed?

3.6 is where it did a $3,600,000 increase compared to the fiscal year twenty six budget. Yeah. So sales tax did go up quite a bit. I'd I'd have to look back at that presentation. It might have been, like, an overall, like, amount

Yeah.

On that slide. I'm trying to remember the slide.

Right.

But, yes, sales tax did definitely go up in the fiscal year twenty seven budget compared to fiscal year twenty six budget. And we were there are a few reasons for that that we discussed in last work meeting.

Does

that help answer your question? I don't know if I fully got there.

Yes. That's a good start. And then can we anticipate that we have here this summary of positions that have been added. It is it fair to say that most of the increased budget was allocated for additional position, staffing positions? Or

I I would say well, personnel costs, those those were built in. They're they're in the budget highlights, there's a personnel elements that kind of goes through the personnel costs. And we could get a breakdown of the exact impact of personnel cost increases. In terms of, like, new positions being added, yes, I would have to go through and add everything up. But there were some full time positions added. There were also but again, it's hard because there were offsets. You know, like the firefighter positions were a good example of how we added positions, but we also reduced overtime. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. I'm just looking for some helps as I look through this to kind of anticipate where those additional revenues might have been placed. I saw in the mayor's letter several references to new positions and cost of living adjustment, and so just interested to anticipate where we can see that increased revenue reflected.

And I guess this might be helpful, but each each of the department pages, they have tables that show his historical like, the actuals, and then it shows the FY '26 adopted budget numbers. Then there's an adjusted budget column, which accounts for any carryovers or mid year appropriations from the council that have been built in. And then it shows the FY '27 budget. But you can kind of see like, if revenues have gone up a lot between the f y twenty six numbers and f y twenty seven

Okay.

That's a good starting point. And we can also provide a summary if that's helpful too.

Okay. Well, I'll let you know.

K.

Thank you to you, to staff who have worked with you on this budget. A special thanks to the administration for, highlighting council priorities and for presenting a balanced budget that will not require a tax property tax increase, so a special bonus.

Right. Thank you.

Councilor Bogdan. Kelsey, when will we

get the consolidated fee schedule?

I have a red lined version that I can send to counsel tonight, if you'd like. Please. But there is also I mean, the consolidated fee schedule is really long. So I would definitely start with the summary of fee changes at the very back of the budget book just to start to understand what they would be.

Right. But we asked for the rec for parks and recs three weeks ago, and we still have not received it.

Oh, I have all of that. I'm happy to give it to you.

And so, yeah, they they haven't followed up on what they were supposed what they were asked to bring. So, yeah, if we could see that, that would be great. Because I'm noticing here that there's stuff in the rec center, but it's not, like, exact numbers or

Yeah. There were quite a few changes, and so it just seems better to summarize it in the actual budget book. But I I have the whole schedule, so I'm happy to send that to you.

Thanks. I appreciate that. And thank you for your time and effort in this.

Anyone else? All right. Thanks, Kelsey.

Thank All

right. There's no objection. We will now adjourn the Provo municipal council and convene as the RDA Governing Board by unanimous consent. Next a presentation we'd like to recognize that Travis Hoban has joined us. Next, a presentation of the tentative budget for the redevelopment agency of Provo City for the fiscal year beginning 07/01/2026 and ending 06/30/2027. And presented by Kelsey Zarbaca again.

Thank you. This is pretty short. Basically, the redevelopment agency budget is listed in the Provo City budget document on page 143. Again, this is not a final budget. It's just a proposal. I know Melissa McNally, our redevelopment agency director, worked to put this together. So we're grateful for her input on that. Any questions?

Does it look like it? Thanks, Kelsey. All right. Any discussion on that? If there's objection, we will now adjourn the RDA Governing Board and convene as a storm water service district governing board by unanimous consent. Presentation of the tentative budget for the Provo City Storm Water Service District for the fiscal year beginning 07/01/2026 and ending 06/30/2027 will also be presented by Kelsey Zarbach.

Okay. And this is the stormwater service district budget, which is also at the end of the Provo City budget on page 142. And, again, it's just up for council review at this point or stormwater board review and wouldn't be adopted until the second council meeting in June.

Thanks, Kelsey. There was a question. Why do we still have the stormwater service district? Is that something we're planning on keeping indefinitely? Or now that our you know, because our building that we originally formed this district for, we've we've done that project. So I'm just wondering what the plan is. Yeah. I think afford and what we're using this for.

Really, it's it's its own entity that was created to help pay off some bonds that were paid off a year or two ago. And I would leave it up to legal, honestly, to decide when this is no longer needed. From my perspective, we're not really using it except to have a lovely little extra item on the council agendas. So

So what are we running through this? Like, what

is So it's anything for the stormwater division and public works, it's paying just for the storm drain operations and any maintenance on the system. And so it is part of the public works department, but it's technically considered its own entity just because of the way those bonds were structured. I don't even know twenty, thirty years ago. Okay. Thank you. Any questions for Kelsey?

Councilor Bogdan? Gary,

any insight on the Stormwater Service District?

Not in particular. I think we would have to take a look at what would need to be done to wind up a special service district and consult with public works. But once we do that, I think we could give some advice on whether and when.

Thank you.

Good. Because what I'm hearing is it was created for paying for getting bonds. Those bonds are paid off operationally. It's not different, and so it's kind of an artifact at this point. Is that fair?

It certainly sounds that way to me. I mean, I imagine how the money is used as a budgeting question, which I would throw back to finance. But in terms of what we need to do to unwind the district, we would need to take a look at that, I think.

K. Can you get back with Justin and let him know about that?

Certainly. Thank you.

I'd be

happy to do that.

Anything else on this item? Alright. And I guess for the public's sake, if anyone's listening, is, we this is our first time seeing this. Like, us presenting it and doc and and taking it is is nothing's decided. And so we will go through and study this and make sure that everything aligns with whatever our priorities are.

And so just the public notes, this is still, like the mayor mentioned, I think Kelsey mentioned, it's still, like, a seven week process, and this is just the beginning. But, if there's objection, we will now adjourn the storm water service district governing board by unanimous consent. Recording stopped. Hey, Kelsey.