City Council - Special Meeting

Hello and welcome to this work session on the 2627 budget. We are going to call this meeting to order. Uh Vanessa, do we do a roll call? All right, perfect. Thank you. Council member GT present. Council member No, present. Council member Leman here. Council member Marsh here. Council member Wade here. Vice Mayor Man Freddy here. Mayor Smith here. Madam Mayor, we have a Thank you, Vanessa. All right, and I'll turn it over to city manager Bidder.

Thank you, Madam Mayor, members of the council. We're excited to be here tonight to not go not only go over the capital improvement plan from our last meeting, but also to focus today largely on the draft operating budget. And so, I really want to thank our our finance team. They've done a tremendous job putting all of these things together. Um, trying to simplify it. It is really hard to do. You know, when we have a budget, even uh you know, the 500 pages that we have here in the book are very much a simplification of of what our finance team works with on a day-to-day basis. And so, uh trying to put that in in a comprehensive way, but also something that's digestible is really tough. And and I think our finance team has done a great job. So, really don't have much more to say, but want to give Matt and and his team an opportunity to shine, and we'll do that. So, Okay. Thank you, city manager Bidder, Mayor Smith, Mayor Senrey, and members of council. Thank you for your time and attention tonight. Um, we will go ahead and dive right into the budget. Before we do so, um, I do want to echo, uh, city manager bitter sentiments on the finance team and the incredible work they have done to put all this information together. It is more, it is earlier than ever before. uh the efforts that they have put in to make sure that this has been put in front of us in this fashion in multiple ways is uh is quite frankly nothing short of a miracle. So I thank them for their work. I do want to thank uh our directors and their staff as well. Uh a budget is an entire city process. Uh our directors work very hard and are very diligent in following and managing and understanding their own budgets in submitting the information necessary to put these things together. Uh this is a 12-monthlong citywide team effort to get this thing done. So while I get the chance to stand up here and talk to you, uh there are so many people that have put so many pieces of input into this process. So having said that, let's go ahead and dive in. Uh this can

be a a live interaction process. There's a lot of information, a lot of slides. I have a lot of things I want to download out of my brain to you guys. So if I miss something or you want to ask a question, please jump in. Please say something. I want to make sure that we get you everything that you're hoping to hear. Okay. So, where are we right now in this process? Right now, we are right here. We at our second budget work session. The next steps in the process will be to come back together May 19th at the council meeting where a tenative budget approval can take place. I will show you in a second what the rest of those steps look like. As we can see here, again, this is truly a 12-month process as a city. on the calendar. We have now arrived right here. Uh this again lays out in a more call it Excel spreadsheet fashion exactly all of the steps that we are taking to get to the final decision. So what comes next as a city and for council. So on May 19th we will bring a budget presentation and a tenative budget approval to city council. Uh for those who have been on the budget and finance committee before, you are familiar with this. But for some of you that haven't done that process, the reality is the presentation that you see on May 19th will mirror a lot of the information and visuals that we share today. Uh there is not a lot that changes or a lot more information that arrives a month from now. This is the meat and potatoes of what you guys will see. So some of this will be repetitive again on May 19th. I will apologize, but it's not like we're going to go ahead and produce 40 new visuals in the next month. So after that, when it goes tenative on May 19th, the city can change nothing else. So it is called tenative budget because the second council approves, there is nothing we can change. No additional expenditures, no revenues, anything. It is locked and loaded. Two days after that, we will make sure that the tenative budget forms are posted to the city website. And at the June 16th council meeting, there will be a public meeting in advance of

the city council meeting where the final budget adoption will take place. The budget forms will be posted to the city website two days later and after that we can finalize the budget workbook and go ahead and put that on the city website. So what you are seeing right now is preliminary. It it is a draft version. Uh we still have some things that we need to finalize and more information can be finalized once the budget is approved. So, uh, last time when we met for the CIP, we did a tour of the website itself. This time I'm going to go ahead and do a tour via the slides. I think the operating side is a little more intuitive, a little more user friendly than the CIP side is because the CIP side contains so much information and so many resources that can be dug into. So, I'm going to go ahead and provide people a quick tour of how they can get to our budget on our city website and all the information that it contains. So, it is available on our new city website. When I put this slide together late last week, I had to update it again this week because the city website was updated and it looks fantastic. So, if you go to our city web page and you click on the departments tab at the top of the page, you will see that the budget site is right here. When you go to the budget site, this is exactly what you will see at the top of the page. And right here under the in development section is the current draft budget as proposed for the budget work session. So you can see that the prior documents from the February work session for CIP are there as well. And then there are all sorts of historical budget books and budget documents from prior years that are further down the page. So on the city website once you go into the document for the budget work session, this is what uh a user is going to see. And within there, every section of the table of contents is something that is going to have useful information. Uh, first of all, if you do want to share this or print it in a PDF or download into a PDF, whatever it is, you have the option to do so right next to the table of contents with the PDF function or the

share function. It will not convert right away. It usually takes a little bit of time because of all the information available. The introduction section uh is where we have our budget letter from city manager bidder. Um, I'll go ahead and share a little more of that quote at the budget meeting on May 19th, but there's a wonderful poem in there about uh what it takes to be a builder and the mentality it takes to build a city like the city of Maricopa. It's it's fantastic. There is an org chart within that org chart section. This is the high level org chart for the city of Maricopa. Um, a resident can see what every headcount is for the city of Maricopa. Plain as day, every department, every head. Um there are some questions about oh what does it mean to be 74 headcount? Well usually that means we have part- timerrs and uh there are full-time equivalency conversions. So if you have four part- timerrs working x number of hours how would that convert to a full-time employee? So that's what those decimals or percentages may look like when you look at the headcount. If you go to the executive overview section that is where a lot of the visuals that we will be reviewing and discussing today are available for view. Under that we have the strategic priorities section as established and finalized by council coming out of futures planning. The strategic priorities are right there for everybody to be able to reference because they are our guiding principles for our budget. The new funding requests, all new funding requests for personnel and for operating are listed in here for resources for any information that people may need on what was requested by our department directors over the current budget. If you go down to the department section, right, the departments actually have all of the expenditures listed in two different forms. If there's a department that only has one division, you can look at the expenditures by the object grouping. Is it personnel? Is it utilities? Is it contracts uh for contractors, whatever it might be, that breakdown is right there. If they have multiple divisions, you can actually see the expenditure by division. So that department level detail is available. If

you go to the CIP section, we have the overview of where the CIP dollars are spent and we'll go and break those down as an update for you guys from the the last meeting in February a little bit later today. Within that, of course, we have just like we showed in February the opportunity to access every single CIP project that exists for the city both in the one-year and the 10-year plan. All of the details, cost estimates, uh funding sources, all of them are available as well on the website. So, here's what that looks like. If we go into an individual project and the available resources that can be seen, it's a lot. The binder in front of you, 539 pages of project detail, plus all of visuals, plus all the information that has been shared. Um, you can see why we are so effusive in our our thanks for staff for putting all of this together because it is a wealth of information. So, let's start talking about it. Okay. Uh what we are going to focus on now is we're going to go back to the executive overview section with the visuals. There are some highle discussion points that I will go ahead and bring up right now as a guideline to some of the things that we're going to discuss. The city revenue plateau conversation that we had at futures planning. This continues and this will bear itself out in the visuals. Our new fiscal realities regarding revenue reductions that we discussed at futures planning can be very clearly seen and represented in the data that has been put together. Now, we will show the visuals soon, but continued reductions in property taxes exhibit our council's commitment to reducing the overall tax burden of Maricopa Maricopa residents. 55% of our capital budget dedicated to streets infrastructure and 47% of the operating budget is dedicated to public safety that reflects an ongoing commitment to the execution of our strategic priorities is established as a city. And then last but not least, our 2627 budget is a balanced budget as proposed and vetted by department directors and city leaders. This budget considers all expected revenues and necessary fund balances to manage the appropriate

levels of service. It is legally compliant. It is statutoily compliant. Uh fund balances and cash management of these various funds uh is a a Jenga tower at the end of the day. So, it takes a lot of work to make sure that we are putting all of these pieces in the right places to make sure that everything is funded properly and that the city maintains its service level solveny that we commit to as one of our financial objectives and priorities as a city. So, here we go. General fund revenues and a three-year trend looking at FY 2627. Okay, focusing on just general fund right now. the 2025 actual revenues for the general fund were about $102.08 million. We are projecting for 2026 that we will end at 97.18 million. So at futures funding, we talked about the new realities of our revenues, the reductions that we are seeing. This bears itself out plain as day right here in this year-over-year drop. For 2027, we are projecting that growth will allow us to get back more or less to the level of the 2025 actuals. We're projecting about 100 just under 105 million in general fund revenues. This does not contain the commuting corridors fund. While those funds do come into the general fund, we do move those funds out every single month and move them over to the 210 fund or the commuting corridors fund so they are available for the intended purposes that council approved them for. We can actually see that on the next visual. So looking at our revenue sources this way, when we talk about our local revenues, we like to refer to it as a revenue chair. Four legs of a chair. There are four key legs. One of them is intergovernmental revenue or state shared revenues. The other is local sales tax. The third is licenses, fees, and permits. And the fourth is property tax. We actually went ahead and broke out the community corridors in this visual so it can be very clearly

seen what we are projecting for those numbers for the end of this year as well as next year. The green column to the left is really where we talk about those new revenue realities playing out very clearly where that used to be a very high growth category for the city of Maricopa. Traditionally it's basically flat for the past three years. Um, that is a very challenging reality to manage. Our local sales taxes, we're projecting slight growth in our local sales taxes, mostly called what I refer to as organic growth. The organic growth of more people moving in the city of Maricopa, more shopping taking place, more opportunities, more retail showing up. This is the organic growth that we would expect from our local sales taxes. Our other licenses, fees, and permits. At the end of the day, these are very heavily tied to construction. Our construction pace is not what it was a few years ago. It's still good. It's still healthy, but we are off that break neck pace now. And that's why we see we went from almost 18 million to now about a 14 14.5 million pace. And then when it comes to property tax, and we'll go this go through this a little more in detail in a few minutes, the growth in our property tax year-over-year is tied to new construction. Everything else is given back to the residents with the property tax reductions that our council is so proud to talk about. And then five million in projected commuting corridors funds for the end of this fiscal year. And then 7 62 million projected for the upcoming budget. This is just another way to look at it. Some people like it viewed in different ways. So, we just want to go ahead and share another way to look at this for you guys. I think we've kind of discussed all of these realities in the last slide. So, I know this is a visual that we really like to talk about every year, and I want to give you a couple different versions of it real quick. This visual takes our general fund from 2021 all the way to the 2027 budget and says what were the total revenues, what were the total expenditures and then what is the total capital outlay or

really the total capital project spend the total asset spend for a city during that same time frame. So this is one where we see again very clearly the the revenue plateau 65 75 91 and then four years of flat So that is our new fiscal reality. During that same time frame, you can see the expenditures 46 to 48 to 54 to 56 to 60. We're projecting that we're going to end this year at about 69 million. 2027 budget 85.8 million. I have a visual to represent this in coming up in a few slides, but one of the things we always like to reiterate is what we budget is not all that we spend. Once council approves everything and we said you guys approve it, we cannot change anything. We have to budget for every available possibility, every contingency, every opportunity that could possibly exist. So that way if it comes up, we have the funds available to spend them. So we will not spend all 85.8 of that, but it is fully budgeted for every possibility. The blue line indicates our capital outlay or asset purchase over those same time frames. One of the things that I'm sure you guys are looking at and saying is, "Well, we had 88, we had 64, we're down at 46. What is happening here?" Well, we know that three fiscal years prior, one of the key asset purchases for the city was the investment in the land for the business triangle, industrial triangle opportunity, uh, over by MCGH. So, we actually went ahead and did a normalization of our capital spend by removing those land purchases so we can get maybe a more clean look at the capital investments that we're making as a city. So, our residents know that we are still making those capital investments. And this normalizes those trends a little bit to show that we know that one of the things we're going to have to do with our new fiscal realities

is be a little more intelligent on which CIP projects and when to execute them. But we have not slowed down the investments that are necessary to keep our city moving forward. And this visual really cuts through a lot of that I would say land purchase noise that we don't quite always see. Okay. Property taxes. So let's start on the left side visual and walk through what our primary property tax levy reduction is and what it means. Our current primary property tax rate is 3.4773. 4773%. That results in a primary property tax revenue of 17.76 million for the city of Maricopa this year. About $1.4 million in potential increases can exist. A little less than half of that is new construction. And then about 823,000 of that would be assessed property growth. Our our property gains value every single year. Uh if you live in Maricopa, your house gets more valuable. until your land gets more valuable uh typically to the tune of about 5% as established by the Panal County Treasurer. So, and the assessor. So, uh in reducing our primary property tax levy, we have chosen to uh propose reducing that from 3.4773 to 3.3279, about a 15 basis point reduction in primary property tax rate. That would result in about $824,000 in savings being put back in Maricopa residents pockets. And the only increase from 17.7 million to the new $18.3 million revenue revenue number for property tax is new construction. So growth pays for growth and Maropa residents keep some more money in their pockets. In addition to the primary property tax reductions, the secondary property tax reduction, this is the general obligation bonds for Copper Sky.

That rate will go from 0.59 to 0.55. Another four and a half basis point reduction resulting in about 19 and a half almost 20 basis points of savings for Maricopa residents. I step aside for a second. I say I dare you to find another community that's cutting rates like this this quickly and with this amount of aggressiveness. So congratulations. It's uh it's wonderful for the Maropa residents to get that fun back. Okay, laying that out separately, here is a trend of those reductions and what they have meant to our residents since 2022. Uh we have had savings prior. It's just hard to get it all fitting on one chart and 11 by7 legal sheets just don't look all that good in presentations. But going from 4.37 to 3.32 since 2022, more than 100 basis points of reduction, almost 1.5 total percent in that six-year window. Tremendous savings for the residents. So, we've talked about revenues. Let's talk about general fund expenditures. Okay, we break our expenditures down uh by a couple of different categories in this visual and then a couple of different types of expenses. Let's talk about personnel expenses first. When we talk about recurring personnel expenditures, that just means, for lack of a better term, the current headcount we have as a city right now today, the positions that we have uh and the people in those positions and the cost for that recurring personnel is about 53.74 million. We are in this budget. The proposals are forou and merit increases of 1.87 million. Theou increases have already been agreed upon with the unions in contracts. So those will be executed according to the agreement. The merit increases for staff. Our proposal is for a 4% merit increase and that the pay ranges will increase by 1.2%

to adjust for inflation. That 1.2% 2% is representative of the Phoenix area average inflation rate for the past 12 months. So that is why the pay ranges will be adjusting by that specific percentage. $1.07 million in increased expenditures for insurance and other benefits. One of the things that the city does uh we have chosen to absorb the additional costs and increases for health insurance uh and not pass those costs on to our employees. So we absorb those costs but that is more than just the insurance. There are also other benefit increases that come along with this. When you pay somebody more, there's a little more ASRS, there's a little more PSPRS, whatever those things are, those are being incorporated into the red line as well. And then the yellow line is 4 million in new personnel requests. We have provided details behind those personnel requests. We'll talk about them a little later, but that is how we go from a current recurring personnel budget of 53.7 million to the proposed of 60.7 million. Um, when we budget these things, we budget for a full year. So, this is another area where we will not spend every single dollar that is budgeted because if we're budgeting for a position to be hired at July 1st, but they're not hired until September, we obviously don't expend all of those funds. From an operating perspective, current recurring operating expenditures for the general fund are 22.59 million. Proposals for 2.48 million of increased operating expenditures uh to a new number of 25.07 million. Now, At the bottom, we can see how those two add together to take us to that $85.8 million budget number that we showed a couple of slides ago for projected budget expenditures. Again, including all contingencies, all possibilities, all emergency funds, all of those things are included right here. So, that is a breakdown of our proposed general fund expenditures, a 12.3% growth rate year-over-year.

Can I ask a question? Yeah, of course. Thank you. I just want to make sure I got this correct. So, the the new requests includes a merit increase of 4% for employees. Yes. And then an inflation increase of 1.2%. No, the merit increase is 4% total. Total.

Yes. Their pay ranges will increase by 1.2%. So, if we look at our our current pay grades as a city, let's just say I'll use very round numbers, that a position's pay grade, uh the entry level is $50,000 and the top end is $100,000, it will go $100,000 plus 1.2%. But the merit increase is 4%. Uh for nonou employees, employees have the other agreements that have already been established,

correct? Great. Thank you. Breaking down those general fund operating expenditures by department. This is where we can see that 47% of our operating budget is dedicated to public safety with the city magistrate, the police, and the fire department. 47% dedicated to public safety via those three items right there. Lays out across the way what each department is and how much of that expenditure goes to each department. breaking those numbers down. Uh getting away from the pie chart visual into an actual hard number visual right here. We can see what those numbers are by department. We have used this talking point for many years now. Um I always like including this discussion point our operating and our personnel. How we break that down in terms of percentages. Our personnel is about 71% of our total proposed operating budget. When I have reviewed other cities, I have seen those numbers at 80, 85, 90% going to personnel. So, by running a little bit leaner and a little bit meaner, doing a little bit more with a little bit less, having great staff like we do, we're able to commit 29% of our operating budget to operating expenditures instead of personnel. So, we have great employees who do an amazing job and keep this percentage responsible to the local taxpayer. So, I promised you a visual that breaks down how we don't spend that entire $85.8 million. Here's an actual trend of what that looks like going back. Uh, we are projecting for 2026 that we are going to expend $69.76 million by the end of this fiscal year. The budget that was approved last year was $81.87 million. So, you can see that we're only spending about 83% of what the proposed budget was from last year. And going backwards, you can see about 77% 77% 89% 87%. Uh this is where that talking point on

we don't expend everything we budget comes in. And we thought it was important for uh both you as council and for our residents to understand how much of that is not spent every single year. So this visual was created for that purpose. We always talk about a a specific percentage every year. uh by policy uh the city is to retain currently 30% of its budgeted general fund operating expenditures in reserves. Okay. Right now for this current fiscal year the projected percentage for that general fund balance as a percentage of expenditures is 39%. Traditionally we have seen this number in the 40s or even low 50s. So this is the lowest percentage that we have shown you guys since bringing the budget. Now I always caution that by saying we understand that we have made an investment in land holdings that will come back to us and bring this percentage higher. So we have diversified the way these assets and the way this percentage is looked at but we still have to talk about it in terms of the cash reserves necessary so that we can weather any potential storm that may be coming our way. So we are still 9% above policy. But this is where we talk about the new fiscal realities and needing to be a little more strategic about the projects that we're investing in, about any types of legacy costs that we are willing to consider. We have to understand that this percentage is lower than it has been before and what that means to the city and our ability to operate by policy.

Matt, I I didn't understand the uh deficiencies in her county road tax and debt service.

The you said deficiencies. It's in line 31. Oh, there are there would be um budgeted transfers that will go to those funds out of the general fund. Okay. Yes. So uh when we have so when we're h managing funds this is why I say it's like a Jenga tower right if we say that we're going to commit I'll use the the CIP fund for instance um let's just say we need to transfer if you look at row 35 it says transfer to general government CIP for $25 million. Okay, if we go back to our general fund revenues for a second, we always say that if we have $97 million in revenues and $69 million in expenditures, the city is not making a profit. That excess $27 million is available to transfer to pay for capital projects. So transfers are how we cover the fund balances for these types of things.

Got it. Thanks, go forward. There we go. Got it. Should push the right button next time. Okay. Thank you for the questions, by the way. I really appreciate it. If we look at our total city headcount by function, and this is where on the left side it breaks down what full-time equivalencies mean, tying back to that description of how we can have.7 headcount for something. If we break down our headcount by department and by function, this is what it looks like. About 50% of our headcount is dedicated to public safety, including two dogs. Everyone loves that part of the visual, right? Um, parks and recreation, 17%, general government services 16%, public works 11%, and development services 6%. If you were to go back to your binder last year, you'll notice that the parks and recreation percentage is up and the public works number is down. The parks team used to report in through public works. With the arrival of our new parks and rec director, that was shifted over to parks and recreation, hence the swap in percentages. Okay. Um this uh your binders and the city website contains a listing of all new personnel requests, every request that has been approved. If we sit here and look at this for a minute, we're not going to go ahead and go through all of these things, but this the image on the left uh shows the total increases from all new requests, personnel and operating by department. Uh it also breaks it down by fund. So in the case of uh the police department or the fire department requesting grants capacity as opposed to dedicated cash spending, we make sure we put that into our grants fund uh for the possibility of those revenues to arrive. So it's not always general fund. U if we look at the approved personnel requests, overwhelmingly we can see that these are

again dedicated to public safety. 12 firefighters, EMS specialists, overtime. Uh we have two new police lieutenants, six police officers, uh a new dispatcher, and quite frankly, you see a couple of additions in public works for fleet. Um a portion of that is dedicated to public safety as well because a lot of our fleet increases come from the vehicles necessary uh to make sure that our public safety team is supported in the way that they need to be. So our fleet team works very hard right now and it's a department that a division that we felt needed some additional help this year. So all of these details laid out for you. We also did notate uh in the instance of departments like information technology or public works that increases to their operating budget are not always solely tied to their department because they are shared service departments and in this case we'll again use the fleet example. Some of their expenditure increases actually come from fleet additions to any other departments. They have to up their budgets accordingly. We budget for all of those things and break them down and calculate exactly what those impacts are. All new operating requests detail also complet in front of you. Also completely on the website for anybody who wants to see it. Laid out by department, by fund type, by request. Um, all readily available for anybody to see.

Yeah. Out of curiosity, just out of curiosity, those we spend about six or expecting to spend about 16, excuse me, $18,000 on mattresses. How many how many mattresses would that be? And how is it? We have a lot of firefighters. Yes, I know. Yep. And everybody's going to be able to benefit from that. I do not know how many are being purchased off the top of my head. My apologies. Um, but I know it was budgeted for the the true need of the request. As long as it's treated equally across the board, I guess 30 30. Yeah.

So, I don't have my uh my binder, the website in front of me like some other folks. I'm trying to shoot from from right here right now. Thank you. I have a question on that um slide. Thank you. This one or the I guess it's both. Okay.

So, one thing I noticed was that there's not any requests from the office of economic opportunity and I know that uh we should have the final results of our strategic plan for economic development soon. And I just want to make sure that we are budgeting for any implementation of that strategic plan because I know that's a priority for for me and for our residents in terms of economic development. Yeah. Thanks, Council Member Noir. We certainly have capacity in that department. We've left some capacity in there over the course of the last couple years and so we're maintaining that capacity and therefore anything that we'd need to have coming out of the strategic plan. Okay. So we're covered there.

Correct. Yeah. Okay, thanks.

Stuck a quick drink of water in my apologies. Okay, one of the things that was also um promised was that we would bring the uh hotel or bed tax policy as a part of the budget process every single year. So, the policy documentation is a part of the binders and is a part of the budget approval process, approving the policy, what that policy looks like in terms of actual numbers uh that are budgeted this year. We know that the policy states that 91% of that bed tax revenue is for tourism projects, in this case, Wild West Musicfest, and that 9% is dedicated to arts grants projects. On the left side, you'll see that we've actually given the FY25 and FY26 current spend for each of those. Um 9,000 for arts grants in 25 and 4500 so far in 26. I do believe there is another batch uh intended to go out soon. you're nodding your head. So, good. Uh, and then for Wild West Musicfest 240 and 222485, I do know that there are a couple of different considerations for police and fire uh expenditures in that as well. Uh, for FY27 proposed budget, the arts grant project budget is 22.5 uh 22,500. Uh, and the tourism project for Wilders MFest is 225,000.

Can I ask another question? Of course. Great. Thanks. So last year we adopted the bed policy, bed tax policy separate from the budget. Yes. Um but I understand why we would adopt it with the budget. So this is great.

However, my question is when I read through the bed tax policy, are we limiting ourselves to funding the Wild West Music Fest with the tourism funds? Just because I know that we're at the end of our three-year contract. I know we have an option to renew, but I wouldn't want to um pigeon hole ourselves if we can't get a ideal agreement with the um event producer, then would we be is there a way to make this less or to expand the ability of us to pay for something else just so that we're not pigeonhold into that?

Yeah. Thank you, Madam Mayor, members of the council, Council Member Noir. Really, when we look at the budget, uh, we, as as Matt mentioned a little bit earlier, we're setting a cap for the amount that is spent. How that money is spent can change throughout the year depending on policy. And so, the bed tax policy doesn't necessarily have to be a policy that goes throughout for the whole year. It can be changed if the majority of the council says, "Hey, we're going to change that." And if we don't have contracts that obligate us otherwise. So really, I guess what I'm trying to say is um until we have a contract signed for Wild West Musicfest, for example, um that fund could be distributed in many different ways um just depending on the the goals of the council.

The policy can be amended throughout the fiscal year. Um it's it's being approved as it currently stands, but it can be amended. It is not while the dollars stay the policy can be amended. Okay. So we would be able to come back and amend it if we decided if we couldn't come to an agreement. Yes. Absolutely. Okay.

Okay. Um that was our operating budget discussion. Let's dive into CIP a little bit. And since we had the workshop, this will be in February. This will be a little less of a focus because we've had the time to digest this for multiple months. But I still wanted to go ahead and bring these numbers back because they are updated and uh one of the requests from the workshop was to provide a list of any changes that occurred since February. We do have that list and we will go ahead and go through those changes here in a few minutes. Our 27 our 2627 uh proposed budget for our capital improvement plan is 181.2 million. Now, uh, in much the same way we've been talking about the operating budget and budgeting for things that may not always occur, the CIP budget works in much the same way. We need to have funds available for opportunities if those things should arise. Everything from uh, the possibility of needing to acquire land for a project that maybe we don't have a full awareness of today to the ability to obtain or receive a large federal grant for a road project. So, we need to have a little flexibility in our capital improvement projects, but as we've seen in the earlier visuals where we're spending 30, 40, $50 million a year in those assets, we certainly are not spending all 181 million of this, but it is budgeted for any possibilities of those possibilities. Uh, we mentioned this earlier, 55% is dedicated to streets infrastructure. It is our number one strategic priority on our strategic priorities list. This is representative of that commitment to the importance of transportation and streets infrastructure within the city. Economic development has 9%, new building construction 4%, public safety has 5%, city parks 22.5 million, 12%, community improvements, fleet, and then existing building improvements. We do have listed below that um some projects represented in that, but obviously a sheet of this size could never contain all of those project lists. So, we rely on the 53 pages of data in front of you to provide

those details if you guys need them. Can can you share I'm sorry ma'am. Yeah.

So in regard I like the notes that are down below this because since we've had that initial capital improvement plan workshop I know we all have been looking at various elements of it and I like that that first bullet or that first paragraph actually talks about some of the priorities I know that we all have. In fact, I remember at one of the previous council meetings, council member Gtle talking about his capital priorities and they're very much in line with mine in regards to the community corridor. So, I appreciate you touching on in that paragraph the elements that are going to be geared toward that community corridor because that's a huge priority for me and I know probably other council members as well. So, I appreciate that information. Um, did you mention anything in regards to and maybe I'm jumping ahead of you. Did you mention

I do have a community corridor slide for you, but let's let's see what you're thinking to make sure it's on there. Well, my next thing is in terms of jobs, did you mention anything in regards to the industrial park in that slide? No. So, please go ahead. So, just curious and I I have the what I think is the answer, but I'll just ask you in regards to the industrial park. How do we ensure to our residents we're continuing to move forward and what CIP project or projects is in this upcoming year to keep that moving forward?

Yep. Uh I know they are still working on the master plan and I believe a part of that is still within our CIP. There is also work that is being done on uh the FEMA flood plane or the drainage um requirements down there. Yeah, that project is also underway where they're working towards 100% plans on what those possibilities would need to be. That is also within our CIP. So, there are multiple projects that are identifying that. And if I'm missing any uh city manager bidder, please let me know. Remembering all of them off top of my head is is a chore, but I know that those two are in there for sure.

Yeah. And madame mayor, I'd just add a lot of those things don't necessarily show up in the economic development paragraph at the bottom because some of those things can also be things like the east west corridor, the sonor and desert parkway phase 2 that appears in the streets transportation infrastructure section. Also, we have a partner on that project that is is going to be purchasing that land and developing a lot of that project as well. So, some of those improvements for that property will also fall on private development as well. And so while we'll be a partner there and we're going to try and and move things as best we can, uh some of that stuff won't even ever appear in our city budget because they'll be privately funded.

Yeah, I 100% understand that. I appreciate you and I know you're going to have a list of things, but I know for my priorities in regards to the community corridor, I was looking for projects for Green Road Loop. Found it. Check East Road Loop. I see that that's we're targeting 2032. Get that. Understand that. Snor and Desert Parkway phase two check. I love that. And State Route 238, which is a huge part of making sure that everything's working smoothly. Check on that as well. So, those things were important to me. I know they're important to our residents and I just wanted to draw attention to that. Absolutely. Thank you. Okay. So, I just go ahead. I was just going to ask a question under the um Please

under the new building construction. Yes. Could you kind of elaborate on some of the some of the projects that might be fall into that category and now that you talk about jobs, are there any jobs that are coming out of it? So, the new building construction, one of them is the continuation of the funding necessary for the fieldhouse to be completed. Uh, and then another one is the uh remodel of the old PD building for city staff. That's going to become our one-stop shop for economic development and development services opportunities uh over at that building. So those are two of the main projects that are dedicated to uh that specific category

jobs. Are there any discussion about jobs being available to those projects? Uh in regards to with within those buildings or in general well that in general would be able to benefit. Will there be some jobs that'll benefit?

Yeah, absolutely. One of the um one of the operating requests, let's use the fieldhouse as an example. There's a request for increase for operating expenditures for staff that need to work the fieldhouse. When we open a building of that nature, we're going to need additional staff to go ahead and run it. Um, our parks and recreation team has done a phenomenal job of coming up with a plan that sort of fits into our current structure for um how we run Copper Sky and and our parks and recck functions as a whole. So, they're they're building it into that construct, but it will require and necessitate new headcount being added to go ahead and do that. So, yeah. jobs will absolutely come that way. Thank you. Appreciate it. Yeah. Hopefully I answered the question. Yes, sir. You did.

Great. Okay. Well, I guess we'll just call this the Mayor Smith slide then since uh we got ahead of ourselves a little bit, but Sorry about that.

We No, it's okay. Um I we know these are passion projects for you and it's passion to the community as well. Uh we want to be able to provide regular updates on that community corridors fund. We promise transparency. Uh I believe as a city we are delivering on that transparency. So, at the very top of this page is the link to the building better roads website on the city website that discusses um our desire of how we're going to spend those commuting corridors funds. Uh it's not just numbers. I think it does a great job. We've got great descriptions on what the sales tax funds are, what they're committed to, what that means, and we have the revenue and expense tracker on the website as well for our residents to be able to see that. Thus far right now, of course, the only thing we're seeing on the website are the collection of revenues for these first five or six months. We will see our first expenditure soon. We should have our revenue bond um transaction closed here next week for the payment we will make to AOT for the 347 project. So, we are very close to reporting that first expenditure as a city on this website. But if we look to the right side here of this image, we can see what the commuting corridors fund is going to go towards. And this is Mayor Smith where I really like to call out the projects that you were referencing is yes the 347 was in the middle there but that is not the only thing that commuting corridors was established for the 238 project the snor and desert parkway project loop road concepts additional regional connections right uh that fund exists for all of these opportunities. So, one of the cool things that I think we have with the CIP itself is we we have all sorts of maps, all sorts of images and and projects with detail dedicated to each one of those things. And I was actually discussing this with a resident just prior to stepping up here is uh questions about, you know, the loop road and and what that looks like. Well, there's within the CIP project list an Excel spreadsheet that breaks down how a cost estimate was put together for what that project might cost. It's a guest

estimate at this point based upon the information that we have available to us. The budget process exists every year to go ahead and update those things. But you can actually go ahead and hop into our CIP list and all of our project list and find these projects by detail. There's the green road bypass loop right there. There's the Sonor and Desert Parkway phase 2. These projects are there available and tie right back to what we're reporting on our community corridors fund page on our building better roads website. uh so residents can truly understand where those funds are going and what they're being spent on. That transparency will exist for the entirety of how we're going to use that community corridors fund. And I know I jumped a little bit ahead myself when I talked about the revenue bond, but there was a great article put together by our comm's team the other day. Uh when we went ahead um and went and obtained this revenue bond for the payment to ADOT, uh we received a phenomenal story and I know that city manager Bidder mentioned it at council on Tuesday. Uh but the story we received from the markets was phenomenal. U number one, we have great partners we work with that made sure we went to market at a very intelligent time. The markets were incredibly volatile these past few months. They are experts at figuring out when the right time to strike is and by partnering with them and them having that that uh subject matter subject matter expert uh capability, we saved about 10 basis points just by going to market when they told us to do so. Um, number one, uh, was that number two, uh, back when we brought this to you guys a couple months ago, we said we're going to get more aggressive with the payment structure. Since we have some funds available in the community corridors fund, let's not sit on every dollar. Let's pay down a little more principle in the revenue bond transaction to save interest, right? That's going to result in about $5 million of interest savings to the city of Maricopa residents. That's $5 million in future road projects that will be available if uh that wouldn't have been available if we had just done

a traditional structure. Uh additionally, our bond was incredibly well requested uh requested to the tune of it was $181 million of requests for a $30 million bond, 6.5 times subscription. uh that is a phenomenal market number and that actually resulted in another seven basis points of savings because once you have that much in requests you can start negotiating with them to get a better rate. So in a market where we had uh 3.75% federal funds interest rate the city of Maricopa was able to get an effective interest rate of I think it was 3.25% if I'm not mistaken um 50 basis points below what the federal rate was going for. So, that is a phenomenal story for the city of Maricopa. Uh, and this is a direct quote. This isn't us tooting our own horn. This is a direct quote from the trading desk uh of the people we were working with who were taking this out to market on our behalf. Um, his words, he said, "This is a phenomenal representation of how the city of Maricopa's financials are regarded by the market. Um, they analyze these things very closely." Uh, and he was receiving word on how impressed they were with our financial management capabilities as a city, which was why it was requested as it was. So, um hopefully that addresses all the commuting corridors, things that you were hoping to hit and shows our residents how these things flow through our budget and where that information is available in all sorts of ways.

Matt, I just wanted to bring up considering our 45 minute to an hourong conversation thanks to Chief Goodman on ebikes and scooters. It's become a late, you know, evolving priority, I bet, for many of us. But I started to dig into the CIP in regards to, okay, so how are we looking at our sidewalks and what kind of things do we do have going on there currently in the upcoming year? And there are some projects which I was happy to see in regards to near Palibria and the Maricopa Cast Grand Highway. And so as we continue to progress forward on trying to understand our sidewalks better and what kind of improvements we can make, you know, we can make those decisions later. But I was happy to see that there were improvements for our sidewalks at the current code standards, which is the 10 feet. Um, so that's uh good to know and I wanted to make sure to share that with the public as well. Thanks. Okay. So, uh we always share this visual as well. Uh we love sharing this visual representation for our residents to see. This is if you were to take our 10-year capital improvement plan, uh look at the infrastructure projects and then lay them out over a map of the city. This is what that project list looks like visually. There is not one area of the city that is not being hit over the next 10 years with some sort of infrastructure project. So, uh, this visual is a a fantastic way of of boiling down 539 pages of information into one visual that shows the commitment to infrastructure, takes that 55% of what we're offering from our CIP and really lays it out for a resident to understand what we're going to work on. and it lists every single project number and the planned fiscal year on the visual so you can trace it right back to the CIP plan and dive into the details if you

would like. We did promise that we would give you guys updates on anything that changed since the February workshop. So, let's go ahead and discuss those real quick so I can give you guys what all of those changes were. Um, the first couple of rows are for the state route 238 project. Most of these changes will be what I call fund changes. Uh the funding sources as we analyze these projects can change constantly with this first one, the SR238 to uh the 347 to 238 2 miles west project. There were two funding source changes. One being using the commuting corridors fund as opposed to the general fund. And the second one is recognizing that uh Moonlight Ridge, they they do have a cash and loot payment being submitted uh for their uh portion of the road infrastructure project on 238. Basically, they pay that to the city and then we go ahead and complete the project with that cash. So those funding source changes uh are what you're seeing here. Nothing changed about the project. It's simply the cash that we're using and where it's coming from. So the Sonor and Desert Parkway phase two uh again the 5 million that are in the budget for next fiscal year. We changed that source to the commuting corridors fund. A lot of these originally reflected the 350 capital improvement project fund. When these things are preliminary, um like we mentioned in February, we have to go back, scrub, analyze, review these things. By the time we get to budget, we're locked and loaded, but we have to make sure that we have all these things tied. And quite frankly, sometimes these things change. So, you'll see a couple of those changes here in a second. uh the remodel of the current PD building. Uh we changed that revenue source uh to the revenue bond that we obtained a couple of years ago. There were some remaining dollars that were available. Uh the fieldhouse is coming in under budget. So since we'll have those dollars available from that revenue bond, we can now use it on a comparable city building um and use that funding source. So that's why you see that

change right there. Feral road, Murphy Road to a half mile east. This was an updated funding source for grant opportunities originally listed in the county road fund. Now we have some grant opportunities. So we're shifting that funding source to grants. Bowlan road park closet to high lonesome drive. This project was moved from FY27 to FY28. So this did shift fiscal year. Uh there was not going to be any fiscal year 27 movement on this project. So we're just moving it to align with the project timelines that will likely exist. The ambulances. Um, here's a great one. Um, city council works very diligently to obtain federal funding. So, where that was originally listed as a 350 fund, well, we received 860 thou $867,000 of federal funds to pay for some ambulances. So, we went ahead and updated that revenue source. Great news. Um, and fantastic work uh by the city and by our city council to obtain those dollars for a very critical public need. the um Gunsmoke Road and Seven Ranch Road. Uh we revised the funding allocation. We just moved this from the county road to the HERF fund. Um these are the kind of things that we talk about where we have to move and balance the funds for the appropriate usage and the amount of funding available. Future Fire Station 573, three rows right here. It says we move design from FY27 to FY28. We did speak with Chief Patassi about this. The fiscal year funding sources are changing, but the timeline that Chief Patassi wishes to open the station in is not changing at all. Um, this is aligning with multiple resources. Number one, a couple of months ago, we approved the purchase of a truck. So, the truck will arrive right around the same time frame. The staffing needs for the fire station will align right around the same time frame that the truck will arrive. And then the construction and completion of the station will align with both of those things. So all of them are coming online at the same exact time and there is

really no limit to our ability to go out and obtain a contractor and prepare for design work ahead of time to keep these things completely in line with what our fire chief is expecting. So but that was one of the changes and we wanted to make sure you guys were aware of that. The the estimated timeline for opening did not change at all. It is simply aligning the funding timing. Uh the traffic strike force uh revising some of the funding allocations there. We had some of that coming from Herth. We have shifted that to County Road. Um we did have some changes in contingencies. Uh we reduced our earmarked contingency amount. We recognize that in some of these cases with our new fiscal realities, we have to find certain areas that we can reduce the cash needs and the impact on the general fund transferring over to CIP and this contingency amount was one of them. We had two variable message boards that we shared with you guys in February. Uh we actually went ahead and had some available funds in FY26. So, we executed that and those are already good to go. The variable message boards are things you'll see out on a road, notifying people of a project, uh construction timelines, things of that nature. Uh JWP phase one move from FY27 to 28. Uh this is some pedestrian uh access work over by Pala. Uh we are just moving this funding source from FY27 to 28. Uh again, some of our fiscal realities uh but also more appropriate timeline for the project. uh Murphy Road, Ferrell Road, and Rancho Elorado chip seal. We moved the Rancho chip seal portion from FY27 to FY28. This is one of those fiscal realities we talked about. We have to figure out which projects to move immediately on and which we have to move at certain times. This is one of those projects we said FY28 uh will be more fiscally responsible than FY27. Uh and then parking lot pavement preservation. Uh this is honestly just a moving of funding sources. Uh we had this ed in the operational budget initially. We've decided to move that into our CIP project list as opposed to our operating

budget requests. So, it's coming into CIP and it was not there before. So, Matt, yes. If on the first twothirds of this, we're moving some of the funding from general CIP over to a variety of other funds. Yes. Why do we have to move out some of those last five items? Particularly again the sidewalk at Palibria. Um if we're shifting funds, that must mean we have some CIP funding available and there might be logic that I'm missing in regards to why shift those to a further out year. Sure. So it it ties back to that 39% number. Okay.

From the general fund. So at that point, any other project that would take place would need a a CIP transfer from the general fund to the capital project fund in order to fund that project. So by doing that, we would reduce our 39% to a lower percent. I get that. But uh on those first 10 projects where you're moving it from CIP over to a grant community corridors revenue bond, that means you're kind of replenishing this the reserves. And so it seems as though you'd be able to stay under that 39 or at that 39% and still proceed with some of those projects. So,

so moving those funding sources for those earlier projects, um, we'll speak very transparently about it. We were not at 39% and had to find ways to get to 39%. Changing those funding sources is how we got to 39%. That percent when we were initially reviewing these lists back in February was much lower. It was basically scraping up against the 30% policy. Okay, that explains

that's how we get to 39 is those shifts allowed us to go from 30 to 39. Good question. Okay, that is all the information that I have to put in front of you. All the visuals, all the um thoughts that I can think of immediately off of uh the top of my head, but I open the floor to any questions or anything that uh you wish to discuss at this point. And I can go back and pull up any visuals you guys would need if if necessary.

Council, what question? Yes, Council Member Lman. Thank you so much, Matt, for your presentation and thank you to all your staff. I'm calling this my baby. I've been carrying it around with me. It feels like a little baby. So, thank you so much. Um it's very, very helpful and easy to understand. So, thank you. Um just a few things. I know the mayor really covered um the commuting corridors and I want to focus a little more on public safety and quality of life. Um, I'm really happy to see the police firearms indoor shooting range um in the budget and hopefully next year we can see a fire training safety facility for our firefighters in the budget. Um, so that'll be something I'll look for next year and I Rudy, thank you for the eight projects I believe on trails and sidewalks. I'm really looking forward to that. I think it's going to um improve the quality of life for so many of our residents. And so I'm really excited to see those in the budget and that we're going to start working on those in some really critical areas as well and improve the safety for our residents. And then I was really excited to see a performing arts center on page 292 um is in our 10-year plan. And so thank you for adding that as well. Um and I thought there was one more. Oh, the kiosks uh for our small business owners. Um, thank you for adding the kiosks in there. So, these would be popup kiosks that local business owners can use to do some trial, um, runs with their businesses and see how it goes. And so, I'm really grateful to see that in the budget as well. Thank you very much.

Well, uh, it was feedback received from council of futures planning, so we made sure to incorporate all that in the budget. So, uh, you can thank us, but I guess we thank you. Additional comments, questions. Yes, Council Member Ghetto.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Um, Matthew, thank you very much. You and your team, phenomenal job again. And I'm going to ask you kind of my perennial question. And I don't want to sound like a a Debbie Downer or anything. If we can go back and maybe just look at the primary property tax levy reduction that's proposed. You mentioned 15 basis points, which is amazing to continue that. We're looking at some financial and fiscal realities coming up and we've been pretty consistent in our messaging of saving our taxpayers money. I'm starting to see and you've been heralding this for the last at least two years that we're going to have to really visit this in years coming forward. I know we're getting closer. So, I'm asking you to look into your crystal ball and just give us a little bit of an idea of what maybe next year or the year after are we going to be able to continue this reduction in our tax rate. Um, looking at the growth needs, the expansion needs, we have tremendous uh personnel, public safety needs coming online in the next several years. Um, I I love seeing those blue arrows. I love seeing those minus signs next to those percentages. But there is going to have to be a time where our revenues and our expenditures are going to have to balance out. And so just help us understand how close are we to that point and I don't think we're here this year,

right? But what does next year perhaps look like? That's a good question. And if we're looking into the crystal ball, I think this will be a dedicated conversation at futures planning next year is okay.

Uh when we believe we need to take that consideration very seriously. Um I love ruminating on this topic, so if I go too deep, my apologies, but I'll really try to answer this with with detail. Um we have a very delicate balance here in figuring out how to fund the the service level needs of the city uh and bringing in appropriate funding and economic development considerations as well. Uh primary property tax rate. One of the the great things that residents of Maricopa have are some statutory protections in in a how much they can pay in primary property tax. Businesses do not have that same limitation. So they will pay the full percentage without any cap on what they pay. So from an economic development standpoint, the lower the property tax percentage, the more attractive business opportunities and economic development opportunities become. Now with the city of Maricopa, if you were to compare some of those opportunities to say a Gilbert or Chandler, the land acquisition costs are far cheaper. So Maricopa is maybe not as attractive from a primary property tax percentage, but the land acquisition costs are more attractive, the opportunity might be more attractive, the location might be more attractive, whatever it might be, right? Um, when it comes to our primary property tax rate, and you you're talking about this specifically, our primary property tax is dedicated to our public safety costs. Um, and I didn't bring the slide here today, but in futures planning, we talked about the growing gap of our public safety operating expenditure needs versus the revenues that are being collected. And that gap grows wider and wider every year as our public safety needs expand whereas the primary property tax has only been going up by new construction. So yes, we do have to figure out what that rate is that we think is a healthy balance to being economic uh attractive for developers and builders. protects the Maricopa resident but gives them the service expectations that they have of

public safety and of the city of Maricopa to make sure that those requests and those needs aren't falling behind. So, we're going to talk and I'm going to bring to that futures planning discussion some data on what other cities are looking like, what comparable cities are looking like, and where we think that settle rate uh or that slow down rate may make sense in order to strike this right balance. And it could be as soon next year.

Um, and it's something that I know Mayor Smith and and Council Member Wade were in my presentation to to Citizens Leadership Academy last week. I make sure I share that with our residents that at some point we have to slow down or or stop these reductions uh just to be fiscally responsible. The way that other cities who don't have a primary property tax rate or have very low primary property tax rate solve these problems are with bonds, general obligation bonds, interest rates, and when it comes to a secondary property tax. Uh when you have a general obligation bond, there is a secondary property tax on your property tax statement. Where a resident has those protections on primary property tax rates, they don't have those protections on secondary property tax rates. Now, they do have the ability to say yes or no to those things because it's a general obligation bond. So, it is the will of the voter saying that they want that, but you can run up the general obligation tab as much as you want with no resident protections. And u I live in a city where there are a lot of general obligation bonds. That rate steadily has been increasing and quite frankly they are looking at raising a primary property tax rate because it's 0% right now. So they gave the benefit to the residents for a number of years but the bill just came due

and now it's going to be a real problem for them. So we will have a very detailed discussion in futures plan next year about what this looks like. what comparable opportunities look like and what we think makes a lot of sense. So yeah, um I appreciate the question and it's something that we need to be very cognizant of and maintain our fiscally conservative approach and our our residents first approach, but but a part of that approach is making sure they get the public safety service needs that they expect of us. Correct. Yeah. Thank you for that, Council Member Gettle. I don't see that as a downer. I see it as a touch of reality of reality. Making sure that people understand um city manager bidder and then I'll come to

Yeah. Just to add to that, I think Matt did a great job explaining that. And I think earlier as well when we talked about the four legs of a chair that that kind of explains as well that there are a variety of funding sources of of how we fund all of our operations and public safety is is particularly unique. When we put our property tax into place, that was meant to cover public safety. Right now, under the proposed budget, it'd cover a little bit less than 33% of the total costs of public safety. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's not necessarily a good thing. It's just the reality that, you know, if we bring in $18.3 million in property tax, well, our operating for our fire department alone is about 18.5 million. So, we don't cover even the operating for the fire department. Now, what I would say to that is that's a good sign for our taxpayers. It means they're getting a really good value because our general op operations and our general fund is a able to sustain that operation today. Now again going back to to Matt's point, what does that look like for the future? That's I think something to be determined. And there are a variety of of expenses that come up every time you open a brand new fire station or you open a brand new service like with ambulance service. We've seen that those costs are are certainly there and um as we continue to grow as a community and and have a need to expand some of those operations, we certainly will at some points have to look at whether it's a public safety general obligation bond or rearranging how those four um four legs of the chair are operated. But in reality, that is is kind of how the property tax was put in place was, hey, let's create some stable funding to help support public safety. And I think those words to me are really important, stable funding, stable budgeting, because the city is at the mercy of what legislators do quite often. And that goes all the

way up to the governor's office. And with elections happening, possible new governor, you never know what are they going to do that impacts the city and their ability to have the right operating budget necessary. I mean, it's all over the place. And I would rather be very conservative and have financial stability than to be spending all of our funds and continue lowering property tax. That to me is wonderful, but at the same time, you have to realize what flexibility you're giving up, right? Yeah. Council member Marsh.

Yeah. Three three things. Number one, we are in an era of high inflation, and I I think this recognizes that. the further you push something out, the le less val value the dollar is that you're going to be paying for stuff. So, you're going to get less for more. Um, second, I was really pleased to see the Bartlett Lake, the Bartlett Dam project still on the list. Um, that that that project will help ensure our water supply in the future. Um, and bless you for putting a senior center on page 353. Um, I see it's coming in in 2036. Um, I probably won't be here, but I do look forward to that.

Well, maybe we can pull the date in a little bit. Yeah, that was another one of the requests that was incorporated from uh the the uh work by council of futures planning. So, additional comments, question. Yes, Council Member No. Thank you, mayor. Thank you, Matt. Um, I love I love my baby budget, but Um, and it's been fun going through it. So, thank you for all the work that went into that. Um, and I I want to highlight a lot of things that I think are great in the budget. Please.

Um, I love the increase in arts grants. I think that's we've had a lot of uh additional applications for the arts grants. So, I love that we're upping the amounts for that. I think that's going to be uh very valuable for the community. The John Wayne Parkway signal upgrades. Um, I think I get a lot of emails and u comments about upgrading our signal timing and so signal upgrades will definitely help with that and so um I love that as a priority as the mayor mentioned the commuting corridors investments those are fantastic. Um it's a tiny amount but I saw 50,000 in there for citizen survey which it's a tiny amount but it's enough for citizen surveys. I'm excited about citizen surveys and so I love that addition to the budget and I look forward to uh that roll out and um us getting some feedback from our citizens. Um obviously on public safety, the 12 new firefighters, six new police officers, two new lieutenants. Um those are great investments in our community. We had a lot of talk about the ebikes and the sidewalks and some of the feedback I got from that was not necessarily should they be able to be on the sidewalks or not, but we need more officers enforcing the existing laws. And so um this investment in six new police officers and two lieutenants uh will definitely take us um a huge step forward in that regard. So I'm very excited about that. I do have some questions. Um and it looked to me um that the transit budget is declining from last year to this year. So, I was just wondering what that is or why.

I don't know off the top of my head and I can get to the details and look into that for you. There is nothing um operationally speaking or fundamentally speaking that uh we are intentionally reducing there. So, it could just be the timing of something with the the grant. Um, or, you know, we had to make an expenditure for a completion of something that we don't have to do this fiscal year, but we haven't reduced headcount. We haven't reduced stops. We are in the middle of the transit study. Um, so it could be the transit study funding. There's any number of things, but we have not made any operational changes and we are still working on the transit study findings to figure out uh what the future of the transit program uh and how it will be executed will be. So, we have made no reductions in that area.

Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. But I'll get you more details just to make sure. Perfect. Thank you. And I'm sorry I wasn't able to email that to you before. That's okay. It's a lot to go through the parking lot still going through. Yeah. All right. Additional comments, questions. Yes, Council Member Wade.

Thank you, Matt, for your presentation and and thank you to your staff as well. It's a lot of information to take in. Looks incredible to see or that how much information it takes to keep us informed. And that's what I wanted to talk about a little bit, just keeping us informed. You do a great job. the staff does a great job, but there's always some concern among the community that they're not getting the information that they need in order to understand what's being done. I mean, 500 pages is tough to understand, even to carry it around all the time. But in your in your role and in your staff, your staff's role, uh is there provisions for marketing to give people an understanding of what this means to them directly? uh we come in and we get briefed on a regular basis but not necessarily is the public. So I don't know if you have a process for that or we consider a process for that because it is something that you're concerned with.

I'm I'm happy to answer that. So when it comes to like an advertising or marketing budget for something like that, we do have advertising dollars available uh for reachout opportunities that we might like. Uh, I know that our communication staff has looked to put out more proactive information, videos, things of that nature on some of these topics, uh, for our public to be able to see. Uh, overwhelmingly, uh, and just, you know, one of the things I'll say is they they hassle me. I don't really like being on camera, so I'm happy to do it. Uh, they have to push me into it sometimes. But uh the reason that my guiding principle as a a CFO when it comes to what we're sharing with our public uh is one word which is simplicity. Uh if you were to to go pull a budget book of a a city like a Chandler or a Gilbert, they're 577 pages, but it's that's not the CIP. That's literally just the operating section. And you can get so bogged down in the complexity of all the information that what you're trying to get to gets lost. So these visuals and what we do with our budget book is really as city manager bitter said earlier the an attempt to be digestible for every resident um everybody to get a look at that information. Um you know I actually took council member I'm sorry Vice Mayor Man Freddy's comment at um futures planning to heart where he said we should share this with the state legislature. We should share this with uh city manager Bidder and I and and our communications team. we've all talked about. Should we get a little more proactive in in how and where we put this information out uh for the public? We're happy to do that. Uh and we're open to the ideas that allow for that engagement. Um you know, the citizen leadership academy is one where we always hear great feedback from the participants on being able to see that information. If there is a way to take that same kind of package or that same type of approach to our residents, I'm happy to do so. Um, you know, we've we make appearances uh at at associations or meetings to be able to share these things. As long as within the the proper

constructs and and doesn't uh delay too much from the things we got to do on a day-to-day basis, we are absolutely happy to keep education moving forward, keep information out there, get it in front of everybody, and make sure they have everything they're hoping to see. I think you would embrace it. Madame Mayor, if I may as well

Matt is a little humble here and um I think his him and his team have done a great job over the last even few months of of doing some adjustments as it relates to how some of these visuals are are provided and and some other things that we do. Um, I think you mentioned mayor in in the last city council meeting, not this week but the prior um the ad that we put in uh the in Maricopa magazine for this month which really tried to simplify how we explain a budget process. This is not easy. You know, as Matt mentioned, this is a year-long process with full-time employees spending their entire year uh dedicated to to going over all these line items and and budgets and and making it line up as as Matt calls it, the Jenga system where you pull one out and something else falls over. There are over 11,000 line items in our accounts. And this is not like just a household budget. It's it's so much more detail. And um when you when you adjust one thing here, it adjusts another thing over there and another thing over there. And so it is a very complex process. And what we're trying to do is is provide all the information that we can. We don't we're not hiding anything, but we also want to provide it in a means in a way that can be consumed by everyone. And if there are still questions, hey, let's improve tomorrow. Let's get it even better. But I think the the things that Matt's been able to do and the team for our finance department and our communications team, we're on the right track and we'll certainly continue to to go down that route and try to publish additional information about these budgets and what it means for every resident. Ultimately, our goal as a as an organization is to improve the quality of life for our residents, to bring more joy to each and every resident within our community. And it's sometimes hard to see that when you're looking at spreadsheets, but the reality is each of these numbers and each of these pages represents programs and

opportunities and um and great great moments where our community can come together. And so that's where we try to make those connections.

Thank you, Council Member Wade. So along those same lines, I have one question that's related to council member Wade's because I have noticed an increase in communications in terms of the budget in terms of a variety of different subjects and I have really appreciated. I know our residents have appreciated it as well. Whether it's video, whether it's a one-page, whether it's in the newsletter, whether it's on our Facebook, I have noticed it and I'm impressed with it. I would like to always see more communication. and you can never communicate enough. So my question is and I and I don't actually need an answer right now because I saw this as an introductory meeting and if I have additional questions I can ask them along the way.

But my question is does our communications department have the budget they need to make sure that we can always be providing the communication that our residents want that we strive to get. Um, and you may not have the answer and that's perfectly fine because I didn't give you advanced notice that I was going to ask the question, but if you have anything now or we can catch up later. We can catch up later. Um, I know that um there was nothing that they had requested during the budget process that was was denied and said that we we can't do that for communications. Okay. So, and you would think that that's assuming or anticipating that people are loving the additional communications and the more the better. I know I am. Okay.

Unless they put me on camera.

All right. Very good. I have really appreciated it. So, I actually thank that department as well. Then my second, and you may not and probably don't have an answer right now, but as you know, we have RFPs going out for partnerships, and I'm going to use the teen one as an example, but we're not sure what's going to come back from those RFPs, but we know that teens need more programming. So the question is related to if the things that come back aren't fruitful to the committee that reviews them and says I'm not sure I see this working or just what for whatever reason maybe we don't get anything back from the RFP will we be able to use contingency funds to help a bit with teen program with arts whatever the case with seniors whatever the RFPs were trying to take care of

absolutely so uh council member no your email the other day actually really helps answer this question So we a couple years ago budgeted uh funds for potential partnerships. So those funds are available in the budget for those opportunities when they arise, whenever they arise. This is one of those if it's not expended doesn't mean it's not there. That's what that $85.8 million number is versus the 69 million spent or whatever it is. We do have partnership funds available for those opportunities. That's great. That's great. That's one thing I wasn't aware of. So that's really phenomenal. Appreciate that. All right, that brings me to the end of my questions. Any additional comments, questions?

All right, keep in mind that this is the introduction to the budget and we will be looking at it again in May. If there are questions, we can gear those questions to Matt and to the city manager. Um, and given that we will call we will adjourn this meeting.