City Council - Regular Meeting

OK. Thank you. Please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Thank you. You may be seated. WELCOME TO OUR CITY COUNCIL BUDGET WORKSHOP I WANT TO JUST THANK UH JC OUR CITY MANAGER UH AND ALL OF OUR STAFF BECAUSE I KNOW A LOT OF HARD WORK WENT INTO THIS BUDGET AND WE'VE ALL BEEN BRIEFED ON IT, BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO SEE YOUR PRESENTATION OF IT IN ITS FINAL, FINAL FORM. SO THANK YOU AGAIN FOR YOUR HARD WORK. SO TAKE IT AWAY, JC.

Basically, today we're going to go over the, is Santino? Yes.

i'm sorry the first or the one that first the first one to get paid off do you know which one the first one gets paid off how about like a like a 30 000 foot view like what's what's our trajectory on the debt service chris chris you have it there like just know your your opinion based on your experience like just is it are we expecting like uh what do you expect or what do you want how would you characterize the trajectory so you can get into the microphone on the smallest note

But I have a couple of questions before we move on to that. So can you just talk to us a little bit about, you know, what the increases are, like what are the top three or four things that were the increases, you know, that are, you know, I'm assuming it's payroll. Payroll.

That's part of your operating budget, but it was responsible for most of the increases from year to year. Is that the only thing that you feel like increased, that you had to try to move things around in order to accommodate?

All right. And do you want to speak to our reserves so that the public

Where does it fly? It doesn't fall under any of those, right?

You're cutting everything else that's going to affect. It's going to affect everything.

so i'd like to chime in so thank you for presenting up for us i mean i think everybody staff i know that we're not the only municipality now i will agree with you that this disproportionately affects us because we are a bedroom community if you rank all 34 municipalities in miami-dade county you said we're number three and it's because we have 70 percent homestead exemption because we're proud to be a bedroom community and unfortunately that means we're DISPROPORTIONATELY AFFECTED BUT EVERY UH MUNICIPALITY IS AFFECTED BECAUSE IT'S IT'S TARGETING WHAT FUNDS MUNICIPALITIES CORRECT UH SO I IN TAL

just so I just I want to be clear at least from my point of view we all pay property taxes right but I feel like this is a very onerous way to try to provide property tax relief I think that there's a a better way to do it a more surgical way to do it we've already it's been signaled to us by legislators that if this doesn't pass they will be coming back you know state government has been you know really cracking down on municipalities uh in in in recent years and uh and we've been You know, there are municipalities that are in far more wasteful and, you know, throughout the state because this

This is a really big thing. And I applaud the effort. It is a proposal. It is a proposal that will be extremely onerous. And it's not even done, I don't wanna say that it's not nuanced, but they're very, very drastic changes. And I think that everybody, you spoke about annexation, right? That was a way to, outside of development, try to increase your tax base to offset the fact that we like to be a bedroom community. But to your point, our attempts at annexation, the county really is going to have to do some cutting with this, and it wouldn't be wise for them to give away their income producin

I BELIEVE THAT AT THE LAST MINUTE IT WAS It was done hastily to, not because they weren't well-intentioned, but because we were up against it, because it was gonna be, the goal was to get something for November. Again, that is the proposal that they came up with, but it doesn't mean that it's the only proposal, and it doesn't mean that we can't have a better proposal that achieves property tax relief. But this is going to be incredibly, INCREDIBLY IMPACTFUL AND BURDENSOME FOR ALL MUNICIPALITIES AND PARTICULARLY THOSE THAT ARE BEDROOM COMMUNITIES LIKE OURS. SO YEAH, I APPRECIATE YOUR CONCERN AN

It's not even that, because you've already mentioned a couple times, Councilman, defunding the police. It's the way we're at ground zero, right? We're not allowed to annex. There's a moratorium. We have a certain way of life that we want in our city. If we were in Golden Beach, they don't you know, raise the millage rate as much as you need to, that's the cost of living in Golda Beach, right? But that's not us. And we're a small municipality and it's not about defunding, if we can't, If these kinds of cuts would seriously make it, you know, it would put us in risk of not being able to have a c

They're coming back with another tax relief proposal.

I was going to say that over the last two, three years, the state, you know, whatever the Office of Accountability that, you know, was, we were, municipalities have been asked to like, right, yeah, I mean, if that's the brand name of it, but We've been having to submit reports about municipalities have been questioned about their millage rate and whether it's been going up. Our budgets have been, for the last couple of years, scrutinized. uh and it's great right in some ways because they have found municipalities that you know that have had to great point find efficiencies but do you just spea

The state has been scrutinizing the municipalities more.

Can you go back to the slide that showed what the percentage decreases would be over the first three years of the rollout?

You're talking about, like, you know what the percentage of our operating budget that is to take that, like, how do you expect, you know, it's not like we're this, you know, bloated bureaucracy that's, you know.

Yeah, but if you talk to Spencer, if you talk to anybody, nobody here feels like they're on easy street.

I had a conversation with him the other day, and he's... Everybody's panicking about this. A lot of people are panicking.

We'll try to get the word out to voters so that we can take another crack at it.

All right. Well, thank you to you and your staff. Thank you, Chris. I know that you did a lot behind the scenes to make this happen. So yeah, thank you again. And so this City Council budget workshop is adjourned at 7.21. Thank you.