City Council - Special Meeting

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much for showing tonight. I call this special meeting of the New Braunfels City Council to order. Today's date is September 10, 2026, and it's 6 o'clock p.m. We requested all cell phones and other devices be on silent except for emergency on-call personnel. Madam Secretary, can you please call roll?

Council Member Carter. Here. Mayor Pro Tem Capizzi.

Here.

Council Member Edwards.

Here.

Council Member Spradley.

Here.

Council Member Lebowski. Here. Council Member Shaw. Here. And Mayor French.

I am present. A quorum is present. We shall proceed. Please join me in the invocation brought to you by Mayor Pro Tem Capizzi, followed by the Pledges of Allegiance.

Heavenly Fathers, we bring this budget season into the home stretch. We thank you for the resources entrusted to our city and for the opportunity to serve. Keep this council humble, grateful, and mindful of those less fortunate, and give us the wisdom to be good stewards of what we have been given, and never let us lose sight of the people we serve. We ask these things in Jesus' name, amen.

I wanna extend my heartfelt thanks to our management, to staff and our fellow city council members for their tireless work over the past several months on this city's budget. Managing the public's tax dollars is a profound responsibility and it ultimately rests on us to ensure that we invest very wisely by focusing on our resources and our services, infrastructure and safety measures that matter most. We ensure that the New Braunfels continues to run successfully, securely, and effectively for every single resident. The safety, security, and well-being of our families, our environment, and our entire community remain at our highest priorities, and this budget ensures that every resident is truly cared for. Our first item right now is the workshop, item A. Public hearing on the FY2027 operating budget and plan of municipal services. Jared Warner, thank you.

Thank you, Mayor, members of council. As we've typically done in prior years for the folks that may be joining us in this budget process for the first time, we typically have a presentation. that provides a broad overview of the budget. So I'm gonna go through that. It's about 30 slides. I'll go through it rather quickly as it's mostly information from previous presentations, but I feel like it's still good to set a good baseline for anyone that is just recently joining us. Again, the proposed budget highlights slide, I won't go through these in details. As we know, we're gonna talk about the proposed tax rate this evening, which is equal to the no new revenue rate. I'll go into some additional detail on property values and some of the recent trends that we're seeing and how those have differed significantly over what we've seen over the past 10 to 15 years. You'll remember from our initial budget presentations that we try to tie back the funded initiatives to the citywide strategic plan. Proud to report that approximately $13 million in initiatives and investments align back to that plan. Based on the adjustment provided by city council, which will end with that this evening, the budget currently has a 3% cost of living adjustment for all city employees, as well as step increases for eligible sworn personnel. As we talked about as well, another challenge for fiscal year 27 revolved around our city's self-insurance fund. where we hadn't increased premiums in almost nine years and certainly hit a point where we needed to do that. And the budget includes both premium increases for employees, but substantial contribution increases for the city as well. So to maintain equity between the cost between the employer and the employee. Across all funds, the budget includes 25 positions to support service delivery and organizational needs. We've talked about the funding for the firefighters. I'll cover that a little bit later. And, of course, an important metric for us that our fund balance and reserve target is maintained in the general fund. As we've gone through, just to illustrate that, as Mayor said, this has been definitely a multiple-week, multiple-engagement process where we had a total of five budget presentations, five budget workshops, our last one being on Tuesday, September 8th. And again, this slide just illustrates kind of the procedural timeline for announcing the date and times of the hearings. Notice is being included in the Herald Zeitung. Tonight, of course, we have the public hearings on both the budget and the tax rate, and then round out our process on September 14th with second readings of the budget, ordinance and tax rates, and ratification of the property tax revenue increase. So let's start with the fiscal year 27 tax rate. I think it's worth kind of, before we get into the actual tax rate itself, kind of going through the property values for fiscal year 27. Again, saw overall growth of 2.1%. However, that does include new value added to the rolls. You can see the figures there for both Comal and Guadalupe County from one year to the next. However, though, when you look at these next couple slides, it starts demonstrating kind of the trend that we're continuing in, right, which is a downward trend of overall growth. And in fiscal year 27, as you can see there, at least for the first time in six years, and really for the first time since fiscal year 2011, where we saw an actual reduction in existing values, all right, of $126 million for fiscal year 27. Again, looking at that, from a percentage perspective, the figure on the right that combines Comal and Guadalupe County, again, this is the growth in new and existing value, really demonstrates what looks like a perfect trend, of course, in a downward negative trajectory to 2.1% for fiscal year 27. You know, looking back over the past several years, it's worth mentioning that since fiscal year 2020, the city's property tax rate has been reduced by approximately 7.3 cents, right? And some of those rate increases were statutorily driven, again, because growth in existing values compressed that general fund portion of the rate. So we expected that rate to go down during times of significant growth that you saw on the previous two slides. It's worth mentioning there's several tax rate calculations that we are statutorily required to implement. That's the no new revenue rate, which of course is the proposed rate. That is the rate that generates the same amount of property tax revenue. for the same properties that are on the rolls this year and last year. It excludes new property from the calculation. That's worth mentioning. The voter approval rate is the highest tax rate that can be adopted by law, okay? Diving into those two components of the rates a little bit. Again, you can see that about 22.17 cents is dedicated to maintenance and operations, that's the general fund portion of the tax rate, with 19.39 cents dedicated to interest in sinking or the debt service portion of the rate, meaning that is the portion of the tax rate that supports annual debt payments on property tax supported debt for the City of New Braunfels. Again, it's worth going a little deeper into the meaning of the no new revenue right here. Again, it looks at all property types, residential, commercial, industrial, raw land, right? And so during our budget presentations, we looked at a whole host of scenarios. We looked at average homestead property in Comal and Guadalupe. We looked at median property in Comal and Guadalupe, because it painted different pictures. To simplify that to just the average taxable homestead property, the impact to a homeowner would be $13 annually at the proposed tax rate. That's roughly $1.08 per month. That's what that .67 cent increase nets out to for an average homeowner. So what does that tell me if an average homestead property is still gonna pay slightly more in taxes, again, $13 more per year, when we're calling it the no new revenue rate. What that tells me is that commercial values, industrial values decreased at a slightly higher rate than residential. And again, a big factor in that, and we talked about this at length during our budget workshops, was that bill that went into effect last year as a result of a constitutional amendment that increased the exemption for business personal property. As a reminder, we lost roughly $180 million of commercial tax base from that change. And I think that plays into the math behind these calculations. One thing I did want to draw your attention to while I'm on the topic of tax rate, if you look at your agenda for both the 10th and the 14th, on the last two pages you'll see the taxpayer impact statement for both fiscal year 27 and fiscal year 26. As a reminder, that requirement went into effect on September 1st of last fiscal year. Usually when those bills are passed, the effective date of those is usually a year out so that there is time for implementation guidance. However, though, with that bill going into effect on September 1st, we had to include this statement in the information for last year. The bill itself does not indicate whether or not we should have a taxpayer impact statement that reflects market value or taxable value. So the information that was provided in last year's statement is reflective of market value. The information that's reflected in this year's statement is taxable value. Certainly understand how that could cause some confusion when comparing the two side by side.

We should, sorry. Can you show that to the people?

Yes. This is the fiscal year 27 taxpayer impact statement. Again, you can see those are the median taxable homestead properties come out in Guadalupe. If I flip the page, again, you realize that the values are much higher. That's because it's the market values prior to that homestead exemption going into effect. So we should have caught that, and we'll fix that moving forward. Thank you. I'll also make mention of that on Monday night as well, because it's on the 14th agenda as well. Again, tax rate comparison. As you all know, the city council has a approved list of 26 benchmark cities. We use this not only for tax rate comparison, we use it for our market compensation studies, any staffing studies, so that we're consistently comparing ourselves to the same group of cities. The takeaways from this fiscal year is that the average proposed tax rate for fiscal year 27 across all these cities is 50.8 cents. When you compare that to the proposed tax rate for New Braunfels, that means that our tax rates roughly 9.9 cents or 19.5% lower when comparing against the average of all these cities. Something that was interesting for fiscal year 27 is that of the 26 cities, 15 of which, 15 are proposing a tax rate increase for fiscal year 27, which is significantly higher than we have seen in years past, for sure. It's always worth mentioning the total tax bill, just to provide some clarity that when our homeowners and commercial property owners pay their tax bill every year, that about 53% of it is going to the school district, about 20% of it's going to Comal County with the remaining 27% coming to the city of New Braunfels. Okay, so revenues and expenditures. It's worth mentioning, Mayor and Council, that these figures have been updated for scenario number one and the budget order that you'll consider this evening. So if some of these numbers look slightly different, it's reflective of those changes in scenario one and any other minor changes that we're recommending this evening as part of the budget order. So again, across all city funds, revenue increases $26 million or 12.9%. However, though, it's worth mentioning that comes from a variety of funding sources, sales tax collections, franchise fees, charges for services, and a planned debt issuance, certificate of obligation issuance in 26. It's recognized as revenue in fiscal year 27. So again, those are some of the major factors behind the revenue increase. Again, it's worth kind of demonstrating the different fund types that we have, and sometimes we focus so heavily on the general fund, but again, when you look at the revenue composition across not just the general fund, but the collective of the enterprise funds, the collective of all of our special revenue funds, collective of capital funds, debt service funds, and internal service funds, it paints a broader picture about the inflow of funds across the entire organization. Shifting over to expenditures, again, a $29.2 million increase. Again, this is driven significantly by not only the initiatives that we've spent the majority of our budget presentations and workshops talking through, but planned capital project spending, again, with the 2023 bond program well underway the capital funds allocate that projected spend for fiscal year 27 which is expected to be significantly higher in comparison to fiscal year 25 so a lot of that increased spending is coming on the capital side which is a good thing that means those projects are moving closer to fruition and in the construction stage of the product of the project Again, similarly, looking at that proposed expenditures across all of our fund types, again, you can see how that breaks down between the general fund, enterprise funds, so on and so forth, and then we do break that down across expenditure types as well, across all city funds. So again, shifting to the general fund, which is the city's main operating fund, pays for things such as parks, police, fire, public works, planning, administration, HR, finance, IT, all of your core government services. And I'll mention one more time, these numbers have been adjusted to account for scenario number one, as well as any changes in the budget order. Again, so general fund revenue is driven primarily by increased sales tax collections, franchise taxes, and charges for services. Property taxes do remain essentially flat. However, it does capture that additional revenue that we talked about during the process when you all proposed to go from the current rate to the voter, sorry, the no new revenue rate. Sorry about that, no new revenue rate. Again, you can see the revenue kind of growth over fiscal year 25 through fiscal year 27. What I always like to highlight on that pie graph is that sales tax represents 34.1% of overall revenue, meaning we rely much heavier on sales taxes to provide core services than we do on property taxes, which not all cities are able to say that, right? We're proud of that strong sales tax base that we have here in Raffles. Kind of going on that a little bit further though, as we know, reliance on sales taxes can create kind of volatile situations at times because sales tax is a somewhat volatile revenue source, essentially more so than property taxes. And so for quite some time, we've had a focus on trying to reduce our reliance on primary revenues. When we say primary revenues, we mean three. We mean sales taxes, we mean property taxes and franchise and other taxes, right? And so at 74.4% of revenue, while that is a significant, a portion of our general fund revenue that has been trending downward for five consecutive years. That credit really belongs to you as a council. There's been a whole host of user fees, specifically those that do not impact residents so much significantly. Examples of that are our renegotiated contracts with ESD-7, our charges for ambulance services, which as a reminder, we do not balance bill residents for ambulance fees. And so again, those have been strategic moves by the city council that have helped, again, reduce our reliance on sales taxes and property taxes and franchise taxes as well. This graph speaks of the other 25.6% of revenue sources. The one that I do wanna highlight for you, I'll highlight two for you here. One is licenses and permits. Again, we're starting to see a downward trajectory of that revenue source. Think back to the information that we went through earlier on property values. I think that there's a correlation there, right? As we see growth slow and the growth in value slow, new and existing, again, we're starting to see that materialize in this revenue source. Charges for services, again, that is an illustration of one of the examples that I just said earlier, the renegotiated contract with the ESD-7, where they're paying a much larger portion of the direct and indirect cost of providing services to that area. Shifting over to expenditures, again, right now, 6.8 million or a 5.9% increase. Some of the highlights of that, compensation increases, the employer contribution to the city self-insurance fund, if you take those two alone right there, it's over $4 million, just those two initiatives. Those two initiatives. But then some of the other items such as operating expenditures associated with ZIPP family, sports park, funding for new positions and initiatives, and some baseline budget adjustments that were prioritized for fiscal year 27, primarily in police and fire. It's always good to kind of break down where the money goes in the general fund. As you can see here, 55% of all budgeted expenditures are associated with public safety. And I think the next graph's even more interesting, right? That of the total budget in the general fund, 76% of it is payroll. Salaries, benefits, and other employee expenditure related costs. Again, I think one of the most important things when preparing a budget is to make sure that it is structurally balanced. Structurally balanced means that our recurring revenues either meet or exceed our recurring expenditures. And you can see from the graph there that recurring revenues of $117.6 million versus $117.4 million of recurring expenditures, we are structurally balanced going into fiscal year 27. Again, very briefly, I'm not gonna go through that full list of highlighted initiatives, but it's been quite some time since we've talked about some of these. So again, some of the initiatives that were included in the original proposed budget, the first of which was a striping crew and the associated equipment. Again, this will be our first time having a dedicated team that can focus on restriping all lane lines in the community. Our goal is to make sure that we do so at least once per year. Traffic calming is an item that makes its way to on a regular basis, whether it's a request for speed humps, pavement markings, additional signage, or all of the above, we typically have significantly more approved projects than funding available. So the proposed budget adds funding to be able to accomplish more of those initiatives as they're approved by city council throughout the year. Continuing on, some facility attendance. Again, one of the things in your strategic plan reference is making sure that we are allocating the operating costs of capital projects that are coming online. As you all know, the Mission Hill Park is slated to open in fiscal year 27, so the budget includes some facility attendance to support that facility. We talk at length about the growing number of capital programs that our TCS teams oversees, and so the budget adds a capital project manager to make sure we have the capacity to manage those projects. The administrative assistant and police really is a force multiplier because what that request was based on is trying to free up some of the administrative tasks that our sworn employees, sworn leadership employees are working on and delegate those to an administrative assistant. Communication specialists, as we talked about, we have not really added an FTE to the communications department since that department was created some years ago. And so to meet the need for that growing department, a communication specialist is included. tying it back to the growing list of projects and additional federal funds that have been made available to the City of New Braunfels. The budget also includes a new buyer position. You may remember us talk about in the past that it's not just the additional projects, the fact that these federal funds require a whole host of reporting requirements and that administrative workload really is much more in comparison to a typical bond project, right? So the proposed budget adds a buyer to make sure that we're adequately staffed to handle that reporting. An administrative assistant in human resources. You may remember us talking early on in the budget process that this is about consistency across the organization. The HR department is one of the only departments that does not have a true dedicated admin assistant. So this position will provide that kind of front desk internal customer service to team members that come in very regularly to our HR department. And then, but it also includes a GIS analyst, but this one's gonna be dedicated all 2,080 hours per year to providing data analytics analysis to public safety, right? So that we can make more data-driven decision-making in those two, again, as you saw earlier in the graph, two of the two largest cost centers in the general fund. Again, as we talked about, three years ago when the city was awarded the grant to fully fund 12 firefighters, we always knew that that grant was going to sunset at the end of fiscal year 2026. So the general fund budget provides that funding. However, though, the fire department team along with city manager's office had been focused on trying to find that additional revenue to support this cost. And I know I've referred to it twice already, so I'll do it one more time. that funding that we did identify was the increased contract to ESD-7. So again, that was able to fully fund this cost. Again, the budget includes two emergency dispatchers, a detective to better manage caseload, And so my next slide, actually I'm gonna come back to this. And again, so what I wanna talk about, and I'll come right back to the scenario one, we'll pause there, but I wanted to provide this updated list that includes the positions identified in scenario one. And so again, this is the breakdown of the 23.25 FTE across the entire organization. And then again, this should be a familiar list at this point. Mayor and council, I wanna applaud the effort that you guys did over the past couple weeks on working on getting some of the additional priorities that you as a council really wanted to see included in this budget. And so what I'll do is I'll pause there. I'll take any questions if there are any, and if not, Mayor, you're welcome to open up the public hearing to comment.

Thank you very much, Jared. Anyone from up here wanna speak on this item here?

Just a quick question on the traffic calming part of it. I know we have additional money in there. You said, you know, touched on the fact that we get that repeatedly, it seems like lately for traffic calming. Is that something that we pretty much take care of in-house with our own teams and our own forces? Or is that something that with this additional funding, we might be able to start subbing some of that out and attacking it more in a multi-phase type of operation?

It's a combination of our internal teams and some third-party support.

Okay.

Yeah.

Any further discussion up here? All right, thank you, Jared. Thank you. Right now, I'm gonna open it up to the floor. For individuals that wanna speak on this item, please state your name. If you live in the city, don't live in the city, ETJ. All right, there being none, we're gonna move on to... Oh, no, go ahead. Thank you, thank you.

Yeah.

Jim Holser, District 3.

And it's just a general question. On the resource officers, how many do we have in the, do you know? Does anyone know? 14 total. So we have all the schools covered. Pardon, we don't. And the reason I speak to that is because my grandchildren go to Uvalde. And they had a school shooting there, which is well known. And then we had one out near Canyon Lake here. I just think it's a resource issue. I'm sure that I'm... if there are some schools apparently not covered, I guess, what I understand. So whether you deal with it this time, but you need to really start having an internal conversation about that because we live in a different world here. And we've actually had, I think, one gentleman went to federal prison because he was threatening schools here about three or four years ago. So in any event, That's my comment on that. I assume that you don't need it or you're covering it some other way. And when I pick up my granddaughter at Kanipa, which is a school outside of Uvalde, I meet the superintendent there, I met him last year, and he carries a pistol. and he says, we also have a shooting class with 1 3rd of their teachers. So they both have a resource officer from the county, but in the school, they've taken another step. So there's other ways you can deal with it, but that would require some coordination, I guess, with NBISD.

Thank you. Mayor, our chief is prepared to respond to that if you'd like him to.

Chief, you wanna have a word on this?

Sure, good evening, Mayor, members, city councils, your police chief. So just a point of clarification, our contract with MBISD is somewhat twofold. One is to dedicate specific school resource officers dedicated to certain campuses within the cities. Those that do not have one on campus are offset with rovers that MBISD pays for to maintain officers on campuses. And so we have worked with them to provide coverage throughout the district with the understanding that over time, as we're able to increase the staffing level of full-time dedicated SROs, that they will then reduce the amount of funding that is paid for the Rovers to be able to have that same coverage.

So just to clarify on the heels of what you just said, at no time do we have schools that are unprotected without an officer in them.

We will have some that they are roving from one district to another, but we have minimized that based off of the overtime rovers that are hired by NBISD to cover those schools.

Thank you, Chief.

I have a question for you. Go ahead. How many rovers are there?

They typically hire, I believe, five is what they have to cover those areas.

So how many schools are not with a SRO?

Typically a rover will cover a couple of schools to be able to do that. I can come back with the numbers as it relates to the full coverage. We have a build out structure with them to be able to eventually get to that place, but it would require some additional planning on our part as well as theirs to be able to staff that, not just from the SRO perspective, but from the supervisory oversight perspective.

Okay, thank you.

Any further discussion up here? Go ahead.

I would just like to mention that the resource officers that you see on this list were not included in the original list. So city council has, if we agree tonight, has agreed to add two SROs to this budget coming forward.

Hello, my name is Rick Myrick, Richard Myrick. My wife and I live at 795 Laurel Lane, just up the street here. And what I wanted to speak about was civil projects, public works projects. Our street was just recently repaved, and I want to thank the city for that. But quite honestly, I don't think Laurel Lane actually needed repaving. And so in an effort to save dollars, to save the city more money, I was just wondering a greater review of public projects could be made by the Public Works Department to actually assure that the projects that are being done need to be done. After seeing the work that was done, my thought was there may be other work out there, other projects out there that could be delayed, postponed, whatever, and end up saving the city dollars by not having to construct them. So thank you very much.

Thank you. Is there anyone else that wanna come up to the microphone? All right, they're seeing none. I'm gonna close public comment for this item and we're moving on to item B, public hearing on the proposed tax rate for the city of New Braunfels for tax year 2026 and announce the meeting date and time of adoption. Jared Warner.

Thank you, Mayor, Council, nothing further to add.

Mayor, on this one, it might seem repetitive, but you'll also want to open it for public comment as well.

Were you asking me to do it right now?

Well, sorry. Just in case someone was about to make a motion. So before any motion's made, you all can have a discussion and then open it up.

For this one right here, I don't see any motion being made.

Sorry, yeah. So we do, we're on item B, is that correct? Yeah. Okay, yeah, we do need, it's repetitive, but it's posted for its own public hearing. So we do need to just open it up again since we just had A.

Okay. So after Jared Warner gives his presentation, I open it up to the public. and then you're asking me for a motion.

I'm prepared to make a motion, Mayor. I think if we just open it to public, because Mr. Warner didn't have anything on this particular item.

On this item B, okay.

It's ready to move to motion. We just need to open it. Okay, I understand.

No problem. There is no action on this item. This is just the public hearing. Action will be on items C and D. As a reminder, the low government code requires a public hearing on the budget, which we just did, item A, a public hearing on the tax rate. And so what we're having right now is a public hearing on the tax rate. As Nathan said, they're separate hearings.

So on this item right here, I'm gonna open it up to the public. If anyone wants to speak on this item, please stand up and line up behind the podium. State your name if you live in the ETJ or you don't or the city if you don't. No one? All right, seeing nobody, I'm gonna close public hearing and we're done with item A and B. Now I'm gonna read a statement. The FY2027 proposed budget along with the 2026 tax rate will be adopted on September 14, 2026 at a meeting beginning at 6 p.m. at 550 Atlanta Street and City Council Chambers here. I'm gonna move on to item C. Discuss and consider approval of the first reading of an ordinance adopting the FY 2027 operating budget and plan of municipal services. Jared Warner.

Yeah, you can go ahead and remove the presentation. Well, actually, no, sorry, we'll leave that up. So, Mayor, all that I have for you is, again, as you just read in the caption, this is the first reading of the budget ordinance. Attached with your item is the ordinance itself, but I wanna spend my time talking about the budget order. As it states, the budget will be approved with the budget order. What this does is it captures any changes made to the budget from the time it was presented to you on August 11th until now. And so the majority of those changes, if you go through it, there's a total of 19, which sounds like a lot, but the majority of those are a domino effect of what is included in scenario one. The best example of that are the compensation increases, right? This is the cost for the compensation increases for the general fund. But with that change, we also then have to change all of the enterprise funds, any special revenue funds where staffing costs are allocated. So the majority of those costs that are reflected here in the budget order that are all itemized for you are as a result of scenario number one. Some of the other examples of changes that we're recommending that are not a component of this have to do with costs that we're projecting to roll over from fiscal year 26 to fiscal year 27, meaning that it was a one-time cost that we originally anticipated for it to occur in fiscal year 26, but from the point that the budget was presented to you, team members have come forward to us and said, hey, that cost is actually going to occur in fiscal year 27. A good example of that is the parks modular building. You may remember approving the cost of that project a month or two ago. However, though, when working through schedules with park operations and our public works department, they feel that it really should be a project that waits until end of October. So we're moving the budget allocation from fiscal year 26 to fiscal year 27. So there's several of those included in the order, but the majority of it, again, is as a result of scenario number one. And so may you're happy to answer any questions on that, if there are any. And then if we have consensus on this scenario, we have some specific motion language that we can run up to you specifically on this, because this is approval of the budget.

So do we have a look at the other scenarios? I can pull that up in a pretty- No, I'm just wondering, because you're giving us an option, and I only see one scenario.

Based on the feedback that we received at the last workshop, Mayor, which was on Tuesday, the consensus was to bring back scenario one moving forward.

Yeah, I see exactly where we made those changes and those SROs was one big change. Yes, sir. Thank you. Is there any questions from up here? Do I open this up to the floor? Okay. All right, at this time, I'm gonna open up to public comment. If you wanna speak on this item, please line up behind the podium, state your name. If you live in the city, don't live in the city, or live in the ETJ. I don't see anyone lining up, so I'm gonna close public comment at this time.

Mayor. Yes. I move to approve the first reading of ordinance number 2026-50, adopting the FY2027 operating budget and plan of municipal services, including the budget order.

Mayor Pro Tem Capizzi motions and Council Member Edwards seconds the motion. All those in favor, raise your hand. All those not in favor, raise your hand. The motion is unanimous and it is passed. We're moving on to item D, discuss and consider approval of the first reading of an ordinance adopting the 2026 ad valerian tax rates. Jared Warner.

Thank you, Mayor, members of council. Again, nothing further to add after the presentation at the beginning of this meeting. We went through the proposed tax rate information at length, but as one final reminder, the proposed tax rate is equal to the no new revenue rate. That's a rate of .415613. And with that, I'm happy to take any questions or, of course, comment from the public. If not, there's some specific motion language.

Mr. Warner, if we adopt this tax rate, what is the estimated cost for the medium home buyer here in New Braunfels per month?

Median or average?

Probably average.

The average bill for an average homestead property will go from $1,143 to $1,156. It's a $13 increase as referenced there on the slide.

So a little bit more than a dollar a month?

Yes, sir. Thank you. Thank you for the discussion up here. All right, thank you. Thank you, Jared. I'm gonna open this item up to the floor, to the citizens. If you wanna stand up, please state your name. If you live in the city, not in the city, or ATJ.

I don't see anyone lining up.

I'm gonna close public comment at this time. I don't think anyone else has this delta. I guess I'm gonna make the move. Oh, you can, okay.

Yes, sir, and this one does need a roll call.

Okay.

Mayor, I move to approve ordinance number 2026-51, levying a property tax rate of .415613 per $100 of assessed taxable valuation comprised of .193921 cents for debt service and .221692 cents for operations and maintenance. I second.

Mayor Pro Tem Capizzi motioned and it was seconded by Councilman Lebowski. All those in, oh wait. Madam Secretary Gale, please call roll.

Mayor Pro Tem Capizzi.

Aye.

Councilmember Edwards. Aye. Councilmember Spradley. Aye. Councilmember Lebowski. Aye. Councilmember Shaw. Aye. Councilmember Carter. Aye. And Mayor French.

Aye, so the motion is passed. I don't see anything else on the agenda here for tonight. There being no further business to come before New Braunfels City Council this evening, this meeting is adjourned at 6.41 p.m. Thank you.