City Council - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon everyone. Today is April 27th, 2026 and this is the city of Prescuit city council workshop meeting. Roll call, please. Mayor Rousing here. Mayor Proen Freeworth here. Councilwoman Frederickson here. Councilman Gamboji I am here. Councilman Garing here. Councilman Grady here. And Councilman Ruby here. All are present. All right. And our first item is presentation and discussion regarding the fiscal year 2027 budget workshop number one. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council.

Good afternoon. Lars Johnson, finance director. And today we we'll have a review of the proposed budget. Um, first here at the beginning, I'd like to say this is a product of a lot of hard work from individuals across the city, and I'd like to recognize and thank them for all their hard work. This is a trail map of where we've been and where we're at. So that big arrow is indicating that today we have workshop number one. But this really started with the council strategic planning session in January. That gave us as department heads and city manager direction on what council's priorities are for the fiscal year. And we got to work as departments to submit budget information to the city manager. Those were reviewed in detail and decisions were made to come up with a proposal for city council. And today we're going to go through that proposal. Today's session will cover some of the departments and then on May 11th we'll cover the remaining. So, so we have administrative departments, police, fire, courts and library today as well as an overview of the total city budget. So each department will in today's session will get up and uh explain changes to their budgets, their service level changes. um some talk about um performance measures will also be view be today. Uh for the benefit of the public, we also have all of this information which is a lot on the city's web page. If you go to um departments budget and finance and then on the right hand column there's a current budget process uh side of the website that will have the uh budget publication the five-year capital plan the performance measures

and the copy of these slides. If any member of the public would need information after this we have contact information for a member of my team Katherine Bolan. if she can set up a meeting to uh review the budget or any questions as well as council will be working with you all to uh answer any questions you may have. Okay. So today's presentation again like I said will have an overview some big themes that came out. We will look at the council strategic plan and some items that are being addressed in the budget and then we'll delve into some financial summaries. First, the balanced budget concept is that operational expenditures expenditures are covered by ongoing recurring revenue. That's what we considered balanced. In other words, the money we're bringing in are going to pay for things that happen every year. The budget's balanced this year. We have one exception, one challenge, and we brought that up at the midyear budget update to council. That's our solid waste services in the solid waste fund. That will be requiring some additional council input and some options will be considered at our uh workshop number two. So, every budget we put together starts with revenues. Like I said, we have to balance operating expenditures to our revenues. We are budgeting conservatively as we do. We are not expecting a decline, but we're budgeting conservative conservatively and flat, I would say. So, we're not expecting growth, neither decline. Now, um revenues are monitored monthly. We'll keep an eye on the situation. If things change, we bring that back to council that something needs to be done

to change. We can do that mid year. We do fund our capital projects with a mix of funding sources. Some of that is with ongoing revenues. Some of that is with accumulated fund balances, which means over the years uh revenue has exceeded expenses and is basically in a savings account that we can use to pay for one-time things. We also issue debt for some of our projects and we receive grants. So we are funding our capital plan with a mix of things. It also maintains our prudent reserves that are in our policy. So the next few slides are talking about some overall things that affect all departments. We wanted to talk about this upfront so that every department doesn't have to say the same thing over and over again. So one of them is employee compensation. We are continuing the plan that was put in place, first started in fiscal year 22, which used the Phoenix Metro annual CPI measure for our cost of living increase. For the next fiscal year, that would be 1.2%. That would be for employees starting on July 1st. And then we have a proposal to have up to 5% merit based on evaluations and that happens at anniversary date for each employee. So it doesn't hit all on July 1st. Then a big impact we had this year was health insurance. We're in the Yavapai combined trust and the trust is seeing escalating health cost higher uh health claims and we had to increase premiums for all the members in the trust by 19%. In the budget, we are proposing that the

employer, the city would cover the lion share of that increase. We are implementing though a small cost sharing um for a middle middle tier plan or I guess it could be called the basic plan. Um before that was 100% paid by the employer for an employee and dependence. Next year we are implementing a small cost share. So employees that put dependence on that plan would have to pay a little bit every paycheck. I think that was the neighbor. Depending on the plan, it's 20 to $25 a paycheck. This health insurance trust also is experiencing reserves depleting faster than expected. The board vote voted in March to have all the entities help with shoring up that reserve. The city's portion of that is a,41,286. Um we are proposing that we would use excess fund balance to cover that um between the two fiscal years. So starting this fiscal year 26 and then the other half would be in 27. So the the combined trust includes Yapai County, Yapai College, town of Chino Valley and city of Prescuit. Those are the four entities in the trust. Now the other impact is our internal cost allocation. This would impact each department. Our liability insurance is going up 13% and our facilities maintenance up 10%. These are some themes that uh boiled up to the top in our budget discussions.

The first one was police officer retention and recruiting was a was a big one for council and I know um the community at large with a lot of vacancies there. We wanted to do something about that. Um, here's a list of things. I guess I won't go in detail because we'll get into the department discussions later. These were sort of the higher level items. Lois, if we have questions on the higher level items, is now when you would like us to ask them or is this better later? I'd say let's address these as we get into each department. Okay. even the overall ones. All right.

And no, if you have something that's overarching for the whole budget, then let's talk about that. Now, if you have something on this list, we can talk about those when we get into those budgets. Okay. So, um the first one is the question about the the health insurance with the four members of the trust. Um and and your recommendation is that people that are in this basic tier who have dependent assigned is the 20 to $25 per paycheck you mentioned is that per dependent or total deduction? It would be total for the their share of the premium cost.

And how does that benchmark with our same um employment group that we're competing against for employees? Are others making these moves now with a 19% increase in health care? I think that's a great question as Brandon, our HR director, looks like he's prepared to address that.

Good afternoon, Mayor Mayor Prom, City Council. Brandon Nunes, HR director. Yeah, when we made these financial decisions, we looked at the other the other members of YCT and try to mimic some of their plans. So, nothing here we're doing is foreign. And I think charging employees is uh is really a shift. We've we've offered so many free plans, but the reality is the the cost of healthcare has skyrocketed in the past 2 years. So, we need to get people used to paying for insurance. Um that that's not going to help us very much financially, but it's really just a mindset and a shift and offering a bunch of your free plans and getting people used to the idea of paying. So, but it it lines up with other what other entities are doing. And why did we just do this on what you call the basic tier? I'm sorry, I'm not in your healthcare, so I don't know the tiers that are available and not in other tiers.

Yeah, we look at the uh we looked at the different costs associated with each plan. So there's really four different plans in each tier. There's 12 different plans. Um and we're keeping the employee only free. We want to do that for recruiting and retention at a time when it's incredibly hard to recruit and retain employees. Um, and again, we we did that on that middle plan just because we have a lot of people on that plan and we again we want to get them used to paying for insurance.

So when you say that there's a lot of people on that plan and you're going to get them used to, are you foreseeing if we continue to keep having these kind of health care increases that we would be asking all of our employees to start thinking about that mindset? Oh yeah, this is a topic I could talk about for three hours, but I I actually think next year we're going to start to look at different uh different models. We'll we'll have to explore different plan options. I don't know that we'll take the same approach next year because the the uh the increase was so significant. We had to start making some of these philosoph philosophical shifts next year. I think we're going to have to look at networks, plan options, uh design of models. So I I don't know what we're doing this year is what we're going to do next year. I think we might have to get more aggressive if we get another increase like that.

I I do applaud you for looking at that. I think we need to benchmark not only with local governments, but also local businesses as well as other governments in other parts of the state to see what everybody's doing. I'm used to in corporate America all employees paid in. So, I just want to see where we're going. I just I'm kind of a little upset that we're only doing it with some employees and not everybody from the get-go. So, um, I'm glad you're looking at it from a long-term standpoint. Thank you. No problem. Okay. And then we have Mr. Gambboji.

Some time ago when we talked about, uh, workforce housing, I said there's exogenous variables that are impacting employees here in Prescuit that we've not factored in. And another example of that is, you know, you're looking at a cost living rate of 1.2%. I think the numbers I'm hearing are somewhere between two and 4%. And you're seeing insurance expenses going up 19%, 13%, and on the radio this morning, they talked about Arizona is the most expensive state to live in. Real estate prices have gone up 60% the last 5 years. Uh Lars, what's happening? Well, the I'll just say the measure that we've been using is the Phoenix Metro. Um, you might hear in the news the US average and that is higher right now at when this came out I think it was 1.2 for the Phoenix metro which increased at a faster pace earlier on over the last 5 years than the US average and now it's cooled off a bit while the US is still kind of increasing higher. Um the costs keep going up. Um we're using this me this measure to stay consistent over the last uh since fiscal year 22 we've been using it. Costs are going up but they're going up a whole lot more than 1.2%. Uh Mary, thank you. You uh Lars, you referenced the need to replenish the reserve in the combined trust in the city's share of a little over a million. How is that share calculated in regard to the other three entities? Is it on a per capita or or how?

Yep, exactly. So we um our cons trust consultant use the covered members as the share. So employees plus the beneficiaries or the dependents that are on the plan. Thank you.

I just wanted to clarify was the the uh cost share between employee employer that's going up for all of our plans by that same amount. I think it may have been misunderstood when I said it earlier. So we have the three plans. The 8020 share plan is called premium. The 6040 share plan is the basic and then the high deductible plan. So that same $20 is increased for all those three. The difference is the basic plan was 100% covered by the employer and now that one has a cost share. The others already had cost sharing in place. So, so this is the change is that now there isn't a totally free plan except if you're an employee only coverage. If you have dependence on the plan, then you do have to pay something.

Okay, continue.

Okay, I'll turn it over to our city manager. Okay. So, as Lars mentioned, um we start our budget process with the strategic plan. And so, I just want to hit a few highlights. Again, we'll get into the budget vision um the budget items as we go here. But, but just to highlight the way these align. Um starting just quickly with the reminder about our our vision and mission. Um I like to use the road trip analogy here, right? Our vision is our destination. That's where we're headed. that's the best version of ourel and you see a lot of themes in there that that rhyme really well with prescuit right we talk about western heritage we talk about uh vibrant cultural events um but also you see aspiration in that in that statement as well our mission is our role in reaching the vision right so in the road trip analogy we might be the uh distributor of snacks or the DJ or the driver or a freeloader in the back seat um as the city uh we've taken on this um this mission and it and it focuses in those first five words. We enhance quality of life and and we try to stay as as focused as we can on that mission. Um and I don't have a clicker, but so you'll see some of these elements in this workshop and in the next workshop. The blue on the screen are items that we'll be addressing in in this workshop and then we'll get to the green in a couple of weeks. So, jumping into priority number one, public safety and um really starting with the the staffing in the police department. Um council knows we've had some challenges um both recruiting and retaining officers. And so this is an area where per the strategic plan we need to focus um both

time, effort, resources. Um the in addition to the COLA and the or the the CPI increase and the merit increase, there's an additional increase in this budget for our police officers. Um again to help with that recruiting and retention. Um we currently have 19 vacant police officer positions. 12 of those came with 478. Um and then the budget also includes four additional um officers uh per the 478 um what was passed what was promised with that. So that that will mean that beginning in July if we're not adding new folks between now and then we would have 23 vacant officer positions and that feels like something we need to charge after pretty hard. So again an increase for our police officers to help with recruitment and retention. um trying some new strategies that we haven't tried before. Um hoping for for some better results. Um and then some some good work with finding other other funding to help make this work. So, uh we'll move a couple of our K9 officers so they're being funded out of our opio opioid funding. Uh we'll freeze a couple of vacant positions and um use the marijuana excise tax for some of this. But it will it will help us to move forward on recruiting the officers as stated in the strategic plan. Another item in the strategic plan has to do with emergency management and resilience. And in 478 there's a a emergency manager position that we would add to this budget. Emergency management is typically a county function and it will continue to be a county function. But this gives us an ability to focus on Prescuit specifically and our resilience. Um it will in involve a fair amount of planning, hazard mitigation planning, um response recovery planning and also pursuit of grants um that will help us to be prepared for emergencies.

Lois, did you have a question?

I I do. Thank you. Um Don, given the staffing of the police department situation, um you know, this is a sizable um double over everybody else. And I just want to understand in light of um in light of the uh employee survey, in light of exit interviews or whatever, how confident are you that this solution um this option you're putting forward is going to be the option that will make an impact? So what what this increase does is it will make Prescuit Police Department um the new officers in our department the highest paid officers in the state except for the valley. So we will still be lagging behind um you know Scottsdale and some of those those cities in the valley but when it comes to outside of that area Flag Staff um came in like Havsu we would be the highest paid department in the state and the interest there is is not only in recruiting new officers um but also in attracting laterals uh to come from other departments. Now, as we've talked with some of the officers who have left recently, this still doesn't quite get us all the way there um to the the numbers that they're getting when they lateral out. U but it gets us a lot closer and then we hope that or the intention is that with combining that with other efforts uh we may be able to do better with retention and and attraction. And so other efforts include things like um considering hiring bonuses as a as a pilot program. I don't normally like hiring bonuses, but it may be necessary to make this work. Um starting up some programs together with a high school to start the

kind of the longer and more sustainable term um or recruitment of local folks who want to become police officers someday. Um, even thinking about other opportunities. We'll talk later about, you know, putting together court operations. Well, court operations includes court security. And there's likely to be interest at times between those court security officers and the police officers. And in both directions, right? It may be you get retired police officers interested in court security positions, but also people who hold court security positions for a few years and then decide, hey, I'd actually really like to be a police officer. So, it's it's putting it all together and trying to put ourselves in a position where we can compete not only on the salary, but we're not disqualified because of the salary. And we think we do that here.

So, would you say you're like 80% confident or 50% confident? Um, I would say more like 80. Okay. Yeah. Mr. Gambboji,

another example of exogenous variables when it comes to police. Everybody loves the fire department. See Hular smiling and everybody wants to defund the police. So, there's there's developments outside the city of Prescuit that are going on. I'm going to do this in my head. So later on I'll ask uh uh police chief Bonnie if I'm right but we're talking about 6% in addition when we put a policeman through the academy that's a h 100red grand if they stay on the force three years and quit that's $33,000 a year we lost that's basically a 50% on top so we're giving si 6% here. It's actually 50 that we're paying. Um I think this is this is I don't know that this affects the marketplace enough. I uh when we lost those officers, I think they're getting 20 grand more. So that's 20 grand is 33% pay raise and this is six. So, I think we're just scratching the surface here

and the public needs to understand that Phoenix actively will send up recruiters to Prescuit to recruit our uh police officers for the departments down in the valley. Continue.

Very good. Um so the traffic injuries and fatalities item is actually in strategic priority number three. Um but mentioning it here just because of the nexus and the the ability to look at that and understand some of the causes so we can address those and make the city safer. And then the uh the Prescuit Regional Airport infrastructure improvement 5-year plan. So, we've been talking about runway infrastructure improvements and the the need for them and how they will support our wildfire base, how they will support um so many other things. And we start to see in this budget those infrastructure improvements included in the 5-year plan. Next one. Okay. Priority number two, uh the dynamic economic environment. And there's really when it comes to economic development, there's really two core elements. uh you've got business um uh retention and expansion and then you have business attraction. Those are the core elements. So business um retention and expansion. Uh this budget includes uh funding for the bizlink concier program to help folks get through city processes, get through government process processes as smoothly as possible, help them to get, you know, up and running faster. And then also on the on the recruitment side um as we're able to bring in a new director, the ability to pursue uh the the priority areas identified in the economic development plan um including aviation and aerospace, advanced manufacturing, technology, healthcare, these these kinds of areas. So they're here and um and we'll be able to pursue them as a result of the budget. Priority number five, there may be a question.

Uh yes, I just want to remind everyone and for those of you who are watching online, we ran a resident survey in 2023 and in the southeast quadrant where it's really important to the residents and we're doing a lousy job is the entry called economy. So, as we look at trying to our budget and funding things, we need to find a way to generate revenue to pay for them.

Yeah, I'll specifically mention one more thing on that slide is the retail site selection. Um, so with some recently approved projects, we will have the square footage identified in the strategic plan. That's not a reason to stop. So, uh, retail site selection as a as a contracted service, uh, will connect us with, uh, retailers and help us not only with attracting new future retail development, but also with infill, right? We have a number of stores that don't have a store in them right now. And so bringing in this service allows us to to get in contact with businesses that could fit into those spaces and and try to fill them in um so that we're using the space that we have as well as building new spaces um in mostly in North Prescott. Okay. So priority five, the last one in the plan that we'll be talking about today. Um and priority five really focuses on performance measures. So there's there's a number of things you here that are kind of interesting and just for your information. Um but it really focuses on the in in the strategic plan the ability to and I will pull it up actually right here. Um talk about being community focused and performancedriven. Um and again that's with dashboards and performance metrics. We talk about public information and engagement. Um and we see that in the budget including a a rework of our website um which will help us to reach out more effectively and uh and then regional cooperation and advocacy. So um the dashboards are coming along within open gov and I don't know Lars if you have the ability to click on that link.

Yeah I'll pull that up here. And I can do a quick preview if you'd like. So this is what I mentioned before. We have on the budget and finance department's budget page. There's current budget process area. We've linked now what's called the department performance measures page. So this is to satisfy that strategic plan goal and this will be continued to be improved and developed upon. But now under departments here you could look up a department such as community development. Uh there will be trends of performance metrics that have been identified such as plan review times. Um the measures will be described an emphasis on what our approach is for this metrics and then there will be uh a couple years of history as long as our goal for the next year. Um, so this is the first showcasing we're doing of this new new page through open gov with efforts from each department to identify and improve on their metrics. And we're very excited about this.

Can you scroll down a little bit so we can see the page?

So this is the one department. Now if you went back to Don where you thinking about the homepage we did have the list of every metric here as well that had um for each department. This gets to be data heavy. So that's why we had the separate dedicated pages as well. Right? So being able to tell the story from input to impact um showing what's going in um what's happening as a result, what are the outcomes? Um and then and then impact is is the ultimate goal. So that could be again in the case of community development, we're talking about turnaround times, right? We from when we get an application to when they're able to put shovels in the ground. uh for things like public safety. We might talk about not only response time, but also our fire department's done a great job of moving forward into well, what's life like for the survivors, right? Um are we creating significant um impacts for them, positive impacts for for folks that we respond to where they're having fewer medical issues after they're they're getting to the hospital on time. that we can mitigate heart attack impacts, we can mitigate stroke impacts, those kinds of things. So, measuring across the spectrum and then being able to report that back to the community. Um, we'll continue building on that, but the the ground or the foundation is there. And then in the last section here, the next slide, um we talk a little bit about the the communications and outreach portion, including the possib, you know, we've we've started with um state advocacy um in particular as we pursue the need for funding for airport. Uh there's an opportunity for federal advocacy um and an update to our our community survey. Um, so, um, Ted likes

to quote our 2023 survey. He'll be able to quote the 2026 survey moving forward. So, we're looking forward to getting that update and being able to look at the trends and understand in the perception of the public, you know, are we doing better at things? Are the things that we need to to focus on and improve? Okay, so that concludes sort of the first introduction to the budget. Now my next task is to go through a financial overview of the budget, what it looks like in total by fund type and then delve in a little bit to our uh most challenging fund to balance is the general fund. So we'll talk a little more about that fund as well. So this is the total proposed budget at $311,930,96 which is a 2.7% increase. When you look at the detail behind that, the operating budget portion is 7.1% increase or $10.4 million and the capital budget is a negative or decrease of one and a half%. the I want to explain on this side also the concept of the expenditure limitation for municipalities. So this last August the voters of Prescuit voted to approve the home rule initiative that gives the city council authority to set the expenditure limit for the city. So the budget that's finally adopted by city council becomes our expenditure limit and that number is the bottom line. So that's why we include such things as a contingency um to allow some flexibility. Um throughout the year the council does have the authority then also to move fund a budget appropriation between funds and departments.

Um the other option if we didn't have home rule would be what's called a state imposed expenditure limit and that's a formuladriven number that really doesn't have correlation to the services we provide. So, we're very fortunate to have this home rule option. The third option is what's called the permanent base adjustment. This might come up in a future discussion with council, but that allows to the community, the voters to adjust that state imposed limit to a more realistic number that then incrementally is increased using their formula. So, we can increase the base up to allow us to use that option instead of home rule. Just a quick uh discussion about operating budget increase here. Half of our operating budget roughly is personnel. So our personnel total budget is going up from uh 75.2 million in 26 to 80.2 million in fiscal year 27. The largest increases of course we just talked about earlier in this presentation with the cost of living merit increases and our health insurance it's split about 5050 on that. So 2 million um health insurance is going up 2.1 million across the city. So the employers portion and then salaries and employer costs are going up the remainder. Um, what does that equal to,

mayor? Sorry, I'm not finding in my notes, but it's roughly 2.8 million. Excuse me, Mr. Garing.

Uh, thank you, Mayor. Uh, so what strikes me is revenues of 268 million and expenditures of 312. Maybe there's a quick short explanation for that. Yes. And I'll definitely talk about that in more detail when we talk about revenues. But the revenues are what are coming through um next year as well as debt issuances or grants. The difference between those is what is fund balance basically. So accumulated balances in our funds um projects can use that one-time nature uh fund balance. So we will talk about more detail about our fund balances in the next workshop as we delve into the capital plan.

And so I wonder if it would be more clear to show that fund balance transfer. Mhm. To balance the budget.

Yes, that's a good good point. We could show instead of revenues, we could call it sources. Um some communities do that and then at that point you could add in the the fund balance use. So, here's the total budget. Now, we'll talk about the revenues. As council member Garing was talking about, our our revenues for next year are two 267 million. Um, I'll kind of go line by line and explain these a little bit. So, tax revenue is roughly flat as I mentioned for our economic forecast. The only increase there was the property tax that we had proposed to increase. And we'll once we talk about general fund, we'll delve into that in more detail. The intergovernmental is things from this other government such as state shared revenues and operating grants. The state income tax is um increasing next year. That's a large largest u share that that's increasing. The charges for services is the largest category of revenue and also the largest increase here at roughly a million dollars higher than the previous budget. Enterprise funds account for the majority of that at 7.2 million. So enterprise funds are services delivered to the community um for a cost and those include water, wastewater, solid waste, golf course and airport. There's previously adopted rate increases in there um in our water and wastewater funds that are mainly driving that increase. um investment income. You might look at that and wonder, are we seeing a big increase? Really, what happened, what

has happened in the past for city budget is that we would budget extremely conservatively so that we do not rely on that source of income for operations, but we bring in a much more than that. Um in fiscal 25, it was roughly $3 million total across the city for investment income. So we're trueing up our forecast, our projection for that revenue. Uh a portion of that we're allocating towards nonoperating so that we're not going to build operations around that revenue, but we can show that indeed it's expected revenue to help cover projects. Um internal service,

excuse me, Mr. uh Patrick. Thank you. Um so under charges for services the increase is 11 million. Um and so tell me again how that constitutes revenue. Isn't that an interdep departmental charge or how do you describe that again?

Yes. Charges for services would be external to the city. So we're charging our customers, our city customers. Um mainly that's enterprise funds. We also have as we look at the general fund in the next few slides. We do have some charges for example community development when they're issuing building permits and um inspections they charge for that service. So that's a type of a charge. But like I said, it's mainly water wastewater and solid waste are main drivers of that. But as you mentioned the um internal department internal city that's internal service line. So the last one on this category that's charges that are from our four internal service funds. So our risk fund for um liability insurance our engineering fund um uh let's draw a blank now. So fleet would be the another one and then lastly facilities. So the revenue they collect shows up as a revenue. Okay. So that covers our operating revenues. They're increasing 7%. Nonoperating are things such as intergovernmental grants. So these cover capital projects and gifts and donations, investment income and proceeds from debt. So there the main category in proceeds from debt is wastewater projects. As we discussed earlier this spring, several of those projects will be funded through debt issuances and then paid for through rates over a period of time such as 20 to 30 years. Patrick.

So, um, describe a little bit better since it's a significant increase gifts and donations. So, that line is under the nonoperating category. We have certain projects that departments will be discussing that they've identified um a gift or a donation to cover that project. So, one of them is um a land purchase and recreation services. And I won't steal their thunder, but there's a project that they've identified a a donor to help pay for it. Okay, moving on then. Excuse me, Mary.

Yes, thank you. Uh just stepping back to the uh internal service revenue. I'm assuming that that's offset essentially onetoone with expenditures from the departments that have to pay for those services. Correct. Thank you. It's it is a sort of a a conceptual challenge because they're they the fund themselves has revenue and expenses but they're also charging internal departmental. So it's actually you know accounting for the expenditure twice but this is the way government accounting works. Thanks, Mr. Grady.

This is line by line. Um, so investment income, we had no money budgeted for investment income in the current fiscal year. Why does it jump as to 1.5 million?

Right? That's a good question. So I I do have a C a line above for investment income. That would be what the policy had been in the past is that would all be for operating but we would budget for it very very very conservatively. So the this is a process change in that we more accurately forecast our income from our investment income but we allocate a million and a half of it towards one-time uses so that way we're not relying on that to fund our operations. So we are indeed expecting revenue on investments across the city and 1.5 of that will help pay for projects. So this is revenues by fund type. As we discussed in the midyear we have five different fund types at the city. The general fund, special revenue, capital projects, enterprise and internal service. um this summarized by fund type the change in revenues general fund we'll address in more detail in the future so I won't talk about that one special revenues is uh grants streets fund things like that now capital projects is the largest increase here and what's um this is also trueing up our actually actual activity that's happening so council adopted new impact fees for governmental services. There's police, fire, and streets that was adopted January 1st or went into place January 1st of 2025. So, a year ago, as we are preparing the budget, we didn't know what to forecast in that revenue. So, well, now with increased history, we can more accurately forecast. So that's adjusting

our budget to match what's coming in for police, fire, and streets impact fees. Okay, now jumping to expenditures. Again, this is an all funds look across the city by department because we are um going to be studying each department in detail in future. I won't go through and explain all the changes like in some years we have. This just gives you a big picture overview of of how we come up with that 311 million by department. Um, yep. I'll skip then to our operating budget as a percent of total. You can see the largest categories for departments in the city for operating is public works and then next police and then fire. So this shows you where you know matching the council strategic plan where the funding is going. Um recreation services is the fourth category and then kind of goes down there from the um to the smaller categories such as general government, community development, library and airport. Oh, and regional communications. Now, this is expenditures by fund type. So, again, looking at the fund categories. Um, we'll be talking in more detail about the general fund, so I'll skip that one. But the the special revenue is related to grant projects. We all know about the rodeo grounds and the 15 million that came um came from the state. So there'll be additional projects in next year's budget to spend that money. That's one of the biggest increases here under the

special revenue category. And then this capital projects fund again is using this the governmental impact fees. Uh there's projects planned for the next year that will utilize the streets impact fee funds. All right. Now, the fun fun discussion about general fund. I know there's a lot of slides and a lot of numbers. So, I'll try to make this meaningful for you, but feel free to stop me as we if you have any questions. So the general fund revenues again we're separating them in two categories operating and nonoperating. The key here is that when we're looking to balance the general fund we have to make sure that our operating expenditures are under under at or under our operating revenues. So the 62 million89,000 would be what we're we're projecting next year for our general fund operating revenues. Each department has kind of a mix of funding sources in here. So as we go through their slides, you also see that. But I will talk about a few of them here. Um again, tax revenues increasing only from the property tax levy. The sales tax is expected to be flat. Intergovernmental

Lars, before we go on, could you explain to the public break down our sales tax? 9.3%, 5.6% goes straight to the state. Yes. Um 75% goes to the county and uh how little we get to keep.

Certainly. So up on the slide I have the breakdown. Um the 5.6% 6% is the states portion of the 9.3 and then there's a 75 county portion and then the cities is 2.95. You also see how we that compares to our neighboring municipalities of Chino Valley at 10.35 and Prescuit Valley at 9.18. There's a key distinction is that the city of press get funds fire and EMS services with our rate but the other communities don't. They have a separate funding source for their fire districts.

Uh I added this slide. The mayor had requested some information about what does that look like in numbers for that 5%. So I put five on% on the slide because uh 6 of it is dedicated to education only. So the state doesn't use that. Um the 5% generates you know for example in fiscal year 25 123 million of activity taxable activity in the city. The state uses that to fund their state government and which also of course provides services to residents through the state. But this the shared portion that we get back from that is 7.2% or sorry 7.2 million which is 5.9% in fiscal year 25. Again these are all estimates based on what we know is the taxable activity in the city limits. um that 75 of the activity in the city um provides the county with 18.5 million. Again, those services are are also available to city residents through the county. So, that was the detail on the sales tax. Seems a little lopsided. I think we're sending a lot more down than we're getting back. And jumping back to the other revenue categories, intergovernmental is again as I mentioned increasing from the income tax share. Um the county library district levy is also increasing in the budget slightly because of um what we know as the current amount was higher than we did a year ago. But we're not projecting an

increase at this point. We're keeping it the same as they provided us this year. So, because last year we didn't know what they were giving us, we put in 350,000 and I think now it's at 460 roughly. The library will talk about it when they get up. Okay. Then charges for services. We we mentioned that there are some charges for services in the general fund. The biggest category there is community development, but we also charge things such as parking fees, uh, renting facilities. Um, regional communications is a partner sharing effort. So the 55% of the regional communications budget is paid for by other jurisdictions. that revenue shows up in charges for services. So, as we went through and projected our revenues, we studied them very closely to make sure that we're being conservative but also accurate. And it came up a few times uh over the last year when we did our audit, when we did um our midyear budget report is our community development fees are coming were coming in much higher than we had been projecting. So we tred those up in fiscal year 27. So of that increase between 6.4 and 8.8 million. Community development is increasing the revenue. It the fees are staying the same but we're turning again we're chewing up the forecast the projection of 1.4 million. So big part of that is from community development. Then the second category is regional communications. Um because they're doing increased operations which they will talk about

later in the presentation. Their revenue also increased by 440,000. There's also some increased revenues from the city court and charges for services. There was a new fee adopted by council. The um docket fee was the biggest one and so we're expecting additional revenue from that. So overall again $62 million of revenue in for operations. Now the non-operating category are revenues that we apply for one-time uses of our local sales tax. We're actually allocating 2 million of that towards one-time use. So, it's a conservative effort knowing that each year we have vehicle replacements. We have capital needs. We take 2 million off of our sales tax and call it nonoperating. So, we don't balance our budget on the full amount. The public safety tax, we know what that is. Um that is showing the portion that's going towards the projects, the capital projects. And then the intergovernmental uh last year we had a million and a half of our state shared income tax allocated for nonoperating s uses. That was because of the turmoil we were seeing in the change in the flat tax and how they was being distributed from the state. We now see that as a more stable source going forward. And so we're removing that um classification as nonoperating for that category. that helps us then fund operations uh at 62 million. Um but then we talked about investment income. We're getting money there. So we put a million and a half of that towards nonoperating. Overall the revenues are decreasing.

That's largely because of the proceeds from debt line. We are not anticipating in the general fund needing to issue debt for next year. So that um projection is not needed. Any questions on general fund revenue? And that was a lot of information. This is a pie chart of the total operating revenue. Uh most of it is non-transactional in nature. So general taxation through intergovernmental distributions or tax revenue which equate to um the majority of the revenue and then we have 14.2% is charges for services. This um it is the taxable activity year to date through February. So as we are talking about sales tax and what we're budgeting forecasting for next year through February activity so that's activity in the business reported in and paid in March we had a de decline of 76%. But we all know about the residential rental impact. So the state eliminated that tax classification for municipalities that decreased that category significantly. You'll see it's down 40% roughly in rentals. If we take that out, our taxable activity is actually increasing by 3.28% year to date. So that's looking pretty decent. Um, again, we budgeted flat. We're seeing um some slight increase. So, I think we're sufficiently conservative there. We covered these two slides, so I'll

skip through that and jump to our state shared revenue for the general fund and there's also a HERF tax on this slide. So, this is what we've received from the League of Arizona Cities and Towns as our estimate from the state shared portion. Overall, it would be going up about $700,000 on a per resident basis using the most recent census estimate of 48,000 people, 48,224 in the city. That's $435 per resident we get from that category. And then using a per home measure of about 1.97 um that gives you a per household distribution of $856 in the general fund. We also get HERF tax distribution that goes to the street fund to help pay for street operations.

Lois question Lars on the hurf. um you know it's it's going down a little bit there, but are we hearing anything out of the state regarding um what what's going on with the HERF fund? What should we be projecting moving forward? Any guidance at all that we're getting? I haven't heard any recent updates. What's causing this decline is that the city's portion of the overall state population is decreasing a little bit slightly. So, I think that's mainly driving this decrease. Um, but we'll definitely get you some information on that for the next budget workshop.

Barry, thank you. And actually a followup to that, uh, I was wondering whether it was the state gas tax revenue as a whole was decreasing or just our share. So, is is that what I heard from you that it's our share? Do you know if the state revenue from gas tax flat, increasing, decreasing? I don't have a lot of information on that. So, I'll get back to you for next workshop on that for the overall state impact. But these I did note that the city's portion of the overall population, how that's distributed is declining slightly. So, I attributed to that, but I'll look at the state forecast as well.

Thank you. And I guess my other uh where you have um a data point per resident. I'm assuming that's all residents, children and adults or is it just adults? Um the census uh does include children. So it's it is census based. Yep. Thank you.

Okay. Real quick on the HERF tax. Um there have been various efforts to date to try to figure out how to um maybe make the situation more fair with respect to electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles um compared to gas vehicles. There there hasn't yet been a formula or a plan that the legislature has agreed it would be the way they would like to go. U but that conversation comes up every year. I expect it'll keep coming up every year until somebody figures out uh which which system makes sense. Um and and ideas have ranged from you know charging by the mile when you do your vehicle registration um which obviously is a little bit invasive into privacy versus or charging um uh tax on tires instead of on gas or there's a bunch of different ideas out there. U we'll just have to wait and see which one the legislature chooses. Okay, a little bit about the property tax levy. This is uh even though it's a small portion of the general fund revenue, it's still an important tax category. Overall, it's 4% of the general fund operating revenue. But as we receive direction from council at the mid-year budget workshop, we will be um taking the necessary steps to increase the levy to the 2.492 million uh which is the maximum allowed for the city. The maximum is, excuse me, I'm losing my voice here. The maximum goes up 2% a year as a cap, but also you can tax new uh property that comes on the road. So new construction is also um considered. So this would be the maximum the rate

would increase from 2329 per 100 assessed value to uh 2374. So what that looks like I did calculations based on a $500,000 limited property value house. So that's the it's not the cash value, it's a limited property value that the tax rate is applied towards. So the in the bill would increase the city's portion would increase from $116 to $119 on that value. So $3 increase, but there is an allowance for a maximum of 5% increase in value. So that also of course drives uh what residents see on their tax bill. So, if the full 5% maximum went on value increases, it would go up to $125, which is $9 uh on a 500. Yeah. N $9 increase from the last year's levy. There's a few additional steps because we are taking the uh rate increase forward. So, I put a timeline here. The 60-day notice is required. that was put on the city's website last Friday or last week actually before Friday. Then there'll be a additional notices required in the newspaper. Then on the June 23rd when we adopt the budget there'll be a what's called truth and taxation hearing. Um it's named that because the legislation is named that. Uh they require additional notices and make sure that we're transparent about how this tax is increasing. Then on July 14th, we'll adopt that pro property tax levy. Now, just a couple more slides for me before we get into the department presentations. Again, since we're going to look at each department individually, I won't go into detail, but just wanted to point out

here that we had $62 million of operating revenues. We're proposing a budget in the general fund of 60.9 million of operations. So, we are underneath that to balance the budget. And then we have non-operating expenditures. Those are projects, capital projects, and there's a contingency as well. I will make just a note about transfers. Also on the slide, the general fund does support a few of different funds. One of them is the grant fund for grant matches. So when we propose grants or apply for grants and there's a let's say a 10% match or some certain match we budget for that in the general fund to help uh achieve that purchase or that program. Also in here is uh transfers to the airport fund to help offset their operating costs in the operating category. And then non-operating transfers are for capital purchases mainly grant matches in the airport fund

Lois.

Yeah. Um you know I recall when we had the midyear discussion about um property tax, it was kind of because we were getting lots of signals out of the state legislature. Um, you know, you saw the impact of the rental tax. They continue to keep talking and haven't yet galvanized enough notes, but to do away with food tax. Um, and I think if I recall, we asked you for a statistics the impact of the rental tax that we lost. Um it was with taking 2% property taxes, 2% in property tax increases, it would take us 43 years to make up what we lost overnight.

Right.

So So this was uh watching the tea leaves of the state government um and how they continue to keep getting involved in local control areas to try and start seeing could we do something. But I do wonder and I'll continue to wonder and push you guys for between this workshop and next workshop if if our homeowners are going to be bearing this, which could be somewhere, you know, depending on the value of your home, but if it if it was, you know, $3 to $19 for a $500,000 home. I just wonder if we could figure out what's the total um amount, well, the 2.492, 492. And how do we think about um trying to find some cost savings or wins for the taxpayers um that we could not have all of that hit hit them.

Mhm. Um again, we're doing it. We already took the hit on rental tax and that hurt a lot. Um, but we've in essence rightsized to deal with that. And I just wonder I I still will go out and sell this property tax, but it would be a lot easier to explain to the public if we could figure out how else we find some wins for homeowners. So, just a thought,

right? We'll we'll think about that and get back to you. And also the this is an option for council. you can see that our revenues will um it's an important mix of how we fund services, but it's still an option for you whether or not to uh go forward to this levy increase. Yep, I think I touched on expenditures enough here. We'll we'll be going through each department. There are some departments such as fire, when you look at their budget, they'll have several funding sources. So this is the general fund only component here on the slide. Um for example, they're in the airport fund, they're in the grant fund, and they're also general fund. You also notice we have two separate lines uh for public safety each so that we have the public safety tax separately identified in operations. That was important for city council to see in previous years. So we continued that. Okay. So of the total operating budget of 60,940,000 public safety um is the majority of it of course we know and then we have rec recreation services library and so forth. I have two slides left and that's talking about the public safety tax initiative. We did bring this up, these exact slides to council on April 14th when we had the public safety annual update. Um, these are just here again for remind you know for the full comprehensive overview of the budget and if council has any questions on these slide just let me know. Again, we I mentioned about proceeds of debt on

the previous revenue slide. That was all related to this program. This these projects because the timing has slowed down on when we plan to accomplish all this. Um the revenues that are coming in are accumulating a balance that's being dedicated and tracked that will be applied in future years. So, we won't need to issue debt next year to fund the the projects yet. We'll keep monitoring it whether we will have to do that. Here's the current estimates for the capital portion of this public safety tax initiative. The total is 137.2 million. Um I just want to emphasize again these are estimates at this point. The in the process they're still scoping. Um construction contractors are getting onboarded. So these these will be revised closer as we move along.

Would if we have questions about this, would we rather hold it until we get into the police and fire department discussions or how would you like to handle this? E either way, I think we have um opportunity now or when police and fire are up talking. They have their capital plans on their slides at that point. So

you want to just go ahead now or do you want to wait? All right, I'll start. Um, so again, I always carry along with around with me the pitch that we gave to the voters in 2024. And we touched on this briefly, but I didn't want to get into this when we were doing the public safety review um study session at the last meeting. But, you know, I I get the point that the funds are coming in um faster, but I'm also seeing us slipping on the um original plan of the fiscal years that these projects are now going into. And so because we're slipping and we're sliding, um you know, yes, it's a good thing we don't have to borrow short-term um debt, but it also could potentially um impact with inflation the costs of these projects. And so I'm starting to see some of that creeping into your latest projections. If I compare um I'll just pick one from police and one for fire. Um, you know, originally we were talking the property evidence substation facility was um going to be 37.2 million. Now we're showing 48 million. That's significant. Um if I take a look at the um for fire, if I take a look at the um the new stations, the brand new two new stations, um those were originally forecasted to be a total of uh one was 13.3 and the other was 11 cuz one of them was bearing the design costs if I remember and now we're coming in at uh 15 and 17. Um so so my concern is you know we're going to

sunset this tax and and yet the costs are going up and I don't understand why is that because of inflation or not and if I then compare you know future projects on these same timets you have still have the original the original numbers if I look at station 71 and 75 5 and 74. Those are the original numbers that we gave to the public in 2024. And I have to ask myself, is this real? Will these really come in that far out in fiscal year 29, 30, and 31 at these same numbers? I don't think so. So, I really would love and I went into the whole um open gov system to see what's there and it's really hard to um get to these kind of answers of of kind of following through on what we promised the voters um a level of deep dive and reconciliation and making sure we were on track. So, so this is what I'm worried about because it doesn't give me a lot of confidence that the future fiscal years 28 through 34 are are real. Um, and if we don't borrow short-term debt and we don't have the money and we keep spending, you know, like the fire training tower came in two times more than two times than what we had budgeted for the whole project. Mhm.

So, these are the kind of things I just have trouble wrapping my mind around that I understand that we have confidence to give the voters what they expected when they were expecting it. Um, like the things we promised in the strategic plan with these new fire stations, we're already not going to have it built in the year we were anticipating it. So, how do I think about these things? I think you have uh valid points here. The what you did mention inflation that is a impact of these cost increases. Also when the plan was put together they were um you know trying to figure out a cost per square foot with the cost size of the buildings at the time and the plan has morphed um as you mentioned the property evidence facility. I'll leave some some of this discussion for the police and fire chief to talk about, but I'll just say that from the financial aspect of it, um I've studied the 10-year period which we intended to use for the capital mainly to make sure the capital projects are done. That analysis indicates we have sufficient adequate funding for this plan as it shows on the screen. Um, as last time I mentioned, one of the biggest differences is that our our operation side of the coin of this tax was um pretty significant because the facilities aren't ready. We haven't been staffing them and um filling the positions as we thought. So that frees up money to be used towards capital. um additional impact fees are coming in higher than we um had anticipated with the fact that the rates or the impact fee amounts increased and then because we are saving on interest costs that all adds to the equation. So um

from the the financial side of things we have adequate funding to to accomplish like u is on the screen. Um yeah,

on the expenditure side, it's just that it's getting more real, right? So instead of forecasting conceptual stations now, we're getting design plans, we're getting um quotes from engineers, we're getting real information going into especially the the next few years. Um and so we're starting to see um changes. For example, the property and events facility in substation was originally two buildings. Now we're talking about one building. Um, and that will help in terms of the there's a little bit of economy of scale there per unit. Um, but as we get the real numbers, we'll update those here. And then it probably does make sense to spend some time looking at the the outy years and trying to true those up with not only what the anticipated revenues will be, but also what we expect inflation to be, typically 3 to 5% per year. Um, and make sure that those are more more accurate. Okay.

I mean, honestly, the taxpayers salaries aren't going up 20 to 40%. And granted, we're generating more sales tax revenue, but I would like to see a much more um public focused and transparent message about what's going on here and how do we find our way to um you know, originally when we were out selling, we also said we absolutely will sunset the tax, you know, before by that December of 31. 35

35. Um but but if we could sunset it sooner, we will. And and if if our projects are going up 25 to double the estimate of the line item, I'm worried. And even though you're telling me don't be worried, I I can't reconcile what I'm seeing w with these reports versus what you might know that you're not worried. So that's my concern right now. And I just want to make sure that we're being fully transparent with the public based on what we we we all sold and we all committed to them that we were going to do these things and have the buildings. I mean, we've gotten emails from people. They're like, "When's when's the new building going up?" You know, I can't wait to see it. And I don't want to write to them and say, "It's going to be at least another year versus what we told you." So, these are things that are concerning. And I don't I need help through this budget process. Thank you for that feedback and I'm sure the uh police and fire presentations will further address that. I do have one more section. It's personnel. So as part of the budget process, the council adopts the authorized position list. So we give you um the proposal for next year and it's as follows. This on the slide are temporary conversions and reclassifications. These mean this means they're temporary is a is a uh classification used for a short period of time. Uh we've had some positions that have been filled for several years and are not officially on the roster. So there's been an effort to bring some of those forward to add to the roster. uh a reclassification means it's taking an additional a position that exists and then renaming reclassifying that

position. So one in finance, one conversion from temporary, there's two in dispatch or regional communications. Those are reclasses from public safety telecommunicator which uh are vacant positions. And then at the airport we have three temporary conversions and then we've eliminated one positions in facilities the total new positions. So these are totally new per se. Um there's six of them at the city court and they will be talking about that in their presentation. There's one for re recreation services trails and natural parklands technician one in transportation superintendent public works streets funding um and then the public safety tax initiative programmed increases in personnel are also on the screen there there's four police officers being added and the emergency manager which was addressed and how this compares as a trend um Here's a 20-year full-time equivalent um or the authorized position list equivalents. You can see the increase from '08 to 27. Um the total increase during that period of time was is 9%. Um I I like to track this as a FTE per thousand in population in the city. So if you look at what the population was in 2008, it was 40,041 people. So that gives um let's see why this where's my mouse

13 oh sorry 14.4 four FTEEs per thousand population in 2008 and in 27 it would be 13 FTE per thousand with the population estimate of um 48,200 roughly was the US census for 2024. This tells a story of where we were and where we're where we're at today. Um with the Great Recession, there was a lot of uh layoffs that had to happen. um it's slowly been increasing and this next slide will indicate which departments those positions were added to mainly. So the new position history over five years. This includes reorganizations. So it's not totally new. We had some divisions being moved around. So for example, community development in 2000 or 2026 budget had a reorganization that increased their count. So this is the change by department. You'll see the majority of them are in police and fire. Um as expected. Okay, that is the overview part of the budget workshop. I know that was a lot to go through and I went through it fast. If there's any questions now or um later, just let us know. we can address them at the next budget workshop or

any questions from city council. Okay, thank you very much Lars. Thank you. So now we jump into the department presentations and I still stand in front of you because now I put on my finance director hat as the should have given you.

I should have as the director of this great wonderful team that I have. So, our mission at budget finance is to efficiently and transparently manage city resources, ensure compliance with laws and policies, and provide accurate financial information to all customers. That's our mission. And up on the screen, you'll see our functional org chart. This is the services we provide. We're an internal service function mainly, but also we do have a external customer service component in our revenue services division. So we coordinate the budget each year. We present to you a balanced budget. Then we also do purchasing and accounts payable. We assist with procurement process, issue contracts. Um making sure that proper approval processes have taken place. In accounting and payroll, we process bi-weekly uh payroll. We keep city finances accurate and audit ready. And then like I mentioned our our external facing division is a revenue services with collections from uh our 27,000 utility accounts. We also do tax compliance programs in that division. And lastly, we manage the city's treasury and issue debt as needed. We are an award-winning um city with two documents that we produce and we send to the government finance officers association. So, our distinguished budget presentation award received the last one for fiscal year 26 for the 24th consecutive year. And then our annual comprehensive financial report, which is our audited financial report, received the certificate of achievement through the

GFOA for the 43rd consecutive year. So, I'm very proud of the work we all do collectively as a city. Now into the numbers. There are certain departments in the general fund that are cost recovered. They they are city council, city clerk, city manager, legal, budget and finance, information technology and human resources. So when you see on this slide how that funding is distributed, it's across the city with only 33% of it remaining in the general fund. Our department's proposed budget for next year is $3,463,883. The largest increase is under other services and charges. So I wanted to explain that we are um adjusting or council approved in adding the operating component of open gov. So, we're adjusting our budget to pay for that contract. So, OpenGV software is the largest increase at about $80,000. The other component is our audit is paid for out of this budget. Um, that's going up by $10,000 next year with our audit external audit firm. And lastly, we're excited to include in our budget a IVR system. It's through utility billing. We're implementing proposing to implement the ability for customers to call an automated number to make payments over the phone. So, we're adding that into our budget as well. Uh some of that will be cost recovered through charges that um the customer

will pay. when they select that service particular particularly. Okay. So here's the authorized position roster for our department. We are as I mentioned previously adding in the proposal one additional position that we had been using on a temporary basis. We want to make this permanent and that's the accounting technician line. All of these positions are filled as of today. I'd like to introduce to you our new deputy finance director. She's in the audience, Emily Shai. So, she has come to us from town of PAC and we're happy to have her join join the team. We're now fully staffed. And that would be all I have for my department presentation. I'd like to pass it on to the next department unless you had any questions for me. Any questions? Okay. Thank you.

All right, city clerk.

Um, I don't have much of a presentation. Um, what you see before you is what my office of three handles every day. Um the only change in the department budget this year um was a request for an increase in funding for elections. Um I've worked over the last several years to actually um decrease the department budget, but with the additional elections that we've been having, um I just didn't have enough to move funds around, take away from training for my staff. Um, so we did request an increase um and pending adoption of the budget that will be approved so that we can continue to um work with the county and pay for elections. So I'm happy to answer any questions that you all may have.

Lois, thank you. Um, so the increase in elections, I had made that assumption as I was doing the pre-work. Um, is this because this year we're doing both a fall and then next in 27 a summer election?

So, a normal budget cycle for my department is allocating for a primary and a general election. However, that falls within the fiscal year. So, um, that's what we've always budgeted for because that's generally what we've had. Um there is no allocated budget for a special election in November of 2026 because it's not a city of Prescuit election year. So um the council approved uh thus far two ballot measures um for charter amendments that will be on that uh ballot and so we had to increase funding to cover the cost of that election. And because it's a bigger election, is that is the cost for that is it proportional or is it the same?

We our agreement with the county is that we pay per registered voter. That fee does not change um whether there are more items on the ballot or not. It's a per voter fee. Lois, do you have more questions? Ted, uh, have you or do you intend to hire any more people?

I have not put in any requests for additional positions. Um, we are we are

it's the same. I decreased our staff uh about four years ago. Um, we used to have five people in the city clerk department. Um, and I I felt that that was an exorbitant amount of staff for the the workload that we had. Um, I have a tremendous staff and I'm very proud of the work that we do every day. We're very busy. Um, but I would rather spend portions of my budget on continuing education and training opportunities for myself and the staff that I have and on expenses that serve our community because we're able to balance our our workload. Um, in the future, if our records request numbers continue to go up the way they are, I might need um at least a part-time position, but I'm not requesting that this budget cycle.

You do have great staff, and the only reason I asked that is if my calculations right, that's a pay increase of 6.7% and police are going to come up and ask for 6.2. too. So, I go back to my point. You're not asking for enough. Okay. So, moving into city manager um budget. Um two different functions here, administrative and communications. Um if we can go to the the budget, Lars. Yep.

Very good. So, a couple of things to note here. One is the change in in staffing over time as we've added the communications u position that wasn't previously in the city manager's office and then in the other services and charges. So, uh we've been doing uh some advocacy work um and lobbying work at the state level over the last year. Well, even before that, but but really gotten serious with State 48 over the last year or so. Um, as we look to the future and the potential need for federal advocacy, uh, and trying to split that cost between the city manager budget and the city council budget. Um, we moved the state advocacy from the council budget to the manager's budget and put the federal advocacy in the council budget. Now, those could go in either place. It's just an attempt to to share that cost between those budgets. Um, and and that's the primary sort of change here. And then there's uh just a couple other things to note. One is uh money for improved communications, including updating the website, which I think is important. And uh and then the renewed uh survey is here as well, so we can do that community survey again. So happy to answer any questions on that budget.

Mr. Gambboji, oh your sal if you go salaries went down. How could you how do you explain that

over the full period? Salaries went up in this last year. Um we had the the initial switch to the communications position. We had a couple of temp projects with interns and I don't know if there's anything else there Lars but but overall we're we're still moving up. You see in the salary line it's just the additional communications position from 24 to today.

Right. But I think that's exactly right that we had the economic development director partially paid up for auto communications and so that's where the 26 projected amount is higher and it's reducing next year because of that moving fully to um to the economic development department. Right,

Louisis. Thank you. Um, Don, I haven't been here too long, only two and a half years up here, but I remember rolling out a new website in my two and a half years. And um, and we were all super excited about it and the public input was great and um, and now here we are talking about rolling out a new website. So, I know that it was difficult for staff to handle changes they wanted to make. Um, tickets, more tickets, all that kind of stuff. So, what are we what are we trying to accomplish by paying for a new website? What capability are we going to get? What responsiveness improvements are we going to get, etc., etc.?

Yeah, I think there's several things. First of all, the the searchability of the site. One of the problems um that I see is that it's it's essentially on a blog format even though it's a website. And that creates some challenges in terms of of searchability and folks ability to find things on the website. And then functionality on the back end. Currently, most staff have to um ask it to make changes for them. And that means, you know, there's a kind of a there can be backups in um in how long it takes things to happen. Um I'd love the ability for each department to get in, change their information, and keep moving. Um so, it's that kind of thing. I don't think we're talking about a dramatically different look necessarily or things like that. But there are so many uh firms in this space um that that do this work. I don't think we need to spend a lot of money to um to get onto one of those uh sort of templates with with a unique Prescuit look have the access on the back end that we need and the functionality on the site as a whole that we need um and make it more accessible um for the public. I will say that I have found myself that when I want to find something on the city's website, I will go to Google and I will search for it on the website. And that's that's not right. Uh we need to have better ability for the public to find what they're looking for on our website.

Yeah. I I just want to add um thank you for responding to public input because we've had uh a lot of public input saying that our website is uh very difficult and not very userfriendly and I have uh found that myself. So, uh, it's, uh, hard to admit, but we're going to have to go back and fix it. And hopefully then we can move on and have a much better, improved website. About how much additional are we going to be spending to do this?

Um, I haven't seen any quotes yet. Um, but I will say I was part of a website redesign um, trying to remember which year, but maybe three or four years ago, and at the time it was like 12 to 15,000 is in that ballpark. Okay, thank you, Lois.

Um, Don, another question on um on communications um and being able to uh get our messaging out to the public. Is the communications budget that we pay for to run commercials or ads, is that in your budget? Is that where it's sitting now or is that somewhere else?

So, there's three separate um currently there's multiple firms doing communication work for multiple departments and and some of it does lie in this communications budget. Some of it's economic development or tourism. And one of the things that is interesting is exploring the idea of just using the same firm uh to do different to do communications and help us with um marketing even though it's serving different um different departments but yeah some of that is in the communications budget

because one of the things I would like to consider as I don't know a new council policy or something in this space is that if we are spending money um uh newspaper ads, radio ads, etc. Um that we spend money with outlets that also give us a chance to give our message. Um right now we're advertising on in formats that literally um won't invite us to come on, won't give us a show, won't allow us to correct the record, and even when we ask, it has not happened. And so that's one of the things, you know, I would like to think about and work on a policy that if we're going to sign a contract for advertising, we should be able to elected officials, staff, etc., we should be able to go on the outlet and tell our side of the story or to refute mistruths that are being shared. What would you think about that? And

it's called equal time. Equal time. Whatever you want to call it. Yeah. Um, what would you think about pursuing a policy in that regard?

I think from a business perspective, it makes a lot of sense. There are cases where uh state law requires ads in certain places. Uh, for example, public notices um have to go in the newspaper. And I don't know if Joe's Joe has any other thoughts about that, but certainly the city can decide where it where it advertises. And uh and obviously when we're when we're looking at where we advertise, one of the most important things we try to focus on is like what's the actual reach and what data do we have about the reach of an entity. Um but certainly another another criteria might be um our ability to share our message or the the um the I guess the general relationship or attitude towards the city. I like the carrot and stick approach. You know, we have a contract, we're paying you x amount of money for advertising, and then it kind of is becomes uh neutralized by the content of the station. So, we're just basically wasting our money and we should be able to say, "Okay, we're just going to terminate that contract and reward stations that let us get our message out and give them the advertising or whatever forms of media are out there because we seem to be shooting ourselves in the foot as it is now."

Sure. Okay, Patrick. Yeah, I'm still having a little problem. Um, so what is the what fully accounts for the increase from 234 794 to 37 375,000, right? The majority of that is the additional lobbying contract. Okay. And I guess I thought one of the lobbying pieces was being put in the city council budget.

Yeah. So the federal contract is in the city council budget. The state lobbying contract we put into this budget. Um and that's I forget if it's 100 or 110. It's right in that ballpark. And that's the majority of that. And then the rest is the the website and the other things. Is there a way that we can get a more detailed description? Is that too early in the process for what accounts for the 375? Yeah, we can do that. Okay. Thanks. Absolutely.

Okay. So, looking at the city council budget, again, the the main issue here is the addition of the uh the federal um contract um on the lobbying. And then on the on the salaries, the executive assistant that serves the mayor and council was previously paid with uh from multiple departments. And here um it is moved entirely into the city council budget. And those are the only changes here. So um I'm go ahead Patrick.

So again uh what what's the breakdown of the two and a quarter for other services and charges? Mhm. Yeah. And we can break that down. the the majority about a 135 of that is the uh federal lobbying contract budget. Um again, we took out the state contract and added the federal so that you only see the delta between the 26 and 27, but if you wanted to see a breakdown of everything in that line, we could certainly do that.

Thank you. Um, was can we go back Dalon? I just wanted to make the point that we are going to get our own full-time dedicated executive assistant and I think that's been long overdue. So, I uh just want to say thank you very much. That's someone. We need someone full-time dedicated to help us with our appointments, get us where we need to be, and carry on uh other other activities to make us more uh more, shall I say, uh competent, useful, and uh able to carry out the voters's wishes. So, thank you. That's that's one of our expenses. Very good. We've heard that and um are responsive here in the budget. Okay. Now, the um economic development and tourism. Again, a few things here um that are that are exciting. Again, as I mentioned before, the main the core elements of economic development are the business retention expansion, which is helping our our current businesses succeed, and that is the the area where we're most likely to see um economic improvement, economic growth. And then there's the the attraction. Um and then in Prescuit, we also spend um a lot of time focusing on our tourism because of how important that is to us. So, a few things here. Um, I mean, this is just kind of a list of services, but if we look at the budget, we've got the the focus now full-time

economic development director. Last year, we added the economic development manager. So, you see that here. Um, there we go. This is helpful. And then we have our tourism manager and our tourism coordinator, the administrative specialist um was the portion a portion of the position in the city council's office. So, we've moved that into the council's office full-time and then there were some um temporary uh there was a temporary position um that were able to move into some uh actual programmatic funds. So, we'll look at look at all of those here really quick. Um, back to sort of the main budget. Um, and and again, most of this is pretty pretty static. Not a lot of new, but but new in the sense of initiatives. So, for example, the retail locating that we talked about earlier and the ability to um try to get some help both with infill um and especially with infill and with new um new development of retail mostly in North Prescuit. Another major I think effort coming out of economic development is the Bizlink um program. this ability to to reach out and and offer a hand to existing businesses, helping them to get through city processes um and really just trying to hear from them and help them be successful with the businesses they're trying to run. Um a great service and and an effort from um our economic development team. Um the next slide here is very small. Um we're sorry about that. This is the the transient occupancy tax. You may see it better behind you than you see it in front of you.

And a lot the same here. But let me touch on a few things. Um so the the open space management you see moving from um expenditures down to that second section um transfers and recreation support. um where where it goes. There's an increase here for downtown beautifification. That's, you know, trash collection and clean up around the square in particular. Um that contract is now being done in partnership with the county. So, we're grateful for their support. And then the marketing and promotion, which is really the the funds to advertise and to try to get folks um to come to Prescuit. and we have additional funds there because of the reduction of the temporary staffing. And then we've adjusted some of the the allocations anticipated for the different um major events based on the um the special event policy that is is not yet final, but that we've talked about a few times. So, it gives us kind of a ballpark of where we'll be there. And I think those are the major changes here. Even with the special that special events policy, um the TAC grants and the role of the TAC will will continue to be the same, right? They have a uh they have a lot of positive input that's really helpful um to tourism and we're excited to see them be successful. And so those allocations stay the same. It's only the uh the special event the larger events under the policy that would that would be amended.

Lois, do you have a comment?

Yes. Yes, I do. Um, you know, I looked at in the more detailed information package that we also got. I looked at all the different fiscal year objectives and the only thing since we're sitting here looking at the transit occupancy tax um that I know um the tourism advisory committee would also like to do is we have finished our five-year strategic plan and I think with a new economic development director coming in it's the perfect fiscal year to renew a five-year plan. Um, and one of the items that they have been kicking around in the past, um, and we'll see if the new economic development director feels the same way is, um, you know, taking a look at our our bed tax rates. I know that's something that would have to go to the voters to approve. Um, but I just want to be open to, you know, we're we're looking at, you know, new big events coming in. We have constantly small groups that want some TAC grants. And so, you know, we're we're cutting in this year, I'm seeing in the proposed budget, you're cutting the ending fund balance um down to $355,000. And if we were to have a, you know, another economic downturn like we saw in ' 08 through 10, you know, we we wouldn't have the money to be able to to live up to expectations. So, I'm just I just want to plant that seed out there. Um to add that to the objectives is we do need to have TAC and the department work together to renew our five-year strategic plan.

Yeah, I think that's great. And on the um the the tax rate, uh the legislature has continued to talk each year about business improvement district or tourism improvement district possibilities in municipalities. That's a really interesting possibility because in instead of a voter approval, it would be basically hotel year approval. Um so those who are collecting the tax would be the ones approving it. um and then they would choose the amount and have some ability to fluctuate it. Um but that comes back into this into this tourism fund and um into advocating for and advertising for um traffic for their businesses, right? So and amenities for their businesses. So uh it's a it's a really interesting possibility, but but either way, the opportunity to look at revenue source and uh and strategic plan moving forward is is a great idea. Patrick.

Yes, thank you. The um so the tourism office itself had admin at 600,000. So how many personnel the tourism manager and tourism coordinator? Yeah, two personnel. And what else is in that line, Lars? There's there's supplies and services as well in there. It's not all personnel, but um we could get that breakdown for you. Thank you.

All right. Good afternoon again, Mayor Mayor Prom City Council. Brandon Nunes, HR director. I'm going to talk a little bit about our department. Uh we are this is the people department. Uh the services that the HR department provides. Um what we try to do from a um from a mission, vision and organizational goals standpoint is align our practices and programs with with what the organization decides is our organizational goals. So some of the things that we do uh we we do uh talent acquisition uh learning and development falls in HR employee relations performance management total comp rewards and recognition HR technology HR compliance employee comm communications and HR administration um in terms of the budget um we uh primarily fall under the general fund if you want to go to the next slide here the so the changes uh upcoming next year um you can see budget to budget a little bit of increases in and our salaries, our supplies remain the same. Um, internal charges remain approximately the same. The other service and charge that we are looking for that would be an increase is a classification compensation study. Uh, we're budging that for $150,000. There's m multiple reasons why we believe we're due for a class and comp study. Uh, so when you're speaking to the public or your constituents, I I'll tell you why right now. So the fir the first reason is our our current class and comp system was implemented on July 20 July 1st of 2021. The data collected during that was during the pandemic that that so that data is now 6 years old. A lot has changed in the uh in the uh employment market and the classification and compensation world since the pandemic. As you could imagine the typical life cycle for a class and comp system is is about 5 years. So if we win another year, we're going to be very aged out. Uh so that's that's the first reason I I would ask that we need a new study. The second is to be regionally comp

competitive. Uh currently our class and comp system is the oldest in the region. Our our neighboring town will be implementing a a new class and comp study after this budget year. They're currently doing their their study right now. U same thing with the county. They're I believe their class and comp systems from 2023. So right now we have the the oldest system in the in the region. There's also internal u internal practices that are signals for us that we that it's time for a study. One would be the demand for recclasses. We get a lot of reclass requests throughout the year um through through HR budget in the city manager's office. That's usually an indicator that we've had people in a system for for a very long amount of time which is a great thing. We love that. We love that we can hire people and develop them and nourish them. But what happens is when you retain people for a while and they acquire a lot of knowledge, skills and abilities is we get them more work. So over the course of five or 6 years, they they've they've started to grow their roles and responsibilities and uh we we need to evaluate their their u their job description and competitive pay. So that's that's the biggest uh service in charge right there. And I'm sure I'm going to get questions about that. So I'll pause right there. Patrick, Mary. Okay. Well, I guess we're fine. Jim,

cool. All right. In terms of positions, there there's seven of us. Uh we have director manager, two senior level positions, two HR business partners, and an HR support specialist. We call ourselves business partners because we like to believe that we work alongside everybody and that's why the shift is a an um away from a HR generalist or a representative to a business partner. I've been HR 20 years so I've been called a lot of different things you could imagine. All right. So there's seven of us. There's no change over the past couple years. All right. Any other questions for HR? Sounds pretty good. Thank you.

All right. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mayor Mayor Prom Council. I'm Nate Keegan, the IT director. It is one of those things that's everywhere, but it's not noticeable generally. So, if things are going well, it's like you don't have it. If things go off the rails, you can't have enough it. So, it's a weird paradox to live in. Uh, yeah, it is an internal service fund. So, we're cost recovered across the organization as you can see on the uh pie chart. Not a ton of changes for the upcoming fiscal year. There are some things that moved around in terms of software where we worked with finance about should IT pay for say Microsoft 365 for the organization versus individual departments paying for it. Same money, same outcome. Which piggy bank does that go to is what you're seeing here. Different changes there. Uh there's currently 19 of us. No, there is a slight change for the upcoming fiscal year. Uh we did an IT staffing study in the current fiscal year and that that came back with several recommendations but two of those recommendations we're looking to implement for the upcoming fiscal year for Prescat Regional Communication Center. One of those would be a CAD administrator position which would report to PRCC and one of those would be a U data analyst dedicated to the 18 uh member agencies of PRCC which currently IT provides the technical support for. So that's if you see a change, it's not shown in the numbers here, but it is a change for the upcoming fiscal year of two positions, one to IT, one to PRCC, but to support their mission on the

technical side of the world. And those two positions are listed under regional communications. Um, that's where the funding is coming from. People forget that you're a 247 on call operation. And it's not just 9 to5 to keep things running around here. Yeah, it'd be nice if that was the case, but it never stops. Never sleeps, never stops. And uh we're uh up and running now. We can work uh remotely now if we need to. Yep. Yes, ma'am. Okay. Thank you. Yep. Uh Jim,

so I'm looking at your expenditures for supplies and I notice they vary quite a bit from on an every other year basis. Is there a reason for that?

It looks like it's every other year here, but that's not the normal pattern. So we'll have one-time projects, say uh like we're replacing Windows 10 PCs with Windows 11 PCs. That might be a year-long project. In this case, we split it over two years. So, you might see some fluctuation there depending on the projects going on, but it's not a a tick- tock type thing. Not the, you know, the thing teenagers are into like a up down up down kind of cadence. It's more depends on projects in the pipeline. It you always have to unexpect the unexpected. So, we try to plan ahead and be proactive. But that that's why you see variance there. It has to do with large projects that are generally one time, do them, move on to the next thing. Okay, Patrick.

Uh, building on that, can you provide a little more definition on why there's a $500,000 increase for supplies?

Yeah, it has to do with the projects that are loaded into the budget. So, those are going to be things that aren't there's some increases for like operational things like um PCs. Cost of PCs has gone up, the cost of memory gone up. So, there's an inflationary element there this year for sure. Uh, shortages of hard drives, memories. But even even if that weren't the case, year-over-year, you might have uh we have to phase out Windows 10 to Windows 11 or Windows 11 to Windows 12 or we may have to replace hardware like firewalls that you do every 5 to 7 years. We know it's going to happen. They show up, but they're not a year-over-year growth on top of growth on top of growth to no end in sight, and then we're out doing car washes and bake sales to figure out how the heck we're going to pay for it kind of a thing, if that makes sense. So, this specifically, we can get you an explicit breakdown of what it is, the difference, but generally they're characterized as year-over-year changes in either accounting with finance, who pays for what, things departments might be doing, and then variability in the cost of whatever those widgets are. Plus, you're you're dealing with built-in obsolescence, I've noticed, with technology.

I don't love it. Uh, it's extremely wasteful. You can see that a lot in the national discourse about data centers and the amount of electricity and power and resources those consumed. The flip side of it is if you brought a time machine went way 25 years ago or 28 years ago when I started and you brought someone from the past here, they would know people, they would see technology, but their minds would be blown about the complexity of the sophistication of the things that not so long ago would be considered science fictionesque are going on. So the technical debt of that is that you have to have things and those things depreciate tremendously at the physical level. We've done some things internally for example like network equipment. We have 55 sites. We have another 125 skated sites. So my math UFA education it's 170 sites. If I buy a3 to $4,000 piece of gear that I need for every single one of those sites to maintain it, that's a lot of money. In three to four years, if I brought all that equipment in here and stacked it up on pallets, I would be lucky to get peanuts for that equipment. It's a huge depreciation. It's an unfortunate part of technology. So, what we try to do is not fall behind. So, you have to spend a tunch a bunch of money to try to catch up. But we certainly don't want to spend at the bleeding edge because that's what it is, the bleeding edge. You're paying a lot of money for unproven technology and you end up with the beta max of technology. It's a dated reference, but you decided everybody's going to go right. It turns out the industry goes left and you're sit stuck holding a bunch of expensive door stops when you're done. We know technology is not the reason why

it is not the reason why the city turns on the lights each morning, each day. But everywhere you go in the city, you're going to find it stuff. So we try to find a good balance between too much, whatever that might be, too little, and then balancing that across all the organizational businesses. So some of the projects in here are things like um installing fiber to certain locations particularly with respect to utilities so we can get faster um I guess eyes on on what's happening with some of our utilities um cyber security licenses uh replacement of a radio tower um that we need um for for our radios um and then various other um software and services that we can we could itemize if that's helpful.

Yeah. A large amount of your uh work is uh related to police and fire. Absolutely. Was that the new uh public safety tower on uh Indian Hill? I saw a new one go up there. No, this one will be a replacement up behind the high school which we call Mingus Reservoir. It's off uh Okay. North Side Drive in Douglas there. Okay. All righty. Jim, one uh final one. Why in the heck did we all have to change our passwords about three weeks ago? I'm not aware that we all That's not Nate's fault. Uh-oh.

It was a It was a system update in Civic Clerk, which is our agenda management platform, and it required all users to update their passwords. It happened to be on a special meeting day for you all. So, so we got to do it. Okay. Any more questions? Thank you. All righty. Thank you, Nate. Good job.

Good afternoon. My name is Patrick Gan. I'm the city judge. Our the service that we provide is to ensure you can't hear me. Is that better? The microphone.

Is that better? Sorry about that. I'm Patrick Gan, city judge. Our job is to provide swift and fair justice for everybody who comes to the Prescuit City Court. We have literally thousands of filings a year. And the idea is to make every person feel like their case is individual because to them it's their only case. Um and that's how they need to feel. As you know, the court's having a lot of growing pains this year. We've been kicked out of our home. Um that actually has been extended by the county till the end of December. Um but we have to have our home by then. We are running this year 11,000 filings. That is double for the last four to five years. Um there's a couple of things I think that are factors in this. One is the growth of the Quad Cities area. Prescuit itself has not grown, but the Quad Cities have. The other issue is the number of police officers. You see that there were 34 trying to add, we're 23 down still. They write tickets. They investigate cases. Those cases come into the court. Um we anticipate to have 12,500 terminations this fiscal year. For the first time in about five, six years, we're ahead of the filings. Um, not sure how long that's going to last though because we're really short of personnel. We've had to pull since I started we before the courts were deconsolidated, we've actually had to pull from the county to meet the mission to open court that day and get things done. Right now, we have somebody on maternity leave. We had a couple people get sick. Our court administrator was answering the phones. Everybody else was in the courtroom. Um, so that's why that you'll see the number of new positions that we're asking for. I had originally asked for four clerks. We settled on two because that's the only we only have room for two right now till we move to the new facility.

Can you give us uh some examples of the types of cases you handle, felonies, misdemeanors?

Limited. We're limited jurisdiction court. So, we're doing all misdemeanors. That means basically DUIs, domestic violence, city code violations, civil traffic, parking. Um those are all the types of cases that come into the court. Um some of them are are state statute. Um that's the 13, that's the criminal code, 28's the traffic code, and then of course the Prescuit city code. Um those all get cited into our court. Um the prosecutor's office, you'll hear from the city attorney, they're looking to add a prosecutor this year. Um, that's good because as we're moving these cases right now, even though we've we are closed more cases than have opened, we are still having to set out at least 90 days for a jury trial. That doesn't meet the time standards of the Arizona Supreme Court. Um, cases have to be done within a certain number of days. Our time standards are far out. They've improved 100%. In the last u eight months, they're still far out. So, we need people. Um, this year you'll see that we added the city judge. Until this it was a part-time position. I'm now full-time. Uh, we need a full-time court administrator. Under the IGA, we were paying 40% for the current consolidated court administrator. We need our own. Um, and then we're adding two clerks. And the reason there's three security officers is in there would basically be two security officers uh, and one baleiff. Baoiff is typically in the courtroom court and they could help back up court security. Court security. The reason there's two is so that if something happens, there's a backup plus AOC requirement so that they have to walk the building every hour. Um, we're looking at including that in the budget right now. If necessary, we may later, um, as I talked to the city manager, we may consider hiring a security firm, but if they can use it for recruiting for police, you know, either one way, phase in or phase out, that'll be helpful for them.

Madame Mayor. Yes, Ted. Judge, with all due respect, you have a PowerPoint presentation here and it would be helpful if you could kind of go through the PowerPoint and most importantly, we want to take a look at the all these costs.

Sure. So, the salaries and benefits, that's the additional employees that we're adding, the court administrator, three security, and two clerks. Uh the reason the supplies are tripling is our IT needs are through the AOC. Our terminals are leased. Uh it runs about $1,000 a terminal. So every person has a terminal and if they have one in their office and one in the courtroom, that's a double cost. We investigated whether or not it was better to use the the city's IT department, but the fee to connect to Ajax, which is the state case management system, it's about a $50 difference. Um, how many employees do you have?

Right now we have eight and we're going to we're asking to go to 14 and it's $1,000 per terminal. Correct. So that's 8,000. You got 30,000 in there.

Correct. But you have to have one in the courtroom, not just at the desk. Also, the uh security people need one, you know, out outside. And so that's where you end up with duplicate. Plus the term, it's not just the terminal. Every printer that connects has a similar fee. It's about $1,000 per printer. Um, that's for the operating. That's why that's such a significant increase. And of course, the capital outlay, that's the build out of the new courthouse. How many square feet did you have when you were at the the courthouse here?

We have less than a thousand. And how many do you have at the proposed new site? It's 7,800. And the goal there is to have a full-size courtroom and a smaller what we're calling hearing room. The reason it's a hearing room is it won't have a jury box. Uh when we talked to the architect, we discussed the fact that make it later on if we could put one in there. The reason for that is and included in the budget in terms of some of the other fees is to have a prom judge at least a couple of days a week to help clear the backlog of cases. So were when you're in the courthouse you had 1,000 square feet. You used the courtroom of the courthouse. So it's a thousand plus the courtroom. You didn't have your own courtroom, did you?

Yes. We we are in the overflow courtroom of Superior Court. So you did all this with a thousand square feet.

Correct. I'm really having a struggle how you have to increase it by seven times pushing eight times. Help me understand that it's the number of cases that we're handling. We're running the court all day long, 5 days a week. The employees literally when they leave to try and catch up, they're out of the courtroom trying to catch up on their work. They're working non-stop and we're still falling behind. So to alleviate that, we need more people. More people require more space. The idea would be to have two courtrooms so that we could have we could have one doing just trials at least two or three days a week. That's the only way we're ever going to get back within time standards. Uh Lois. Okay. So this is a a huge increase versus what we're used to seeing.

Yes, ma'am. Um and so the question is is because I don't know courts like you know courts all over the state. So help me understand how do we increase um income revenue?

Well, one of the things and it's most important to remember I actually was at a meeting this morning with the Supreme Court talking about this is and I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news but I think you all know this. Courts are a losing proposition for any entity. We don't make money, we cost you money. Um, that's the way it is across the state. Um, and if you are concerned about why that is, I'd suggest reading the Ferguson study where police chief was actually setting the fines in that case. Um, and it created a lot of issues for the DOJ. One of the ways we've increased revenues, of course, is we have the um civil docketing fee, which was $45 per case for every civil matter. The issue with that is on top of that, you have the sir charges. So, it wasn't as in the presentation we did in January, it wasn't just $45 that got added onto somebody's ticket. It's $80.55. So, that's one way. Um, also, certain cases would not have captured that fee. For instance, if somebody chooses to go to defensive driving school, that's a diversion. They don't ever pay the civil docketing fee because there's no finding of responsibility. So, what I did was I increased our defensive driving by $45 to capture that. Um it put us a little bit higher than the other people in the county. Um we're not the highest in the state, but the idea was to make it equal for everybody. Um other things in terms of revenue, we've also gone back. I'm looking at the city code right now as a result of the civil docketing fee. The city code actually lists certain offenses have mandatory minimums. The last time that was reviewed that we can find was probably 2018, more likely 2013. I'll give you an example. Some of the things say it's a $20 minimum fee. In 2018, the search charges were 82%. They reduced it to 79% but they added additional assessments. The additional assessments worth $30. Well, the way the system works is the state because it's their computer, they make sure they get their fees. Their percentage comes off the top. If you go

down and look at a receipt, the $20 minimum fee we're supposed to get by city code, we were collecting $11.70. that's no longer the case. Um, as of May 1st, it's been published on our website. It's what it says in city code. We didn't increase them. It's what the code says. So, that's one way that we've increased it. The other thing that we found is when we went through the budget is there were some fees, some revenue that was not being captured. It was actually being attributed to the police department as opposed to the court. How much did we decide that was, Lars? About 300,000. I think it was about 300,000. So, is there more places we could be recovering some costs? I understand this is a losing proposition.

Well, we Yes, ma'am. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to No, that's okay. But I want to see where else can we think about

We we do uh try and also get back public defender fees. Um when we have people fill out a financial statement, we can charge them. You know, there's typically a minimum of $25, but that's adjustable because we do pay our public defenders by the hour. There's currently a statewide examination of public defenders and their contracts and how they're compensated. So, we have been charging those. Just so that you know, like everything else with the state, there's currently a bill pending before the legislature that would eliminate our ability to capture any of those fees, including our civil docket fee. Um, we'll see what happens. So, where we have um I I have the uh the posting of the fee schedule that is and I was glad to see you have some fees there. Um and I'm wondering if it's possible like some of the other departments added the CPI of you know another 1.2% which adds a dollar here and a dollar there. Um is that possible on your fees? It

it is but you have to remember that only certain fees come to the city. So, like the civil docketing fee comes directly to the city, parking fees come directly to the city, which is why I made that a priority to adjust those immediately to what they were in city code. Some of the other fees, this the big portion goes to the state. And remember, on everything there's a 79% search charge. So, if it's a $100, let's just make it $200, we double it. Well, it doesn't become $200. It becomes $360 because of the fact that you have to collect the search charges. And those fees don't come directly back to the city. We get a portion, but we don't get them all. Patrick,

yes. Thank you. Um, well, I'll ask the the most recent point you made about $79 charge. What is that?

79%. Um, 79%. It's a fee imposed by the legislature for different services. Part of it was for prosecutor training. Then it became defense attorney training. At some at one point it had risen as high as 82%. In 2018 the legislature adjusted that and said we have too many fees. So they knocked them back down to 79%. There's a victim's rights fee. There's some other percentage that go in there. What then happened is from 2018 to today, every time the legislature was a session, they added a new assessment. There's one for public safety for police officer equipment. It's like $4. Um they added some additional victim information. That's $9. And so what happens is on a parking there's $30 of statutory assessments. That money goes to the state. Um on a criminal case with the new first responder fee, there's $70 of assessments. That's on top of the 79%. So if it's a $100 fine, 79% sir charge and $70 of assessments, you're now at $250. Oh, and then we have our city court assessment, which is 134. So now we're at like 415 because on the city court assessment we get $75. 79% goes to the state. We have to collect that because it's a fee on every case.

So um another question when we recently I guess due to the county moved this function to the city directly. Um, I mean at one point the budget was under a million dollars. Now it's almost $4 million. I can you Well, correct. Cuz part of it convincing me why that's a good

part of it is is the capital outlay for the new courthouse. That's the 1.7 almost 1.675. That's the new courthouse. And then on the new courthouse, we have to pay rent. And we are now going to be in all the different funds. So we have to pay that. And then we're asking to increase the number of employees to almost double the size. We were paying the court administrator 40% under the IGA and a bail of 50%. So you can deduct that off of it, but it's not that big a savings. And where the numbers come from in terms of the people that I've asked for in clerks is looking at the filings. If you there's actually a state website um through the AOC that has all the statistics. It's called a dashboard throughout the state and you can see how many filings. Most of Yavapai County is running about 800 6 to 800 filings per clerk. We're at about 1,500 and it would be even higher if unless we get more clerks because our filings are up. We're probably going to surpass Flag Staff by the end of this fiscal year for our filings.

Let me ask you this. Um, do you get a lot of repeat offenders that just keep coming back over and over and over, revolving door and just tying up your resources?

You we have, you know, we we do have some um what's interesting is that because of everything that's happening, let me just I'm going to I hate to say this. I feel like I'm going to live and die on the hill of parking. Um when they started bringing me all the parking violations for people who had mailed in their checks because of the issue with the civil docketing fee, 90 to 95% of those people getting parking tickets are represcuit residents. They were not tourists. They were people who live here regularly who are not obeying the signs. And many of them, I have to tell you, I've heard them at the front counter as I walk by. Well, it's only $33. And so that's why we keep having these filings again and again and again. Well, that 133 now that the new civil docking fee has gone out as of May 1st is 128 some cents. So about 129. Hopefully that'll make people think twice. Um we do have some people who have 5 10 15 20 cases. Um, since I've been there, we've we put a stop to that because my view is if you've committed three or four offenses, if we release you and you go commit another, probably need to stay in custody for a while um till we can resolve the matters. Well, and we found we've had some cases that have been around for 3, four, 5 years that we finally resolved. Um, we had one individual who had 18 open cases. that that's very difficult for staff because that literally takes a clerk an hour to two hours to close those 18 files whereas normally they're at you know one file every 5 minutes. So it is a significant use of resources.

So why are you so busy in a senior resort retirement community?

I think I think it's the growth of the Quad Cities area. It's the growth of the police department. It's the number of filings that we're having. Um, also please remember that we have people who come while we do have elderly retired residents, very often they have children who come back and live with them because of other substance abuse issues or, you know, emotional or or mental issues who come back to reside with the parents. Otherwise, they're homeless. And, you know, nobody wants to see their child homeless. Well, that can end up using resources because if they're using or if there's an argument, the police get called. Many times it's not even the parent who's calling. It may be a neighbor. Um, and that does there's a lot of that that comes from domestic violence. Those types of things do come into the community.

Plus, we also have our veterans court. Um, we're getting because we have the veterans, we have a lot of resources with that and that's restarted again and we actually had graduated all but three and I think we're up to 13 again now. They just um because we have a lot of folks who can use those. Mr. Gambboji, did you have a comment? I sure do. If I knew we were going to go down rabbit holes like this, I would have brought my beagle to the chambers. I want to talk about the money that you have up here.

Uh you you're talking about a total expenditure is uh to Councilman Grady's point, is almost four times what we're spending now. You're going into a facility that is almost eight times more than what you have now. and we're renting it. Now, how much money are you spending, plan to spend on this 7,800 square foot property to make it fit your needs? That's the 1.675. Okay. And who gets to keep the 1.675 if you decide a year from now we're going somewhere else?

Well, first of all, I would not be the one to decide that. That would have to be council. Second of all, we have a five-year lease with a renewal. This is not a building that we will be in for one year or two years. The idea is that hopefully we'll be in this building for 5, 15, 20, and that within 2 or 3 years, we can actually purchase it. Who owns the capital improvements you're suggesting here? Well, the city does because out of the capital improvements, some of those things are not permanent improvements. For instance, the connected at the end of five years, the leash is up and for some reason we decide to walk out. Where is that $1.6 million? Who keeps it?

Well, it depends on what the items are. If it's a connected courtroom, we unplug it and take it with us. I'm really struggling with this budget. Mr. Garing, uh, Judge, how how are you coming on the new remodel? What's your status? We met with the architect last Friday uh in terms of get trying to get a floor plan so that we'll have the buildout costs. Um Tim Leggler with facilities is here if you have specific questions for that. Thank you. And Lois,

so I'm going to build on Kathy's question with this retirement community. I know we have a lot of bad drivers. However, um I'm trying to figure out who else is going to help us. um if we were to go get some funding for some help from some other government entities who have put a jail in the middle of our neighborhood and are going to go to the voters soon and ask to grow that jail. Um so I'm worried you'll have enough square footage, but you're going to need more bodies. And so, so I do think there's something to be said here about us having a meeting with our uh county counterparts to figure out um how do they help us with the sales tax that we're sending in their direction and all the needs to grow our police force now our court. I mean, this is I I agree with where Ted is. I was dumbfounded reading this. I'm I'm still dumbfounded. And what I think would really help and I don't know if we have the analytics is to really understand the breakdown of the cases like just for 2025. What's the stories? Does it all relate to drugs? Does it relate to alcohol? Does it relate to uh ripping off old people and scams? like I I want to get to the how do we do something about this to reduce it as well as ask others who are helping our cont our community uh grow in unsavory ways to uh to help us also. Um so I hear you and I understand we are now what's what the busiest municipal court in the state.

No, no, we've gone from we were 23 5 years ago. We're now 16 and we're gonna surpass Flagstaff I think this year. So we'll be number 15. We may jump as far as 13 based on filings. So we have a real problem. We can provide a report that actually shows each case filing what it is and the terminations. Um it's broken up in things like domestic violence, shoplift, DUI. Yeah, I I kind of feel bad that I didn't know about any of this when we went out and sold Prop 478 because I would have bundled all of this into, you know, the police can arrest them, but where do they go from there? But where do they go from there? And I don't think we really thought this all through because it was out of sight, out of mind over in the county.

That That is correct. And excuse me. I I really feel like I have this garden that's been ignored for a very long time. Okay, which brings back Lars, which brings me back, Lars, to the point I made earlier in introduction where our costs are skyrocketing and you're telling me, don't worry, we have the revenue. I'm sorry. I'm worried. I'm I was worried before. I'm now really worried now. And I think we have to rethink what we're doing in this space. It's scary. It's really scary. Not your fault.

No, no, I understand. Well, and I also want you to know if you look at under the dashboard, you can see the years of experience, 80% 75% of my staff has three years or less in the position. The jobs just turn over. Uh the same meeting I was at this morning, again, it's a statewide issue. We bring people in as a clerk. One, we train them, they go out for other jobs. Hey, question to our city attorney here. Is there any other ways you can think of that we could generate revenue from this

generate revenue? I think it's the fees fines that we've established create revenue and um I'll talk to the judge about a few things where I may not agree with the what the state has said. But having said that, uh, in terms of the criminal, it's not there's sort of this discussion that retired people aren't committing the crimes. They're committing the crimes. So, it's we're as exciting as we all think we are. Huh. Okay. I I I think the judge could give you stories, but there's more stories than you can imagine of retired neighbors fighting each other. Retired people getting into accidents and fighting each other. Retired neighbors at Costco fighting each other. Um

retired neighbors getting in accidents driving away. Yeah. So, it's across all ages. There's not a situation where young people are getting crimes and the retired people are observing and paying for it. It's pretty evenly split.

Um But having said that, in terms of the the criminal case load, in part the criminal case load's going up because we're charging crimes. And so it we could we had an easy solution. We could just stop charging things, which is sort of what Flagstaff's doing. That's why they're moving down. Um, but it's just a function of law and order is important to the people of Prescuit. We will charge those crimes because it's important. it improves over time and people across all spectrums are the ones committing those crimes. I think there's a few things we can do in terms of the um the recovery and we can talk about that but I don't there's no silver bullet. Well, a lot of this is due to growth. You know, we've grown and I think we need to invest in our our courts to keep up with it. And I think once we get over the hump and get you into your new place and hire your new people, then uh going forward, I think your budget will stabilize.

Oh, absolutely. I I don't anticipate coming back to council asking for an increase like this ever again. Yeah. This is this is just I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Remember, this is being recorded. Oh, I understand that. Uh yeah,

I'll just I'll give you an example like the the city attorney said. There was a big article today about the shoplifting. Postcoid shoplifting has been rampant across the country. Many stores now keep things behind plastic baby formula things. I mean just necessities. They finally have started to see a drop because of prosecution. Prosecuting the people, getting convictions, calling the police. It does eventually lead to fewer crimes. If you if you don't do it, it just increases. And that's why all the people are moving here from California because there's no prosecution over there because you can walk out of a store with something merchandise that's what $1,000 less or less. And jurisdictions that won't even file,

they just load up their shopping cart and away they go, right? And uh people don't want that. So we don't want that here in this community. And unfortunately, it's not going to be cheap. But I think once we make the investment then things should level off. Thank you. Any other comments? Uh Jay Ruby, do you have any statistics or does anyone on cities of our size and their rate of growth and how that relates to the number of court cases?

Well, I don't have any statistics, but I can look at the dashboard. The the population growth in Prescuit has only been about 20%. You heard Lars give you this. That's not what's driving this. It's the Quad Cities area has had this enormous growth and everybody still comes to Prescuit. They come and do business here. The county courthouse is here. The not downtown, the nightlife is here and they're coming here to do business and that's what's bringing the cases in. So this is really a regional driven problem. It is that we're bearing an extra burden on. Yes. But by 400%.

Yes. because quite frankly the city court has been neglected for a long time. This has been a consolidated court and it was always somebody else's problem and so this is we're trying to fix it and we have wonderful staff. They work incredibly hard. They're now processing about 14500 cases per clerk. But how come you can only keep them for three years? Because I wasn't here before then. That's all I can tell you. I think part of that depends on the leadership.

With all due respect, with all due respect, this budget reminds me of the field of dreams. You know, if you build it, they will come. If we build a bigger building, we'll get more criminals and then we can ask for more. Okay. Any other questions? Jay, do you have another comment? No, it's just still up here. I'm ready to go forward. Okay. proceed. We can move to the next department if unless there's any questions for the city court. All righty. That was uh very eyeopening. Thank you.

I just wanted to quote one um piece of information on the city court. So the revenue side of the equation um we're projected to increase their to offset the increase in expenses. There's $220,000 of increased or revenue to help cover that. So partial offset of cost. Okay. Next we have legal city attorney.

All right. Joseph Young, city attorney. Uh the city attorney's office or the legal department has four primary responsibilities. We're the city's general counsel. Uh we do the civil work which is when we are involved in contract negotiations or answering questions for the various departments and so forth. Criminal which is all of the cases the judge just spoke about and our risk management group. Um primarily the city is funded through enterprise or our office is funded through enterprise funds and special revenue funds. This is all for the internal servicing that the um legal department does for the various uh enterprise fund departments. Um the general fund taxbased portion is primarily the prosecution portion of our office. Sorry Lars, I know you're going through it. Um there you before you you have our budget. Um salaries and benefits being the largest part or the second largest part. um other services and charges make up the largest portion which is primarily our insurance. So I think our insurance is 1.7 million roughly per year. Um so that drives that cost other services and charges. It also includes claims and judgments paid out uh workers comp, the car repairs we do um when we back over someone's mailbox. um and includes also BDU, CLE's, WLAW membership um and our case management software and all of that. But primarily that is driven by um liability claims and in our insurance rate. So we have currently nine or we currently have 10 uh staff members in my department. We had nine but um plan on filling that one. A couple years ago I came to council and asked for a parallegal position to assist the

prosecution. It has been more of a burden and hasn't really worked with a parallegal. So we have converted that parallegal position into another prosecutor position and we have filled that position. The new prosecutor hasn't started yet but has accepted an offer. Um, and then we also have one other opening from the retirement of the former deputy city attorney, uh, which we're looking to hire. So, not a whole lot of changes, just increases primarily with insurance. Like I said, I think it's gone up 15% each of the last several years, uh, which is a big driver of our budget. So, if you have any questions, I'm here. um tell us about the um increase in all your cases that you've had in the last couple of years.

Yeah, I I just got numbers sent to me, but essentially everything the the court just addressed is increased in our office as well. We are the prosecution for all of the cases within the city court. And part of it is increased law enforcement, part of it is just increased individuals in the area, and part of it is increased prosecution of the cases we already had uh and that the police were already investigating. There's a lot of discretion involved in prosecution and you can kind of use that in different ways, but we have chosen to uh enforce the law that we have in place to avoid kind of the the the future and set a tone that let me my former prosecutor used to say that pro or u regardless of what happens in the rest of the country, shoplifting is prosecuted in press and we do that and so it it's driven an increase in prosecution. ution quite a bit and I think we're at according to this we have 3,500 uh cases during the 25 year which is a lot.

Um any other questions for our city attorney? Okay, thank you.

Thank you. Good afternoon, mayor, mayor prom, council members, staff, and citizens. I am Melissa our I am your Prescuit Public Library director, and I'm happy to go over our budget and information today. Our work chart is divided by services, not by individual staff. We have two small but mighty departments in the library. Our first one is public services where we see over 328,000 people a year which was 8,000 more than the previous year. We got out in the community and spoke to almost 1300 people this past year. Circulated almost 700,000 items which was 38,000 more than the previous year. conducted approximately 700 programs and outreach visits to the community with over 20,000 people in attendance. Even though we reduced the amount of programs, we did still see an increase in the number of people who were attending these amazing programs. With being open 7 days a week, 61 hours a week, we cover at least four service desks every hour that we are open. We truly need to cover six, but four is what we cover the majority of the time. Uh, this department also selected over 19,000 physical items to add to the collection, answered 32,000 reference questions and a total of over 141,000 total questions this past year.

This is the library that gets an annual uh satisfaction of 96 to 98% for the staff customer service that they provide. The support services end of our services is all of the behind the scenes that happens. Those 19,000 physical items that were uh selected have to be ordered, purchased, and cataloged into our system. We have to mend books also to make sure they're still in circulation. And we have to remove those that need to be removed from the system. We reserved over 1,800 meeting rooms this last fiscal year, which is approximately five per day. We've managed over 140 volunteers from this department who work over 12,000 hours a year. We lent out to other libraries across the country 766 items and uh borrowed 1,189 for our prescuit citizens. Our transportation portion of our services there transported over 220,000 items last year back and forth from our bookdrops to our central Yavapai distribution center and around the city. We have our own internal small building maintenance department. There were 223 work orders last year and the library maintenance staff processed 165 of those which was 74%. This includes uh issues with plumbing, doors, locks, lighting, electrical, vandalism and so much more. Imagine

again seven days a week we're open. Uh so we do see a lot of things that happen to the library. The cleanliness of the building is second only to the customer satisfaction we receive each year. So I wanted to brag about the library a little bit. Next slide please. Okay. Our funding the library as you saw in previous slides is 5.7% of the city's general funds. 86% of our total budget does come from the general fund, but approximately 71% of that is personnel. As Lars has alluded to earlier, it takes a lot of people to keep the city running and especially the library. The Yavapai County Free Library District percentage is 13% uh which is actually closer to us receiving about 8% back of what our Prescuit citizens put into the tax levy on an annual basis. And then lastly, our general fund. We do charge um we don't like to, but we do. If there's fines and fees, room rental charges, lost items, general fees, those things add up to the 1% which is about 26,000 uh dollars um from last year. And again, one source that's not on there, but to be aware of for our citizens and for everyone here is that our friends of the Prescuit Public Library pay for all of our programs, supplies, and any equipment that we need beyond the funds that we have here. Okay. So, looking at our budget, we have our budget, then we had our projected. So, I wanted to give you some reasons

why it's going to be different. um we're going to have lower in salary and benefits because we had a staff member retire after 44 years. So, as you can imagine, she was at the top of her range. We had a lot of turnover this past year. So, there were savings there in that supplies. We have almost um $80,000 in gift funds that are not needing to be spent this year that will go into next year's funding. And so that's where you'll see that located. Other services and charges, we were supposed to have a uh lighting conversion project from changing out ballast to direct wiring. The company that we were going to use went out of business. And so our amazing facilities department taught some of our staff how to do that. So it really ended up costing some supplies as opposed to service along the way. So that was great. savings there. And one of our subscriptions, OLC, reduced their annual cost because we are a long-term uh customer. So, we were able to save $13,000 in that area as well. So, the last one there is the capital outlay council last year. Sorry, if you can go back one, I'm so sorry. Uh if you'll see there um you guys approved 160,000 for us last year and this is from our um budget where we were able to have impact fee funding. There's about $500,000 that had been collected prior to the fact that it's not being collected any longer and we had asked for $160,000. One of the projects was to get the mobile pods that we have in the library and the other project was to expand the

third floor so that we could have a room that could be combined into two to have a larger space for our public. So if you can see the projected the 63,000 is for the two pods that we were requesting those are in and ready to go and they're in a high use at the library. The remaining funds will go into next year's budget and is part of that 470 that you see in our 2627 budget. And if you look again, this is the same as everybody. Our salary and benefits are going up of course because of the um cola and the merit. Um we have a decrease in the supplies uh that we were asking for because we had bought a lot of technology and equipment to keep up with the demand that we had at the library. So we don't need that uh this upcoming year. We have internal charges that are going to go up just like everyone else. Um there's no change there. and other services are going up because of additional expenses like library subscriptions, software maintenance, uh utilities and online resources. Our biggest request and biggest reason for it being 4 million is going to be the capital outlay of 470 which I'll address on the next slide. Okay. 250,000 is now the requested amount to complete the third floor remodel. Again, the funding is already there. It's been there from impact fees that were originally uh applied for and received with uh the library department. So, we're asking to finish that up at 250.

We also need to get an automated materials handler. If you've ever been to the library and we've given you a behind thescenes tour, we have a device called Lucy and Lucy is named for such because it's like the chocolates going down heading to the right location. Ethel is at the main Yavapai Library district and we have Lucy. She is 16 years old and she is very much out of shape and uh ready for the scrapyard. Melissa, for the benefit of uh Dr. Hamer in the audience, she's referring to Lucille Oall. Got it.

Oal. Okay.

Okay. So, uh, one of the main reasons we have to replace it is because the county um is the one who directs the type of equipment that we have. They went out for an RFP. We had staff sit on that committee and a new vendor was chosen, Bibliotecha. And for us to be able to adopt that, we have to change out all the devices that go with the automated handling system. So we have estimated that at $220,000. So that's why we have the $470,000 amount. Um the equipment is supposed to be the same across the system. in order to work and have less work on the county staff who have to maintain it throughout the 50 plus libraries we have in the network. Okay. And then we have proposed for 28 we are one of two departments I believe that needs to have an elevator replaced. Our small original 50-year-old elevator, remember our building is 50 years old, needs to be replaced. I have staff that are afraid to get on it, but we have to transport thousands of items up and down. That is our main way of getting things down to the public. So, that is requested at 190. And then our uh last request, of course, is for our branch library. Uh this branch is requested and proposed to be in 2029. The 9.1 million is the most recent estimate for the first phase of the branch uh from the architectural assessment that was done in 2024 with an updated pricing in 24, sorry, in 22 with

an updated pricing in 24. Uh so we have that in there as a placeholder. Um, was any questions? Were the friends uh planning on helping you out with the new branch?

So, that is the friends funding. Um, so just so everyone is aware, there is a piece of land that is being offered to the friends. They are in the process of getting that in writing. This is a bequest from a resident who left funding to either um renovate the library in the downtown, our current one, or to build a new one. And the friends have been working with staff and city management, and the decision is to have a brand new public library added at some point in our future. That is very exciting news. Yes, it is. Congratulations.

Thank you. Okay. Lastly, we um have not added in five plus years any additional staffing and we have the same amount listed here, but we did make a change this past year. If you look under support services, we did not have a lead librarian uh up until um a few months ago when the 44 plus uh employee retired, we were able to reclassify that position and get someone at a higher level but at a lower price. Um, so we're happy to have a a librarian that has her master's degree and a lot of uh supervisor experience and is really working on making some efficiencies in that department for us this year. So, we've remained the same in that location. And that is it for me. If you have any questions, let me know. I have a question. you have an a custodian on staff and I know it's very important because you have an older building that gets a lot of heavy use. Have you looked at maybe outsourcing that and hiring uh a cleaning crew to come in every night or do you need a custodian on site? We definitely need a custodian on site. Uh I wasn't here when that position was located in the facilities department and we had someone come in and the complaints about the cleanliness. Uh I think it's more of a source of pride um that we have staff that really care about that building and make sure it is sparkling clean every day. Uh my understanding is from having it different in the past was not what the library needed for the public.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Let's see. We got a lot of comments here. I'll start with Lois.

Thank you, Mayor. Um my concern again for the third year in a row will be to talk about this new branch library. I understand the friends want it. I understand it would be fantastic. And with the growth up north, I don't blame us. We'll need one. But my biggest concern is that this city pays a lot of money on their property tax bill to the Yavapai County Free Library District. and they keep taking that money away from the Prescuit Public Library and building small branch libraries all over the county to service a population that wouldn't come close to what we would be servicing if we had a branch library up north. And so, you know, we can't keep going back to the prescuit taxpayers again and again and again. um the the friends would help us with the start, but you know, double the costs over time. You said those were just phase one. You know, if we're going to have a good library, I don't understand why the county wouldn't invest in this with the lots of millions of dollars that they have of Prescuit taxpayers money in that library district. And so I don't want to say I'm okay with this because we can't seem to get the attention of the county to help solve this need between Williamson Valley, you know, um, and and the county people that I mean, we have more county people coming to the Prescuit Public Library than will come to all the branch libraries added together. So, I just I can't say I'm aligned to this capital expense because we haven't broken through with the county. And I really would like all of the friends and all of the part, you know, to go in the direction of our county supervisors and

ask for their help because like we just saw what we had with the court. We can't go to many other people other than the county. And I'm going to have the same thing to say now about going to the county to help us with expanding our library services. So I'm not supportive. Though I am supportive, I'm not supportive of it coming from city funds.

Okay. I would like to address that if possible. One of the things we're going to do is look at several options of what this initial phase could look like. So, one of the thoughts is we could make it an automated library where staff do not have to work out of that building. Um, in Scottsdale in uh Appaloosa Library, we worked on um uh open plus technology where we have you sign an agreement that you go in, you're on camera, you do the selfservice, you check your materials out, and you leave. And so we are going to present some ideas of ways to make it as cheap on city uh taxes and um the city as much as possible. So we know that is really just the building of the building and supplying everything in it. But we do have other ideas of how to get more services out into the North Prescuit area that would be of minimal cost to our citizens here. If if I can back up real quick, um just to add some numbers to this. So, um, last time we looked at the district and I'm remembering off the top of my head here, something like 80% of the revenues in that district were collected in the cities, um, in the county and only 30 to 35% are actually spent in the cities in the county and and obviously Prescuit's one of those cities and so yes, we have some concerns about uh, even just the basic fairness I think of that. Uh but also um trying to and ultimately some kind of a breakthrough in that conversation with the county is is absolutely necessary. Trying to be creative in the absence of

that to the to date. Um we've talked about through several options including with the friends creating what is what would essentially be like an endowment um where they're taking the money that they have um and putting it into a fund that would create ongoing revenues that would help to fund operations. Now that's the same people who are paying into the library fund and so we still have that concern. Um, but it's creativity from the friends um and and from our library folks and an opportunity to create what um what Melissa described, which is basically a um an automated almost like an AI sort of library. I don't know if anybody's been through a a large airport lately, but the last time I walked into a Hudson, I grabbed whatever it is I grabbed and I walked out and it automatically charged my card. I never had to check out or talk to a person. Um, and it's that kind of an idea for the library, right? Where it would know your library card and what books you were holding and and help you check out. That that's getting creative. That's trying to find um efficient ways to do things. Ultimately, we're going to need to pursue both. We need the the funds that are collected by the library district are intended to support library services and we we can prove we can provide those services more effectively. We provide them more efficiently. We can serve more people. Um and and on this topic, one other just sort of thought, not to pick on anybody who's in an unincorporated area. I've been a county manager. I've worked with folks in those areas. Um, but if you move to a very rural area, you're not surprised when you wake up in a very rural area. And so, uh, you have a plan. You know that every week or every month or whatever your your rhythm is, you're

going to come into town and you're going to go to Costco and you're going to go to the doctor and you're going to go to wherever else you got to go. And adding the library, you know, you're going to get groceries, you're going to do all those things. adding the library to that circuit isn't a big deal for you. You live in a rural place on purpose and and you expect to go into the city to to receive those services. So, I I understand the um kind of what the county is trying to do. And from the city perspective, you know, in a a very real way, it's taking away from the services we're able to provide and in some cases providing the same services just at a much higher cost per patron. So, um, we'll continue to have those conversations with the county. We've continued to encourage the friends to have those conversations with their supervisors. And uh this is intended as a way to to keep moving forward regardless of what the county decides to do.

Okay. Thank you for that clarification. And now we have Mr. Gamboji next. Great presentation, Melissa. Thank you. It's money well spent. Uh I want to ask some questions though, kind of level set. Earlier in your presentation, you referred to 300,000 visitors per year at the library roughly. We So if I'm going twice a month, that's 24. I'm making 24 of those 300,000, right? Correct. Okay. It's not individuals, it's the accumulation of everyone coming and going.

Okay. Uh many times in city council meetings, I'll use the same old phrase, which is this is not a binomial, it's a multivariant. It's not the fact that there's a library up north. It's the fact that if the library is up north, then people don't have to drive down 89 and they don't have to drive down Willow Creek. And I think we discussed this like a year or so ago. I I did a calculation or something like what's that we discussed this?

Yeah. And I think it's like 150,000 less cars in a period of a year that come downtown if they're only using u the library. And then you know it kind of reminds me of debate between Adam Smith and John Kanes. In the world of capitalism if someone wants to give money to the library I don't think it's the part of the government to say no you you can't give money to the library. You we want to use it for something else. Uh I've been I think I've lived in 15 different communities. I've never seen the enthusiasm for the library like I see here in Prescuit. I mean, these people just love this place. Um, and if they want a library up north, I don't have a problem with putting a library up north because it gets as less traffic downtown and it and people can donate the money the way they want to donate the money. So, great presentation. It's money well spent. Thank you.

Thank you. I have to agree. Um, we have a pretty fabulous library and um, I've had people tell me that's um, when they were thinking about relocating to Prescuit, that was one of the things they looked at was uh, our library and it brought them here. Any other comments before Melissa sits down? Okay, Mr. Garing,

uh, we're all assuming that this new site for the uh, new library is up north someplace. Where exactly is it? We're in the process of working with the friends. They have um been for several years talking with the James family to get a piece of land close to where the new fire department uh location is going to be. So, at the Fippen Roundabout is the current location that they're looking at. All right. Thank you. Uh I like libraries. My mom took me to the Cardi library when I was a kid. Love it. Any other questions?

No, I think we're done. Thank you. Thank you.

Now, fire department. All right. Good afternoon, Mayor, Council Hoger, Fire Chief. Um, so, uh, let's get right into refreshing a little bit of the conversation we had on April 14th during our public safety study session. What you see here is our four divisions and 16 programs. And I want to really commend our partnership with finance as well as our internal folks. Uh, Kristen Quali is in the room here. Uh we've been working on this for the last 3 years to in essence assign every penny and every dollar in the fire department to one of these programs which then also directly connects to performance management and performance measurement and that's obviously very important to us. That's no mystery. Um next slide our funding sources. One thing I do want to point out here uh again this is not new information but tribal contract. We are the fire department under contract for the Yavapai Prescuit uh tribe and that is a very uh collaborative and productive relationship. This has an escalator in it that escalates every year to account for the cost of increasing services. I believe that escalator is 3%. Um and again we do enjoy a very very good relationship there. Next slide. our expenditure summary. Uh again, also within materials that you've been offered, yes, we have had a couple of increases and I do want to make sure that I call out a few things. For instance, we have seen a significant increase in the cost of our other services and charges. Those are things like software contracts, but also the other additional costs that are now being realized because we've added uh with your permission over the last two fiscal years, 10 firefighters as part of the public safety tax uh initiative. um those new firefighters have uh PPE costs. So, you know, outfitting them,

upfitting them, sending them to class, and those are all partially in those line item increases that you see uh there. Um the other component, the capital outlay, I do want to call out that that is a blend between uh PSTI initiatives as well as our regular CIP that I'll be discussing here in just a little bit. And then I do know uh uh Mayor PM Freeworth I will definitely address some of the uh questions you had earlier regarding the increases. Uh next slide. This is our capital project pipeline for the next uh five years as well. Some of the future outy years that you see there. The primary thing there is the public safety training center that we can discuss uh separately. But obviously the much more important items are in the fiscal 27 proposed budget and the following years. The majority of that money is public safety tax initiative, fire stations, the relocation of fire station 73, uh the significant remodel of station 72, and then of course the addition of station 76 as well as the other regular capital that we carry in the fire department. And next slide. This is our personnel overview. uh the only change that you see is what we discussed earlier in the presentation which is the addition of the emergency manager and I would be happy to of course expand on that point as well. Um the other thing that you see here is a reorganization to some extent. It's not really a reorganization. It's actually alignment uh that reflects that uh structure the division structure that I uh discussed at the beginning of this presentation. So, we're now really trying to align true costs and with those cost centers and those service centers, which is the evolution and the maturation of our budget. And next slide. Oh, that's the police department. All right, that's that's the end of that. Now, let's get into uh public safety tax

initiative. Uh uh Mayor Pertam Furworth, if uh you'd entertain, I can discuss a little bit about some of the cost increases. Mayor, is that an appropriate time to do that? Okay. Um, so first of all, there's a couple of things that I do want to highlight. Uh, this is obviously a multi-ep department effort. Um, but let's first talk about the projection at the April 30th, 2024 council session that you all called to in essence study and consider whether to move forward with a tax proposal. Um, we did emphasize significantly that these are projections. Um, and we knew at that time uh that the timeline was tight to get it to meet the council and the ballot deadlines. Um, and that some of the projections had to be made in a fashion that would allow us to move forward. I can tell you a few things about the project list that you see up there. So, first of all, at that point, land had not been identified for where these stations were going to go. We had three sites that we were looking at for the potential for station 76. That's just one of the factors. Station 72, the station on Sixth Street. At that time, we felt that it was important for us to consider a significant remodel. After we've engaged the architectural firm that we hired as part of the 478 funding, we learned that that would be fiscally responsible. And in essence, uh, station 72 had to be taken all the way to the ground to rebuild. That of course changes the funding assumptions. The other component of this is the uh capital costs at that time were all assumed to be accounted in the first fiscal year. If you remember, we had immediate needs, intermediate needs, and then long-term needs. And those were all considered to be in that first year as part of the initial assumption. And of course, as we now have seen, they start spreading out over those capital years. The other component of it is it was a projection based at that time on the

information that we had available once we've engaged with the architect as well as had to go through the procurement process within city finance. Uh posting on an RSOQ selecting a contractor making sure it's in front of you for those decision does delay things past the projection that we had initially had. Those assumptions were that we would build it as fast as we can. One of the reasons why we have a 40-hour engine company in service right now is exactly to bridge that gap that you mentioned. The taxpayers expect us to deliver the service. Uh you all gave us the staffing and we are delivering that service with an engine company that's currently in service. It just does not have the brickandmortar building yet, but the service is there during the week 8 to 5 to make sure that we start decreasing that response time. Another couple of items that I do want to cover regarding these uh additions is assumed 14,000 square foot for each station based on a projection. We didn't have an architect at that time of course uh nor did we have time to hire an architect to get those projections. Right now the initial uh build plans that we have are more closer to 17 to 18,000 square ft. We're in the process right now of ratcheting that back down. But keep in mind, we were at a 14,000 square foot projection and once we engaged with the architect, considering we're making a 50 to 75 year capital investment, we want to make sure we build it right and not to amp that did not at that time have that architectural professional expertise for us to really sharpen the pencil. The good news about that is is that the cost per square foot um even though the square footage went up, the cost per square foot is within the projections that the initial uh projections did uh assume uh which was roughly right now we're at about $795 a square foot. Uh it's still pretty good. Um the other thing is we're about to

engage uh and bring to you a proposal for the contractor under the construction manager at risk semar process. So we're at 30% design. The reason why we are actually proposing Semar is in direct response to some of the concerns that you shared about capital costs increasing. By securing securing a Seymar contractor now it helps us offset outyear expenses for those initial sets of projects. So 73 is relocation, 76 new build and the 72 construction. And as soon as we have that contractor, unless we make significant changes, in essence, that contractor is held to that cost, even though it might be 2 to 3 years in the build pipeline. Speaking of the build pipeline, um we were hoping we could get a station built faster than we can. The fact of the matter is is in order to build it right, go through the plan review process, go through the design process, the reality is it is taking longer. That is for sure. um that is something that doesn't you know sit well with me either. However, again that's why we added that company in service so that the effective service that that engine company would provide would be in service as quickly as we possibly could while we built the station correctly. Um that is an initial um response to that. I recognize that there's also further assumptions that Lars can expand on in terms of how the financial assumptions were made. uh as you know I'm not the finance director so he can he can respond a little bit more directly to that. Uh and then the other thing is I did hear you uh on your uh recommendation and insight on making sure that we continue to build this story book so that we are responsive to our taxpayers and that's definitely something that staff level we've already started to talk about uh because as these projects evolve over time assumptions change. Um we're talking, you know, we're not even talking about police on our side. You know, tens of

millions of dollars of capital projects over the span of about 3 to four years. Um that's just for the initial phase. Things are going to change during that. You know, when you get a build lot, suddenly you recognize that it's in the right location for response, but it might be more expensive for bringing fill dirt or site preparation that we didn't anticipate at that time. That's normal, but it's on us to make sure that we communicate those changes in an objective way. I hope that begins to help. And I'm sure you have more questions about that. Madame Mayor, I have a question. Yes, Ted.

Fire trucks been about the same size for a long time. Uh, so I'm just I'm asking this on behalf for Lois and the rest of the public. it. Wouldn't a fire station be design be kind of standard by now? Well, by now, the last fire station, as we know, that was built in the city of Presc was in 1995. Since then, the assumptions have changed dramatically. Have they? Yeah.

Yes. One of those things is, for instance, firefighter health and safety. uh in order to make sure you have appropriate areas for decontamination separating protective personal equipment from the living areas. Those assumptions have changed. The base assumption of a 14,000t fire station is definitely one of the beginnings. The other component that is being considered in this fire station that's very important to mention is that each one of the new two new fire stations, the 73 relocation and the 76 new build is being built with four extra deep bays because we currently don't have enough room to store our fire trucks out of the weather all the time. If all of our reserve apparatus are in, it is very uh likely that we might have to park one of those trucks outside. That's expensive. Of course, when you're building a fire station, building the station, uh the bay itself, so the garage component is actually the cheapest square footage in the entire bay because it's one big span as you know. Um we're making sure that we build that component right so that it's not just for the fire department we have today, but the fire department that this CIP contemplates so that we don't come back to the dis and ask for more money for something that we could have predicted at that time. If that helps. So, for the benefit of the residents who are listening in online, there have been a lot of changes on how you design a a fire station. So, it's no longer a cookie cutter design. Thank you.

Yes. Any other comments? Okay. Oh, Jim, Chief, did the older designs have exhaust systems that evacuated? No. No. No. Yeah. And that and to your point, that's just one example of many many changes uh including the fact that, you know, prior to 911, we were a fire department that ran EMS calls. We're now an all hazards department that does technical rescue, all of the other services, hazard materials. That all takes floor space.

Okay, great job. Are you done? Unless you have any more questions for us, man. Okay. All righty. Thank you. Thank you.

Hello. Last um thank you so much for this opportunity to talk about our budget. Um as you know, our services 247 emergency response um to emergencies and um standard calls for service to protect the life and property of our community. um crime prevention investigations, offender accountability efforts, traffic enforcement, collision response, roadway safety education, community policing, special events planning, victim assistance, school and youth engagement programs, and emergency preparedness. So um we do all of that within the confines of that um chart up there. Um, of course, um, pointing out that while we kind of have the the presentation separated into two different, um, areas for the police department and also Prescuit Regional Communications Center, um, PRCC is definitely part of our police department team and police department family. All right, so you have our funding sources. um with the addition of the public safety tax added in there. Um we do have a small amount of grants that we do receive um annually and those tend to fluctuate, but this year we've got about 427,000 in that grant. The rest of our um funding comes from the general fund as you can see there. I'm going to try to beat Holar. We'll see if I can do this. Um here's some some highlights of our budget. As you can see, our personnel services, salaries, and benefits along with um every other city department has increased, but that's a direct result of the addition of the um the additional police officer positions that we have there. So, um that's that. We appreciate that and we are eager to to fill those positions and we'll see some increases in our operating supplies, internal charges um as well. And since um every director was asked those questions, I came prepared um during my time in the back to talk a little bit about what that looks like for us. Um so we've got some additions of um uniforms there. So along with those police officer positions, they need to be fully equipped. So uniforms, firearms, um

rifles that go with them as well as their their service uh handguns. Um so that does contribute to a large um increase there. Um additionally, we want to equip them with bodywn cameras, um tasers, um AEDs, those kinds of things that help them keep our community safe. Um, so those are the the increases that you'll see there. You can um so as far as our capital projects go, and I do want to just echo um I think Chief Dura really teed that up for me. Um recognizing the exigency that our community felt and the the support that our community showed us with the passage of 478, we too wanted to move as quickly as we could with this project and really start putting um shovels in the ground and starting to see some some progress. But what we learned and what I I believe is the right thing for our community um is to really plan the project out appropriately so that is um effective and efficient well into the future for our community. And so we really want to take our time designing it. We want to be thoughtful. We want to be strategic um in which services we're going to move to that facility. And so our original projections, the amount has remained the same. Um but uh we've moved some of that funding around. And I'll just give you a quick example. Um, so in the in the projections for 478, we did talk about um remodeling our police department downtown. Um, I think initial projections indicated about a $2 million um remodel there. And we looked at it, we're like, we don't think we're going to need $2 million to remodel that building. Facilities does an outstanding job of keeping that building um up in good condition for us. And so we wanted to move some of that money um over into the capital to help build that new building. So things like that that we were able to basically reprogram those funds um as we look at building this building and similar to fire we're just about 30% done um with the planning of that and also in the pipeline to bring on a Seymour similar to to how Chief Dura explained it to you. So, in

addition to that, we've got some um firing range improvements, some radio tower upgrades, um the addition of police vehicles that goes along with the um additional police officer positions that we have, um and replacing old vehicles as they come along. So, that's where you see our major capital focus is. Um here you can see our authorized positions and I do appreciate um I'll just give a shout out um to the the team that we have here. When I went to um city manager um Kimble and was like I really would like some help hiring and filling these positions. That's the the most important thing to us right now. Um gave him a proposal and we talked about it for for a while. um worked with our finance team who is extremely creative, very supportive, as well as our human resources division, uh our team to really take a holistic approach to how we're going to fill these positions. It's such a unique opportunity for our community, for our police department to have such an infusion of sworn police officer positions. Um and we want to make we want to make every effort to be as aggressive as we can in recruiting um and finding the right people to fill those positions. So there you'll see that. So, total authorized um staffing ofund I'm going to round it up. It's 124.5, but I'm sure somebody will do a little more than halftime work. And then we're going to move into the Prescat Regional Communication Center. Also, as I mentioned, part of our police department. Um there you have there our administrator, um Dr. Jim Dong, uh the director there is managing all of those services. We have 16 police and fire agencies that we dispatch for in Yavapai County. Um, and one uh contract with Copper State Ambulance. And again, our funding and one of the things that's unique about the funding

at PRCC is why you see the general budget there um of 5.7 million um the next next uh page there. The city of Prescuit is responsible for about 45% of that because it's police, Prescuit Police, and Prescuit Fire Department. So, the remainder of that budget is build out to our partner agencies that we serve um to continue to provide service to them um and continue to keep our community safe. And there you will have that. Um again, those numbers going up because of the increases um to insurance and um merit increases for the employees that we have there. Um and again reallocating a couple of those positions or reclassing a couple of our our dispatch positions um to really continue to serve our partners in this communities as um Director Keegan talked about with the IT specialist, a CAD specialist in a public safety data analysis position that's really going to help us continue to move the needle and push PRCC forward. And there you have it. PRCC we've got 35 um and a half positions there um from our manager on down to our public safety telecommunicators and that's not changing this year. That is it. I'm happy to answer any questions that you have. Mr. Gambboji,

good presentation. Thank you. I'm trying to understand a little bit the dynamics of salary. Um I thought I'd see more in terms of salary here. Uh we're you're down how many officers? The 16 um public the brand new 16 public safety tax um positions and then I think five general fund positions. So that's 21. And uh you propose a salary increase of 6.2. Is that right?

Correct. So basically recclassing police officer positions from an a pay grade of 113 to a pay grade of 114 which is approximately um it's different for every every position but approximately a 6% increase. Is that across the board from new hire to you?

No, it is um addressing new hires um sergeants and um compression at our lieutenant level. Um myself and deputy chief are excluded from that. Um, and that's what I wanted to get to because the issue is we hire them, we train them, we give them experience three to four, five years and then they pull the plug. How comfortable do you feel with what you've proposed that you can mitigate the attrition we've been seeing?

I I'm I'm going to back my boss. Um I you know we know from research and I actually have some some great research um articles talk about police hiring and recruiting um pay is pay is an important thing and what we're aiming to do here is put our city and our community at the top of the menu when we want um people want to come here that's the thing they're going to look at first and so it's pay and benefits and um getting really creative with what kind of benefits we can offer is also an important piece of that that puzzle. Um, I am confident, um, you know, that we're gonna make an impact. I really am. I think we're we're as aggressive as we possibly could be with this, trying to be as creative as we possibly can be. And, um, I'll look forward to reporting back and let you know how we're doing.

You've you've been sitting in the back of the room since the start of this meeting. You've seen that I've taken issue with some budgets, but in your case, I would say, why don't you ask for more? Uh oh. Yeah. Um speaking of more, um that's a pretty eyepopping number for the evidence and facility in substation 48 million approximately.

Can you explain to us what is it at that facility that makes it so costly? So again, you know, the the cost escalations with um inflation is a huge part, but the other thing is I mentioned earlier that we really want to take our time planning this. And as we first, you know, took took a swipe at this um 3 years ago when we began these conversations, we really were looking at property and evidence as our immediate need. Um, but as we we looked at the piece of property we had and we really looked at what our future needs are going to be for our police department, we recognized that we are um right now we're outgrown in the building we have now. We're adding 16 new police officer positions. I don't have a place for them to be. My locker rooms are busting at the seams. Every closet that I can turn into an office has been turned into an office. Um, and we also want to enhance our response time. So, if you remember a couple weeks ago when I came and talked to you about our response times, our response times improved by about 30 seconds. And so, we loo took a look at at the city of Prescuit geographically, we don't respond in the same way that the fire department does. Most of our people are mobile, but what we know is that we're growing to the north. So, we wanted to find some place that was um a little bit further to the north that would allow for a quicker response to what we know is high um high call volume areas, highways, um shopping centers, those kinds of things. and what that would mean for our community in terms of response times. And so the property that we have and where we um are going to build that building, we anticipate not only moving property and evidence, but also our traffic safety division um which is currently housed on Virginia Street, as well as our entire patrol bureau. So, what that will allow us to do is improve that response time, continue to grow and house um house them in a building that's modern and up to-date um but also keep some of our our central um services in our downtown location which will remain. So, um a place for our community to go. They're familiar with where the police department is. It's great that we're in

downtown Prescuit. Um but, uh we want to move those those other services further out there. So, the building has grown um a bit and um let's we were able to reallocate and like I said reprogram some of that money so that we would be able to um I guess cover our tab as Lars Lars likes to do that. Okay. All right. Thank you. Uh let's see. Lois,

thank you. I feel like I already made all my comments up front, so I'm not going to say it again. But my question is regarding um there's been lots of rumors out there in social media land that this budget is laid in with more cameras and all sorts of stuff and I go through the capital plan and I'm not seeing it. So am I missing something? No. No. We um are finishing out some contracts with some of our our safety equipment. Um, but nothing. Um, I don't have the line items in front of me, but um, cameras. I do and I don't see body warn cameras. Um, so the normal stuff, normal stuff that we've already included. No eyes in the skies budget

expansions. We're finishing out our specifically our LPR camera contract. Right. So, yes, but I'm not seeing it in the capital for the future. No more growth with that program. Very good. Thank you. You're welcome. Any other um comments? Okay. All right. Thank you, Chief. Well, Mayor and Council, that was our all the departments we had on today's workshop. I appreciate your time and attention, and we've had some follow-up uh questions that we'll come back with answers for you on at the next workshop.

Okay. Um before we go, we have some public comment. I believe we do. Yes. Our first one is Chad Dere.

I'm going to keep this short. I know that was a really mindboggling all the money that's uh has to go out. Let me put my glasses on. Good afternoon, mayor, council members. Uh my name is Chad Dere. I'm a local resident, businessman, and journalist for I am Prescuit. Let me get straight to the point. This is about accountability to the taxpayer. Every dollar you discussed today, every line item in this budget does not belong to the city. It belongs to the people of Prescat and they are paying attention. Our platform reaches tens of thousands of residents across this community. These are business owners, families, retirees, and people who work hard, pay taxes, and expecting transparency in return. And frankly, the transparency hasn't always been there. So hopefully we can do that this time. Budgets are often presented in a way that the average citizen can't easily follow. Millions of dollars get allocated, shifted, and approved with the it's um with very little clear simple explanation to the public. That changes now. that um we are making a commitment publicly that I impress will track, review, and report on how every dollar is spent, where it's going, why it's going there, and whether it actually benefits the people funding it. We'll be at the meetings. We'll be retrieving the documents, and we'll be asking the questions that the public is asking, and then we'll take the information directly back to the citizens. No filters, no spin, just clarity. We are not here to play politics. We're here because the people deserve to know why certain projects are prioritized, why costs continue to rise and where their money is actually ending up. Because when government and spending becomes difficult to understand, trust starts to erode. And when trust erodess, that's a problem for everyone in this room. So let me be very very clear. Iron Prescuit is now the eyes and ears of the citizens. We won't be changing our logo

and putting ears on it, by the way. So we're going to keep it the way it is. We will highlight what makes sense. We will question uh we will question what doesn't. And we make sure that this is a clear line between the decisions made here and the impact felt out in the community. This is not a one-time conversation. This is ongoing. And from this point forward, every dollar will have a spotlight on it. I do appreciate you, Lois, today bringing up how I think you guys need to look at different platforms to go on besides paper and things like that so you can disseminate and get the um information out to the public. Um, last time Tony and I were here, we had over 200,000 views on our videos and we have a captive audience locally of about 30,000 people. So, I think some change needs to be done there. So, thank you very much and appreciate your time.

Tony HR,

mayor and council, thank you for the opportunity. Um, great perspective and a framework from Chad for us to all think about, but we at Ion Prescuit are determined to influence where the community is going and understand what the community wants. Our good friend Mr. Gambboji always talks about the 2023 community survey and that certainly is a good one and I was so pleased to hear today that we're going to bring that up to date. So I think that's extremely good. Let me compliment Don and Mark and LZ in terms of what we've been hearing and what we're teed up to hear here. I think uh we've got a evolution of the budgeting process which is good for everybody. Uh as a community we can see best practices being used in terms of a clear process which often wasn't the case. Linkage to strategic goals as developed by you in January. uh heading towards structural balance in terms of the budget, stakeholder engagement, both department heads and residents. And maybe we can do a little bit more with the residents cuz we didn't have too many people today. a longer term view, a glimpse at the three to five to seven year um forecasts. And that's very important for people living here. And now we need to think about just how

we can refine the budget based on feedback. today. Obviously, in the court area, we had some problems and uh certainly needs to be addressed. So, I I really appreciate where we're going, but I would be remiss if I did not add three points of needs improvement. A clear definition of assumptions in the budget. There's been obviously some thought put to that, but for those to be straight up front for everybody in terms of what are the assumptions on revenue.

Thank you. An acknowledgment of legal liabilities and expenses. We have over $200 million slloshing around out there. And finally, attention to those two clear community requirements and that is around health and wellness and it's the economy. Stupid who said that Ted will James Carville. Thank you.

That's all mayor. Okay. If there are any more comments, this meeting is adjourned. Thank you.