City Commission - workshop

Commission budget workshop to order. Today is August 25th, 2026. It is 4.30 PM. Just as a reminder, we're going through the budget review process. Let's please stand for Pledge of Allegiance. Thank you. Okay, that was a nice reminder when I looked back and saw everybody standing. That was really nice, thank you. I apologize, I'm kind of running between meetings. So I know we've got our budget session today. I'm certain there's going to be a great presentation. I want to remind everybody, just a real quick reminder, we've been doing our budget road shows throughout the different districts. We've got another one tomorrow evening. With apologies, I won't be able to make that one. But I've attended all the rest and they've been very lively, very good conversations. I know we are gathering all of that feedback. Some of the other information we're gathering via surveys or directly from people's input into those sessions are going to be fed back in by the city staff for our final budget reviews.

uh so um well just thank you everybody so far for your input into all of this and uh we'll continue forward with our session this afternoon okay thank you mayor city commission um tonight we have about an hour and 45 minutes which hopefully we will break between 5 45 and 6 pm before your regular meeting tonight um Finance Director Devin Schmidt will present the operating budget and the operating budget is focused on what expenses are required to run the daily operations of the city as well as support the implementation of the capital improvement program. Much of that takes staff as well as a complement of contracts that we utilize to implement those services. Director Schmidt's going to give you a presentation. We're hoping we can get through it and then hold questions until the end, and then we can reference back to slides as needed. So with that, I'm going to open it up and kick off.

All right.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Commission. I'm Devon Schmidt, your Finance Director. Thank you for the introduction, Francis. So what we're looking at today, I'll take you through seven different sections just to set the stage a little bit. We'll talk about our financial policies because that explains nearly every one of the directions that follows within the budget process. We'll talk a little bit about the revenues. We know we've already discussed that quite a bit. Then we'll talk about some of the personnel costs that's included in this budget. We'll have a department by department comparison. and then a fund summary of each one of our 10 funds. And then we'll have a small brief on capital as we've discussed that at quite length at some of the previous workshops. And then we'll close with some information about how the public can get involved prior to adoption. So with that, we'll kick it off with our financial policies. So I think it's important to note that the budget isn't something that's discretionary. It runs on authority and this table shows where that authority is. So the commission established and adopts the budget by policy. The city manager executes that and administers it. The finance department along with all of our awesome department heads help us prepare that budget and we report on it and we make sure that it keeps in compliance. And the commission is also responsible for adopting the millage, holding all those hearings and approves those under our Florida statutes. So those policies that we will talk about here in a minute, those aren't written once and then shelves. And so we'll talk a little bit about what those look like. Before I dive into some of those policies, I did want to take a moment to just discuss the different accounting rules and explain why some people find it generally confusing between the two governmental funds and our proprietary funds. So your governmental funds is your general fund, your capital, resiliency, building, and multimodal and fleet. we use what's called a modified accrual basis so we recognize revenue when it's received and it's measurable and available so we focus on that current financial resource whereas in our enterprise funds which is wastewater reclaimed water and storm water and parking we use a full accrual basis which is what our private businesses use so we separate our operating from our non-operating We budget principal and debt payments and capital assets as an expense. And we don't budget for depreciation. The reason why that matters is that the general fund is not supposed to make money. It provides services and the taxes that pay for them. The enterprise funds, wherever, are supposed to cover their own cost because of the people that use those services are the people who pay for it. So that's the reason between those different accounting basis. So when we're looking at some of the budget policies, I won't read through all eight of these, but I did want to talk about a few of them. So legal compliance. Florida requires that we produce a balanced budget, and the budget in front of you is balanced. The service level priority. So we look at essentially funding essential services first, and then budget for growth with our regional agencies. inflation that we track with benefits and insurance being an exception which i'll talk about a little bit later you approve the full-time equivalent control in each budget process You approve the numbers of positions, and we can't exceed that without coming back to this body. We also do what's called encumbrance accounting. So if a purchase orders that are still open at the end of the year get reappropriated into the following year, and obviously that's a great one to remember because when we look at our capital section briefly later tonight, that's the reason why we use that encumbrance accounting. So next, when we're looking at one of our, I think one of our most important policies is our reserve policy. So the first step that we have in here is our 25%. So we maintain a 25% unassigned fund balance, which is equal to a quarter of our annual general fund expenditures. In general terms, that's about three months of our operations. The second step that we have in there is a 10% or a hurricane contingency. And we use that only for declared emergencies under the Florida statute. And after Helene and Milton, I don't think that any of us need convincing that that is real. The third step that we have is anything above those two reserves is what gets directed to our capital projects ranked against the criteria that the commission had set. So that's how one-time money becomes infrastructure instead of becoming recurring costs that we can't sustain. So unassigned funds is used for one-time expenditures or for something that will last longer than a single year. So on this slide, this is three policies that really set our budget process. I want to spend most of the time on the capital column because that's what comes up the most. A capital asset, just so the commission understands, is anything that costs $5,000 or more or has a useful life of longer than a year. So when we're looking at capitalizing an asset on our annual comprehensive financial report, we're looking at anything over $5,000. Whereas in our multi-year capital program, that is any project equipment over $20,000 with a useful life that runs from 15 to 50 years for buildings, three to 20 years for equipment, 12 to 40 years for infrastructure, and three to 15 years for any of those intangibles. So the capital plan is obviously coordinated as well with the operating budget. So when we build something, what it costs to operate, we include that and we plan for that as part of our operating budget. On debt, we don't issue debt on short-term operations. It's actually prohibited by policy. And we prefer to use revenue that is self-supporting over any borrowing for those operating assets. So on our next slide, I just want to talk a little bit about some of our policies. So last year in compliance with GASB 54, and that's the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, we added a 10% hurricane contingency as a reserve target, plus a diversion of any one-time funds to a capital investment. for transparency and engagement we publish the we'll publish the fy 2027 budget and this year we're also going to be putting together what's called a citizen's budget and brief as well as producing quarterly reports so a budget and brief gives the opportunity for the community to read our budget in 20 pages instead of the 210 pages so it's a nice opportunity for everybody to see it in a smaller format We don't have any changes to our CIP policies this cycle. Last year we formalized the annual calendar for the budget. What we did this year, as you all are aware, we've been on a budget traveling roadshow to try to increase that community engagement. um to make sure that we're still benchmarking against the government finance officers association we will be working with leadership team to come up with our performance metrics so that we can include those as part of our budget process so you can see what are those metrics that's driving each one of our strategic plan goals and what are the dollars that are associated with that so i'm going to move on now to our revenues and trends So if we're looking at our total $85.2 million in total sources, you can see that the four funds really carry 89% of all of the city's revenue. So that's gonna be our general fund and our capital fund and our four enterprise funds as well. When we're looking at our general fund, I think it's important to highlight that 57% of the general fund is from ad valorem taxes. The next highest piece there that you'll see is our county emergency management resources reimbursement. That's one of the items on the tax bill that does come back to St. Pete Beach so that we're able to offset some of the cost of our emergency management. And then I did want to note on that federal grant, we budget for that as we expect for it to come in. But as you can see, that's not a recurring revenue source. So we don't budget for that as a forecast. And then our ad valorem, I just want to keep reiterating that the millage, we haven't increased the millage. And so you can see here that the millage hasn't moved, but our base has. So the rate has been flat from 3.0913 mils. from fiscal year 24 when the commission reduced it to 3.15, which was the first reduction in nine years. So please note on that third bar, that's our fiscal year 26 to date. So that's not a full year. And so I just wanted to highlight that piece as well. And again, when we're looking at our tax base, we do have that 70% that's non homesteaded. So as we think about Amendment three, That's really our cushion should that pass. I just wanted to provide a little bit of some trends that we're tracking. So obviously with our ad valorem, that carries some risk if Amendment 3 passes. Utility taxes are starting to recover on a cautious basis as storm damaged homes are rebuilt, hotel occupancy normalizes. The Duke Energy franchise fee we're showing is flat. The county emergency management is stable. And the half cent sales tax we're projecting as flat. Parking reflects the completed fee study and any of those increases that we're forecasting. and when we're looking at fema with hurricane helene and milton we have 86 active or we had 86 active projects and about 9.1 million dollars in obligated federal shares with about 5.9 million still outstanding in that area which is largely for our category b One note that we did get a question on at the Finance Budget Review Committee was what are our utility taxes? And so really what that is is a city adds a percentage to your electric or your gas bills. So if you think about your Duke bill, there's a percentage on there and it's 10% for St. Pete Beach. That's redistributed back to us. So just wanted to help kind of clarify what that is for you all. We've talked about this quite a bit, so I won't spend too much time on it. But again, if Amendment 3 passes in November, we'd be looking at about a $1.1 million gap and then growing in that subsequent year. So you'll hear about this tonight as part of your meeting on ordinances, but this slide reflects the direction that the commission gave staff to right-size our enterprise funds. So on wastewater, the future capital is now built into that rate structure, and the structure was redesigned for equity between residential and commercial customers. On stormwaters, that one the finance budget review committee did recommend that only current identified projects be backed by the stormwater revenue and that is something that will come back in march and will be come to fruition on fiscal year 28. on reclaimed water this i think an important note is the study did not address any future design for individual property metering so that will be an item that we still need to study And on parking, I just want to remind that's our most flexible fund with the ability to direct revenue increases towards operations or capital citywide. And the reason why all of this matters is when we set fees below the true cost of service, that difference doesn't disappear. It gets deferred into future residents in the form of aging pipes or postponed projects and a much larger bill later. So grounding those fees in actual cost is what the Government Finance Officers Association recommends, and it's what the Governmental Accounting Standards Board expects out of an enterprise operation. So let's take a look now at some of our personnel cost drivers. So we have five assumptions built into our budget, our personnel budget. So first off, we are showing a 3.5% increase in our benefits, a 3.2% cost of living adjustment, a merit increase of 1.5%, which is held exactly the same as last year, a 10% increase in workers' compensation, which is a worst-case scenario, and a 10% increase into the property insurance. I did wanna highlight that we do not have those rates back to us yet, but as we do, that's our worst case scenario, so this budget number could come down. I did wanna take a moment to highlight, you'll see an asterisk there, that our fiscal year 26 budget was understated because of an error in our system implementation when you're looking at our library services, so I did wanna highlight that. So you can see here that our personnel changes is showing an 11.6% increase, as well as our personnel taxes and benefits is showing a 10.7 increase. I did want to note too that part of that increase is about $700,000 in a wage re-opener for our fire and emergency management services, plus about $150,000 for that cost of living trending at the same rate. and 125,000 should that merit increase come to full fruition. And as you increase all of those, obviously your retirement and your FICA, all of those are going to continue to flux with that. So this slide has highlighted no new positions for fiscal year 27. Just wanted to provide kind of a composition of where our positions land. So you can see we have 159.6 authorized full-time positions. So within our general fund, we have 124.25. In our building fund, we have 16. In our enterprise funds, we have 17.10. In our fleet fund, we have 2.25. You can see our largest general fund departments by position counts as well. I did want to note a question might be how can we have a .10 of a person. We do allocate some of our departments, if you think about our public services director, he's responsible across a lot of the enterprise funds as well as the general fund. So we do allocate those positions accordingly to how much they're offering supervision and directions to those areas. All right, so moving on to our operating departments. And we do have all of our department directors here as well. So when it's time for questions, they can certainly help with answering some of those. So starting off with the City Commission, the Finance Budget Review Committee last year recommended a raise for the City Commission. Since that did not come to fruition, since that is a referendum, we did take that out of the budget for fiscal year 27. So that's the reason for the reduction there. You can see here in the city manager's office, we had some professional and contractual services down. Our city attorneys, we did increase to provide some basic legal services for 25,000 for specialty outside counsel if that's needed. Community development, you can see what's driving some of those areas. And then in information and innovation technology, professional and contractual services is one of the changes there, as well as some of our software. So part of that had to do with, as we continue to refine our budget process, we are taking things like our I-Work program, which had historically been in the building fund, centralizing that into IT so that it can be managed by the IT department. And then we have a cost allocation or administrative services fee in those outside funds that is able to recoup back some of those costs for the services. So that was a strategic effort there. And then in human resources, that's a small department of two and reflects recruitment and retention of our professional HR staff. So in our general fund, you can see in finance, we're showing an increase there for accounting services, which is largely offset by our lower travel and training. We have Our law enforcement contract, that's something that we receive from the county every year, and so they provide us what that figure's gonna be, where they're tracking inflation, and what their increases are. I've talked about fire and EMS. You can see that we do have, with that wage re-opener, an increase, but we also have a capital outlay as we purchased two vehicles this year that was reimbursed by the county through those EMS funds. In our library, that's where I'm calling out, we can show with the system implementation that it's understated. So we will be bringing back in September a budget amendment to correct that as well. Resident services, you can see here we're showing that that's returning to a pre-hurricane service levels across recreation and aquatics with the gym coming back online as well. And then non-departmental, that's down specifically because of those inter-fund transfers that we made last year that are still sitting within those funds as those capital projects proceed. So just to try to show it in kind of a more graphical format for you, if you look at our entire general fund budget, you can see what our largest drivers are, of course, fire and EMS, followed by public services, law enforcement. Within our funds off to the right, I did want to explain that as we get into some of the capital, those aren't necessarily new spending decisions. These are construction projects that are already in flight, projects underway. And as we continue and as Camden and his team continue to do projects, you'll see that number fluctuate. The number that when we get to capital is already different than what we've been showing on the budget roadshows as his latest update. So I'll talk a little bit about that when we get to capital. um and our fund summaries before we go into and we look at each one of those funds this was a question that we got from the finance budget review committee is could they get a bubble chart essentially to show how all of these different um funds play together and how they all work together. So I won't spend too much time on this slide, but you can see where our transfers are going in or transfers are coming out, where we have some of those administrative fees for the cost of internal services and how those are being directed into the general fund. You can see how parking is helping with capital or offsetting any of the streets or beach maintenance within our general fund. And you can see where we are still offering some subsidies to our enterprise funds as we wait for those revenues to catch up with the fee studies. All right, taking a dive into our general fund. So you can see our revenues are showing at about 32.7 million with expenditures of 33.4 million. We have a budgeted ending fund balance of nine million. And you can see what some of those drivers are off to the right with our operating expenditures of 11.7 million and our personnel services of 10.7, which makes sense when you're looking at our general fund since it's a very service based programs that come out of our general fund. Moving on to our building fund, you can see we have 1.7 million in revenues that we expect to receive, 2.5 in expenditures, and 2.9 in that ending fund balance, and 16 full-time equivalent positions in there. I think the highlight here for us is that we are working on drawing down that building fund balance so that we're in line with the statutes that we have to have within that fund. So looking at our resiliency fund, you can see that we have 364,000 in revenues. We have about $5 million in expenditures and an ending fund balance of 4.3. A lot of this, as I mentioned earlier, has to do with those capital projects that were budgeted in fiscal year 26 that are gonna be reappropriated in 27 as those projects continue to move. In our multimodal fund, this is an area where we are able to collect parks impact fees as well as transportation fees. This is an area where we are collecting revenue and we're collecting that ending fund balance of about 1.1 million. The intent here would be for our public services director to identify a parks project that could utilize this funding or a streets project that could utilize that. So right now we're just saving that until an appropriate project surfaces. In our capital improvement fund, you can see here that we have a 20 million point two five that we're expecting in revenues and 39 16 million that we're expecting in capital projects with a $15.6 million fund balance. Again, this has a lot to do with all of those projects that we expect to reappropriate. And you can see again here that I do have that asterisk where we would bring back what our best estimate is for fiscal year 26, bring that budget down in the way of an amendment to you all so that that can be reappropriated in a fiscal year 27. In our fleet fund, you can see we have $800,000 in revenue. We have about 1.3 million in programmed that we expect to utilize. 267,000 of that is operating expenditures. 160,000 is personnel with those 2.25 positions. And you can see that we'll expect an ending fund balance of about $29,000. I think an important note on this particular fund is that we are building out what you would see as a lease program, if you will. So if a department is utilizing a vehicle, essentially they're going to end up leasing that from the fleet. So as we work through that programming and that scheduling, we will bring that to commission. You can see that full fleet lease schedule that we're showing. And our wastewater fund, you can see with the right sizing of the fees, we're looking at about $14 million in revenue. $20 million in expenditures, so you can see 12.4 of that is in capital outlay, with 5.1 of that in operating expenditures. You can also see that we do have some debt in this fund from other capital projects, and you can see here as well that we expect to have an ending fund balance of $749,000. I will note that the $749,000 for an ending fund balance is probably one of the areas that I'm least comfortable with, which is why we need to get some of those reserve policies in place for these enterprise funds. When you're operating a $20 million operation, we should have a higher fund balance in there, so I did just want to make note of that. In our reclaimed fund, it's a bit smaller of a fund, but we're showing about $2.3 million. Again, with that right sizing of the fee studies, about $2 million in our expenditures and an ending balance of $600,738 with 1.2 FTEs. Stormwater, we're showing revenues of 3.759. I'm sorry, an expenditure of 4.6 million with 3.1 of that being in our capital. Operating expenditures of 863,000 and personnel services of 348 with 4.55 full time personnel in this fund. And then finally our parking fund. We, based on the increases that we have completed with our parking fund, we have $8.8 million in revenues, $8.6 million in expenditures. Primarily that is transfers out to some of our capital funds or our general fund with an ending fund balance of 6.7. The question might be why would we keep an ending fund balance of 6.7? The key here is that we want to make sure that we have a full year of parking data to really realize and see how those fees come to fruition. With that safety net in there of a forecast of about 6.7 if all of those revenues do come to fruition. And we have 3.1 employees in this area. So this is the area where I mentioned we worked with our public services director just last week to make sure we updated all of our capital projects. So you can see here that they have completed more work than we had originally put out on our budget roadshow of that $64 million. So now we're down to about $61.8 million. So across those eight funds, we are showing 61.8 million with 16.8 of that being on our enterprise funds. So I just wanted to take a moment and say, you know, a lot of those projects are underway, but they won't be complete at our September 30th. So those are being re-appropriated. So we continuously are working with our public services department to make sure that we're, tracking what we expect to spend this fiscal year and what needs to be reappropriated. And then some of our 10 largest projects. I won't read through all of these. We've talked about them at quite length, but just wanted to kind of show what the bulk of our projects are. And then I wanted to take a moment here, too, to talk about our community and next steps. So tomorrow we have our last budget roadshow in District 2 at the library at 530. 530, OK. 5 30 p.m so if you haven't had the opportunity to come out and chat with us hear from us you can see this is an area where we'll have our opening remarks we'll take you through some education about where your dollar goes We're going to talk about our millage. You have an opportunity to vote on a thermometer to see if you would like to increase the millage or keep it flat or even do the rollback rate. So it's been a great opportunity for us the past three districts that we've been in to really get out there with the community and discuss. And then finally, we have the survey open that will close at midnight on September 3rd. So we'll have that data for the commission at the September 9th hearing. So there'll be two public hearings. Your millage adoption will be on September 9th. and you'll have your first reading on budget September 9th as well, followed by the final reading on September 21st. We will, at that point, my staff and I will make sure that we apply for the Government Finance Officers Association's Distinguished Budget Award, and we'll keep you apprised of whether or not we're successful in that. And then this was just a few other questions that came up at the Finance Budget Review Committee. This was a little bit of a deeper dive about where parking money comes from and where does it go. So I wanted to take the opportunity to show what those revenue sources are, how much of that comes from our parking facilities and meters versus our county park, what the transfers out are, and how much it really costs us with those parking operations and personnel. One item to note, the large operation costs that we have in here is our freebie is in our parking fund as well as our PSTA contract that's in our parking fund as well. And then you can see there we have an administrative fee, and then we have about $300,000 programmed in order to do a license plate recognition system. And then this was another question that we got at the finance budget review committee. The question, can we say we're operating at a best in class level? I talked about the budget award. We have also earned in past years, we're waiting to hear on the government finance officer certificate of achievement for excellence in financial reporting. That helps us with our credit rating and also shows that we're benchmarking what we actually do against the other cities and counties that are a part of that. And then you can see here too, that as we're working on formal reserves policies, we're also gonna be looking at doing a five to 10 year. We have the five year financial forecast, but how do we bake in a 10 year, even a 50 year as we roll out some of those asset management plans. So just wanted to share some of those items that we got questions on. And with that, I will stop talking and have you all ask questions of all of us.

Commissioner Maldonado.

Devin, thank you for the very thorough presentation and for keeping it very simple for folks. So last night someone had asked a question regarding the audits. Can you just speak briefly to the audit? And I think also that maybe they alluded to a DOGE type of inspection, not just checks and balances. I wanna make sure we talk about the two different types.

Sure, absolutely. So the city actually did have a Doge inspection, as did all cities. And so we sent all of our information to the state. They did not come back with any questions or findings of us in that regard. Every year we are legally required to go through an annual audit where we have external auditors come in that is hired by our finance budget review committee or selected by, I'm sorry, you guys actually hire them. Staff is not a part of that process as that is a best practice and actually a state law that we can serve as an advisory capacity should the committee have any questions. But we are not there to rank or select the auditors. So on September 2nd, the Finance Budget Review Committee will meet to go over the eight auditors that submitted proposals to us. And they'll have a recommendation that we'll bring to you on September 21st to select and engage your next audit firm.

Excellent. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Commissioner Causey.

Devin, thanks again. Wonderful. Now, this is sort of a little question I'm not sure you'll have off the top of your head. But is there a way to walk us through the timeline on FEMA funding that we've received and that we are expecting to see? And if or if not, that's included in any of the numbers in the presentation today?

Yes, so I could, I don't have those numbers off the top of my head, unfortunately. I'd be happy to send a follow-up out to the commission or at the next meeting, bring that as part of the final adoption presentation, if you will, but I would be happy to follow up on that.

Is there FEMA funding that we have received already or is that all in the future?

yes we did receive funding um and again i don't i don't want to necessarily quote the number but we did receive funding for category a and b which is our debris removal and our debris monitoring that's based on We work with FDEM. We show them all of our policies and our procedures, and it's based on a percentage. And so the better our policies and procedures are, the better we get back right away versus having to wait for them to disperse that. As it relates to our capital projects, I know our public services director and other folks on the team have been meeting, we meet with FEMA weekly to go over where some of those projects stand. But unfortunately, I don't have those numbers just directly in front of me. So I'll make that a follow up item.

OK, that's good. And I want to ask this question. As far as you know, have we received any disaster relief from the county up to this point?

Not that I'm aware of, no.

So I know some state funding probably gets redistributed through the county, is my understanding. So is it too hard a question? So what about county, state, federal hurricane recovery funding? Have we actually received anything from any of those?

that's included in numbers that we see in our picture here today I noticed as I was watching the presentation so for next year I believe you put $400,000 you were expecting in revenue from FEMA

Page 14, I think, was where it all was.

So that's based on a very conservative revenue estimate. While public services, we have a grant administrator there that is overseeing, I believe, 80 plus projects. with FEMA right now. So we'll be happy to give you a presentation because it's extremely complex.

I'll bet.

And to show you how this process works. So the answer to, and what happens is when you request money through FEMA, it has to go through the state. to approve it before we finally get the distribution. So while it's coming from the federal government, those FEMA distributions do come through FDEM as sort of a secondary audit cash flow function for the federal government for them to review it for compliance as well. Your question about did the county supply any monetary value I would say indirectly during Helene and and Milton absolutely because there were items such as the on the ground title basin though there's some you know the the initial assessment we didn't spend a dollar on that when title basin came in the state fronts the money they push it through the county and the county never sent us a bill so those kinds of things while you could You could think, oh, we didn't get any money. Had we had to front that, we would be now working with FEMA to try to get the reimbursement. So the county did front quite a bit of money on the first responder, you know, several weeks post-disaster. the reason that's important is the county has advised us that in the next hurricane season we will be on the hook for paying for those services that's why we now have six contracts in place and we're ready for the on-ground assessment well we're going to have to foot the bill and then seek reimbursement through FEMA So there's a big paradigm shift and I just want to make sure everyone understood through that question that there was a significant financial burden that was released from the city during that from just a cash flow perspective from the county and the state.

okay yeah that does answer that question now there was a presentation earlier this year about the 880 ish million dollars that was given to the county to distribute and that we were hoping to get some of that money is can you give us an update on that and is any of that in these numbers

Yeah, so from my recollection, about five, almost 600 million of that was distributed to what they were communicating as sort of a people first campaign. And so that money went into first home time buyer programs, low income hurricane repair, Elevate Florida received some money. There were dozens, but I'm just giving you a few. So that left about 200 million. to what they had characterized as community grant programs for recovery. That piece of the program has not been launched yet. And they did advise us when they did the people first portion of the money that it was going to take 18 to 18 months to two years to launch that I have been in contact with the county within the last two weeks and they Have not prepared that outreach yet. So we haven't had the opportunity to request any grants through that program yet. I

And that would be approximately $200 million distributed throughout the whole entire county then.

With the exception of St. Petersburg, who has their own CDBG program, so they were able to secure funding through HUD only for St. Petersburg.

So it doesn't sound like out of it $800 million that we would end up with that very much of that being one city and many in the county or we're still hopeful.

I'm considering the barrier Islands received the brunt of the damage from those hurricanes that will be in a good grant requesting position once that opens up and we plan on we are ready to to proceed with those requests.

So those type requests would be what type of things that we would possibly... We don't quite know.

That's what we're waiting for, the program criteria.

Oh, okay. Is it specifically supposed to be for then hurricane recovery or the money that they're talking about distributing?

It was specifically to the recovery for those two storms.

All right. Thank you. Thanks, Devin.

Thanks, sir. Mr. Marriott.

Thank you. Thanks, Devin. So I've got a couple of questions, just little things, really, that I made in notes of as we went through. Back in the very beginning, it talked about the definition of a capital asset being anything that's over $5,000 or expected to last longer than a year. Is that something that we, is that an internal city policy

that we've decided that that is or is that standard municipal accounting that is a standard you might see in some cases for larger municipalities like the city of tampa or the county they might have a higher asset classification of ten thousand um but five thousand based on our size is um it is a standard that we would have yep okay perfect thanks i was just that was kind of where i was going with that is that

should that number be higher you know if that's something that was left over from 20 years ago and now things are more expensive um thank you so much for um uh calling out the changes to next year for the budget in brief and the quarterly reports i think those are both a great idea and so thank you for that um on the parking revenue projections is is that based on um is that based on like previous parking statistics just with the new rates or did we do we have enough data yet since we raised the rates to be able to have any more specific revenue projections for parking based on having raised the rates whether it's affecting the amount of people parking or like is that is that is that very specific or is that just a pretty general This is how much we collected last year. We raised the rate. We think it's going to be this much.

Let me let the parking czar of the city explain.

Lots of hats, Sarah.

Lots of titles, all right. So I would say it is more general at this point because we are still gathering data. For example, at the commission's direction on holidays, we're still charging the hourly. We didn't go to the flat figure. So we got a lot of things that we're still analyzing, but we're building a month to month kind of revenue projection so that we can see what it's going to look like in the future i would say right now we're we're trending significantly above what we had projected for the previous year so you know i do think that um you know the fee increases are are meeting the objective of the program overall

OK, perfect. Thank you very much. And then one of the big increases departmentally was the HR department. And this is just kind of a general question, probably for the city manager more than anybody, which is that with an increase largely in salaries and having a more professional department, what kind of downstream results should we expect to see from that? is that is that just a we need to spend more because that's just what we have to have or is that we need to spend more because by spending more the downstream effects are that we expect to have less turnover or less problems or you know like is that going to potentially save us money anywhere down the road or is that just a this is what a city this side needs size needs to have

So a couple couple let me address the downstream first because when I first arrived here we essentially didn't have an HR department. And so that was developed slightly I would say shortly after the investigation had been completed and it was identified that we really lacked any internal systems so in order to build in HR department. We were able to recruit a very seasoned HR director with 25 plus years of experience who knows how to build these systems. So from that perspective, you're going to see a very professional implementation of a system that has the technology we need. We just recently implemented an HRIS system, so now we can actually report and know who is here. and what they're making at any given time and what personnel actions we've taken. Secondary, our personnel rules are outdated I don't think they've been updated for over two decades so we are out I mean we were arguably they don't they're not up to par with the current employment laws and then HR is at the end of the day it's one of your number one risk management tools so I would be looking to avoid grievances employment lawsuits the city being at risk of making any adverse employment actions that's one of our highest risks actually because we we are a personnel service heavy city and um so that's it was really just building a professional team that act that had experience and many years of experience to be able to build a system from the ground up okay perfect thank you very much um

And I'm kind of jumping all over the place. I apologize for not being very coherent. On the various fund summaries, we have the 2026 budgeted numbers, and then we have the 2026 year-to-date actual numbers. Are those all year-to-date actual? Are those all as of the same date? And is that like the end of June or do we know roughly? And what I'm getting at is that like three quarters of a year or is it?

yeah that's a good question so when we're looking at our expenditures that is going to be pretty close to year-to-date I want to say probably not probably it is end of July figures when we're looking at some of the revenues as we've been working through some of the parking for example or community development or some of those other areas where we have revenues we've been working to due process improvements around those and so we are slightly delayed on some of our parking revenue receivables and recording those but not at any stretch of in a bad position in any way okay all right so so the the year-to-date expenses and the year-to-date revenue aren't necessarily as of the exact same date okay perfect

And then this next question, I just want to make sure that I'm understanding this correctly and that the public understands this correctly as well. When we're looking at the capital funds and we see what was budgeted last year, and we see you know you could look back in previous year budgets and see what was budgeted the year before that and see what's budgeted for next year because of how dollars get carried forward because projects don't get completed in one year would it be correct to say that you can't just add up those budgeted numbers and say you know like next year we're budgeting 60 million in this particular fund last year we had budgeted 50 million in the year before that we had budgeted 40 so that means that we're spending 150 million that's not that's not accurate because because of how they get carried forward correct

Right, and the reason why you do those reappropriations is that, so let's take an example. You have a contract to complete a street infrastructure project. That contract, you need to make sure that you have that budget reappropriated into that next fiscal year, and so that's why when we're looking at that 26 budget, you'll see that it's a lot less than what you all adopted initially. We would bring it back to you as a way of amendment, but yes, to your point, to go back and look at every single one of those years and say that that's what we we budgeted it's because those projects take sometimes 10 years to conduct conduct really wanted to know what we're spending in any one of those any one of those capital projects or capital funds you'd need to go back and look at what we actually spent every year and add that up to know what we're spending in that department Correct. Yep, that would be our annual comprehensive financial report. Okay, perfect. Thank you very much.

Commissioner Robinson.

Devin, can you walk us through the assessments that are sitting on our tax bill now that have been there since 2010? There's two waste, stormwater.

Stormwater assessments, yeah. So the first assessment, that's just for services, which is what will be updated through the fee study in fiscal year 28. So that's just, the first assessment is just basic for the services to be provided. The second, I believe, is called a tier two assessment. The variable.

What's that? The variable. There's a fixed and a variable.

yes yep so um in 2015 i want to say and i can get you the information around that loan document but the commission made a decision to go into debt to do some capital projects in stormwater and is that the force main i i don't i'm not sure i'll have to follow up on that but i can't amount was i don't know that off the top of my head but i could follow up with all of the loan documentation and that information for you

but I'd be happy to but yes that was for a capital project and that's what that second assessment is on your tax bill well I believe it started in 2010 with one and then it grew to I think 2012 it went into two okay and then it did a substantial increase a hundred and fifty percent increase in 2022 I can research that. So I'm just curious because I know with assessments, they're supposed to end at some point. They're supposed to be legally an end date to it. And we haven't even touched on that. I've got residents looking at increases on a lot of items and still fitting this bill on the tax roll. The question is, when is that going to end for them? Because it's done nothing but grow. And again, like I said, it grew 150% on the variable. And I think it was 70% on the fixed. So that's a large amount to foot and just would like to be able to understand when will we see relief from that. Because it's not going to anything. It was obviously a bond or, you know, we had to secure it that way. So it would be nice for residents to know when they're going or property owners to know when they're going to see relief.

Absolutely. I'll follow up on that.

And I know a couple years ago, I don't think it was the last budget sessions we went through, but the year before that, we had talked about, there was a lot of talk about moving our money to higher yields, yield accounts. Have we done that?

So the city does have a financial advisor. Part of what we're working on is revisiting our investment policy. Don't quote me on the date, but I believe it is from 2015. So looking at that investment policy is something that we would start with. I do have a member on staff right now that is working on putting together an investment analysis to determine, to your point, what is our best use. Since I've arrived, the city was investing in certificates of deposit. Since I've been here, we've actually moved a lot of that funding into what's called Florida Safe. Florida Safe is a group of municipalities that Combine all their funds so you get a higher yield It's also a more conservative approach and it gives you the flexibility to have Shorter should you need the cash it has a shorter return so we have made some steps But that's certainly an area that we're still working on is this reflected in any of this?

Yeah

That would be in our revenue, so you'll see under, and I can send out what we're projecting for investments next year, but yes, we do have a separate investment line item by fund.

And under department's general funds. I see city commission, the change is negative 17.4% and city manager at 4.7%. Question, Chair, on that. What all is involved in the city commission? I know that we've got our salaries here. Because if I count up salaries, it doesn't come anywhere close to $178,000.

Sure so within City Commission there is a line close to like 40 maybe so your salaries and wages is actually thirty thousand one hundred dollars there's FICA and Medicare tax so that's another two thousand eight hundred each Commissioner does have two thousand dollars for travel and training And then you'll see on here, too, that there is a $10,000 donation line item in there. At one point, the commission did give donations to, I believe it was the Gulf Museum. I don't know that the commission has done that. Since I've, go ahead.

The last one you did was you donated to CABA for the dolphin installation. That's part of a dolphin tour around the barrier islands.

I think you're referring to the $100,000. I think that might be a lobbyist fee.

There's $110,000 in the lobbyist line item.

Okay. That's $110,000.

Yeah, that's your professional and contractual.

Yeah.

Yeah. and I just other than those I just don't see I see everything else growing and I just don't see a lot of operational cuts at all on any of this I'm willing to give up our salaries if you can call them that I believe that would still need to be a referendum of the people

because that's written into the charter.

So I'm sorry. So the 110 for the lobbyists, can you explain that to me?

Yeah. Yes, I can. So, that's another. Those two contracts were implemented two or three years, actually two years ago upon my arrival. I was directed by the commission to explore expansion of our state lobbyists as well as an addition of a federal lobbyist. Both went out to bid. We brought those contracts back and the commission adopted both of those contracts. So, we currently have um both a state and federal lobbyist team that lobby on our behalf they work on a retainer basis so it's a flat fee per month and usually your measurement or metric is whether or not they're actually effective in bringing back money into the city so far state lobbyists has been incredibly effective with multiple millions of dollars in even the few years I've been here. We've only had the federal lobbyists for one year. We were not successful this round with the federal lobbyists, but I would not recommend. These are not one-year investments. You usually want three to five to build the relationships. We also, unfortunately or fortunately, for relationship building, our district got redistricted, so we just lost our federal congressional representative. So I would recommend we stick with it for a few more years because federal takes longer even than state to build those relationships and get into the pipeline. Okay, thank you.

Okay. Devin and team, thank you very much. These are always good to see. I might echo a few comments, and then I have a few others as well. Commissioner Koshy mentioned the future FEMA reimbursements, so I as well would love to see what we've gotten so far in recent years. Obviously, don't go back 50 years of historic, but maybe last three or four or five years of fema reimbursements and anything that we have applied and or projected going out forward in what years they theoretically would come in i know none of that's guaranteed but just an understanding of where we've applied and might be able to get some fema reimbursement um next um And I don't know, and maybe it's drawn out in here. I'm not quite sure. So I'll just ask a question. You can tell me it's on page whatever. You know, we're right-sizing or we're about to very soon right-size these fees on all these enterprise funds with the goal that they become self-sustaining, right? And then I think there was also some reserves that might, each of those might have some reserves or not. We'll have that conversation as well. But ultimately, those funds will grow based on these fee right-sizing. Have you projected out, number one, what the growth in each of those funds would be? Because theoretically, then I would be able to start extrapolating what we don't have to take from the general fund accordingly to subsidize those. And so I guess I'll just start with the first question. Have you started to project out what you think those fees will be revenue impacting on an ongoing basis, perhaps next year, the subsequent years?

That was part of our engagement with Raftelis, and they did provide us what their forecast was based on all of the different variables that exist within each one of those funds. That is factored into the budget. I think where it might get a little bit, not confusing, but where you might not see it here at this very rolled up level is if you look at wastewater, for example. Our 26 budget, we had 14.8 million in revenue, and in fiscal year 27, we're showing 14 flat. 14 million flat the reason for that is that transfer from the general fund to help offset and waste water so yes the short answer is yes we are forecasting those out and i'd be happy to share kind of what those future year as we implement or as if the commission should continue to implement those fee studies what that looks like for each one of those different periods

So theoretically, future years, more revenue coming from the fees, less fund transfers, I think we call it, right? Coming out of general, theoretically leaving more money in general for the other needs. And I would love to see that, you know, I know we're talking 27 budget now, so I realize that's our priority in the moment, but I would love to start seeing that project out, right? And so theoretically, our general fund should be um you know a benefactor in all of this work as well because we're no longer subsidizing the the enterprise funds accordingly i'd love to see how that starts to project out maybe over the next five years or so um i don't need it from you right now just just know that i'm thinking about it um and then um commissioner robinson touched on something about uh what i'll just call operation efficiencies um maybe a question i don't know this might be for you city manager or city yes city manager i apologize um do you know what our our annual turnover is in staff percentage-wise Rough 10%, 15, 20%, do you know?

I actually don't. But let me see if my HR director has any data yet, because we just implemented an HRIS system.

Hi, Jody Costello. We trend pretty low. I don't have an exact number I can follow up, but currently right now we only have six vacancies in the city, which I find to be extremely low.

Out of 159 FTEs currently, so like about maybe a 4% or something like that is kind of what I'm rough math thinking at. Might be off on that.

Yeah, that's really low for an organization.

Yeah, so I don't know, is that, you say currently, six out of 159, so can we project that out annually? I don't know. What I'm really trying to get at, let me just cut to the chase of where I'm trying to go with this, right? So let's imagine that's 4%, but that's only a current slice of time, but across the year, maybe it's 8%, 10%, whatever the number is, right? So my question is, as we've talked about previously about software, for example, that might make our... gosh, are permitting a little faster, a little more efficient, things like that. We've talked about other operational efficiencies that we might gain from other software improvements, perhaps with some AI help. Obviously if we've got positions coming open, because we do have some turnover, uh that leaves us the opportunity through attrition to become more operationally efficient if we choose to so um i obviously thank you i don't obviously you don't know they have the number on our annual basis i'd love to understand that because obviously i don't expect anybody's jobs are in jeopardy but if we've got an open position and we or can be more operationally efficient then maybe we don't need to fill that open position theoretically and we can grow in that way and and gain some of these efficiencies on our operational side so And I think our attrition would be maybe an interesting way to kind of go about that. I think that was my question for you, so thank you so much.

I think that is followed. Thank you.

Yeah, please, thank you. Hi, Ms. Schmidt. I might have missed it, and I know I see it in here quite a bit. I'll go to page, kind of hard to tell, I think it's page 22. Page 23 of 141, but it says 22 at the top. And maybe I'll just ask you, it's a fairly $20 million fiscal year 20 budget for non-departmental down to 6 million or 6.8 million. So number one, just help me understand non-departmental. What's kind of baked into that? Because that's a huge number to kind of just lump together.

Yeah, absolutely. So non-departmental is going to be anywhere where we would have any outstanding debt. It's also where we make those transfers out of. So if we're transferring to any one of the other funds as we have, that's what kind of that large share is. So in fiscal year 26, we transferred 5.8 million to the resiliency fund. In fiscal year 27, we did not do that. And our transfer to our fleet fund is $600,000 this year versus $607,000 last year. Transfer to wastewater in fiscal year 26 was $5.2 million, and we're not transferring anything there this year as a result of realizing those rate studies. And then we did a transfer of $7.7 million over to our capital projects last year. This year we're doing $3.5 million. So that's how those areas will ebb and flow. We also have about $700,000 programmed in there right now for our property casualty insurance. So that's an area that we look at. And then we have 430,000 and debt principal and 63,000 and debt service interest.

Okay, so I'm sorry, I and I, I realize you're looking over maybe you got going through your head as I'm looking, I don't know where you're at in the presentation. So you mentioned a moment ago, We, last year, with 2026, we had, I wanna say five million was the number that you gave that you transferred out of general, presumably, into some enterprise fund, and because of the result of the fees that we've accrued, we are no longer sending that five million, theoretically, in our- Through the wastewater fund, that's correct. Wastewater.

Yep.

So, I just wanna make sure I understand. Were we subsidizing wastewater to the tune of $5 million in 2026?

We were for the intent of completing capital projects.

Okay. And that will not be in 2027, right?

That's correct.

Okay. And that, interesting you just quantified for the purposes of capital projects. That doesn't necessarily imply that we were underfunding operations in those areas, but together with operations and capital projects that we would have liked to have done in 2026, we had to subsidize the uh wastewater wastewater fund from our general funds yes that's correct okay um okay um a general comment and and i uh i will tell you just for me thinking about it and i'm looking at these slides and and i don't have one specifically to draw you to but you know you kind of say uh well let me just let me just let me get you to anyone that kind of explains what i'm kind of alluding to if you'll just go to the page 28 of 141 i'm not sure this is a great example but but uh you know you've got expenses and other outflows and so because all of these transfers are taking as part of expenses and other output flows it's hard for me to understand what did we actually spend and what did we transfer from other department between funds and so we kind of lose that what are we actually spending in this in this concept because we're so busy spending and sending money elsewhere through that slide i don't know if it's possible or maybe it would help me or maybe i need some education on how to just what i want to understand is what we spent in 2026 what we transferred to other funds in 2026 and not have them co-mingled together as expenses and other outflows because i just love to understand that as we stop these outflows from happening what i can anticipate the actual expenses to be year on year um and so I don't know if you can maybe again that's my either educate me or I would acknowledge that I think we should maybe try and separate those two so they're not always coming together I also would understand that as we stop doing these subsidizations that some of this should naturally clear itself up but I just in general think I'd love to see what are the actual expenses that we spent and then we outflow to other things because we had to subsidize in other areas

Sure, so I think this bubble chart that I have up on the screen right now does do an okay job of at least showing you where the money's going to and from. In the budget book, we can certainly have some more descriptors in there where you will be able to see how those are footing and how those are netting. The intent would be parking, you'd wanna continue making those transfers out of that fund to offset capital, general fund, But where you don't want to see that continue is stormwater and reclaimed water. You will always have those admin fees going back into the general fund out of building, reclaimed, wastewater, and stormwater. Those admin fees cover the cost of payroll services, your city manager, your city clerk, HR, IT, all of those internal service functions where those enterprise funds would have to hire somebody separately to run their payroll, for example. So those admin fees will stay. Those will continue year over year, but the intent would be that you see less of those arrows going other places. Now, if it would be helpful, I could create something similar to this for 26, but this was a question that we got from the finance budget review committee that said, help us understand how all of this kind of flows together. So that was the intent of adding this in here.

Yeah, I'll comment on myself. I think as I start to look back at where we've spent, what we budgeted, what we spent, what we're budgeting, what we anticipate spending, when you start commingling transfers with actual spending, I lose the ability. It becomes obfuscated, and I can't quite tell. So a general comment, as much as we can. Apologies, just another two. Commissioner Robinson asked about when do these assessments end? And yet all of us have those assessments sitting on our trim notice. Do we title those assessments? Like do we tell the property appraiser's office or the tax collector's office this is the title of that assessment?

so i'd have to follow up on that particular one um i believe that we probably would have the ability to do that um i think just been a past practice that whatever it was titles just how it's kind of carried forward to be completely honest but if there's a better way that we could explain that to the residents and we can change that titling next year that might be a good call out to both of your points to really try to explain that to the residents

This fee expiry date, I assume they have a fixed duration usually. These are bonds that have a fixed duration, and they're meant to expire at a certain time. So if we title it with an expiry date, that might be something really good. We can say, oh, that is, and it expires in 2027, and here's what it's for, right?

Absolutely.

Contemplate that, please. Let me see. This might be my last question, or I might defer. Let me see. City manager, maybe a question for you, ma'am. You mentioned the county program criteria for the grant request, the $200 million that Commissioner Causey asked about, and you said they haven't announced it yet. We're watching it. Do we have an anticipation of when they might announce it yet?

Are they projecting?

We'll tell you about it in, I don't know, January of next year or something like that. Have they given you any indication?

I didn't get that specific level of detail on the timeline.

They didn't provide, or can we ask and see if they've gotten information on it?

I can try and ask again.

Understood. I get it. I wonder if they know and just haven't communicated yet or whether they don't quite know.

I don't think they quite know based on my conversation of the exact timeline.

Obviously that, to Commissioner Causey's point, would be something barrier islands more affected. Theoretically we might have a chance at that pie. And obviously understanding when those dates are coming so we can all be weighted with bated breath would be good. Absolutely. Okay. Thank you. Appreciate your time. Two minutes off. City Clerk, I apologize.

All right. Thank you very much for your feedback and we'll incorporate it and see you in a few weeks for our first reading.

Thank you. Thank you. With that, our City Commission Budget Workshop is adjourned.