- All right, I'll go ahead and call this meeting of the special fiscal committee on February 15th,
- the order. Bucky Stafford, Sherry, and Council of District 3. I'll go with about 30. That's a rather
- big number. It's about the last minutes. City Council, District 1. Trustee Namp, Deputy Mayor. Deverell,
- District 4. Council. Lepia, MacDowell, Clark-Sambas.
- Jeff McKinnon, City Control. Lisa Langer, Council of the City. Thank you to you guys. First thing on
- our agenda is the agenda review and approval. We want to give a special welcome to the City Control.
- Thank you. And so on my proposed agenda, first there was a 2025 year after report from Jeff. And then
- talking about the December deliberation session, which
- Isabel led for us what to do with those results and how to get the rest of them that we kind of need
- and then talk about overall scheduling of this committee this year. So I need a motion to approve this
- agenda. Or no, does it look good? Anybody have any concerns or additions that they want to make? Great, so.
- Jeff taken around in our 2025 year report and any administrative update. I wasn't sure if I should be
- here this morning, so if you have anything I want to leave a little early to make another meeting that
- should be good. Great, thank you very much. And before I actually I have some spreadsheets that I want
- to share. I don't want to just sit there and read a lot of numbers, so the intention is to just have
- it start a conversation, see what kinds of questions you have.
- Also see what kinds of reports you would like to see in the future. Now I did want to make, I'm going
- to go ahead and share my spreadsheet. I'm going to paste the link in the chat, which should be open
- to anyone. Is it what was in our packet? It is, but I want to address that actually.
- sure that I can do that. Sorry, this is the first time I've shared screen on this on this my new city
- computer. So the learning curve is five. You know what I have to
- Actually, I have got admin rights to my computer, which I don't. Can you just share the link that it
- should be in it? I should get those out. Okay. Yeah, perfect. Thank you. The only downfall is we might
- not see. Here, let me give you that and this just in case, and then I can manage the zoom.
- Okay, great. So the first thing I just want to address is an issue related to accessibility of documents.
- And this is just, you know, as we all work through this process of creating accessible documents, there
- are always going to be complications. And so with spreadsheets in particular, there are various guidelines
- to make spreadsheets accessible, including making the
- that include keeping the spreadsheets very simple, like not basically having them be tables. And then
- the guidelines actually best practice is to actually use Google Sheets to make them officially tables.
- Google Sheets when they have tables, I'm going to show you right here. Oh, sorry.
- You'll see that Google Sheets, when you actually define a table, there's a heading there. There's a
- title of the table, which is obviously best practice for accessibility. The problem is when this got
- transferred into a PDF, the print process for Google Sheets that transfers to PDF does not include the
- table title. What you got are the spreadsheets without any title, which makes them useless.
- This is just another accessibility issue we're going to have to work through as the whole city we transfer
- to fully accessible documents. I just wanted to get that by way of explanation. I'm going to show five
- sheets. I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on any of them, but I did want to point out that
- the on the first tab labeled sources, there are two links to the expenditure data and revenue data.
- They're actually on the city's public open data portal. And I find those incredibly useful. They are
- really as good as anything we have on the inside. It's data that's directly extracted from our financial
- system in the city and posted publicly every night.
- So anyone can have access to near real-time, like within a day, overall budgetary expenditure numbers
- and revenue. I just wanted to point that out. Let's start with revenue. My first sheet here is revenue.
- Let me also just say we have about 160 different funds in the city. Most of them are not
- interesting to most people, but very specialized. So the funds that I included in this particular
- spreadsheet, this report, are just ones that I thought would be particularly interesting to members
- of this committee. Again, if there are other things you're interested in, just please let me know. So
- what this sheet is showing is the difference between, this is revenue,
- When you pass the 2025 budget, you passed it along with estimates of revenue for each fund and each
- department within each fund. What this is, is this is a comparison of what was essentially approved
- by the common council in approving the budget versus what was actually received in each department.
- Again, every single number here
- could tell a story. If you just ask me why, just to pick a random example, legal had a lot more revenue
- than expected. I would have to look into that in detail. I want to see what kinds of questions you have.
- I will say that one big difference that you will see in revenue that's actual versus what was approved,
- shows up in the Comptroller's Office Department under the General Fund. It also shows up in the Comptroller's
- Office in the Economic Development Lit Fund. Well, it's different in the public safety. I'll get to
- that in a minute. But the reason why both the Economic Development Lit
- and the general fund to show up as having so much more revenue than expected is because of what's known
- as the supplemental distribution, the supplemental lit distribution. The state is constantly, state
- actually is who collects local income tax for the rest of the state. It's collected at the state level,
- and then the state makes distributions to local governments based on a formula. Every now and then,
- the balance in that state account or the state collects the money gets too large.
- And the idea is that money should be returned to local governments so they can use it. So the state
- will then once a year, if that balance gets above a certain threshold, provide it to the local government
- unit to use. And we don't budget that. We don't assume that we're going to get that because we don't
- know what it is. And so what it does is it provides an extra opportunity to kind of make up for
- Deficits in other ways and so the reason why you'll see in the controller's office line almost a million
- one point three million dollars and in the general fund and one point seven million dollars in the Economic
- development lit fund is because of that special distribution or some amount of distribution So in other
- words, we hope we receive more lit than we had projected And just
- FYI, we will know what that distribution is by approximately May 15th for this year. So we'll know what.
- For 2026. For 2026. The supplemental part. The 7th. May. May. May.
- So you know, the Department of Local Government Finance every year comes out with a budget calendar
- where they give us all these dates that are of this information is due to local units. And they have
- not published, they are themselves late with that budget. But if we base it on last year, which I've
- been told from DLGF reps that it's likely to be accurate, that that date is accurate. So I guess before
- we move on to,
- The one other difference that we see is a big deficit as far as revenue goes from police. That's because
- in past years, the dispatch local income tax was in a city received into public safety lit fund and
- then maintained separately in a police budget.
- That is definitely not best practice. Last year, the city created a separate PSAP Lit Fund and started
- to manage the Dispatch Center funding in a separate fund, which is really the way it should be. Because
- that revenue was originally budgeted in the Public Safety Lit Fund, but instead it was actually then
- receded into a separate fund for Dispatch Center. That's why it shows up as a large
- negative in terms of the amount of revenue received. Okay, but that bond is not cheating. I did not
- include that. That's the PSAP one? That's the PSAP one, exactly. But so the sister creation of the new...
- Sorry, so the revenues came in before
- we have that separate fund? No, in prior years. In prior years, it used to get receded into the public
- safety lip fund. But then last year, it was receded into a separate PSAP fund, but it was initially
- budgeted as being receded into the public safety lip fund. That's why instead of being receded here,
- in the Public Safety Lit Fund, it was received in the MPCS. That's where it is. It's not actually less
- money received than inspected. It's just where it was deposited. In terms of tracking revenues, one
- thing that took me a couple of years to realize was happening that was a complicated factor is the inter-fund
- transfers that count as revenues from one fund or come out of another.
- Is that something that would be, that would be a contributing factor to some of these differentials
- too, in like this close file, or yeah? It could be, although a lot of times those inter-fund transfers
- were actually anticipated. Right, exactly. For example, for 2026, you have a fairly large sanitation
- plan transfer from the general fund. Got it. So those wouldn't typically show up here if they were approved
- in Plan 4, as that is just
- things that happen differently in the displayer. Yeah. Yes. If you're interested in a report on the
- inter-fund transfers, that's something else I can provide. That would be helpful because I've gotten
- some inquiries from a constituent who is a CBA and he knows that the general fund expenditure went up
- in 2025 by about 20 percent and wonders exactly how that wears out. Tracking that would be a good idea
- because it seems that
- I think there were definitely a lot of moves from the 2025 also 2026, but in particular, a number of
- items that were moved from the general fund to the public safety and the economic development. Is all
- of this revenue in here like tax revenue?
- Or is it just a combination of revenues and you can split it out? It's a combination of a whole bunch
- of different things. Now, it can be split out. Actually, if you look at those detailed data sets that
- I put links on the front, you can actually see the detail. But it depends. For example, the general
- fund has a lot of revenue sources. Property taxes is the biggest one and local income tax is the second biggest.
- there are probably 50 other revenue sources for the general fund. Some of the others are much
- more straightforward, like there's only a small number of revenue sources. Parking, for example, there's
- only a small number of revenue sources. Yeah, I guess I'm kind of looking at say like ITS versus animal
- shelter, like animal shelter probably has an extended revenue of people actually coming in and adopting
- pets, but like ITS would just have revenue from
- Yeah, it definitely the property tax and income tax would not show up under individual departments as
- far as the revenue goes because those that revenue for property tax and income tax would be receded
- against the controller's
- So that's all going to be anything in ITS that's going to be other stuff. It's not. Wouldn't it be the
- grant? Wasn't there a grant? Yeah, I'm assuming that that. It could have been. I don't want to speculate,
- but yeah, they've got lots of different sources. Just echoing the everyday conversation, this is probably
- beyond the scope of this report, but it is something I forget what this administration, certainly the
- previous one I had asked on several occasions,
- have a better understanding of the multiple revenue streams that make up each fund. We've tended to
- take a fund-oriented approach to budgeting, which is like, here's all the funds, and here's the amount
- that is in them, and here's how we're gonna spend it at the end. And it's like, really hard to get your
- head around the whole thing if you don't understand the diversity of revenue sources, where there's,
- like, all the income transfers that are planned for, all that. So that's gonna be a better picture of
- all that. And we don't necessarily need to know, I don't think, all 50 revenue sources for the general
- fund, or maybe the ability to drill down
- But other categories, like so we talked about the major categories of property and income taxes, things
- like fees or, you know, things like that, like it's still in that way. Certainly, I mean, yeah, yes.
- Yeah, I actually request like next quarter. More so for project planning, I think, for 2027, but
- One thing I've done, or I've already started working on it, and really more for me to make sure I understand
- it all, it's just literally a diagram where boxes representing the different funds and a little arrow
- that says, general fund to sanitation was this much, general fund to that Jack Hoffman's fund is this
- much. I mean, that is certainly the sort of thing that. And I don't want to speak out of turn, but I think
- The ability to have a go bond or not also impacts where we would pull money from sometimes for different
- projects. So that probably had a ripple effect last year and we've heard some good news on that front
- from our financial advisors. So maybe there's opportunities there in the future, but that also has an
- impact on such as this money goes here every time. Sometimes we have to move things around to compensate
- for other losses or restrictions.
- So Matt, what you were saying is currently we just assume that certain revenues go into certain funds,
- and we wanted to take a look at. We don't have the full picture. I'm not sure we've ever really had
- a presentation of like, for every fund we have, here are the one or more revenue sources occupating
- that fund. And whether it's required to go into that fund. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I know, for instance,
- or I think I know,
- I think the Alternative Transformation Fund, which includes the sidewalk of the committee's budget,
- for instance, I believe that is in part populated by a general fund, an inter-fund transfer. That's
- something I've heard in the past. I can't tell you comprehensively that type of information. That's
- what I'd like to know or see. Yeah, in past years, actually, it's been a transfer from the cumulative
- capital development fund and then this year from the general fund. Yeah, you're absolutely right.
- Yeah, there are a number of transfers out of some of these big fun. I'm sorry. Yeah, there's other revenues
- that I'm interested in, too. We don't have a lot of control over those things, but like parking revenues,
- I think a good example, or even change meter rates in the day. If you think about that and like high
- use areas, for instance, and so use and parking garages, same thing. And those are on an escalator per
- code. But so you can start to, you know, you can start to think about, you know,
- The more you understand the revenue, you can start to think about the levers for any kind of adjustments,
- I think, would be better. Yeah. Yeah. And parking could justify an entire long meeting. We just didn't
- understand what was there. Can I just follow up on the ITOS negative revenues? So how does a negative
- revenue show up in this table? In the actuals?
- It was negative $236,000. I would have to look at the detail. It could be that it could be a refund
- or a transfer out, something like that. Something unexpected coming out of the account or the fund.
- Yeah, I can certainly look into that. I would like to know that. Okay, anything else on revenue? Okay,
- let's go to the, sorry.
- All right. This is essentially the same thing. And again, this is derived from the publicly available
- data set on on the city website. But it is the difference between the budget that was adopted,
- then amended, which would either be through transfers within within a fund and within a category, or, you know,
- And then the actual is what was actually spent and remaining is what was spent, what's remaining in
- the appropriation essentially. So again, every one of these can tell a story, but just a couple of big
- ones, let's see.
- The remaining is not cash balance. It's what was remaining from what was working. Exactly.
- This is appropriations, this is not cash. I will get to fund balances two tabs from now. Essentially,
- in terms of good management, we should have positives everywhere in the remaining because if we were
- going to have a negative in the remaining, then we should have amended the application.
- Yes, exactly. Yes. Ideally, you'd have zero in a way that makes your budget is perfect. But obviously,
- it's not always going to be that way. I guess the one thing I would want to point out here in particular
- would just be the human resources budget because there's a large extended appropriation. The appropriation
- for the employee salary increases was budgeted in HR.
- And so this was just unexpended appropriation associated with the salary adjustments. I think if there's
- anything else that was. The public safety with police.
- shows a big unexpended balance. There are a couple issues there. One is the PSAP. I think I had mentioned
- that the PSAP is now expended out of PSAP. There's also an unspent line that I noticed from health and
- insurance. I don't know why I have to spend it. It's going to take me some time to look into that. It's
- something I noticed yesterday. It might have been a transfer that wasn't made. It might have been that
- the previous controller decided to
- budget in a different way for health insurance. I don't have any insurance, just a particularly large
- number. When we created the PSAP fund, we put 4.5 million in there, but the expenditures, many of the
- expenditures still hit the, yes, what?
- No. In fact, the expenditures for dispatch, the expenditures for dispatch all were appropriately recorded
- in the PSAP lit. I know PS lit and PSAP lit. It can get a little confusing. I guess what I'm saying
- is that was a temporary transition thing where these expenses and revenues were budgeted in one fund,
- but actually receded and spent and out of a different fund.
- during the year. So that's not going to be an issue in 2026 because there's no, every PSAP and PSL every
- budget on Saturday. With respect to, I know this is the same as our cash balances, but with respect
- to the remaining appropriated but unspent fund at the departmental level or the fund level, if that
- makes sense, what is the administration's
- approach to those? Is that a required approach or is there flexibility there? Recalling the Hamilton
- administration in particular, I think there was like a sort of internal policy executive branch of like
- the departmental level. If you had unspent appropriated money, there was like a shared agreement of
- like you could spend half of it on priority items that were consistent with, you know, the funds used
- in your department. The other half would like revert to the sort of
- office of the mayor to decide what to do with uh obviously also subject to getting to um additional
- like appropriations or fund transfers where that was required but it consists with funds uh purpose
- does that is am i asking the question right about like this yeah and i will say i have not had that
- conversation so my understanding or our experience has not been um when jessica was here she there was
- no percentage on
- you know, you get to keep half or you get to not keep half. It was simply at the end of the year, you'd
- look at and he says, probably not through this process too, maybe not. Look at the money that you have
- on spend and, you know, encumber what you needed and then anything else you would give back
- to the controller's office. So the administration didn't have, or rather the mayor's office didn't go
- through and say, gosh, here's this pool of money and I don't spend it here, here, here. It was more,
- it all came out of the controller's office to say, here's,
- here's all the money that wasn't spent put back into the fund. And then the controller made the decisions
- about, you know, departments that had deficits, we would use it to cover that. And I don't think there
- was any, there was no discussion in any year of here's some extra money, what should we do with it?
- I think that if it wasn't spent and someone didn't have a need for it and it wasn't encumbered, we didn't
- make an extra plan to then go out and spend it. And in fact, I will say I had one,
- staff member who did approach the office of the mayor saying, hey, this wasn't in my budget, but I have
- extra money left over. Can I spend it on this, this, and this? And my response was, well, we went through
- the budget season and, you know, this isn't budgeted. It hasn't been reviewed by council. I don't think
- it's appropriate to say we've had this extra money. Now we're going to spend it on something that hasn't
- been reviewed by the public or by the control or me at this late stage of the game. That usually happens
- in late November and December.
- And so we see inter-fund transfers, which is part of the story when we see that. And to uncover something,
- that's like a formal, like, contractual obligation or something like that, right? Yeah, yeah. You didn't
- quite get your contract wrapped up in the money, but you're saving the money so you can still do it.
- Right, which makes, I know, makes a lot of the analysis. Right, and just thinking of things like, I
- think this has come up in the engineering context, for instance, where, like, they're busy, they're
- understaffed, whatever it is, they can't quite get to the project that they thought they would get to
- this year. We did budget and improve it, and then it's,
- December and then they kind of what happens if they can't cover the money, you know. So the way we did
- it last year and our new controller may do things differently is, you know, if you, let's say that you
- had a, let's say you had a consulting project you wanted to do and you didn't have your, you hadn't
- yet secured the vendor. So you didn't have a purchase order, which would be the normal way you would
- do that. And so for a big engineering project, that might be like the rewrite not have
- I don't know if it's true, let me walk that back. An engineering project involves a lot of different
- expenses. So as long as you have a contract and a purchase order of different income rate, if you don't
- have that, you have to at least have last year a letter of agreement or something. So you have to know
- who's doing it and have some kind of connection lined up like, yes, we're going to make a contract next
- year to work this out. You can't just say, I continue to plan to do this project. I think that's a harder path.
- But there might be other ways for engineering a project that works a little differently. Yeah, that's
- what it could be. I will say just as a matter of budgetary philosophy, over the past years, past four
- years or so, the local units of government have been kind of a wash and mark of funds. And so there
- have been some kind of extra funding sources that just aren't available anymore. My personal kind of
- First of all, is that we're going to be, things are going to be very tight coming up in the next couple
- of years, especially from SEA-1. Both the loss of ARPA, or the ending of ARPA and the SEA-1 changes.
- So I don't foresee us being in the position where we want to encourage extra spending that hasn't already
- been budgeted. Yeah, I may have mischaracterized that also. What I was just trying to do.
- exactly what you were describing, the reverse of the controller. And then they weren't, it went up throughout
- the process, you know? Yeah. But, um, going further back under Kazam, we did have an angled reversion
- appropriation. So that's interesting. But in February, March, we would get, here are the reversions,
- and here's how you want to spend it. Right, Dave? Yeah.
- All right, if there's something else on expenditures, and again, you can please come back to me with
- additional questions once you get a chance to look at the data more. I did have a tab on taxes, just
- because I wanted to just look overall at property taxes and income taxes, just because those are the
- big sources. Yeah, I can get that actually
- all fit up on screen. Okay, there we go. So we've got property taxes and I'm excluding TIFF here. You
- will see that we have, property taxes generally go into four different funds. Well, they go into the
- general fund and the parks fund. Those are property tax in 2026,
- you have budgeted revenue into the motor vehicle highway fund for the first time. That has not been
- a typical practice in the past. Those three funds, some of the property taxes of those three funds are
- fixed by law. The state will determine how much property taxes we get out of those three funds and is
- up to the city. It's up to the local unit of government to determine how those
- those property tax are allocated among those three funds. Typically, they've just been split between
- general and parks, but for the first time, they've been also allocated at the NVH, but it's a fixed
- sum. Anything that's out of property tax that's allocated to motor vehicle highway comes out of general.
- Can I ask about that ship? Was that just a bit
- I don't know, like logistical in the sense of like where we're using general fund previously, but then
- I assume where we buy the fund is going to repay any projects, that kind of thing. Honestly, I don't
- know why that decision was made. Okay. And then cumulative capital development is a separate rate controlled
- fund that's separate property tax rate for capital projects. So those are your basic property taxes.
- You will see that
- property taxes have increased at a kind of a steady clip for the past four years. And then, but in 2026,
- our projections is that they'll actually be decreased a little bit based on SE81. And we'll probably
- see a little bit larger decrease at 20%. So property taxes as a whole with respect to those general
- funds have basically crusted and will probably
- go down from now. So this table is redact tax revenues? Yes. This is just property tax revenue. Then
- we have the bonds. The general obligation bonds also come with their own property tax rate. When you
- pass the general obligation bond, it also comes with a separate property tax rate to service them.
- Those property taxes that are shown under bonds are in addition to the property tax shown under chain.
- It's a general fund property tax rate is crested, but it looks like the parks want to start going up.
- Well, that's a choice. That's a positive choice. It's the total.
- So it's not like there's a statutory rate for parks and the statutory rate for general. There's a statutory
- rate overall that then gets allocated among those three funds. Oh, sorry. So in theory, we could, like
- this council, reduce the rate that parks gets to increase the rate that the general fund gets? That's
- an annual budgetary decision. Two questions.
- I understand the GEO bonds rates are based on what the amount of bond was. Do you remind us the Community
- Development Funds rate based on how that's set? And then the second question is, are all of these treated
- identically that are listed here with respect to interaction with constitutional limits on property
- tax revenues, like for different types of property? Or are some of these accepted in some way from not
- counting against that consideration, I think,
- Yeah. So there's a question. Well, let me answer the last thing first. They are all within the property
- tax caps, the constitutional limits. They all behave identically in that way. The only debt that's really
- accepted from those property tax caps are school referendums, school levies passed by referendum. Are
- TIF incremental TIF revenues pretty differently in some way too though?
- They are treated differently. They're still the tax caps still apply. Yeah. Okay. And I'm sorry, what
- was that? Yeah, that's something that that you said. Yeah, there is maximum. We are at the maximum.
- And it's just it's a it's what's known as a weight controlled fund. So it's just a certain amount of
- It's a certain rate per $100 of assessed value, net assessed value. So that's what it brings in. And
- it's fairly strictly limited by statute as to what can be spent, what can be spent. All right,
- let me comment. So could you describe, so the STA one was tax deductions, larger homestead credit. And
- so it's, what residents of Bloomington will see is that they're,
- that their property taxes are going to essentially flatten out or cap. My reading is that property values
- have essentially kind of capped as well for mineral camp. In other words, housing at least is flattened.
- So I assume SS value would be essentially
- as well. You're talking about just assessments having to be flammed out? I guess, yeah, taxes, assessments.
- So I'm just thinking like, so, you know, just the big picture. So, you know, we were obviously not going
- to annex areas, you know, one and two, the county. So that's, so we're limited in terms of expanding
- our tax base from that. The state has imposed these deductions.
- before, you know, property taxes are going to apply now. We're going to be deriving more and more from
- LID apparently. That's the key point. That's the content. And I guess my, so just evaluating that, when
- we went into the process of creating LID and deploying it, we have various buckets of where it was going
- to go during Hampton administration.
- and it would be great to have clarity as to exactly, you know, where that goes now. I mean, is it going
- into just the general fund for, obviously for, but you know, exactly where is it going relative to where
- we planned it to go in the past? It is radically different. Exactly. You're in a very different place
- now. I know, I know, but I'm just, I'm trying to wrap my head around, like, you know, where the landscape
- going forward
- is going to be pretty different. It's going to be very different because right now there are essentially
- four different lit rates that you receive. It's called certified shares, which is just kind of your
- basic lit. That goes into the general fund. It's not accounted for separately in terms of expenditure.
- It's mixed up with property tax and all the other receipts into the general fund. That's your certified
- shares. There's your public safety,
- which goes into a separate fund. There's the economic development, which is probably what you're referring
- to. Yeah, that was added. Then there's the PSAP that's specifically for the dispatch. With SCA-1, apparently,
- and I don't know that we want to get into this discussion. No, we have time for it. It's already time
- for it. Exactly. Well, I'm just trying to impart that's what I would like to build in the future.
- A more detailed report about what and how we spend it right now. Yeah. Just a general discussion and
- maybe agreement on our priorities going forward. To me, we budgeted for public transportation. I think
- it's absolutely essential that because what we're talking about is a regressive taxation. We ought to
- be spending it to the best of our ability for low income people. They're going to be deriving more and
- more from people.
- Well, just to be clear, I think, you know, we do have that commitment to BT. Yeah. But I believe it
- expires right about the time EDLIP also expires. So all that money is going away and we'll have to redo
- it. And just for the benefit of the public, I don't think any individual property owner who's maybe
- listening to this should assume that their tax bill will be lower as a result of the SEA 1 changes.
- It very much depends on whether your business, residence, the value of your property. And then, of course, as those
- taxes go away and counties and municipalities are forced to reintroduce them in different ways. The
- end result, even though we have less money as a municipality, may not be that residents also are paying
- less. So just to caution folks, that may be true for some folks, but it probably won't be true for all.
- And Jeff, those four categories of rents are all going away. As of now, they go away until it for calendar
- budget year 2028.
- All right, let me just, I'm just going to zoom through these last two. The next tab is just fund balances.
- I'm not, I don't think we really need to talk about them, but they're here for your reference. This
- is basically, I pulled together the end of the year fund balance for a number of interesting funds from
- 2020 through 2025. You're welcome to look at that and we can ask questions or you can ask questions.
- Then I put together another tab, which was our 2026 debt maintenance. And we've already talked about
- the GO bonds, which come with their own property tax levy. We have TIF bonds, which are paid for from
- TIF increment revenue. The one bond that is really paid, we've got food and beverage tax, convention
- center lease, which is paid out of conventions, out of food and beverage tax.
- Bond payments that do essentially come at the expense of other things are the CD-LIT bonds, which was
- used, which was used among other things for fire station improvements, purchase of showers west,
- et cetera. And that comes out of, that doesn't come with its own tax rate that comes out of your CD-LIT.
- And then these three parks bonds, solar panel bonds, golf car lease, which is over this year.
- and then the Twin Lakes Reparations Center. I don't want to go into detail on debt here because I would
- like to have a separate conversation about debt where we have our municipal advisor here to talk about
- our constitutional limits and give us a lot more detail. I just wanted to give you what we know are
- our 2026 payments. Thank you. Sorry for taking so long.
- I think it sounds like there were a lot of questions, but I'll yield back to the chair. Yeah, are there
- any urgent other questions from? Go ahead. Just one that I hope is short, which is, or relatively, which
- is that my Republican appeal, which I think is on fall, had made a few public comments recently about the
- the comprehensive annual financial report, is that right? Which is distinct from an annual financial
- report. There's a level of detail. It's now called the annual comprehensive financial, ACFR. So I guess
- first confirming that is distinct ACFR from an annual financial report. That is a second. Could you
- speak to some of, I don't know if you've seen his comments from the previous meetings, but noting that
- we're, I guess, behind on filing an ACFR, is that right? And give an update on that. Yeah, we are, that
- has been actually
- finishing that has been my number one priority since taking the job. And we're still working on it.
- Understand that it is kind of a three-way relationship. We provide information and artifacts to our
- Gatsby Gap firm that does the Gatsby Gap, essentially our accrual-based accounting. They then provide
- information to the auditor, which is the firm called Pro.
- And then crow asks us for artifacts to test. And so we were, you know, we respond to any requests for
- additional artifacts we get within a day. But
- We are still probably, from talking to the two firms involved in this, probably still a few weeks out
- from completion of the ACFR, which is an audited report. So that's a big difference between the AFR
- and the ACFR, is that the ACFR is audited. And so every bit of it gets tested by the consultants who
- are doing the audits, as opposed to the AFR, which is just something that
- And both of those are statutory requirements for our unit, yes. And just to reiterate this, I think
- this has been said, but for the benefit of the public, these audits have to be done sequentially by
- year. You can't do multiple years at once. And we started with a backlog, so we've been playing catch
- up and we are all looking forward to being caught up and then we intend to stay caught up forever. Yeah,
- so the 2025 audit would be
- and ACFR would be due by 2nd or 30th of this year. We intend to be current. Are there any penalties
- for being behind? No, no, and it is. I mean, there are a lot of things that have happened and a lot
- of communities that not all, not all, but there are a lot of communities that are behind, but we work
- very closely with our state Board of Accounts representative.
- It's just something that's very important to get done. So that the AFR for 2024 is already available.
- The AFR for 2025 will be done, I think we plan to finish it on March 23rd, or February 24th, sorry.
- 60 days. And then submit it before March 1st. And that's on the controller's website. Yes. Thank you.
- Great. Let's go ahead and go to public comments specifically about this year and report. So if you want
- to stop the screen share and go back to that and see if there's any members of the public. If you want
- to speak, there's no members of the public and here with us, but anybody wants to raise their hand on
- Zoom to let us know. Looks like Mr. Keough would like to have a comment. Go ahead and state your name
- for the record and you'll have
- Can you hear me? Yeah, my name is Kevin Keough. Thank you members of the fiscal committee for
- this opportunity to speak. I want to be very clear about my intent today. I am here to advocate for
- a process improvement that I believe is essential to sound fiscal governance, informed decision making,
- and public trust.
- As I stated in prior meetings, the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report is not just a compliance document.
- It is the single most important accountability tool that elected officials and citizens have to understand
- the city's true financial condition based on actual audited results. The ACFR for the year ended December
- 31st, 2024 was due on September 30th, 2025.
- That deadline was missed. At the official committee meeting on November 19th, 2025, the former controller
- publicly committed to publishing the report by December 31st, 2025. That commitment was also not met.
- The controllers subsequently resigned, and as of today, February 14th, 2026, the 2024 ACFR still has
- not been published.
- At this point, we are approaching 14 months after the end of the calendar year 2024. This is not a timing
- issue. It is a governance issue. Audited financial information delivered that late is no longer decision
- useful, particularly when the city is already discussing policy choices and will begin development of
- the 2027 budget later this year. I was particularly concerned by the statement made by the former controller
- November 19th meeting that there's no way for the City of Wilmington to produce the ACFR any earlier
- than September 30th deadline. That is simply not consistent with recognized best practices in government
- financial reporting. The Government Financial Officers Association, the GFOA, explicitly recognizes
- excellence in financial reporting through its certificate of achievement program. One of the
- core expectations of that program is timeliness.
- My research shows that multiple Indiana peer cities, including Fishers and Carmel, meet these standards
- and have earned that recognition by publishing their ACFRs within the roughly six months from the end
- of the year end. This tells us something important. Producing a timely ACFR is not theoretical. It is
- achievable. It is being done right here in Indiana by cities with comparable complexity. My request
- today is straightforward.
- I urge the committee to formally take ownership of the ACFR timeliness as a governance priority.
- Specifically, I ask you to direct the administration to establish a process and expectation
- that Bloomington's ACFR be published within six months of the year end and the city pursue the GFOA
- certificate of achievement and excellence in financial reporting. This is not about an award. This is
- about discipline, accountability,
- and restoring a reliable financial feedback loop, one that allows the council to govern proactively
- rather than reactively. Timely audited financial information adds value, it strengthens budgets, it
- improves decision-making, and it builds public trust. I respectfully ask the committee to lead on this
- issue. Thank you for your time and consideration. Thank you, Mr. Keough. Is there anybody else online
- who would like to make a comment?
- specifically about the year-end report. All right. I don't see any hands being raised. Jeff, do you
- know if any idea when that 2024 will be finished? I just said. Yeah, I know. I would say it is a number
- of weeks, not months, but not days either. All right. Thank you.
- So I just want to explore a little bit. So you said that it's a sequential process. Yes. So we can't
- run parallel to, we can't do both. So if we hadn't finished, if we were behind on 2022 and 2023 when
- we came into office in 2024, you can't start 2024 on time because you have to go back and finish 2022
- and 2023 first, which is why
- As Mr. Kia points out, we were not able to finish 2024 on time because we were working on the previous
- years. We are all anxious and looking forward to being caught up. I assume working on previous years
- because that was under the previous administration with a previous controller, finding all those artifacts
- become ever more challenging. Is that accurate? That's part of it, but not really.
- Here are two factors that make it complex. One is that the standards changed over the years. There are
- a number of new requirements that have come out, particularly with respect to capital improvement, management
- of the value of capital improvements. New standards for leases in particular have added a lot of complexity.
- And then also new standards for, and this is one of the things that I had to work on as soon as I came in,
- standards for management of subscription-based IT arrangements. In the past, you buy software and they
- say it's a purchase, but people don't buy software anymore. They subscribe to it and those subscription
- arrangements require additional accounting that didn't exist before. There are new reports, new processes
- for governance of IT-based subscription arrangements.
- and so the city has a fairly decentralized procurement system. Any question that comes from an auditor,
- for example, has to then involve gathering data from a number of different departments. If you haven't
- been through the process before, it's not just find the invoice that matches this, it's sometimes find
- processes, find proof that you went through the proper process,
- before the invoice of the first disorder was even created or that it was reported in the proper way.
- So that was a very broad scope. Yeah. Well, thank you for your work on that. The administration worked
- to try to get us caught up on the 22 and 23 before we get to 21. Jeff, could you address that option?
- Because I wouldn't like that to sit out there. 22 and 22 are done. Yes, I know they're done now, but
- they had to be done before we do 24. So it was a leftover. Is there a way to maybe
- those after because I would really like to move on to the December deliberation at this point. I will
- just say, can I just say that there have been no major issues found so far? Thank you. So moving on
- to the deliberation session that we had in November, as a council, we're trying to prioritize outcomes.
- Isabel, you
- did a great job organizing that activity and going through like the comp plan and the environmental
- action plan or the climate action plan to get us started with some outcomes and then council members
- chose their own outcomes. And then for those three groups, the high performing government, housing and
- homelessness and economic development, we were actually able to do the activity, which was each council
- member ranking those outcomes. And so I
- Recorded those that data here. And once again, this was this was originally in a table and I was advised
- by staff to move it out of a table format because it was more than just numbers. I also, you know, recorded
- which council members said what in terms of their rankings and then I scored that
- First ranking scored three points, second ranking scored two points, and third ranking scored one point
- per council member. In theory, the highest score was 27, and council members had chosen the exact same
- outcome as their number were ranked. I don't feel like there's necessarily time right now or we should
- take time right now to look through these specifically in light of
- my discussion questions of is the data useful? What do you notice about it? Are there other ways to
- present or use this information? But I would like us as a group to be like, was this concept useful
- and should we figure out how to get this information about the remaining outcome areas from our colleagues
- and ideas on how to do that if we think that we should essentially finish this activity.
- So should we finish the activity? Yes. Yes. I think so. I think it's a good baseline of understanding.
- I agree. The next deliberation session right now is scheduled for March. As far as I know, there is nothing
- that is set and scheduled for that deliberation session, but I was also wondering if it can be effective
- to not have to have it as a deliberation session, but have some kind of a virtual reaching out or,
- I mean, we have several committee members here because it's kind of this two phases of coming up with
- a list of outcomes to prioritize and then everybody actually prioritize.
- what do people think about how to finish the backtake? Say what meeting type? Yeah, what meeting type,
- whether we should say, let's do it as a deliberation session and then I can talk to council member Sari
- about that, council president Sari. I don't know if Jeff or Gretchen can tell us at what point does
- this prioritization stuff from council become
- less valuable in terms of when you receive this information from some budgeting for 2027. I have a broader
- comment about the whole PBB process that I want to make that I think is right here. I think you know
- we've been following the resource X methodology for
- priority-based budgeting that involves four steps, like importing, cleaning the data, performing
- a comprehensive inventory, identifying the true cost of programs and scoring program effectiveness.
- That is an eight plus month process that I don't think actually is going to give you the answers that
- you need in a way that helps with budgetary decision-making. I'm wondering if we don't want to instead
- this year,
- try maybe choosing a certain number, a small limited number of priorities, say 10, that can certainly
- be incorporate the priorities that you've already been identified and then have us associate the various
- budgets with those priorities and just report on those rather than try to go through the whole process,
- which like I said, I don't think is going to give you the information you want in a time of need. Gretchen,
- I don't know if you have any more.
- Yeah, I mean, I think we've talked a lot about how incredibly detailed this work is. And I know Lisa
- has seen how it is for even a relatively simple budget. And so I just want to make sure that we don't
- spend all of that staff time and then wind up saying at the end of it, well, that still doesn't show
- us what we want. And I think that the work you've done on outcomes is really helpful to the administration
- in that it's showing us
- what matters to council and what we care about. Not all of these are things that are budgetary items
- or things that could be even in a single year's budget. But it does help us go through and see what
- among these lists do you have programs or areas of work that we could track spending on and could report
- on efficiently without having every department member come to multiple department meetings and having a
- an interminable process where we're overwhelmed by numbers but don't actually get the information about
- that. I think the exercise is illuminating, not everything in here is a budgetary item. I think Jeff
- and I are on the same page of how can we narrow the list to what are the 10 things that you really want
- to know. I know the mayor, of course, has her ideas of what those things are. We'll have some overlap
- in the Venn diagram. How can we use the systems we have to track that without
- you know, spending countless hours. I don't think you care whether, you know, one person spends 1% of
- their time on this and 2% of their time on that. So your proposal is basically like, you know, thinking
- say in the context of this activity that one of our top housing and homelessness outcomes based on that
- activity was to increase housing diversity within neighborhoods. So you would say like if we kind of
- collectively chose that as one for you to focus on that for that one, you would break out
- those different program expenditures, but you wouldn't necessarily break out those program expenditures
- for like everything. Is that what you mean? That would be a great example of a goal that would be very
- hard to... Well, yeah. I would say you've done a lot of work on this end, and what would be helpful
- at this point would be for Jeff and I to look through this and say, okay, what are the things that we
- know are tied to specific budget
- to programs or to activities or that should be tied to programs or activities that we want to track.
- Like, what is trackable and reportable from this list? And that might be much less. And we could come
- back and say, here's what we could track. And maybe that list has five things. Maybe it has 20. And
- then we could little it down from there. Of course, as I mentioned, obviously, the mayor will also want
- to have things on the list. I think that many of that list will have interest in saying that.
- Well, at the December session, one of the things that I remember us saying was that some of them are
- nested underneath each other, and then the difference, I think, Matt, you said the difference between
- the outcomes as cited in the plans should maybe hold a different weight than the outcomes just mentioned
- by council members at the event.
- And these lists probably could use a little bit more refinement comparing if we don't have time for
- today. Well, I think we could we could definitely let's let's pick words with sidewalks and say, oh,
- we have plans. We're making more plans and perfect plans that would tell us here's what you should do.
- Big picture. First, we want to assess what are we actually spending. That's the big one in all of the
- different pockets. And then we could come back and say,
- Here's what the plan says we should be achieving long term or over a five year period. And this year,
- you know, this is what our spending has gotten us in the past. And this is what we would need to spend
- to keep up with the goals in the plan. So I think it might be difficult for those of us who don't know
- all the fine points of those programs to randomly say, well, in one year, I think this transfer, I think
- it would be easier to start the numbers and then look at the big plan and have staff who have expertise
- in those areas.
- back and say here's what we think and then you can look at that and say well I think your goal should
- be higher or no that's too much slow it down or you know. But this was useful. Yes I mean anything that
- helps us understand what we can work on and where we find common ground and what we value and want to
- know about is always useful. Okay great. So first of all I do want to be careful about the words we
- use so priority based budgeting is not
- really what the council agreed on is outcome-based question. Well, what we on the council are still
- trying to wrap our heads around is we need to focus on outcomes, not programs. We can say, we need more
- police, but what is the actual outcome for the community that are seeking?
- So I think this is still very valuable to go through the other categories to do this with council. And
- then we can wiggle it down to what's measurable and what's doable within one year. And we can also take
- this and we have another year in our term, same council, as a basis for adding measurable outcomes and
- therefore, uh, budget prioritization next. Wow. Yeah. Some other reflections. Well, um, I think that's
- agreed with a lot of what I'm bringing the outcome based versus priority based approach agreement I'm
- hearing from, uh, deputy mayor controller as well with respect to like a nice breakfast last time we
- met about this. I'm very cautious about not creating work that is in actionable, uh, for us.
- Um, and I think we should finish the exercise because I think we're in a sort of interim space where
- it is going to be, continue to be useful. But I'd also like us to dedicate more meeting time in that,
- for more space in that same meeting to continue the conversation around like structurally,
- where do we, where are we trying to end up? Uh, and I think the high level things here is that I think
- we have alignment on some of these, that city goals and plans are
- our best source currently for shared outcomes between executive and legislative branches. However, even
- where we have those plans, we lack consistency, but they're structured. So there's no, for lack of a
- better term, there's no consistent logic model for these things. So that these resources are spent on
- these activities, programs, or outlets in order to achieve or try to achieve these near-term and long-term
- outcomes. Like that format isn't the same or consistent across plans. And then there's whole separate
- areas where we don't have plans of that type, but I would say public safety,
- is one, right? And so, like, defining where we're trying to go on these things, if we can get a shared
- vision, even if it's five years down the line, like, would then help us understand, oh, we actually
- do want to have a legislatively adopted public safety plan that covers these areas, and we're going
- to prioritize that in 2027, you know, like, whatever that ends up looking like. And then just the last
- note that I think, yeah, and I think the deputy mayor noted this as well,
- that conversation a little bit with an assumption about that everything costs money and we have to just
- pick which things we want most. And I think often one of those outcomes that is not true, it's like
- actually just policy and how we choose to spend staff time and, you know, the laws we choose to have.
- So I think we're making progress, but yeah, I want to very much keep that structural aspect in mind
- as we iterate our way towards like a final version.
- I'm sure things will always be, you know, iterated upon. But I think trying to get that vision of where
- we're headed is very important, if not more important than like prioritizing a subset of things to workshop
- this year. So are you advocating for doing these last four segments as in-person deliberations of the
- full council? Yes. I mean, based on how long it took the first time, it sounds like that you want to
- have an additional conversation about
- You know, that first time we did split conversation, I would say, around some of these structural elements.
- Like I was, I certainly wasn't, I think others were speaking to them as well. So I think we could split
- the meeting across those topics. Maybe this committee could also further advance, conceptually, like
- a straw man to workshop the, the, the, the, the people speaking in the room, and people were actually
- kind of reacting to something as like parties. There's a version of what this could look like three
- years down the line. What do people think? All right. Other thoughts on?
- to finish the activity and we're doing it in March. I think Council Member Sari was good with that,
- that deliberation session. Could we talk a little bit about the process of the deliberation? Because
- some of the deliberation sessions we've had seem to be a spin-off into chaos. We're looking too many,
- too much. Tell us what you really think, Dave. Too much, wow.
- Sorry to say that. I mean, I respect the effort. I really respect the effort and that was a lot of effort
- on your part as well as part of it. So this is not a critique of that. But just to say that, you know,
- I'd really like to have the full council, the administration sit down and just go through without, we're
- representatives. So we've sort of, and we've gotten a lot of them in the past. So I don't see a need
- to have breakout groups and have
- all that go on, I really want council and administration to go through and find out if where we were
- on the same page. In other words, here we are. And I would say that if outcome is overall important,
- but there are programs that I would like to know, have they ceased to happen, you know, as the administration
- decided not to put, you know, continue effort into this. I mean, our comprehensive plan,
- as directives in it. And they were taken out by the previous administration and then maybe, you know,
- budgetary constraints just say, let's just stop doing that right now. I'm not aware of it. I just assumed
- that these things are going on. I mean, it's not a criticism. I mean, feel free to ask any time. I'd
- be happy to look into it. I don't have a thought that doesn't bring it. And nothing comes to mind like,
- oh, we looked at the plan and said, we're not doing that, but I'd be happy to talk about anything. Okay.
- That's something I think I'd like to explore meeting
- screen. So the liberation session piece of finishing this would very much be like the December session
- that we just had repeated except for these other four and whatever changes come from the feedbacks that
- I would like to make. Well, I was going to go in a little bit of a different direction in that I think the
- chaotic part of our December 10th deliberation session was when people started getting up and writing
- things on post-it notes and putting them on sheets of paper. I think that we could do that ahead of
- time with some, let's say here, virtual feedback collection if we're allowed to do that kind of thing
- under open door law and have that data already available when we have our deliberation session so that
- we can then
- discuss compiling it in a way that you had for the first four topics here. And I think only after we've
- done both of those things, would it be most helpful to sit down with the investigation. Because we do
- have to do that as a council to have a unified rules. So that would be a proposal for trying to collect
- the information in a non in-person sort of way.
- and then process the information together perhaps with administration, perhaps also then including some
- of those structural kind of questions and the long range where we go here. That's good. And so thinking
- in terms of the timeline,
- sure if we could get all of that information from our colleagues in time to do a March deliberation
- session, but would an April deliberation session be too late for admin to get that kind of feedback
- around the phone consider budget? I mean, it's, I think it depends on how much back and forth you're
- wanting to have at the end because really some folks are already working on their budgets.
- So sooner is always better. And we do have two union negotiations this year to wrap up as well. But
- we want to get done well ahead of budget season so that we're looking at all the numbers and needs and
- requests at once. So I would say mid-April would be pushing them. Yeah. I think we could do it by March
- 11. I think that we could maybe do it by March 11. Lisa?
- After we talked about this meeting in terms of material meeting, whatever, could I go out say to another
- council member not in this room and say, Hi, I need you to give me like I need you to brainstorm whatever
- outcomes you want to see in addition to what we're already listed because it's already has the outcomes
- listed from those other four categories. So like, look at these. What else do you want to see in public
- safety transportation that like I can do that.
- Let's talk about a process for that. I'm not sure that I'm exactly following. Basically, I just don't
- talk to them. Maybe there are full committee members here. Each of us can talk to one other. Right.
- With respect to serial meetings, I want to sit down and lock the statute because the requirements are
- very specific. It discusses one of the most diverse in meetings.
- of a council, you know, in that context, no, we couldn't. Yeah, that's a good one. I'm wondering, is
- it an email that they should do things, you know, yeah, I defer to our council and follow up. Yeah,
- what you want. I'm just not exactly sure what that would be. I guess I feel like it's more reliable,
- a more reliable way to actually get timely feedback from our colleagues is to
- contact them one at a time and have that kind of like one-on-one connection, at least initially to get
- the outcomes. So I think that that'll be the harder part to do is if people wanna come up with additional
- outcomes for those areas. As the ranking, I mean, and we should be able to have that kind of thing as
- like a Google form, right? Like you could just make a Google form and send it out the way that we've done with
- I mean, we did that kind of stuff, other like surveying all council members, as long as it's not some
- kind of a shared Google Doc that we could edit all at the same time, but a questionnaire is okay, right?
- Yeah, I think so, as long as it's aggregated. So that part, I think we can get feedback on pretty quickly.
- It's the outcome conditions. And I guess I'll be clear, some of the more structural things that I'm
- most interested in, frankly, of like where we're trying to go aren't necessarily things that inform
- this year's budget, except for with respect to maybe some small expenditures to develop things that
- are needed. But I don't think we're going to be in a place that doesn't have a long-term vision. We're
- not going to be in a place that is necessary. Yeah, use it as a framework for decision-making. So just
- so we can wrap this up, the goal is to collect virtual feedback.
- and I'll be in touch with Lisa about the best way to do that, making sure that we follow the door law,
- but I think that it would be preferable if we could reach out individually to folks and please about
- outcomes, and then have the March deliberation session about basically processing and coming
- to understandings about the actual problem. Is that right?
- It kind of allows the opportunity to workshop longer in the process. Dr. Gretchen as well. Yeah. I'm
- happy to work with another committee member. I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah. For that. That's the
- line. Just to immediately advance. Yeah. Yeah. That would be great. Yeah. And so Gretchen and Jeff,
- I believe that date is March 11.
- and I will first have to check in with council members. Sorry, last I knew there wasn't anything. Yeah,
- that's March 11th. The last I knew there, or last I investigated, there was not a deliberation session.
- Okay. Let's go to public comment real fast around this deliberation session.
- topic of conversation that we have just been on. If there are any members of the public who would like
- to comment on that session or the reflection that we just had, please raise your hand. I don't see anything
- that was done. Wonderful. Again, that was March 11. We'll cross our fingers if that still works.
- Next, fiscal committee scheduling. I put in just a little note about the overall 20-27 budget calendar
- here at the end, just kind of recognizing that it is part of the charge of this entity to work to create
- a timeline and activity framework. It looks like we already injected one thing in here, which is the
- March 11th deliberation session.
- Does anybody else, including controller or Gretchen, want to add any other dates in here that might
- be relevant and committee members, do you want to add any other types of conversations that you think
- are really important and also recognize we're going to have to talk about this again because we have
- like 10 minutes left for our meeting. I want to throw two more dates on your calendar. These are really
- DLGF dates, Department of Local Government Finance.
- On July 31st is when we expect our estimate of property tax cap losses, which is becoming much more
- significant post-SEA long. That's kind of a major piece of information for us in terms of budget creation.
- Then August 16th for our local income tax distributions. Did you say August 16th? August 16th. So that's
- for 20.7. Yes.
- That's the supplemental distribution. No. That's the projected distributions for 2020. So in other words,
- we're building the budget before we know those numbers. That is normal and terrible. Yes. And the July
- 31st is similarly, it is projected property tax cap losses for fiscal year 2027. Yes. Correct.
- Wait, the supplemental distribution in May is for $20.26. Yes. Right. That's May 15th. Right. Exactly.
- What's the date in July? Sorry. July 31st. I think what I'll try to do is I will try to make a budget
- year calendar like this and just have it tacked onto every meeting that we have.
- try to kind of keep that up. So if there's any dates like that, that crop up. But I also will want to
- review that with you to make sure I'm being at home. Knowing that I can't really make a table because
- then it's not accessible. So it's just going to be work on that. There are ways to make tables accessible.
- It just needs a little extra work. And soon we hope to have some templates where there are sample tables.
- So we can just use the templated table. What I also understand is that it's
- If it's not numbers within the table, then it's a little bit harder anyway. It's technically accessible
- and maybe still a little bit harder to really understand if it's not just numbers. I would say that
- ITS just rolled out a new tool. There isn't a possibility on a new tool called Gruntle that's available
- as an extension in Google for docs and spreadsheets. It's really good. It'll tell you what's not accessible.
- Sometimes you just click a button and it'll fix it.
- Yeah, it is an excellent tool. Wonderful. Committee members, any other? Yeah. Not defending the process
- necessarily, but in 2024, the 2025 budget, part of council sharing priorities and then having back and
- forth negotiation with the administration led to
- a number of like shared agreements about things we were going to do in 2025. And like that included
- like what came in, like the geo bonds and how we went through all that. And like, I think some of those
- things happened in the way they're expected. Some did not, some may have been delayed. And I think like
- auditing that in some sense, like maybe to this committee could be helpful just like looking back and
- like, here's what we had agreed upon. Like another one that came up at a council meeting last year was like,
- this sidewalk operation plan that the courts developed, I thought we had a shared agreement in 2024
- that we were going to expand that into like an infrastructure plan that would go into the transportation
- plan update for like pedestrian infrastructure, infrastructure and capital planning and like that didn't
- have ultimately so maybe there's going to be misalignment there to read it, you know, what was documented.
- But like it's one example of a number of like things that like we had kind of, I thought negotiated
- and reached agreement on
- But then I think there's some disconnects out of line. So I think we can be back at that to understand.
- I think we can inform or should inform how we think about anything. I'd love to see that list because
- I think that that is still happening. I think it's just taking longer than we thought. And some of that
- is consultant availability and the pace at which they work to do their analysis. But I would also be
- glad for the opportunity to say, what did we say we were going to do? And did we do it? And if not,
- what happened?
- I have to scoot for another meeting. Thank you. Thank you. So that's essentially not a date, but a suggestion
- for what you want this committee to accomplish this year. Yes. Great. Other thoughts? Accomplishing
- it before we finalize by mid-year would be helpful, I think, to inform, do we need process improvements
- like an agreed quarterly reporting on the shared priorities that we negotiate, something like that,
- improvements if needed in some of those areas. Okay, speaking of that, do we also want to kind of put
- down a goal of having some kind of a shared goal slash letter? And is this activity that we're going
- to do in March just that constitute that? Do you know what I mean? Like if I think in 2024, we have
- that like letter of priorities, I can't remember exactly how we did it last year.
- Do we think, you know, this activity and these priorities is going to count as of this year? Do we need
- to also then drive forward all of council coming up with a more formalized? I don't think that that
- would could. I think this is the underlying input opportunity. Yes, I think that probably needs to then
- be formalized by way of like a synthesis document. I think we have one round of feedback on and then
- vote out of the council meeting for like formally adopt some set of priorities or books from council
- or piece about them.
- Yes, I agree with this. I also have this other one that didn't make it into the document or voted for
- it, but I actually don't sure if these could vote, but whatever it is, I don't think. Yeah, yeah.
- All right, so Deval, did you have your turn? Well, I wanted to make sure, I know we're past this agenda
- item, but we kind of rushed past the summary and scoring that
- that Hopi did for our deliberation session in December. And I wanted to make sure other, I think it
- was helpful and it's helpful to say the top three outcomes in each category are this and there are the
- points. I just wanna make sure the other committee members also think that's a good direction. And for
- clarity there, as I said, it was on,
- post-it notes in here and handwriting was not always clear. But I also was not consistent about how
- many tops there were. But in each one of those categories, there was a clear kind of cut where there
- were a lot of scores for this and then everything else got like two or three. And so there was like
- scores and then a big gap. And so I just put all the top scores and this did not consist about how many. Yeah.
- I think to the extent that we're going to finish this activity and mirror this process for round two,
- I don't think it's the perfect, but I think it is a step forward on continuing to iterate and advance
- conversations about priorities and outcomes we're seeking for this year. We're not going to have a perfect
- system in place this year. I think it's a meaningful step forward and an improvement
- Last year, they were that respected coordinated council input on Properties out to be like this see
- Anything else about calendar and stuff Yeah, and so then the last thing to do of course is how are we
- gonna meet and I
- I don't fully know everybody's availability. This was basically the one meeting time that the four of
- us had available on that chart or on that poll that I sent around a while ago. I don't know. One of
- the things I was wondering is if separating meetings out to have meetings specifically more about
- council priorities and budget, things that we have to do as one set and then having different meaning
- that is like an only word. We're only talking about the controller and those budgetary things. I mean,
- we talked about that year report today for almost an hour and we could have talked about it for a long
- time. In terms of the funds and the bonds and all of those pieces and having almost like more frequent
- meetings perhaps.
- on more defined topics instead of trying to shove all of the information into one long meeting. What
- do people think about that in terms of your own personal schedules? Is it, I guess, is it easier to
- have more free, much more meetings or fewer, longer meetings? I'd be up for a bi-weekly hour-long meeting,
- maybe alternating topics, like I'm going to drop like that, kind of like working with kids for a little
- bit of a deep dive. And because I think this informs a whole other area we never really talked about
- with protected councils,
- role in budgeting. Well, I mean, setting priorities and outcomes is one thing, and then kind of understand,
- making sure we understand and have visibility to the overall financial management picture and like physical
- responsibility. Like that's another that we weren't really talking about at the meeting. And like, I
- think there's progress we made there, including what we would like to see, or what goes into the council
- oriented budget process in August, September, October.
- So, yeah, I'd love to keep working on that and maybe, you know, again, an alternate sequence. I'd be
- glad to do five-hour meetings. So it'd be better for you to have more. Sounds good. And this time works
- well for me. Yeah, generally for me, good. Okay. Okay, great. Great, great, great. Great. Oh, let's
- look at the calendar real fast before we leave that. Actually, let's sort of pull a comment real quick before we
- or maybe while we're kind of peeking at calendar stuff. If there's any member of the public who would
- like to comment on scheduling issues, anything that they would like to see from this committee.
- I see Mr. Keogh has his hand up again. Go ahead for three minutes. I'm trying to find a way to stay
- on my watch. Yeah, Kevin Keogh again. I just want to comment on the fact that you can't start the audit
- until the other audit is complete. I want to make
- sure it's clear, you should by all means, the city, I would encourage you strongly to get a start on
- 2025 on day one. And you could start that now and to really be looking at a process to get things completed
- on a timely basis. You don't have to wait until that audit is done. The only thing that would hold you
- up is the final adjusting entries.
- But you should, by all means, be looking to closing the books and having these processes to deliver
- these financials, and also working with your auditor to say what's going on. And I also encourage you,
- maybe you need an executive meeting where you can discuss some of these tough issues. Do they have enough
- resources? What are the issues that are preventing the completion of the audit?
- Are there some internal control weaknesses? Do you have fraud? These kind of things should be discussed
- way before you get surprised later.
- So I would encourage you to do that, but I would keep your eye on the ball here. I don't think you need
- to wait another 14 months to issue the next one, is my key thing. I think you should start looking forward
- to having this one done timely. And when I say timely, that's within six months. And I don't think that's
- something that is impossible to do. I think it's very doable and it's been shown other communities are
- doing it. So that's my only point, hopefully. And I say that with,
- My intention is to add value and hopefully you're not taking this as a complaint or anything else. And
- it's also to build public trust. Those are my two, and I would really be disappointed if someone were
- saying there's Mr. Keough complaining again. But anyway, we'll just leave it at that. Thank you.
- Thank you. Are there any other comments about fiscal committee scheduling and responsibilities this year?
- All right, I don't see anybody's hand raised. So let's go ahead and think about scheduling. Is everybody's
- Friday, February 27th at 8.30 available, 8.30 to 9.30? And then that would be on, yeah, February 27th,
- 8.30 to 9.30. And we can focus that on council-related stuff, make sure that we're all set with our
- deliberation session. Yeah, does that work for
- I think that it's a real interesting question right now is how we're gonna let's let's figure out using
- through our
- and with our council attorney how we need to deal with collecting that data first. I'm asking about
- a second question. I know, but let's not deal with that. You feel like we won't be able to cover that
- in the deliberation session? No, I think that we will. I just want to be offensive to the fact that
- Isabel started this activity. I also want to be sensitive of serial media laws.
- I'm going to start dragging something. That would be great. Yeah. Sounds good. It could be a lower priority
- agenda. Okay. So Fed 27 from 8.30 to 9.30 is our next meeting and that's going to focus on the Council
- of Liberation data stuff. Then I've got my calendar again. Two weeks after that is March 13th.
- Was that also where people take 30 to 930 March 13th and then that would focus more on reports from
- the controller and then some of those nuts and bolts things or funds and we can figure out at that point
- what details might be useful. Does that work for folks? Yes. Yes. Okay, great. So those are our next
- two meetings and we have the topics set unless there's anything else. I'm fine scheduling.
- either twice monthly or every other week on Friday mornings at that time for the year. It was like getting
- them down. Maybe that's pretty tricky. I just wanted to talk a little bit about your time right now.
- So let's think about that moving forward. Let's maybe not, let's pencil that in, never check your schedules
- every other Friday morning, moving forward, at least maybe until like summer recess kind of thing. Okay.
- And we're a nerd.
- Thank you guys. Thank you.