- I'll go ahead and call us to order then. Special fiscal committee meeting on August 7th, 2026. Hope
- you stop for district three and chair. I guess more clarity at large. I just want to make sure.
- Jeff McKim, city controller. Pauline Williamson, deputy clerk.
- Thank you. So perhaps this meeting can be relatively short today. It's unfortunate that I think last
- time we talked about this, Councilor Verrall also wasn't here, because I was looking forward to being
- able to have more conversation about some of this. But anyway, our agenda is an update from the controller.
- Jeff indicated that he had some things that he wanted to share with us this morning. And then just looking
- at the elected official salary stuff in terms of comparison speed.
- progress, but also this larger question of where we go from here in light of budget stuff and in light
- of not being able to decrease salaries once they're increased and what everybody's thoughts are on this
- entire process right now this year. Oh, Dave entered the waiting list. Maybe he's here. Maybe this is
- the Dave that we want. What's the real Dave Rallo? That's right, the real Dave Rallo as opposed to a
- false Dave Rallo
- The AI avatar. That's right, the AI avatar. Yay! Hi, Dave. Good morning. Hey, folks. I'm so glad that
- you could be with us today. So I was just going over the agenda review and approval. We're going to
- have an update from Jeff first. He just wanted a few minutes. And then we're going to talk about elected
- official salary stuff. And I think last time we talked about this, you weren't able to join us. So I'm
- really glad that you managed to log on today.
- As long as that looks good to everybody, great. Jeff, why don't you go ahead and take it away with what
- it is that you want to share. Thank you very much. I have a couple of things and the things keep getting
- added to the list of things I want to inform you about. The first thing I just wanted to do is really
- give Council Member Stossberg applause for an exceptionally well-done and informative report on the
- lead issues that we're facing, that you did a great job of
- distilling all the stuff from AIM and Reedy in a way that was, I think, really useful to everybody.
- So thank you for that. I did, there was one, realized just today, this morning came to me, there was
- one comment I kind of wanted to add to the entire thing that I know Reedy mentioned, but it's just important
- to keep in mind as we move forward with all these numbers. The city's ability to raise lists,
- the amount of money that the city can raise depends on basically a guess of the adjusted gross income
- of the city. Well, for the full county, we know exactly what the AGI is. We know basically to the dollar
- of what or very close of what accounting rate will bring in. We really do not know what a city rate
- will bring in and I think both
- aim and really are using different ways of getting the numbers, but ultimately it comes down to just
- estimating based on census data. So just kind of want to make clear that there's a high uncertainty
- when we talk about the amount of money that specifically can be raised within the city. And I think
- the really important thing to mention about that is it just shows how broken the system is.
- in that you all are being or possibly be asked to make these decisions based on a new law, a new structure
- without the state having released any specific numbers that you can base your decisions. I just wanted
- to throw in that there is a big uncertainty factor there, bigger than for other labor related issues.
- The budget process, just wanted to put that in context a little. As you know, the budget book,
- and the raw data set have been released. I encourage you to use the raw data set if you're a fan of
- Excel and can do pivot tables. It's a really good way of doing, of kind of pouring through the budget
- proposal if you want additional information from the past added. I can do that. I mean, it may take
- some effort, but I wanna make it useful.
- The budget presentations have been scheduled for August 17th, 19th, 24th, and 26th. And the reason why
- I mention that is that all of this, the budget proposal, the budget book, the raw data set, and those
- budget proposals or budget presentations in August are all essentially informal or non-binding pre-work
- that we do with the budget. They're an opportunity for dialogue between the administration and the council
- on the budget.
- And things really become official when the proposed budget is actually officially advertised to the
- public. That will likely happen in early September. It has to happen at least 10 days before the official
- budget hearing. When the budget is advertised, it becomes available on the state's gateway system. And
- like I said, that's kind of the real first formal action of the budget.
- The official budget hearing for the budget is scheduled for Wednesday, September 23rd at 6.30 PM.
- And again, the budget has to be advertised at least 10 days before that. So our advertisement will go
- out no later than September 13th. And then the final budget adoption is scheduled for Wednesday, October
- 7th at 6.30 PM. So that's the budget process. Anybody have any kind of questions or anything you want
- to know about these proposals?
- Sorry, I just want to find kind of fast. So when do you have to put the figure, the proposal into gateway?
- It would be 10 days, but so September 13th is the latest. It can be done earlier. And it really,
- you know, days before the official. Yes. Council member Dave, you have a hearing about. Yeah, I do.
- Can you hear me? Yeah. So, Jeff, you referenced population having a bearing on revenue.
- and there was an undercount in the last census because of COVID. Are we in any position to request a,
- I know census usually occur every 10 years, but I think they can occur more frequently. And I think
- that we've got a good case rather than waiting another four years or whatever for the next census. Is
- that relevant or could you address that? It isn't.
- First of all, it is relevant in some ways, and that adjustment has actually already been made. Actually,
- if you look at the census numbers, they occur in these four-year blocks. There's a term that's used,
- vintage, four-year vintage. The most recent vintage has actually been updated to essentially accommodate
- for the fact that it was undercounted during the census.
- with respect to local income tax, it's not really based on population, it's based on income. What really
- matters is how much income is earned by people who live in the city. That's an actual figure, not a
- census count. That really depends on how much money has been reported to the Indiana Department of Revenue.
- That's where those matters come from.
- the population is important to a lot of things, but not specifically to this. Colleen, can you turn
- them up a little bit? Dave, I think you just froze. We're not really hearing. You're frozen.
- Probably not here now. Yeah, he might not be here right now either. I have a question while we're waiting
- for Dave to unfreeze. Just think of other revenue. Wait, Dave, you were frozen there. Can you start
- over? I'm content. Thank you for answering. OK, thank you.
- I'm good. I think this is more of like a statement, but one of the things you mentioned was the informal
- nature of the budget presentations and about that it's really this partly a dialogue thing. I just want
- to really emphasize that to the public too, because last year, if I recall correctly, there was maybe
- one public comment through the entire budget presentations and at every single one of these
- budget presentations, there's an opportunity for the public to comment.
- And we just got hardly any comments last year at all. And so is there a plan for advertising those in
- any way to try to get more of the public or well, maybe we think about.
- doing that. Yeah, I mean, the administration has time out of press release and the city's budget website
- does have the dates and the specific departments that are presenting on each day. I mean, I would encourage
- you as elected officials also to just use your channels to communicate and solicit. So yeah, I'm not
- sure how many people are online right now at this meeting. There's actually 11 participants. That's
- a bunch of AI participants too.
- I'm not sure how many of your own people versus note takers, but pass that around. All you folks that
- are here to come and look at that for comments as anybody feels led. And then again, there are also
- multiple opportunities. So there are the opportunities in your budget, in the budget presentations,
- but the quote unquote informal parts. And then in the official budget hearing after the budget is advertised,
- there's additional opportunities for public comment.
- additional opportunities in the budget adoption process. Great. Thank you. Yeah, sorry. So in the budget
- memo, one of the things that I mentioned is that particularly on the revenue side,
- just a lot of things we didn't know. We don't know at the time the memo was written, and so we keep
- getting additional information, and I just wanted to give you a couple of kind of important points of
- additional revenue information that we've received since the memo. The first one actually is an outlet,
- and it actually came during the while I was writing the memo, and so I kind of incorporated some really rough
- estimates into my numbers, but there's still more to come that we don't know. This is about how the
- lit numbers are communicated. The first step in the process is that the Indiana State Budget Agency
- provides the overall lit numbers at county-wide level. What that really does is that's your first cut
- at, well, really, how much did our income grow and therefore our income taxes grow. It's a good proxy
- for how much ultimately the city, the county, and the other units are going to get. That information
- just came out this last weekend. If you actually want to see that information live, you go to the state
- budget agency website, state and local revenue information,
- local income information and there's local income tax data. And there we have 2027 certified calculations.
- That's the new information that we just got. And this is a great, I love this report. I mean, it's not
- very long, but what it does is it provides the amount of income tax countywide for every county for
- each of the different income tax buckets. And so you can actually, so if we go down to Monroe County,
- you can see how, and I'll break something up soon, but you can see exactly how much in certified shares,
- public safety, economic development, correctional facilities, which goes just to the county property
- tax relief, and special purpose, which also goes directly to the county. But you can see county-wide
- how much revenue is
- going to be there for 2027 and so. Can you share that link in the chat maybe of the zoom. Yes, so that
- then it's. Mark easily available I suppose. Or. Yes, there's. A better way to do that.
- It keeps giving me the local up. Okay. Maybe we could just share those as like supplementary material.
- Yeah. Yeah. Because the public might be interested in looking at that. Yeah, definitely. It's easier
- to have a link available somewhere to this information. Right. Yeah. So we can talk about that later.
- Then I just want to show you what that means overall. Essentially, if we compare it to the 2026 numbers,
- we get a 5.38 percent increase in local income tax. That's a decent number. It's not for the city. That's
- county as a whole. We don't know the city yet. That's the county as a whole. We know that we brought
- in a big 5.38 percent more in
- local income tax that'll be distributed in 2026. If you look at the, I don't have those numbers right
- up here, but when they came out, I looked at them compared to other counties and we're in the middle.
- There are counties that were much lower than there are counties like I think Hamilton County that have
- a 15 percent increase, which probably doesn't come as a surprise to anybody. But I would say that it's
- relatively good views. In the past,
- In 2026, the city received 37.55% of the certified shares, 41.88% of the public safety, and 56.66% of
- economic development. And so I used those same percentages, and then I discounted them by 25% just to
- be conservative in the estimates that I put in the budget.
- But the idea is, this is what we know now, and we just learned. Later in the month, we will receive
- the first distribution, and it won't come from the state budget agency, it comes from the Department
- of Local Government and Finance, and it'll show the actual estimated distributions to each township,
- to each city, the county, and so on.
- Then there's a third, and then there's final estimate that we'll receive later. Right now,
- we know county-wide, we don't know exactly where the city, but based on the past, yes. Is this the process
- that happens every year in terms of when you create the budget for the next year, you're estimating
- how much a lit you're going to get, and so that could also then
- I feel like last year, I remember there being some discrepancies between the budget book and then the
- actual. Oh, there will be. I think that's very pointed out. That would be one of the reasons for some
- of those discrepancies, this sort of weight breaking. Yeah, there's a number of things that I've tried
- to say that carried out at the very beginning of the memo. The revenues are going to change. They're
- going to change throughout the process as we learn new information. Okay.
- And then the estimates though that you guys are doing are based on pretty conservative revenues. Wow.
- Well, overall. Yeah. I mean, I would say, right. But accurate, conservative as opposed to accurate,
- like hopeful. Yeah. In my opinion, it's better to like guess low for like,
- expenditure like for revenues. Yeah. Some of that is projecting. So yeah, that's why I use the 22% discount
- factor in case we wind up. I mean, we know what the overall is, but in case the county winds up with
- more, you know, higher percentage of that growth. So as we move from the budget presentations to council
- to the official members, um,
- I think part of the problem last year is that there wasn't enough explanation of changes. So just to
- flag that for you, it would just be fair to explain what changes took place and why. OK. So yeah, there
- definitely will be on the revenue side. There will be changes. OK. And then so that's the local income
- tax. Let's see. What's next? You do have a lot of this. But it's all changes that happen already. So
- it's all exactly relevant to this discussion.
- This is the good news and bad news of property tax. You already know about the 6 percent maximum levy
- growth portions. That's the property tax increase we get each year. That's based on the six-year non-farm
- income growth moving average. It's been statutorily capped 4 percent until this year that statute expired.
- So it now reverts to kind of what it actually is based on income growth, and that's 6%. So that's the
- good news. Now, the bad news is that just yesterday, about two days ago, we received the net assessed
- value numbers for the property tax base that property tax is based on. And what we're seeing now, and
- I've got those numbers up on the screen,
- that we're seeing for Bloomington. You remember Bloomington is made up of four taxing districts, Bloomington
- Township, Perry Township, Van Buren Township, and Richland Township. The portions of each of those townships
- are within the city limits. And that, the assessed value went down by 142 million from 2026 to 2027.
- So yeah, that's a lot of money. Now, why did it go down? It went, this is a direct impacted SEA one.
- It went down mainly because of the additional exemption or deductions given to owners of rental properties.
- One of the big SEA 1 innovations was to, sorry, in the past, almost all of the property tax deductions
- and exemptions have been only to homesteads.
- But with SEA-1, some of those deductions are now given to rental owners as well. And this particularly
- disproportionately affects Bloomington because we have so many, about 50% of our net assessed value
- in the city is round-up pumping. So that means that this SEA-1 affects Bloomington disproportionately.
- And so we've got the exemptions for rental housing phases in over time.
- It was 6% in 2026, 12% in 2027. And that's the big impact that we're seeing this year. That's going
- to continue to go up 19%, 25, 30, 33, 24. So we're going to continue to see the net assessed value get
- hit because of these deductions to over-survival efforts. Yeah. I want you to say that just a second again for
- folks in the room and anybody who might watch with that number, it's that huge deductions just went
- to owners of rental properties. That's all rental properties, no matter how big or small the property
- is. Right. You'll hear Reidie refer to them as 2% properties. They are the properties that are subject
- to the 2% tax stamp. They are residential but not homestead properties.
- So yes, that is big apartments, small apartments, say individually owned rental houses. But this tax
- break to owners of these rental properties is a major reason why we're seeing such a large decrease
- in net assessed value. It looks like Council Member Ralla has a question. Yeah, go ahead, Dave.
- Thank you. That's harrowing.
- I wonder to what extent, Jeff, short-term rentals play a part. So the estimate is about 1,000 homes
- have been converted to short-term rentals in the past years. That has to equal quite a lot of net assessed
- value, does it not? And is there any estimate of that effect specific to short-term rentals, Airbnbs, so forth?
- I've not heard, but that's a reasonable calculation to do. I think that would probably rely on information
- from the assessor's office. I don't know to what degree that they collect information, whether there's
- anything specific in any database about short-term rentals versus other rentals. They are definitely
- 2 percent rather than 1 percent. They're not homesteads, so they definitely would have an effect on this.
- But yeah, we would have to somehow marry a list of short-term rentals with the information from the
- auditor and assessor's office. But that's certainly something interesting and worth, I think, worth
- calculating. I think so. Thank you. Thank you. Next. OK, so this is kind of the last one. This is also
- a follow-on to the
- the issue that I just talked about with the net assessed value is, and this literally happened this
- morning. So as I was reading and looking at websites, I realized that this new information, which is
- the circuit breaker estimates for 2020 set just came out this morning. And so I haven't had a chance
- to do any analysis, but I did want to just kind of give you the top line number and I've got it projected
- up on the screen here. So what we're seeing is,
- Can you make it bigger? I make it bigger. How's that? That's much better. OK. And so the key piece of
- information here is the 2027 estimate from the DLGF. Again, this is just an estimate, but this is the
- number that ultimately will go into the advertising budgets.
- And what we're seeing is a hit of 1.3 million from the circuit breaker. This is the tax caps. This is
- an increase of 7%. Or if you look at those numbers there, almost a million dollars in property tax loss
- to the city from the circuit breakers compared to 2026. Now you'll see that the big SEA 1 hit is this
- year. We've already kind of digested
- part of the largest impact of the SCA1 where we saw a circuit breaker increase of 626% from 171,000
- to 1.2 million. But again, as we see this assessed value, and it's all related because when net assessed
- value decreases, property tax rates increase for the same amount of money. When property tax rates increase,
- circuit breaker, tax caps, loss, increase. So that's the kind of chain of causality here. And so that's
- what we're seeing. Again, late breaking news, none of it good. And the lit information's good, but the
- property tax information's bad. And this is a direct result of, you know, this is not local economy.
- This is a direct result of SEO 1.0, SEO 1.0 situation. So that's all I had. And I know it was a little
- longer during that.
- I think that that's okay. And I'll continue as to bring to you any new information that we receive so
- that, you know, by the time we actually start talking about the budget, we're kind of working with the
- most recent and most accurate information. If you could kind of assemble these things into a one or
- two page whatever and add it into the fiscal committee folder, the shared one, so that we can
- post that as a packet that's in them. I can do that. I saw that. I kind of had some notes. Yeah. Yeah,
- I saw that. So I was kind of like, oh, hopefully it'll be easy for him to just put that in a quick little
- one-pager just so that we can have those links and have them made publicly available as well.
- We'll do. Any other questions or comments for the controller? OK.
- Let's move on to review of the compensation framework and the elected official salary stuff. And now
- I'm going to work on sharing my screen, hopefully. One thing that I want to share first.
- So last time we talked about this, I hope it's this one. I hope that's right. Perfect. So last time
- we talked about this, Dave, I don't think that you were here. And so Isabel and Matt and I discussed
- the updated kind of guiding principles
- that they had worked on modifying and so the first thing I wanted to do was kind of review this piece
- of and my recollection at the time was that I thought that this was good and you guys obviously created
- it and you thought that it was good and I don't remember there being things that we specifically
- about changing. So Dave, I'm especially interested in your feedback on these updated guiding principles.
- So values to guide how we make decisions, accessibility to public service. So compensation makes the
- office attainable for community members. There's equitable pay according to respective levels
- of responsibility relative to other Bloomington elected officials and departmental leadership. Quality
- customer service or community service.
- enables the elected officials to meaningfully engage and serve the community, informed decisions, allows
- us to make informed decisions. Oh wait, those were the original ones. Then transparent and documented
- process. That shifted to three values, accessibility of public service, quality community service, and
- equitable pay.
- two processes, informed decisions about the elected official compensation, and then transparency and
- consistency of process. Now that we all remember this, are there updated comments about it? Dave, you're
- unmuted, so why don't you go first? I'm in agreement.
- that the new version looks good? Yes. Great. And we decided that last time. Can we vote? We could. Sure.
- So I will take a motion then. I move that we approve the new guiding principles for setting elective
- potential sounds. Is there a second? Great.
- There's motion a second to approve this new tax. And actually, should we approve it or should we recommend
- it to the full council for approval? Or should we? I don't think the full council ever voted on it.
- No, they didn't. No, they didn't. All right. We could recommend it for approval by the council also.
- The idea is that it's this body's guiding principles to make a recommendation on the actual figures
- that are being updated. And it could also maybe go along with the rest of, because if we recall correctly,
- there's like additional guidance on how to actually set this. And so these are just the guiding principles.
- So I think that this motion should stand, and then maybe we should bring the whole package to the council
- for a whole approval. Does that work? All right, let's vote.
- Isabel? Yes. Matt? Yes. Dave? Yes. And I'll vote yes, too. Wonderful. OK. Got them. The next piece of
- this was the elected official was the comparisons. And so actually, this is where I'm going to stop
- the share, and I'm going to start a different share.
- This was where Dave and I sat down and we had trimmed down the list of salaries to, this is actually
- what I want.
- to just a few cities. And instead of taking all of the second-class cities in Indiana, we had specifically
- picked out ones that were maybe of more comparison value to LaMita. And then we had also collected some
- other potential comparison entities that were outside of Monroe County and or outside of Indiana.
- and other, you know, like Alexville is on here at the town council. So they're a little bit different,
- like a different body and the Indiana state representatives and senators. And so I did a little bit
- of that and updated the sheet. Dave, do you have any updates that just haven't gone onto the sheet yet?
- Yes. I completed my assignment for
- Mayor and Council on the Google Doc. Is that updated on the Google Doc now? Should be. Are all of these
- numbers updated then here? Yes. Excellent. But you didn't update the sources? I did not. That's why
- I was confused.
- But I did make a number of calls to verify the amount. OK. So I can safely delete everything from this
- master list from the purple ones? Yeah. Great. And did you put any notes in here about any of them?
- Or can I delete the notes too? I did not.
- And I did not complete the number of meetings, et cetera. So I have to do that. OK. So we've still got
- a little bit more work to do on the sheet. But this, at least, is a little bit updated. And so you can
- see, I sent out some emails. I've got some outstanding things. These sources are not valid on the green
- ones, unless these numbers have also been filled in. OK.
- Then the rest of this document, which is also partially filled in, is the number of regular meetings
- per year, and I tried to average the last three years, the number of council committees, the number
- of other appointments, and then just dividing pay by meeting, and then pay by meeting plus other appointments.
- This is where I would say any analysis gets a little bit dubious. We can absolutely have a discussion
- of how we want to analyze this stuff and what we want to really do with this information and what the
- relevance is. I suppose you could say in terms of things like council committees and other appointments
- because there's nothing in here about how frequently council committees meet or how
- long they meet for and similarly with other appointments. Are the other appointments monthly? So dividing
- it essentially adds one meeting per year, I think. So I'm not sure how relevant that is, and I would
- take feedback on that. So the purple stuff,
- from Dave is not in your packet of information. It is just up on the screen at this point.
- And once again, which is kind of the way it was in 2024, there is quite a variation here in council
- member pay. It looks like the low right now is Muncie at 14,000. Oh no, the low is green. It's Greenwood
- at 12,000.
- And then the high at least that has been recorded is that 28,000 Lafayette, it looks like. And Dave,
- do you have the information about number of meetings and you just kind of added it in yet or do you
- not have that information? You're muted. Yeah, sorry about that. I did not add it in yet.
- I've got a couple, but I don't have accessible at this moment. Um, so I, I need to, yeah, sorry about
- that morning, but I ran out of time. Um, and by the way, the West Lafayette number is tentative. They
- just passed an ordinance, uh, last week, but it wasn't, it hasn't come into effect yet.
- Okay, so they passed one for increases for next year, for 20.7? Yeah, they just did their salary ordinances.
- They just revised them. Okay. Great, I'll add that in as a note. So it would be interesting to know,
- especially because they are amongst the lowest, whether they are changing that.
- So sorry. So Dave is the 16,209 for West Lafayette. Is that for 2026 or 2027? Uh, 2027. Wow. Oh wait,
- the 16,000 is 2027 is next year for West Lafayette? Um, they just passed the ordinance literally a week
- ago. Right. I believe it's effective next year. I don't think it's effective this year. I think it's the,
- Because they're just setting their salaries for next year, as I believe. All right. So that's their
- 27 number. All right. One of the things that I find interesting is that there were a couple of clerk
- salaries up here that I think have been increased in Evansville and Fort Wayne. But it looks like some
- of the other ones have not been.
- And of course, salaries are all over the place. And I don't know if we want to do any kind of comparison
- based on population, because that can certainly go into this chart. I don't know at this point how useful
- it is to do this comparison versus how much we need to just sort of assess. I mean, our controller just
- gave us, I would say, more bad news than good news about
- future revenues. So they all want to do. Well, I think the. This doesn't directly answer your question,
- but just to give feedback on this chart, I think the number of. House committees and number of other
- appointments and the pay for meeting plus other appointments is not. Doesn't
- Maybe we can, maybe the number of regular meetings is relevant. I wouldn't even do the pay-per-meet.
- I just don't think those other things can be compared as apples to apples. Like you said, we don't know
- these other appointments if it's just once twice a year or if it's twice a week. We don't know what
- the duties are. There's a false sense of accuracy. Yeah.
- And the, I'm curious for Lovington, number of regular meetings for year 39? That was the average of
- the last three years. That, that included the budget hearings? Yeah, that included all of, I'll say,
- the regularly scheduled full council meetings. So it was like, so our regular sessions, our special
- sessions, like what we approved,
- in like November or December. Okay, because you said regular meetings, so I thought regular sessions,
- which would have been good. Right, no, like the things that are scheduled at the beginning of the year
- that we put on our calendars that we expect that we're going to actually have, so it doesn't include
- anything that might kind of come up as an emergency session or an executive session or
- We had an executive session this week, it wouldn't have included that. From the other cities also, it
- was like their annual count. That's what I asked them for, yes. What's four more? It's only four more
- than us. Yeah, it's only four more than us. What are we doing? Some of the other ones specifically said,
- Like Evansville, for example, they meet twice a month. And with no brain, I guess they're really reliable
- about it. But then when I clarified, I also wanted things like the budget guarantee. Oh, add three to
- that then. And that's apparently they only have three budget related sessions.
- didn't ask things like legislation or, you know, any of those sorts of expectations, like how much in
- the weeds it's really worth getting, probably not at the time. Yeah, just Hopi, since you mentioned
- it, I do think population is relevant. I mean, there are a lot of facets to determining salary in terms
- of responsibilities, such as number of meeting committees and so forth, but population, I mean, it really,
- obviously,
- is going to affect the number of constituents and constituent input that you're going to hear
- as a representative. I think it's also a good proxy for economic activity and development proposals
- and things like that, the population number. Anyway, I just wanted to add that. Okay. Maybe doing some
- calculation based on population.
- should probably factor in to some degree. Yeah. Thank you. Matt. Yeah, I think, you know, I appreciate
- having the data. I think it's difficult to parse. And my broader concern has always been that there
- are systemic inequities that, in fact, not only in Bloomington but other places do.
- And so simply looking to a bunch of systemic inequities to validate our own graduation in the same is
- not like a sound approach. I don't mind it as a contextual consideration to look at. I think it does
- help when we add some of these details, population, number of meetings, et cetera, to better understand
- that context. What I've always found
- relatively compelling as a basic way to look at things is the ratio of a full-time mayor to a part-time
- legislator, you know, salary as well. And just doing some, like, basic searching for, like,
- state legislatures as an example, which is also very widely, right? Some have very short sessions and
- some have very long sessions. A three-to-one or a four-to-one ratio from the executive to the governor
- to state legislators is pretty difficult.
- Um, that's layers based salaries, usually lower, but most states have prevailed things around the number
- of days or in section, things like that. And when it's all said and done, the typical range across the
- country seems to be about three to one or four at one for governors to get legislators. That's a ratio
- that we talked about in the context of Bloomington where, um, you know, based on the, the, the input
- from current nine council members about not just their own service, but what they believe it takes.
- to provide quality service, you know, as an elected official, as an elected council member, I believe
- it was 12 or 14 hours, something like that was the average, you know, answer. That's, you know, that
- has limitations to a number I feel very comfortable with as conservative is, you know, quarter time,
- essentially, quarter time service. And if the mayor is full-time service, that's a ratio of four to one.
- Of course, I know there's other ways to think about this, including the fact that there are nine city
- council members. So when you think about them the same way, you know, on and on and on, the others are
- always thinking about this. I think that's a reasonable ratio. And I think analyzing the ratios to these
- other cities can also be helpful. There are some that are like wildly out of whack, you know, in a sense,
- like I think, you know, the Greenwood ratio is like pretty extreme, but I think their council is also
- like a pretty lean body. It doesn't do a lot of fog council members there before.
- Their meetings are short. They have no committees. They only have regular sessions, right? You know,
- they just, you know, really, really lose their business. And I'd be deferential with the executive.
- That's just not how things are. I've been for a long time in Bloomington. No, I think our residents
- generally want things to be. So, you know, I guess my broader point here is that the values and process
- we updated are all well and good. There's enough.
- wiggle room in them for any of us to read pretty much any range of answers we want to into it. So the
- values are great. It at least gives us some basis to explain how we're thinking about this decision.
- But it doesn't give us a very objective way to write a number instead of trying to subject it. I still
- find it feeling something basic like relation
- setting aside the court salary for this purpose, but set the relation between mayoral salaries and council
- salaries as a ratio. And I wonder if adding, at least, you know, so that's just how I'm thinking about
- it, but also I wonder if adding that ratio to the columns of, you know, the columns that, you know,
- by city that present this data would be another interesting thing to look at.
- and consider how, you know, where the shoes are. But again, with the caveat that I don't think that
- I probably could assume that it's all that useful. Yeah. I mean, I do have these percentages over here
- that I filled in. Yeah. Because I wasn't sure where we wanted to do that. And so, yeah. That's my long-ended
- endorsement of doing that, yes. OK. I can do that. Dave? Yes, I think it's an interesting proposal.
- I'd like to think about that in terms of ratio because that would be then predictable and maybe it would
- be a good check relative to the mayor's salary and the council's salary too, unless of course there's
- collusion between the two bodies. But generally speaking, I think that that does make sense to have
- a ratio kind of approach. And I just wanted to note that it looks like I think Terre Haute and Hammond
- are about four to one.
- in terms of the ratio, if I'm not mistaken, between the mayor and the council. So, you know, there is,
- there are examples. I mean, I'm not saying that they're explicitly, you know, aiming for that, but it
- just kind of falls within that range. That's all. Thanks. And what about the clerks?
- Yeah, Dave, did you just not get to putting the clerk's salary for these other places on there on the
- chart yet? Yeah, I haven't. Yes. Yes. I'm sorry. I'm tardy. That's all right. We'll get this updated.
- I'll just briefly follow up. I didn't really mention it. I don't tend to think of the clerk's salary
- in the same way with respect to a ratio to the others. I tend to think about it more like I think about
- the head of the council office, which is running
- running a city department, keeping it a small one. We have a number of small city departments. So I
- think there are limits to that approach as well. And yeah, there has been an allergy, but that's, I
- think it's more in that direction than the ratio of other realtor. Great. I want to note that the time
- is 9.22, and I want to have a public comment on this. And Port Bolden also walked in on the limit, and
- I want to give her an opportunity at all to say anything about salary stuff.
- want to comment on this? Just really quickly because I was coming up to whisper in Colleen's ear and
- ask Dave and listen to this. So sorry, I'm glad I did because I actually had questions and she had the
- answers on our spreadsheets. When I gave you guys salary information, what, two, three years ago, one
- of the concerns that was expressed by both the administration and a few council members, I think actually
- Councilmember Rollin who were one of the
- you wanted to actually have source materials, you wanted them verified, so email them, but it probably
- wouldn't suffice. My solution was to actually provide you guys with the salary ordinances for those
- years. So I would strongly suggest if you guys are going back to the council, you actually pull up the
- 2026 salary ordinances, or if you would like, we can provide them to you, because we do have them. And
- for all the second class cities,
- So some of the numbers that you have on your chart just by eyeballing it will be correct, or they may
- have additional information that wasn't accounted for in a phone call and or email. So I would just,
- that is my advice, take it however you wish. Councilmember Rallo, I think at one point you would talk
- about Monroe County salaries versus elected official salaries as well. So that may be something we wanna look at.
- I'm sorry, there are lots of bills in the state, so not to discount or discredit that, but that would
- be something that you all might want to consider kind of incorporating because you're talking about
- comparison of cities where you know they are a town, but that may have some bearing on what you guys
- are looking at.
- I haven't had a chance to check in with Elton yet, but I got the Monroe County ones on there. We sat
- down a while ago, talked about the other comparison cities outside, and we just haven't had time to
- look at that score. It's already 924. The last thing,
- I missed my train of thought there. Oh, yes. I appreciate you guys looking at this, and I'm assuming
- you're talking framework and all that other stuff again. But just to be very, very clear from my perspective
- for the Office of the City Clerk, I think the polling increase along the lines of the rest of the safe
- and civil city staff is fine. I do think that you guys should explore this in more depth leading into
- the next city clerk, the next mayor, the next councilor, so that it's not immediately set in, we're
- raising our own salaries, but we're looking ahead for the future. All right. Oh, that may be. As long
- as the peace builder doesn't blame you for saying that. All right, thank you. Anything else? No, I mean,
- I think that most of this, I didn't invite you, we talked about this a little bit and I didn't specifically
- say like, hey, come to this one, because I figured that we would mostly be talking about council salaries
- in terms of some of the stuff that we've talked about before, but probably in September we'll have a
- conversation that we'll want to invite you to as well. In terms of giving feedback on, maybe even October,
- honestly, as far as saying we'll have to chat about that.
- So all right, I want to make sure to get to public comments about this because I said that we would
- have public comment here. So there are no members of the public in the room. If there's any members
- of the public on Zoom, if you could please raise your hand using the raised hand feature. I'll go ahead
- and stop the screen share and I see
- K. R. K. C. P. is that has raised their hands. Um, and I'll go ahead and set my timer for about three
- minutes. Um, and can you hear me? Yup. We can hear you. Go ahead. Kevin Keough. Um,
- First, I want to acknowledge Jeff. He's been accessible and responds, and that's greatly appreciated.
- The budget book released date 126. This is my enumeration so far. I'm searching for a methodology. This
- is my starting point. But my first objective was to enumerate the general fund comparison on page 12
- and trace it to the ACFR. Initial observation was that revenue and expenditures 2023, 2024 did not match.
- completed a worksheet, sent it to Jeff at City Controller. Answer, the comparison combines the general
- fund, the rainy day fund, and the payroll clearing account fund. This shows the nuance of some of these
- descriptors. The more disclosures made, the better it is for the public, that's one point that. But
- the finding I came away with is, I need to use the AFR reports, not the ACFR.
- I found the AFR reports are static cash basis reports as of 228 for the prior fiscal year. They do not
- change. There's no further adjustments made. If a correction is needed, a completely new AFR is submitted
- and dated. This is a significant finding. It needs to be expanded and I need to look into it more, but
- it really gets to the quality, integrity, and accuracy, and the completeness.
- is not at this time. Finding two was the fund numbers changed into 2025 AFR. I have no idea
- of the significance of this. Again, maybe at a later time we can discuss or whatever. The payroll count
- though, I think it's account 904, it had a change in accounting principle for fiscal years 2023 and
- 2024. I get words
- further enumeration at a later time, brings up the issue of fund transfers and inflating revenues and
- expenses. I think this is very significant and really just warrants some discussion. The budget book,
- the Appendix A, does not include the beginning or the ending fund balance, which should equal the cash
- and investments.
- It's disclosed in the AFR. I think it's significant. I think it's good information. If you're going
- to include in which the appendix is quite lengthy, that would be some information that I think the public
- would find important. Also, this started a new objective because I started looking at that appendix
- and I compared it to the AFR listing of fund balances and funds.
- It seems to be there's some missing funds in the appendix. I've started preparing a list. I'm not clear
- on why certain funds are not included in that appendix, and I really can't determine the significance,
- but I think it warrants some further enumeration. I need to know a little bit more. I think the public
- would, you know, why some funds that are listed in AFR aren't listed in that appendix. Overall, just
- just to figure out how all these funds work. I've seen in other municipalities where they have a flow
- chart and they talk about the funds and how the funds interact and the significance, you know, and I've
- had plenty of experience with fund accounting and I know the importance of restricted funds and unrestricted
- and always- Mr. Kiel, that was three minutes. All right, that's all I get.
- I just want to encourage the public to look at this, but there's a lot here and it's not easy to digest
- all this. That's just to give you an idea how difficult it is. Anyway, I know I've got to shut up now.
- Thank you. If you have other comments about that specificity, I'm sure that those things in writing
- would be easiest for the controller to look at.
- Yeah. Are there other public comments? I didn't see anybody else's hand raised and once going twice,
- we're gone. Coming back to the meeting, we talked a little bit about where we go from here and it is
- 931, so I want to adjourn us.
- We do not have another fiscal committee meeting until September. In terms of our rotation, we would
- expect to be hearing something from the administration on the floor. We'll have to talk about whether
- that makes the most sense because we'll be coming right off of the budget presentations at that time.
- We'll have to decide.
- Welcome feedback from my colleagues about whether there's something that you would appreciate hearing
- from the administration, maybe specifically related to the budget presentations and any of those concerns
- at the beginning of September.
- could potentially be useful to continue talking about elected salary stuff and to go back again to that
- original framework because some of the things in terms of the comparison cities versus the percentages
- of, or like the ratios, that kind of reminds me of some of the conversations that we had the first time
- around this, around the basis of salary setting and what kind of basis are we going to use. And so,
- might be worth revisiting exactly the original form, the whole thing, and going down the next step of
- that and doing that sooner rather than later on be useful. Well, it might be a good opportunity since
- we will be coming out of the budget hearings to give some feedback on the presentation, both in the
- budget book and during the hearings and what worked well and what maybe could be adjusted.
- That is true, too. So yeah, I guess that's also good feedback. So we will have to figure that out. And
- I'll put some notes on September 4. So elected salaries, budget presentation feedback, or just kind
- of delving deeper into
- specific budgets, concerns, slash issues. Any other thoughts at the top of anybody's brain about that
- September 4th meeting? All right. Then similarly, in this calendar memo at the end, I'm trying to collect
- those dates so that then we can know when to do things. I do have
- the budget hearings on there and the introduction and then adoption of budget legislation and then carrying
- into next week. We don't have time for this right now, but my little paragraph at the bottom, we have
- discussed having some kind of a budget fair to present financial data into the public in more accessible
- ways. We can maybe be thinking about that as we go through these budget hearings and that would be excellent.
- Any other last comments?
- I love the idea of budget fare. Yeah. I mean, I love it too. And I think that we just have to figure
- out the details of when it would make sense to do it and how it would be done. We good? I mean, I think
- we do need to touch base again on the base question. Yes. Yes. And that might actually. I had an idea
- about that.
- We were talking about it earlier in the year. I'm especially interested in this and like a framework
- for like what it would actually entail to do that. It would probably take multiple years to implement
- changes to be able to establish shared outcomes in many areas where we don't have them currently, right?
- Along with the kind of uniform approach, setting metrics that are actually systematically measurable.
- It could easily be a budget, you know, or related reporting. It's a lot for any, for staff to take on.
- It's a lot for the internet community to take on. I wonder about a,
- O'Neill graduate student capstone class. It seems like a really good project, actually, for the public
- affairs folks. So we've had capstones, most recently, looking at deparmentization efforts with the Commission
- on Sustainability, leading one. There have been other capstones in the city before, and that could be,
- it's something to consider, where to help get capacity on project purpose. Great.
- mentioned to be training things that we forgot about. I was about to adjourn so now we're adjourned.