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.