So workshop session council member Lutz Cole
is not with us this evening, so I'll be running
the meeting for everybody.
So bear with me as I stammer through this.
We have council member Ballard virtual tonight,
and I believe Laura might be joining us at some point
virtually, but we'll see if she's able to make it.
I get started on our first item.
That's the housing action plan revised draft.
I believe Mike has an introduction on that one.
All right.
Thank you, Mayor Pro tem and members of council.
And tonight we are revisiting a revised draft
or revisiting reviewing a revised draft
of our housing action plan.
Couple workshops ago, council had a presentation on a draft
and we have Molly Fitzpatrick with route policy
online with us.
Who's put the work into this as our consultant
and worked on previous policies plans as well.
We provided a redlined version and a clean version
in the council packet, which was posted on GJ city.org
for the public to review.
We got that posted last Wednesday, I believe,
and tonight the purpose is really to get council's thoughts
on those changes, see if the changes were based
on the feedback from your last workshop
on the housing action plan we would like to get this to meet
the deadlines with the state requirements and everything,
to get this through the regular council
meetings and the public hearing that the state requires for us
to get to final approval.
Looking to do that later in September or October
if necessary.
And so, I think to start off if and I
also have Paul Starkey here from our housing team as well.
I can help answer some questions,
but I think Molly will be our presenter.
Molly, if are you able to just pull up something that where
we can just walk through a quick overview of those changes
and then see if council has any questions or discussion related
to those and if there's anything you'd like us to change or add.
Can you hear us.
Well Molly, we can.
Can you guys hear me.
The tech check to make sure we're all set.
So perfect.
Thanks so much for the intro.
Appreciate the time.
I know you guys have other agenda items as well,
and so I'm primarily here to answer questions.
I'm going to do a quick run through on the key changes.
I don't have that in a slide deck format
just because they're pretty quick.
And I think the easiest way for you all to look at obviously,
is checking the red line, which I know
you've all reviewed already.
So let me just walk through at a high level, the key things
that you should expect to see as you're looking
through those red lines.
And I'll take any questions that you all have.
First of all, this new draft is intended
to reflect the feedback both from our council discussion,
your council discussion.
Last time I was there, as well as some feedback
that we received from stakeholders, primarily
the housing authority.
And I think I saw Scott there as well tonight.
So he's around to help support that as well.
In terms of feedback from the last council session,
certainly there's a couple tweaks throughout,
but the two primary changes that you'll
see based on our conversation was, number one, removing
the recommendation that formalized
a Housing Advisory board as part of our discussion.
Your discussion.
It really felt like, look, we can do that really just
through targeted engagement.
We're already having those conversations.
We don't need to formalize that in a board.
So you'll see the removal of that recommendation
based on that feedback.
The other thing which I think is more minor.
We did talk a good bit about just your current budget
priorities and acknowledging that any consideration
for potential funding of housing that would be
separate from the general fund.
So you can still have those conversations
with the general fund, but the strategy,
which was strategy 7 is now or was strategy 8 is now.
Strategy seven said explore revenue
options and financing tools.
We pushed that further out into the planning period.
So as you all this housing action plan is a six year plan.
We initially had that financing and funding strategy
in a to two year period, and we've pushed that out further
into more of 4 to six years in terms
of looking for opportunities for new funding sources.
So that's one of the action items under what's
currently strategy seven.
Those are the two main topics that
came out of your conversation.
As I mentioned, another source of updates
was feedback that we received from the Grand
Junction housing authority.
Really thorough and great review from that group.
Obviously, they're a key partner and a key implementer.
Those changes were primarily focused
around making sure we're emphasizing in the right places
engagement with stakeholders.
So particularly as we're taking out that Housing Advisory board
as a formalized response, making sure that we're really
clear within recommendations where it's really important
to make sure you're engaging with those partners,
getting feedback and input from those partners,
and having them as really kind of a leadership partner,
not just a reflection partner.
So you'll see some of those changes
throughout a couple other kind of technical adjustments
and making sure that we're characterizing their programs
correctly, that we're looking at,
some of the incentives in a way that makes sense as well.
So a little bit of feedback from them
that emphasizes that partnership role.
And then two other things I want to touch on for in terms
of the edits, one is real minor update for flow, but you'll see,
we kind of moved the progress update from your last strategy
just into an appendix to help the actual housing
action plan read a little more clearly
focused on current priorities.
So you'll see that big section moved.
We didn't lose it.
We just moved it to an appendix.
And then finally, the only real content addition to this one
is looking at the framework for annual prioritization,
I will maybe share my screen briefly just
to show you what that looks like, which I know you can see
it in yours as well, but let me just pull that up
real briefly because we have this nice infographic
that was designed by staff.
Actually, I think Paul was helpful on this front.
That just gives you a sense of really how to think about this
in an annual version.
So as I mentioned, this is a six year
housing strategy that you also are submitting to the state.
But really when you think about priorities,
and we talked about priorities a good bit last time
and really acknowledged those things change year to year,
depending on what grants are available, what your staff
capacity looks like at any point in time,
as well as what your funding priorities are for that year.
And so we want to be really sensitive to that.
Make sure we're not giving you priorities that
don't fit over a long term.
And so we really felt like, look,
instead of really prioritizing in a way that
may become we are unrealistic.
Your strategies.
We just wanted to give you some framework and thoughts
around how do we think about this annually when we're going
through the housing budget, when we're looking at general funds,
how do we think about those things.
And so you'll see that as a new content item.
It's not intended to lock you into anything
or say, oh, this is what you have to do each year.
It really is.
Hey, these are the things to think about
as you're making those priority decisions
on a year to year basis.
So I'll pull that up briefly.
And then we can pivot into any questions that you might have.
So give me just a second on the screen
shares giving me a pinwheel.
So let me see if we can get it up here.
There it comes.
So hopefully you'll see this again.
This is just the infographic.
There's a lot on here.
We're not going to walk through it.
But I just wanted to acknowledge there's a wide range of criteria
that you all already think about when
you're thinking about priorities for other components.
This just highlights what those are within the housing space,
what questions you may want to consider as you're doing that
and how to apply it.
Now, there are still obviously within each priority
that we talked about last time or within each strategy.
There's timelines, there's actions.
This just gives you additional help
as you're thinking about how do we allocate
funds or not allocate funds.
And what are we really focusing on with the staff capacity
that you have.
So that's all I have for the update,
but I'm happy to answer questions on any of the redlines
specifically or just in general.
Next steps are, as you all probably
it is currently available for public comment,
so we are still taking public comments
as they come in on the draft housing action plan.
Once at the end of that public comment period,
there will also be a public hearing and then approval by you
guys and submission to dola.
In the meantime, dola is giving a preliminary kind of courtesy
review to make sure everything's looking like the T's are crossed
and I's are dotted and that sort of thing.
So with that, I'll open it back up for any questions
or kick back to I don't know Paul,
if you want to if you had anything
to add that I may have missed.
I know you've worked really closely on this as well.
Thank you so much for that.
Molly, did you have something else.
City manager.
I think we don't have much to add.
I did just want to note that the point at which extending
the time for looking at other types of financial models
is not in reference only to.
I know we had a robust discussion last time,
but there's many different ways of finding funding.
And it doesn't just it's not solely focused
on any kind of tax or increase.
It's looking at currently when we've added funding outside
of grants or other programs, it's been
a general fund contribution.
And knowing that we can't sustain
general fund contributions on an annual basis.
This is an opportunity to extend the period of time.
So not one to two years, but the period of time
where we are seeking all the different creative.
Some of those funding sources may not even be available now
to go after, but working with our partners in a way
that we're able to seek out other types of opportunities
for funding affordable housing in the community,
whether that's through the city or through our partners,
but making sure that we have that ability without locking it
into one way.
Council Kennedy Yeah, and actually, Molly and Mike,
I really appreciate the fact that literally what each of you
said were kind of my first two questions
that I'd been working on this topic.
So, Molly, thank you for that.
Talking about that annual look at funding
and that it's not locking us into anything
and obviously we can't commit future councils to action.
Year by year that.
But it's just where we take the doubt out of the way
that it's written that, well, this council passed this
and it's a mandate for them to the next council to take
this action to fund this thing.
I think that we just have to be careful in how we
word that which I think your first comment certainly
addressed that.
So thank you for that clarification.
And then Mike, that next point that explore dedicated revenue
was a concern because that can certainly come across as hey,
let's pass a tax or a fee that is also potentially a tax.
So that was something I appreciate just that the options
and again, since we're not requiring anything
of a future council, but these are basically these
are guidelines right.
So we're not saying that, hey, we are going to do this.
We are this isn't council giving direction to staff.
And I just want to make sure I'm understanding that clearly.
I see Molly, I see you adding your nodding.
Your head is am, I am, I am, I tracking on that with that way.
I'm saying that on number two that dedicated funding, revenue
exploring that is basically just a matter of saying, hey,
let's keep our eyes open for opportunities
to bring in additional funding sources.
Yes, that is I mean, that word explore at the beginning
is very intentional.
We are not suggesting a specific action other than keep your eyes
open to the extent that it becomes a council
priority to say, hey, we want to understand what our options are.
Then you direct.
At that time, you would direct staff to explore that and say,
hey, what are those options.
What do those look like.
All of.
There's lots of pre-work before anything jumps to oh,
do a ballot initiative for tax.
There's lots of other things as Mike mentioned
and that is really intended to be in there so that if you want
to prioritize that in the future,
you have some language and some structure
so that you're not reinventing the wheel from ground 0.
We're really trying to get you off on the right foot
if and when you're ready to look at that,
and we don't expect you to even start looking at that
within the next several years.
That's why that one specifically is on that 4 to six
year timeline, because that's far enough out, but still
within the planning period.
Great and then just one last thing, that regulatory cost
test.
I really like that idea to where we're
looking at cost impacts on housing
production and affordability before adoption.
And we're looking at specific cost drivers around housing.
Is there a way that we can strengthen that.
Is there something else we can do
to make sure that this is something
that is a policy consideration.
I know it's hard to say.
We're going to put anything going forward
on any future council decision.
But as these things go, I think this
is it's just so important that we consider
impacts on the cost of housing.
Yep and I think to be honest, that one's
really hard to get to a middle ground of detail on,
if that makes sense.
So you say, hey, you need to be thinking about this.
Like understand costs of regulatory impact,
understand the benefit.
And then you've got to weigh those as trade offs.
And then beyond that level of detail,
it's really, really hard without something specific to say,
this is what you weigh or this is how you calculate it.
It really kind of jumps from the conceptual you
have to really be looking at a specific thing
to understand how that is.
So I mean, I appreciate your request to strengthen it.
I don't know that we can give it a lot more meat on the bones
just because it gets real nuanced
real fast, if that makes sense.
Depending on what that component is.
I'm certainly the extent to which
you have additional thoughts on that and want to share those.
I'm open to certainly open to hearing those.
I just know that from the economist perspective,
I jump to OK, how are we doing this and how are we doing that
and what are the details.
So it gets pretty tricky pretty quick.
So it councils comfortable with the conceptual understanding
of hey let's make sure we're evaluating
costs and benefits of policy considerations
through this lens.
That was our intent.
But I'm certainly open to other thoughts on that.
So what comes to mind specifically
in this is a conversation we had in this room a couple of years
ago about undergrounding utilities
and say, well, yeah, sure.
It's pretty.
Yeah it looks great.
It honestly does it.
Wouldn't it be great if all utilities just were underground.
However, there's significant costs associated with that.
Who's like what is that cost.
So if staff is going to bring us that say staff,
we want you to also bring cost associated.
If you have an idea such as underground utilities.
Just as an example, we need to say more than hey
that looks great.
Wouldn't that be great for our whole community
to have more underground utilities.
But to say what are the actual costs
that are impacting housing.
I guess that would be the example.
But the crux of it would be if we're
going to take into consideration something like that,
we would need to look at costs.
I guess my only reaction to that is,
wouldn't that be the policy discussion
of that council at that time.
So it really I think presumably come up.
But it really needs to be since we're not binding
a future council, it needs to be that council's policy discussion
and what weight they put on that, because we
can't force that on them.
We can put it as kind of our general priority
as it's written, but we can't force
a future council to require staff to do anything.
And of course, we can't force a future council to do anything.
That's, that's a given.
But what I'm saying is that when staff brings us something,
brings us, for instance, undergrounding utilities,
that they may bring a anticipated cost per unit
for something like that.
And I know every utility.
Utility theory that's on the area
depends upon what an easement might cost, things like that,
but just that it's a consideration on staff side,
not necessarily from the council's perspective.
Any other comments or questions from council.
Sure council member.
Molly I work on some of the homeless stuff
and there were several mentions of needing and working
on emergency and transitional housing, which when we work
with the many, many providers in town,
is the number one need because they can get people
in wraparound services and they can work with their providers
and all that stuff, but they can't
get them from a tent to a transitional housing phase.
And we've talked a lot about what our role is on it,
but it wasn't really clear to me which direction
we were going from this report.
As far as our concerns about transitional housing,
there was some mention about deferring stuff to the County,
but I've never heard that the County was
excited about working on that.
And there was some mention about working with MCC on that,
but I've been in their meetings for years
and they really haven't come up with any solutions or anything.
So in your opinion, where does that leave us.
Great question.
And I think you're astute to acknowledge we're not overly
directive in this document about how to address that
and exactly where those priorities are.
Priorities are I would say the housing action plan is
intentionally deferential to the community
wide on how strategy and implementation plan.
So because that plan is currently part of your approach
to homelessness as a region, we wanted to be deferential
to that, particularly knowing that plan
could get updated during the lifespan of this six year plan.
And so where we have left, it really
is under strategy number 5, which is to stabilize households
through different housing models and homeless response
and prevention systems within that strategy.
We're saying continue to support implementation
of that unhoused strategy and implementation plan
because that is really the guidance around exactly
how to look at that component, that segment
of the housing market.
We did different than in previous strategies for the city
that that's kind of been a missing piece.
We said, hey, here's your housing strategy.
Don't forget you have a homeless strategy over here.
This time we really try to tie those together a little bit more
by intentionally calling out that strategy five of hey,
you've got a whole strategy.
Make sure you're integrating that.
That is part of your entire housing spectrum.
And so I would say to answer that more concisely,
we are deferential to your existing plan
with an acknowledgment that existing
plan could get updated and revised
during this six year plan.
Any other questions or comments from council.
Councilman Ballard, do you have anything
you would like to add to this.
No, I think most of my talking points
have already been discussed.
Thank you.
Great Well, thank you so much, Molly.
I really appreciate you on this.
I think you did a fantastic job at listening to council
and our individual meetings as well as in our group sessions,
and really implementing that into the plan.
Before we go, city manager Bennett, do you have anything
else you'd like to say on this.
Yeah, I definitely want to echo.
Thank you Molly.
And she's been incredibly helpful through this process
and the engagement and interviews that she did,
and putting it into action and working with our team
has it's been great.
So I did want to just verify with the council
with these changes that we presented
tonight, questions you asked.
We make these, we accept these changes
or as in the clean version, are you ready.
Make sure you're ready for us.
So we'd be bringing this for formal adoption
in the near future.
We have to as Molly mentioned, make sure all is good with it.
They're finishing that review.
And then we would bring that with a public hearing
and recommendation for adoption to council.
Great how does the process work.
We have to it's a requirement.
So we have to submit it to them.
So they have it to review.
And I don't know if there's anything to add to that.
They'll get back to us and make sure that it meets.
They don't get into how of what we're necessarily trying to do,
but they want to make sure that we've met the criteria that's
required within an action plan.
I'll just echo that they do a courtesy review so that they
give us a little bit of feedback, at least
on ones we've done prior to this one.
They've given us, hey, can you make sure you clarify this,
or we want to make sure you're doing this in the couple
that they've reviewed of ours already,
they've been really, really minor,
just tweaked adjustments, that kind of thing.
In preparation for that can see that in Appendix
A of your housing action plan.
We outline exactly what the state is looking for.
And then we tell them what pages to look at
to make sure that we've answered that question.
So we are trying to tee you up to make this as easy as possible
for dola to review.
And so it's pretty straightforward.
And it's relatively informal and that they're really free
communicators or have been so far with housing action plans
to tell us to make sure we're hitting criteria
or if there's anywhere where we would have that conversation,
but we haven't had any issues with other plans so far.
So from our perspective, yours is certainly looks like it's
likely to be compliant.
Then the next step is just to actually submit it to the state.
Once we get that feedback from them, once you all approve it,
we would submit it.
They have it on File and then it just
becomes part of that requirement makes
you more eligible for dollar grants
and all those sorts of things.
Great Thank you so much.
Looking around the room, are we comfortable with moving
this to the next phase.
Great yeah, I'm seeing lots of nods everywhere.
So thank you so much Molly.
I really appreciate all your effort time on this.
Thank you all for your time.
Appreciate it.
Bye So our next item on tonight's agenda
is budget process and focus overview.
And I believe we'll be turning that over to you write
have an introduction on that.
I do, yeah.
Thank you.
Thanks for the time tonight on this subject.
This is something that we obviously see a lot of support.
We have a big team that works on budget
throughout our organization.
And I appreciate the work of all of our department directors
and their teams and budget team.
It's a lot of expertise and a lot of great perspectives
to consider.
As a recap for the council and also
for information for the public when
we go through our annual budget process
before finally, the final act of adopting a budget before the end
of the year for the following year,
there's a lot of work that goes into that.
And typically that's on average about eight
months of work the year before that, next that, next year.
And so what we have been doing internally
is we just completed what we call our line item reviews.
That's when we sit down with our extended budget team,
with each department individually,
and we comb through thousands of line items.
So we are in essence, looking at no matter what the amount.
So if it's small amounts, large amounts,
we're looking at trends, what we spend in those,
if we need to spend in those line items we look at,
we come through our contracts with for example,
it contracts where you have softwares or different things
that we use for different services.
Make sure that it's still the most optimal.
We're finding those that we actually work with our IT
department that they're awesome and they're
coming up with sometimes we can do that in-house.
We can create a dashboard for that
or create a program for that.
Or yes, we need that outside proprietary software
to accomplish that.
So we go through those kinds of reviews.
We go through one time requests, we go
through our personnel requests.
So it's very in depth.
Excuse me.
Prior to that, the first step we did
is we had to Director to Director presentations,
and we really focused on high level.
What are the operational pressures that each service
area is facing.
What are the headwinds tailwinds.
This was a new step that we added into our process,
and it was incredibly beneficial to take
the time over multiple weeks for departments to take
a significant amount of time to walk through a presentation
that they had put together after working with their teams,
and really explain where those pinch points are,
where the opportunities are, where some of the challenges
are, and that helped shape, then going into departments,
submitting their recommended budgets to our budget team,
myself.
And then we did those line item reviews.
So the next steps for us is some really heavy lifting and work
where we try to get to that balance recommendation
that we bring to the city council in October.
So we will have our October workshops where we devote
to presenting our recommended budget,
having discussion with the council,
we have, we have room for a further discussion
on the first workshop in November,
and then bringing through the formal adoption
process of first reading and second reading
starting in November.
And so that's the overview of the full piece.
We'll touch on that a bit as we go through this.
Today our CFO, our Chief Financial Officer,
Jay Valentine, and I wanted to present,
we've referred in recent meetings
and fairly recently multiple times to a structural deficit
that we are facing and different than a cyclical deficit
where something might just be down for a moment
and we have to bridge a gap and then we're back ready to go.
We continue to run into being short on revenues
for the expenses that we have to deliver,
the services that we are committed to provide.
And we have I want to be clear, this
is in no way trying to point backwards at decisions
or anything like that.
We have the luxury of hindsight and we have the luxury
of trends, and we're using those to look forward
at how do we fix this structural deficit tonight is we're not
seeking any discussion on trying to find solutions
or anything like that.
We're heavily involved in that internally.
And we'll bring those recommendations in October,
as I mentioned earlier.
But we want to just be very transparent and public
about what the structural what the structural deficit is,
why we are there and how we have to address it and addressing it.
It's more than just what we do in 2027.
You'll see some trends as we walk through,
and I'll chime in as Jay is presenting this
and we're going to tag team it.
But he'll do the bulk of the presenting
and we'll point out some key factors.
The only portion of a solution that we'll
be talking about tonight is the potential, the potential use
of fund balance for some portion of this deficit
that we're talking about.
So we'll get more in detail there.
And then we have a couple other we
have a presentation after this on financial policies
and a new financial report.
But first we're going to walk through this structural deficit
and the painting, the picture of what we are working through
before we get back to you all in October
with recommended budgets.
Excellent I think with that, we'll be turning it
over to our CFO, Jay Valentine.
Thank you all.
So as Mike laid the groundwork, I just
want to go through the challenge and we're going to be
very transparent about this.
And the slides will speak for themselves,
but I'll go through them.
The currently the 2027 balancing gap is $6 million.
So if we didn't add any new staff or any of the one
time requests this status quo.
We need to track the $6 million deficit.
When we add to that, there are $7 million
of additional one time requests and 7.9 9 million
of new positions are salary requests.
5.5 million of that is public safety,
and the rest is for the remaining
pieces of the government.
As you'll see in some other slides.
This is our sixth straight year of declining.
We had $11.3 million surplus in 2021.
And it's declined from there to where we've faced a deficit
these prior two years.
So as Mike mentioned, when the expenses are outpacing
our ongoing expenses are outpacing our revenues,
that creates that structural gap.
This isn't a one year sales tax is lagging.
So we're having a tough budget year,
but we expect it to rebound.
That would be a cyclical type of deficit.
Again, this is structural that we look back.
As Mike said, hindsight is 2020.
The things we have done that compound
in terms of some of the encumbrances
that we've taken on.
The $6 million gap, as you'll see,
is largely it is salary and benefits.
One other thing, and we'll talk about all this here a little
more in depth.
But the first responder fund, where we have the 0.05% 7.5%
sales tax.
That's going to need a subsidy now from the general fund
that growth in public safety.
The tax is not enough to cover the expansion of those funds.
So this will be the issue will be
the first year that the 27 that will be subsidizing
hear that going forward.
I'm just pointing out you can probably see that
from the top bullet, but that this specific piece
of our expenses outpacing revenues is only 23% since 2021.
So that compounding effect is pretty significant
as we get to this point.
So while revenues have continued to grow,
they've just grown 23% less than expenses.
This slide here is I did an online seminar by Cliff Clifton
Larson, a national accounting firm,
and they did a state and local government, the state
of the industry presentation.
And this slide actually came from them,
where it talks about the reality that's
happening across the nation.
Focusing on the city's general fund growth
is down from 7.5 fiscal year 24 to less than 1% growth.
Currently, about 45% of CFOs are confident meeting 26 needs.
That means 55% aren't.
Obviously, 60% of general fund goes to public safety.
And really the ARPA ARPA cliff is here.
The all that money that was sloshing around in the economy
has dried up.
And along with that went a lot of grants
that were used to either create programs or prop up programs
or used for very specific purposes.
So we mirror this national squeeze
of slower revenue, flat spending and the end
of the federal relief.
As I mentioned, the recurring operating margin has
declined every year since 2021.
And this is graphically how that's depicted.
As you can see, starting in 2025,
we went into the fund balance at 600,003 million last year.
And now without doing anything so far we're down to six.
I want to point out that the 600,000 and the three million,
that was a lot of council directed uses of fund balance.
So we did a lot of things to get that deficit, not deficit
to have a flat spending at 0.
And then we added the council.
But to do that stuff, there's a lot of one time levers
that have been used to balance the budgets
over the last few years.
And those one time levers, I'll just say it.
It shields you from reality, for lack
of a better word for that one year,
but it hits you the next year.
So that's also.
Compounded over this time.
And one thing that we want to point out
is the compounding nature began heavily in 2021.
So while this is a trend, what's compounded each year
are from things that have occurred
or ways we balance the budget or things we've added,
or new expenses and the expenses outgrowing
the revenues along the way.
And now we are filling those in a much more significant way
than we had in the past.
This is another way of showing where
our recurring costs have outgrown
our unrestricted recurring revenues.
It's just the same way of showing
a different thing that it's a structural, not a cyclical.
You can see it.
You could look back and see that.
And like Mike said, we've had the benefit of hindsight.
The one time items I spoke of would further widen that gap.
And we not pulled those certain one time levers again,
that gap would be widened.
And again, it's just a mix of a mismatch between revenues
and expenditures.
Just to talk some about our revenue sources here,
property tax has grown unevenly since 2021.
But we also haven't changed our property
tax structure in over 30 years.
It's been eight Mills for over, like I said, over 30 years.
Add to that the state assessment rate cuts under House Bill 24B,
you can see in 2024 the assessed value of properties
was rising very quickly.
And the state legislature imposed these assessment
rate cuts starting in 2025.
And so you can see as the result of that has hit us.
Had the race not been there, we got our assessment,
our mid-year assessment, which is an estimate from the County
that didn't have that.
We faced about $800,000 hit to our funds.
I'll also add on top of that some other things out
of our control is the cannabis tax that we receive 10% share
of the state tax collected.
That got pulled back to 3.5% last year.
And this year as of July, they took
the state took the rest of it.
So we received we don't receive any property tax.
That's a 200 plus $1,000 hit there.
I guess how to say that.
So fund balance.
The fund balance I've charted back from 2016
from a low of 2017 to 20.4.
That's grown to a fund balance of 48.5 million in 2025.
So while we're facing a structural deficit,
we have found ways ace to add to fund balance.
So good work to add to the fund balance.
But if it has come at somewhat of a cost.
Now that's funny to have that picture.
The gross surplus a lot of it came from one time sources.
I mentioned the ARPA public safety.
We'll talk about a lot.
I know PD has had trouble.
We would budget for positions, and they
were unable to fill those positions
because it's hard to recruit and retain police officers.
So when that money didn't get spent on hiring police officers,
it drops to the fund balance.
I just want to point out the 2% sales and use tax is the.
About $56 million is what we receive from the 2%
and that's what needs to fund general government operations,
finance, HR, community development,
transportation, engineering, most of Parks and Recreation.
And now part of that's is to fund.
PD so this doesn't count the public safety tax.
So we do get some help from that.
But 56 million to put that perspective, when we're looking
at a $316 million total budget, 52 million sales tax, sales,
and use tax isn't it's not a whole lot
to fund what we do from a general fund perspective.
We do also include the eight month property tax.
But as we've discussed now, that is either leveling out
or declining from what it was.
The voter approved taxes are restricted.
And I think that goes without saying.
We can't utilize those for anything
other than what those are restricted for.
So the first responders, expansion capital, community rec
center and certain parks fees are not
available for general operations.
So we have predicting about $4 million of tax growth.
But by the time we add in some of the deterioration
of the revenues that I've spoke about,
we're looking at about a 1.9 increase in our revenues.
So that's a 1.6% which kind of falls
in line with that kind of national industry slide
that I showed you earlier.
Some other things that complicate
is the stalled development at o'clock Rios.
We're going to pay a debt service of $1.3 million
and 27, when the debt service for that
was modeled to come from the sales tax
and the property tax increment that was generated by the growth
of businesses there at that.
And we've talked about this as well, that we'll
find the rural fire contract to get 3.3 million
revenue, that the service costs are at least $2 million
higher than that.
Mentioned that labor and benefits are driving the cost
of what we're seeing in 27.
In fact, the operating we're actually seeing so far
a little bit of decline in non-personnel operating
expenditures.
Compensation, as you can see, is up 7.3 million.
This does include a $1.3 million placeholder
for the compensation, classification
and compensation study that's being conducted
right now as we speak.
Health insurance.
We're going to get a lot more into that here
in the next couple of slides.
But right now, we're looking at a major 50% type major increase
in health premiums for 2027.
I mentioned the fund transfer, expanding staffing and stations.
A new $1.3 million first responder fund transfer
is going to be made in 27.
I mentioned that it's more like three,
but we're utilizing the remainder 2.6 million.
I think of the remaining fund balance in that fund.
The first responder fund, so that an additional amount
is the deficit of that fund.
A lot of the drivers.
Station 6 and 8 community rec center housing
and other added programs.
So just created permanent obligations.
Compensation plan.
From the 2021 through to 2026 general government.
Our annualized rate of increase.
You can see there what those have been.
These are all based on step one of our pay plan.
There are people that come in higher than step one.
So that's why it's not equal.
Each step is 3% in our general compensation plan.
So some are a little bit more than that
and some are less than that.
But it's for that reason.
I would add here that this isn't because in previous budget years
there was an over budgeting of salaries or benefits.
We are still not keeping up with our market based comparisons
and with comparisons with other cities and in some situations,
we don't just base with other cities.
We may look at other utilities in the area
for utilities positions and different things like that.
And so while that can be looked at as well,
that's quite the increase is over time.
We're also chasing what has just happened industry wide and not
necessarily not just chasing it but trying to so that we're not.
It's a significant cost as people leave for higher pay
with the skill sets they have.
And then we go through the recruitment and all the expense
of each recruitment and the time we lose
and then the time for training, all that compounds as well.
And so for instance, as an example,
just taking the police department as an example,
there were a number of years where
it was very difficult to get lateral hires recruitments.
We've finally gotten to what we would call more of a sweet spot
and I would say a better comparable in the market.
But that is changing every year.
So don't just get there and then you've made it.
If you don't keep up with where that market is, which
is increasing each year, you get back right to the same situation
we were in.
And that can take that can be one year
and you're back into that situation.
And so that's not just for police departments for many
of our departments, but just as an example
where we actually have seen once we get into that,
it's not paying the most across the state.
It's not even it's being very comparable considering where
our location, considering our size, levels of services
and things like that, where all of a sudden,
we are competitive enough to bring lateral recruitments in.
And so that's why when Jay says it's not always a step one,
whether no matter what department it's in,
we're seeking a certain amount of experience,
and you have a number of those years of experience
in exactly that role.
You're not going to start at that step one.
But if we are not competitive in that market,
we struggle and we're not able to make those recruitments.
And we've seen that recently as we
recruit for some of our higher level positions,
where we've had to where we've gotten
some incredible feedback from finalists
that were very well qualified.
They were excited about the area,
excited about the organization.
Everything seemed to look right until they start calculating
the move, selling a home wherever they may be
in the state or in the country.
Purchasing a home here, all those things that everybody's
running into.
And then with the salary not being as competitive,
we've had to increase those.
And so with the Comp class study that we're doing,
we don't anticipate it won't be.
Every position is going up, but we do.
We anticipate that some of those market adjustments
will show where we might be lagging
in some of those positions.
As Mike discussed.
We had to make market adjustments and in PD and fire
in order to help recruit and retain those.
So as you can see that the annualized
increases are different from the general government.
And I think we've explained why that is.
And it's actually worked our police chief and fire chief.
So that's just for comparison's sake.
OK health care costs.
And I have.
I have Shelly Carrasquilla behind me,
and Brandon has finance director and Matt Martinez, our budget
manager, who are all very well versed in this problem
because they've been working on it all year long.
We do have a.
Consultant Brown and Brown, that what
helps us to navigate this and help this
to the self-funding model from the previous fully
insured model.
And we made that move to self-funded when
our Cigna rates were I think.
What says 41% That was what our renewal was going to be.
So we went to a self-funding model.
And I think the only thing that we
probably are not the only thing that we didn't do.
We should have done is put more seed in that fund more
to have a larger fund balance, to be
able to ride the tide with the.
Sometimes fluctuation in high claim costs to ride that wave.
But you can see the.
Rising costs here.
Now for 26.
We need $1.2 million to restore the insurance fund to 0.
That's 25% Our costs are 25% above what was projected
for 2026 to where it's $2,528 per
employee per month, compared to the $2,028
per employee per month.
That red dot, that red line is what's needed
to restore the fund to 0.
So one thing that we did ask Brown and Brown to do
was what would have happened if we would have stayed
in a fully insured model.
And so they went back and made that decision.
And we've self-funding still saved us $5.8 million
over that time.
So we have it was the right choice.
Health care is are the health costs have been rising sharply,
but we still save that 85 $8 million.
So one of the proposals that we're seeking
is to take that some of that $5.8 million that got
added to the fund balance because of that decision
to go to self-insured and reinvest that
back into that insurance fund.
A 50% reinvestment of those funds.
That's what that graph is telling you,
would give us a $1.94 million and a 75%
reinvestment, 3.4 million, and I'll let that slide.
Am I missing anything there.
That's a good summary.
Jay, could you go to the slide before real quick.
I just want to reiterate a couple things here.
When it comes to this.
So just to make sure everybody's on
and anybody watching go into self-funded means
that when we may have a contract with Cigna for example.
So an employee goes to a health provider,
they provide their insurance card,
but Cigna is not paying the claims.
We pay those claims.
And so when you make that transition,
you have to fund a fund balance with enough
to pay for those claims that may come before all the fees you're
collecting each month, where each employee is
paying what their fee is, where the city's
paying another portion.
And so when we did that shift with the 2020 of hindsight,
even at that time, my understanding
is Brown and Brown.
And there were recommendations that we fund that fund balance
more than we chose to do.
So we went a little more aggressive.
And then those claims were more.
But during that time we had savings throughout that
went into fund balance.
So we're not saying we need to take fund balance to make
those annual one time expenses.
Because it's two part.
We didn't put enough in to start with.
And have we done that we would be at a better spot.
And then there's the portion of increased costs and claims.
So we want to replenish that fund so that we're in a better
position for where that fund where the health
insurance fund should be.
And then of course, there's then we
have to address those ongoing increases
in claims as they were.
But we didn't fund it enough at the start.
And we can clearly see that.
We also can see, as the slide before said,
is that we know that if that we saved 5.8 million.
So yes, expenses, claims have gone up.
But we also but we also save 5.8 million.
And if we stayed fully insured, we also
know that some of the other things that we've added,
such as some fixed cost for benefits like a health clinic
that every employer we spend.
I think it's 43% less on each employee that visits.
Is it.
We saved $4,000.
Sorry yeah, we save 4,000 per employee.
So we see these very specific savings.
When we use these fixed costs versus making these full claims.
And so we have the right model and we have the right focus
on where we can add minor expenses to reduce
much larger claim expenses.
But part of that takes some investment in those fixed areas.
But it also means rightsizing this fund balance that
was created during times where we were also increasing
our overall fund balance.
So we don't see this as being something we want to come back
to year over year and say we need to take more fund balance
and put towards this.
We're looking at it as a fixing what added to getting us there
outside of the piece of increased claims
so that we're in a much better spot moving forward.
Outside of seeking out competitive pay
are by far our strongest component
of retaining employees as our health insurance
and benefits that come along with that.
So drastic changes there could cause
even bigger swings than minor than where the pay
moves as we move forward.
So it's a pretty significant component.
We just want to reiterate over and over that this is not
to say we want to use fund balance
for continuous ongoing costs, but it's to say,
hey, we increased our fund balance during a time
where we had in the one year we started,
we chose to save and try and reduce by not putting
enough in fund to start with.
Which caught up to us within those three years.
Yeah that's right.
I did it on my own.
I just want to reiterate to what you said
about when we were fully insured and we had the clinic operating.
We didn't have access to all the data.
That was sickness on that data.
Now we're self-insured.
We own that data.
So we could very succinctly tell somebody that utilizes
the clinic compared to somebody that doesn't utilize the clinic.
And what a difference that makes.
So we're obviously making efforts regardless of budget.
We're just start getting these more
people engaged in that clinic and ways to do that.
And I would say that it's working because now we're
running into the challenge of it's hard to get into the clinic
because we went from people getting used to
and starting to use it to now heavily using it to where if we
want to see more of that savings,
we have to expand that opportunity for more
of our employees to be able to get in and utilize that as well.
So early in the presentation, when Mike mentioned the director
to Director presentations and he talked about that
the headwinds and the operating pressures,
these six kind of stood out.
The workforce costs are rising across every fund.
It's the largest driver recruiting and retention.
Turnover near 12% It's 102 to fill vacancies.
It's just harder and harder to recruit growth ads
like we mentioned growth ads, permanent obligations.
We talked about Lane miles and 53 park acres,
with roads and medians and those needed maintained.
15 subdivisions.
Police calls are up 20% So public safety commitments
exceed dedicated revenues.
I've mentioned that.
And then our aging assets and rising technology costs fleet.
Our fleet average 14.2 years versus 7 and 1/2 to eight
year target on replacing that.
And that's one of those that we need to get
back to when funding was.
Budgeting was tough.
I think fleet was and facilities was a good way to say, wow,
those cars will last a little longer.
So we won't fund that to a certain point.
And then also mandates at work without the funding.
As you can see, there's 40 law enforcement
Bills, state housing laws.
Water rules, all of that.
We did also talk about delivering efficiencies
as one of the pillars.
And so it's great to see those are already taken hold
with almost every department.
It's just not enough right now to close a $6 million
operating deficit.
I just want to highlight that there's been an heavy effort
across the organization, and we've
been thrilled with the creativity
and the recommendations the departments have found,
and finding savings and efficiencies
and taking things on our own that we've been able to create,
whether it's help from it or efficiencies
in reporting and finding ways with sometimes
with other software or whatever it may be.
I also want to reiterate that there's been a number of years
where each of the departments have
made small cuts to try and make each of those years efforts.
And so where services maybe will reduce,
there were two different time frames where police services
were reduced to just to keep up with calls
and all that continues to that to this point.
It's not.
When you look back at this, it's not surprising
that where we are right now, if we take those one time requests
and/or the personnel requests and then just the
carry over with keeping everything
flat that we're pushing, 18 million last year
it was 14 million.
And it was a little bit less the year before.
And it's because these things have compounded.
There's been years where when we purchase our vehicles,
we know that we have to pay ourselves a certain amount
every year so that when you have to replace that vehicle,
you have that in the fund.
And that doesn't mean that we replace exactly the same amount
evenly divided every year of all of our vehicles
or all of our equipment.
So those fund balances grow.
And in the past, those fund balances
were the funds from those were used
to help balance that year's budget
and then never replenished.
And so there's some of those types of things where.
And it's not to say I'm not trying to say
that was a poor decision.
It's when yours are tight and trying to make
those kinds of balancing.
Sometimes that's what goes, oh, we don't have
to spend that much this year.
Can we make this work.
Can we squeeze one more, one more
year without adding that position,
even though we're clearly beyond we can see it in the overtime.
We can see it in the hours worked and the shifts
and not being able to cover it depending on whatever area.
But we make it work.
And we make it work.
And then we make it work.
And all that continues to come compound
into where we're at today.
Also, some of the director, the director
figures that were reported in the presentations
to one another.
Again subdivision growth.
There's 15 new subdivisions plotted since January
one of 25 annexations.
City limit.
It totals 41 3 square miles.
You can see the fire response area is 80.4mi and EMS responses
649mi for every 100 new homes adds about 31% and annexation
continues in multiple areas in town
that just adds more pressure to fire the call volume.
I won't read them all to you, but number 4,
you can see the call volume up, police calls for service.
Everything is rising and the infrastructure
based on annexation and growth.
And that also has street lights, all that.
So growth adds those reoccurring costs as well that this
is where we are right now.
We get the director presentations.
We get the Department submissions
and line item reviews.
We're going to go back in September
and start to do some prioritizing
and get some balancing done.
And then we'll be back in October.
The first part of November sit with you all kind of.
See what we've done during that time
and then come up with a solution, which
we will to fix all of this.
I would just add that and Jay touched
on this at the very beginning.
People hear a 300 million plus budget as a whole
and think, well, OK with $360 million budget this year,
whatever that may be this next year.
And you think so.
Out of that much, it's not hard to find 18 million.
If you're thinking 300.
But when you break it down and we're
talking the structural deficit within the general fund,
within the core areas of government
that aren't, and you take out each enterprise fund.
So all the utilities that separate
take out all of the water and sewer you take out,
of course, our solid waste and recycling,
the community recreation center that's separate.
You take all these out and you get to these core functions
where it's limited and you're in the 50s and a million,
not in 300 million.
And you start trying to figure out, where this deficit
continues to amplify.
Each year that I talked about that becomes how much more slim
it gets in trying to make those minor tweaks.
And then you think about let's just
say the million if everything it'll probably be less
because we don't always have every one time
ask in there or every personnel request.
But I will say these personnel requests
aren't just the wish list.
This is a fire department that knows we need x amount,
but we're only asking for this amount for this year.
This is a police department doing the same thing,
knowing that if at any given time
we have 15 sworn officers or so that are deployable,
we know we need to be about 165 deployable.
So you really need to be around 180 or so.
And we're in the 1 1 30 seconds and then
we have, at any given time, not that amount
to be deployable at that time.
Still just asking for a certain amount for each.
For the next year.
Not that whole gap.
When we choose.
Even though we.
It might not be realistic.
Even if the money were there not to go after
or not to try and budget for more than a certain amount
that we know we wouldn't be able to recruit in a given year.
But we use that money for something else,
or something new means it's not there when
we get to that future year.
And so all those things are kind of multiplied.
And when you get to that 18 or so million
and you start thinking, we have a debt payment of a million,
we have 3.3 million to the rural we can go down the line.
And even though we've added X amount for revenue,
we've added X amount for efficiencies,
we're still not catching up.
And so I know this sounds more like it
sounds very doom and gloom.
It's meant to just show how this has happened over time
and why it's important that as we go into our 2027 budget, one,
we want to be very mindful of what we recommend
when it comes to fund balance.
We've talked about that.
I won't reiterate that and don't want you to be surprised
as that's a portion of it.
It obviously doesn't address at all.
It also means that some of those bigger discussions
we've been having as we relook at our economic development
efforts along the riverfront and the agreements we have,
we have to relook at those.
We don't want to just continue as is
without making a different steps to seek out different solutions.
It also means that we have to look more regionally
and how we work with our partners
when it comes to where we are providing a service,
not just within the city limits, but in a very large area
outside of those limits.
We've talked about that with the rural fire district.
We have that agreement.
We do need to provide them the two year notice.
If you remember, that is a staff notice.
Whether it doesn't necessarily come from the council.
It comes from the fire chief.
And I just want to give you a heads
up that we want that we are going to plan to give
them that letter of notice.
And just to clarify, it's not a notice
of we don't want to contract with the rural fire.
It's just over the next two years,
we have to get to an arrangement that works for covering
and renewing that agreement.
But without giving that notice, it makes it very difficult
to take steps, actionable steps to actually change
that and work towards it.
So again, our letter coming from our chief of the fire department
to the rural district would simply cover the fact
that we are completely open to continuing to contract
for the rural district.
But we need to renegotiate this agreement within the next two
years to be able to continue to do that where it's not
at a loss to citizens of Grand Junction and the services
that we are providing out of the jail.
So there are multiple components we are coming through.
Also looking at dissecting what parts of the increase expenses
that we talked about that are outpacing revenues
are tied to growth.
And then which parts are things that we've added that might not
be tied to growth, where we might have to have discussions
about whether or not those are things we continue or we adjust
or things like that.
So again, we'll be coming in October
with all those recommendations, and
we're working heavily on that.
Now we don't have all those outlined.
Usually by the time we would do this, we would do that,
but it wouldn't be until October.
We just chose to come earlier to talk
about why we're running into this on an annual basis
and be open.
Because sometimes in times like this,
it's where we have to say no to some good ideas
to make sure we get everything structurally
sound to be able to continue to provide
the services at a high level.
So happy to take any questions.
We've got a lot of people here that we can call upon.
But again, we're not at the point of the line
item recommendations.
Just really just big picture.
Council Member Stan, did you have something.
Yeah I think that we really need to start having conversations
in earnest about funding some kind of study
about what it would look like to form a fire district
and remove that from the city.
It's one of our biggest.
I mean, it's not that we don't want to.
It's not that we don't want you, but it would give the district
the ability to go to taxpayers and to ask for the taxes
that they need to be able to fund this.
It would give much more flexibility
when it comes to setting pay and not
having to have it compete with or inflate
other departments here.
I mean, it would also potentially create
some solutions for how much we're doing elsewhere,
but the city's not getting paid for everything
that was presented here.
Really, the biggest potential impact
would be not having the city continue
to saddle the entirety of the metro areas, not the entirety.
That's unfair, but to saddle so much of the entire region's
fire and EMS needs.
And I don't see I imagine that what you're going to bring
to us for 2027 is going to be a short term
solution for this budget, but we are not
going to be able to continue to short term solution
our way through this kind of a structural deficit, when
so much of that deficit is coming
from our fire department and our fire assistance
that we're providing.
I don't know why we're not having this conversation very
in earnest and very soon, and why we're not looking at using
some of our reserve to authorize some study to start looking
at what that would look like.
So that will be part of our recommendation coming in.
We're definitely having those conversations with our partners
a little more informally before we
look at a more formal process.
But you're 100% right, Councilman,
that when I talk about the fire service
and how we work with our partners in the long run.
That's not a fix in just the 27 budget.
That's a bigger picture, multi-year fix
that takes multiple years to get from here to there.
And we have to get going on that and our chief's
done a great job of beginning to reach out with our partners,
gather some support because it's not something we can do alone.
It definitely has to be with some of those partners.
And we're getting there's a reception
to taking those next steps.
I don't want to speak for any of those partners yet,
but there's reception and taking that.
But it would include bringing an outside group in
to work with not just the city, but the other entities that are
involved in that transition.
Because you've got to comb through what
the adequate funding is in the long term, how to merge assets,
how to actually go to the multiple areas
that would be involved, how other districts
could come in the future.
There's a lot of layers to that, but you're 100% right.
Without getting started on that, we perpetuate
what we're facing right now.
Yeah the other piece of this, though,
is that I think it's the best solution for our region.
I think it's the best solution for the city
and for the city's budget situation.
But if it doesn't work.
We also need to be looking right now at a parallel question,
which is how do we go to the voters for an increase
to our public safety tax because of all the issues
that we see with the budget.
One of the most significant is the fact
that our public safety tax is not meeting
our public safety needs.
And so we can do a bunch of things
to fix the rest of the budget.
But that's the place where there's the most opportunity
and I can't see going to the public and saying,
hey, we need a general tax increase for general city
services because that does not move voters,
does not convince voters.
The public safety sure does.
And I don't want us to wait until we conduct
a very prolonged process, looking at the potential
for a fire district and not simultaneously
look at what would we need.
If that proves to not be a viable option, what would
we need to be going to the voters
for from a public safety tax standpoint.
And we know that when we did the last, when we did twoby in 2019,
we didn't ask for what we needed.
We asked for less than what we projected we would need
for public safety, knowing that we would have a future ask
if all things continued equal and they
haven't just continued equal, they've been exacerbated.
So I would urge that we don't put one on the back burner
while we pursue the other, but rather we're examining both
of them as potential options for as soon
as we can get it in front of voters.
And I would just add, one of the things we want to do in a very
transparent way is show everything that's
added to the show, how we're spending those funds show where
we're short, show where our efficiencies have been made,
show where the growth and revenue has been made so
that when we do get to some point where we have to do well,
when we do potentially have to put an ask out there,
there's a lot of understanding of all the things we've done.
First to be able to then ask for that trust and that commitment
of the public that we've made these efficiencies we've
utilized new revenue in this way.
We've sought out other opportunities and partnership
to lessen the load.
But this is what it takes to provide
that level of service and the expectation
that our residents have.
Council Member Kennedy.
Yes, we've been talking about this for several years now.
I remember when we were talking to Cliff,
looking at Clifton fire for a while,
and some of the challenges there.
We were talking about what a district might look like then,
and certainly over the years, we've
talked with the local about that in conjunction
with potential other, things that they're
looking at employee collective bargaining incentive.
So I think that the appetite is there.
I think it certainly is a good opportunity.
And I think that the situation that we're looking
at with this budget gives us a great motivation
to actually have that discussion,
as council member stout pointed out.
It's a good time to do that.
And also a great point on that to be from 2019.
That was as that public safety tax came out.
So much of that.
Well, first we asked for less than what
the need was because it was just about well, what do we think
will pass.
Because that's always that challenge.
It was just like when we tried to build the police department
the first time, and we were asked by the public
to not build it at that scale.
It was greatly brought down to a smaller level.
And now we're looking at an enormous expense
for a police annex just so we can continue services.
So when we don't ask for what we need.
That puts us, I think in a position
where we have to come back again later with our hat in our hands.
So if there's an opportunity this time
to say to really rightsize this, not that it I mean,
it's going to be uncomfortable for all of us,
but I think that's important to look at that and to say, let's
not just think about OK, what will pass.
Let's think about just doing a really, really good job
of explaining what the real need is, because so much
of that to be went to our building,
a new fire stations to dispatch that type of thing.
Really, the amount that went to the police department
in particular was relatively small.
And I don't think that the public totally
understands the way those funds got distributed or distributed.
So that's a challenge as well.
So yes, I agree with council member on those two issues.
The one thing I would ask Mike on this, when we come back,
we talk about this again on that breakdown on that $6 million
structural deficit.
If there's a way you can give us a breakdown
on what that's made up of as far as and you talked about some
but what we can't avoid as far as contractual obligations
debt service benefits and things like that.
If just a better understanding of what that is.
I mean, even though I mean, we have to take it on,
it's not like we can't do that, but just so
we understand what we're looking at and use that for framework
as we go forward.
Any other future decisions.
Any other council comments or questions.
Council Member belfus.
Thank you.
Well, I gotta say that the numbers and the turnover
and the wage increases that we're looking at
are not unique to City of Grand Junction.
I mean, when I talk we have a lot of meetings.
We go to the house, talk to what's going on
and their companies and that sort of thing.
And it's kind of in line with what
I'm hearing in the community.
I have it's kind of hard to imagine that the average
business that's paying insurance benefits to their employees is
paying $30,000 per employee per year, but we are in a very
high health cost area.
I worked in an area for a long time.
So it's an ongoing problem.
Nobody's figured it out yet.
So it's very difficult. But if at all possible,
it would like to have more detailed breakdowns of costs
as far as benefits.
Where we're at.
Do we have I would ask you I mean,
we have an aging population in Grand Junction.
Do we have an aging workforce at the city.
Are we going to see, a lot of people
retiring in the future that would bring younger people in.
That would be a lower end of the scales
as far as salaries and wages go.
What are the trends that we're looking at in the near future.
I mean, we're in an area that we're at a crossroads
where we gotta look pretty close at a lot of this stuff
and ask a lot of questions.
But we have to have really good data to do that.
So just putting that out there.
One thing during engineering and transportation director
Paul's presentation to I think it was 25% of your staff
is within a couple of years of retirement age.
So to your point and also to your point of we're not.
And I had it on my second slide about national trend.
I was on a call today, a rating call to get those cops rated
by S&P and talking about this structural deficit
and what we're doing, trying to proactively address it.
And they confirm that, yeah, we're not alone in this boat.
That's what they talked to.
That's what they do all day is talk to municipalities
and governments.
And they said, yeah, we're not alone in this to your point.
Not unique for sure.
Any other questions.
Comments yeah.
One quick one.
I like what Catherine was getting at there as far
as the trend, Mike and I know it's a lot to ask
and I know nobody has a crystal ball.
That's one of the things as we look at our trajectory,
it's like, OK, if we structurally fix this step
and say here.
From what we know and what we can
look at going forward to whatever
extent is reasonable, right.
It'd be fantastic if there was like a five
year projection understanding with the understanding.
Obviously, nobody knows what those future revenues
and expenses will be, but with what we can know
and what we can project based on where we're at, what can we
do to course adjust to make sure if we
do have deficits, that we can shrink them as we move forward.
Yeah and we're happy to share what makes sense to get there.
I just reiterate that we have 900 professionals
and departments of finance and HR
and working with Brown and Brown.
So we're diving into all that level of detail on a full time,
daily basis to get to do the recommendations
that we bring to you all.
So it's not being looked at or not being gone through,
but it would take I mean, to go through it would take,
more workshops than we could schedule in one year and hours
to go through the level of that detail.
So I hope there's trust in US that we have the right teams
going through all that and then bringing those summaries of why.
Here's what we have to recommend and
here's what is leading to it.
Today was not bringing you that level of detail
because it was just framing the overall picture.
But as we get into those recommendations,
we'll definitely take these notes so that we
can bring some level of detail.
So you have more understanding approving or considering
those recommendations for sure.
So yeah, Jake, if you go back to the slide,
that shows the kind of surplus and deficit over time.
One four.
Yeah So I guess my question is obviously this looks really bad,
but you kind of alluded to these one time levers and deferrals
that we made perhaps in some of those like years that look good.
And I'm just trying to add context or understand
the context of how much is that maybe juicing those 2021
through 2024 numbers and maybe making that curve
sharper than it is in reality.
Like, do we have a handle on that.
Yeah, I'll just say speaking for when I guess Mike and I
last year jumping in.
We were at a $10 million deficit and the budget process started.
And by mostly doing one time of levers,
we got that and brought council balanced budget.
Not every year is going to be that much.
But for instance, funding of facilities
was pulled multiple years in a row.
We're funding it to the point of $1.2 million per year.
Now, many years.
We have $0 for facility kind of preventative maintenance fleet.
We mentioned fleet we were having.
Some enterprise funds pick up some general fund costs
because the enterprise funds operated at a surplus
and there's some tie to maybe what the service was things
like that add up in a big way.
You won't miss anything.
It's also accurate, though, that we had really healthy
sales tax collections in 2021.
Correct I mean, the economy was much better back then as well.
Yeah double digit growth at a time
before the expenses significantly grew.
So not only inflation but prior to there was mention of 2B
and yes, that I think we knew that we
probably needed more at that point in time
from what it sounds like.
What we didn't know is what happened, a year later, and not
only with following the pandemic and inflation and construction
costs growing dramatically.
When we're building fire stations but a massive increase
in public safety salaries across the country,
across the state that weren't factored into those projections
and took a lot of that extra money
that would have went to New employees,
but it went to keeping up with those salaries
and then construction costs and then all that kind of amplified
at once.
So yeah, you're right.
2021, some of those years, 2020 was
a great revenue year, even though it was a tough year
for a lot of people.
But revenue wise it was great.
And from about 2017 to that point,
we were having in this whole area,
we were having the highest year over year increases
we had seen ever.
And that was significant.
And that was during a time where revenues
were outpacing to some degree increase in fund balance.
And then that took a big shift where expenses obviously
went to outpacing those revenues even though they're growing,
just not growing at those rapid at the same rates.
Another thing that wasn't factored into the 2019 question
was the number of public state, reactionary public safety bills
that were going to be coming out of the legislature in ensuing
years, and those made it lost a lot of officers or professionals
who left our not just our department, but left the state.
And then we had a number of unfunded mandates
that were passed down from the state legislature to us
and things that made our jobs more
difficult from a municipal standpoint.
So 20 the 2019 tax was helpful, but it
didn't contemplate the full need in the first place.
And then the need burgeoned after that.
That's a great point.
And as you all probably good from a public perspective too
is part of the reason those salaries shot up
across the board is because there were a large amount
of vacancies being created, and then it
becomes very difficult to find enough people who are qualified
to do those jobs and willing to do those jobs with those added
changes that came through state legislature
and that compounded in a big way.
And so none of that was foreseen or would have been in people's
projections and really, really snuck
up at a perfect storm of really added up to where we're at.
I do want to address the thing that you said.
Just before council member Nguyen spoke about you.
Hopefully, trust us or you hope we trust you.
And not only should you hope that we trust you,
but it is built into the structure of our government
that we should be relying on you as the experts and not.
And I'd like to caution my colleagues that we not we
not request so much detail level information
that we're stepping into your territory
and to operational matters.
We need to maintain we stay in our lane
and maintain our role as policymakers
and take the information that you bring to us,
ask clarifying questions, of course.
And some level of additional detail is appropriate.
But I would strongly caution us against delving
so deep into this that we are interfering
with the operational side of things
and not behaving the policy role that we belong in.
Any other questions or comments on this from council.
Well, with that being said, thank
you so much to staff on this.
We know the lift is extremely heavy.
Upper management budget team all the way
down into the individual departments.
We know this is a lot from top to bottom
and there's a lot of sacrifices that are made.
But we're extremely fortunate to have incredible people doing
this and running these numbers to make
sure that our city is in a great position moving forward.
I think we'll wrap up that topic.
With that being said, is anybody in need of a break at the moment
About an hour and a half.
Yeah so let's go ahead and take a 10 minute break,
and we'll be back at 14 after.
That sounds.
Good I didn't say.
We'll go over to financial policies and reporting overview.
And city manager Bennett has an introduction.
All right.
Thank you.
This item is really to give council a preview and a heads
up on two things.
The first is we've created a new financial dashboard that we
plan to update every quarter.
As you may recall, in our strategic plan planning process
and some of our objectives, we had a goal to create something
beyond just our revenue report.
Beyond our budget overview.
And so our Jay and the team have worked hard on creating this.
And Jay is going to give you a preview of that.
We plan to go live with it tomorrow.
And so he's just pulled up actually
what we would turn on live on our website,
like all of our other dashboards.
They're living.
And as we get feedback along the way, as we use it more
because these aren't while these are very public
and for people to gather information,
we're creating them in a way that's twofold, where it's very
useful for us as staff to utilize
for you as counsel to utilize.
And so as we do that, just like we've
done with the revenue dashboard, we've added components.
Our partners have received lodging tax like the airlines.
And the Sports Commission had some good feedback.
So we added some components where
you can break it down in our lodging tax that
goes to them on that report.
So just like those with this revenue report,
we anticipate that we'll probably have some additions
and improvements along the way.
But just going to walk you through a preview of that.
And then second to that we have internal financial policies.
These are things that get reviewed in our annual audits.
The auditors look for very specific things and policies
and ensure that we are actually following those policies.
And we had some discussion in the last year
during council meetings about creating
a adding a little more structure or adding to a debt policy.
And so that's one of the additions we've made.
We wanted to give you a preview of as well.
And again, those are internal policies
that get double checked by our auditors each year
and continually adjusted.
But that was a little bit more of a public discussion.
We'll go over that with you.
So Jason going to walk through both of those
and then get any feedback that council may have.
OK thank you.
So in the vein of again of transparency
and fiscal responsibility, we've created this.
This is a mid-year financial report.
But we will report this quarterly.
So it'll be the quarterly financial report.
There's a lot of ways that we can present.
You've seen the comprehensive annual financial report.
That's probably the most transparent document we have,
but the most hard, difficult to comprehend
finance report from a public standpoint, there's a lot to it.
There's pages and pages and pages.
So we've created this.
And trying to get feedback just to see
if this hits home for a very high overview of where we're at.
It consists of multiple tabs across the top and overview.
Just real quick here.
You can see that what our general fund adopted budget is,
how much we've spent so far and mid-year,
how much of that appropriation have we spent,
and what's that look like from the same period of 2025?
So once again, a very high level.
But it does tell a story.
It would tell a lot different story
if it said that we're 75% spent mid-year
and we're 22% over the prior year, for example.
Just a little narrative on where the six months landed and then
we really as you keep going into it,
it'll just now we're talking about the different types
of funds the general fund, the first responder
fund, enterprise funds.
Different ways of looking at this.
Again, here's just a different kind of chart.
We've included all these because with the Mike said,
with the revenue report, things are going to resonate
even as we use this ourselves.
We're like what.
Be more helpful if we could break out
what enterprise funds and this overview
and see we do that over here.
But on the next tab we talked about all funds,
how much revenue we've seen to date,
what percentage of that and the tax revenue
that we received to date.
And again, it goes through the different types
of funds the general fund, internal service
fund funds, just different ways of looking at this.
Again, we have data associated with these dropdowns,
and those are a lot of things that we've been asked to enhance
on the revenue report.
As categories of revenue.
So you can go to what makes up those revenues.
And you can go down and see what the different categories
on all of this is.
And then we'll go through it all.
But just to give you a good idea.
So tomorrow you could go through it if you
think we're on the right track.
The general fund we did an overview.
This is going to go more in depth
to it on the general fund tab, now we're breaking it
out by different departments.
Based on the largest spend.
So the police budget compared to what they spent this year
and on down the line, different ways to look at that.
Your budget versus expenditures numerically percent spent
and how much is remaining.
Categories, labor and benefits interfund charges capital.
Again, it's looking for that feedback.
Then we'll drive down into the public safety tax
fund, the first responder fund.
And same kind of data I could go through it
all but it's the same stuff but just
a different way, just different segment that we're looking at.
But we are showing the spend between police and fire.
A little the narrative enterprise
funds is the same way.
Now we break down from the overview.
We just had enterprise funds.
Now we're going to break those out
so you can see them separately.
But it's the see where we're at revenues versus expenditures.
Keep in mind if you're looking at it tomorrow the.
Supplementals that we've done have not been posted.
So that's why it looks like there's a lot more not enough
revenue spent appropriated.
Again going down the funds internal service funds.
And our insurance funds.
So that's how we have it set up.
And just looking for feedback if that's the right track.
Like I said, we're going to post this tomorrow
and we will keep enhancing that and maybe
there's some repetitive stuff that will tease out of there,
maybe how to dig a little deeper into some of that stuff.
But this is how we plan to present the financial report.
We also have it in pamphlet form that we could distribute.
And we realize this is a quick glance tonight,
but all of our dashboards, as we've said a few times,
we'll continue to update them.
So I think as you have more time to spend with it,
or as you hear from members of the public,
you get any at the end of any given workshop,
bring it up if you have.
Hey, could we break it down this way or any questions
or suggestions that we can talk about as a group in the future.
We don't expect you to have a bunch of feedback
in a quick glimpse glance at the moment, but if you do,
I'm happy to take any.
It was more of a heads up that we've got that first draft,
and we'll be releasing that tomorrow
and obviously we can build upon that as we move forward.
Councilman Davis.
Yeah can I just ask, is this modeled
after a particular template that a lot of other cities use
or a particular city.
Do we.
Know what this is.
We tried to model it off of our revenue report
for consistency, the revenue report,
meaning the sales tax report that we've also put online
now where it's modeled after that when
we talked about efficiencies and we
could do some things in-house.
There used to be and the city had purchased it
back in the day, as they say, a software,
very expensive software that would do the same thing.
You can keep drilling in and get to what kind of information
you're looking for.
This is set up in a way that just categorizes things
by the way that we look at life structures,
types of funds like general fund,
enterprise funds, internal service funds.
Let's take Scott Hawkins, IT director.
They've been doing these.
We meet with them and tell them what we want
and what we're looking at.
And Brandon, our deputy finance director, he had a ton of input
in this about the kind of questions that he hears
and what's important from what he hears from the public
and what auditors and the say so.
And then I would say, going back to strategic planning,
some of the questions were we report on our revenues,
but we're not necessarily except for once a year
reporting on what the total expenses are.
And so being able to see revenues and expenses together
on a quarterly basis throughout the year creates,
creates a lot of additional transparency,
but also ability to measure where we're at.
And then we'll have the ability to add some narrative,
because sometimes there's certain larger
expenses that we have that only happen in the fourth quarter.
So it might look, or there's some large expenses that happen
at the beginning of the year.
So it might look like, oh, we're out.
So we can add those types of notes
just like we do in some of our dashboards
or the dashboard for the strategic planning
update, revenue report, all those things.
So yeah, my compliments Jay.
Really and what you just said, that last piece
about the questions that were being asked and paying attention
to that from both staff and auditors, that shows that
is clear.
So sincerely my compliments to staff.
My sincere appreciation when we talk
about government transparency.
This is speaking directly to that.
And I sincerely appreciate it, especially that example just
looking up there at that the police and fire funding
and being able to drill down the fact that this is updated
quarterly, I think what this will probably
lead to is a lot better questions from those
that are really interested in, hey,
what's going on with the city.
How are tax dollars being spent.
And that type of transparency where they're
like, OK, that's where it's at.
And then they may ask some questions that they might not
have ever thought of otherwise.
So I think this is a great tool.
I really, really appreciate this.
And obviously a lot of work went into this and it shows.
So thank you.
Thank you Mary.
Yeah can you scroll to I guess maybe public safety.
Downtown yeah.
Just to the bar comments I'm wondering like.
If there would be a way to add a kind of dashed line,
just showing where I know spend is not linear across the year,
but show where this report is kind of reporting
to in terms take our adopted budget divided by 12,
this is end of May show where that line would
be I guess in the budget just to get a sense for OK fires
slightly ahead in this quarter which maybe means there's going
to be less cost in the last quarter or something like what
I'm going to get instead of just saying, yeah, 50% your target.
Yeah, visually depict that instead of only
have it kind of in the tables.
That was kind of my thought as well.
I think this is incredible.
I think seeing possibly a line graph that has projected spend
throughout the year with an actual spin
kind of aligned to see where we're dipping ahead,
where we're dipping below.
I think from a public perspective they could see,
oh, they've only spent 48% So there's so much more room
for these other services, these other things,
when in all reality we might have
a big spend around the corner.
So a little better narrative around that could be helpful.
But otherwise, I think this is fantastic between this
and the sales tax reports we get and that are going
on the website, I think it's just such a great picture
to paint for our community.
Yeah, thanks.
And that's a good suggestions.
And we could do that.
And those trend lines where are you at
compared to where you should be at this time of year.
Yes, we can definitely work on that.
Any other questions or comments from council.
All right, we'll move on then to city council communications.
We did have one more on just a brief overview of it's still.
Oh yeah.
Yeah I'm sorry.
I should have thrown that back to you.
City manager Bennett.
Yeah that's OK.
This will be quick.
We have gone through and updated all of our financial policies
into one document.
We've added the debt policy that was questioned
at a city council meeting.
I think that was questioned about the state of New York and
the parameters that they used.
I'll say that our policy and the recommendations on a jet policy
is not quite as prescriptive as.
You can't go over a certain percentage of your revenues
because they feel that every organization is different
with different revenue streams.
And so the policy that we have is kind of that talks a lot
about what we do internally.
It talks about the role of council
and when we bring that to you, and what kind of debt
can we even bring.
It's long term financing for capital projects.
I think I mentioned that I'm going to ask a sales
tax for general government.
We don't just go get a debt because we're
facing a structural those kind of things.
And what type of debt would it be.
Would it be a CLP and why.
But all of this stuff is a framework that we then
bring to council to decide.
But one of the things that the policy, the more
prescriptive part is where they talk about what percentage,
but how much debt is too much.
And is it based on how much revenue that your government's
receiving.
And even S&P stopped doing it that way.
Measuring it that way because there's so
many variables that go into it.
But a rule of thumb that will start that I think
would be important that we should
it's bringing this to you as part of the policy,
not just where we're at.
Like, what would this debt do compared
to where we're at from revenue.
And for example, below 10% is commonly viewed.
This is from the GFOA commonly viewed
as conservative debt burden.
A 10 to 15 suggests debt should receive closer scrutiny,
and above 15% to 20% often raises concerns about reduced
budget flexibility.
The cities right now are.
Our debt burden is 7.96% of revenues.
However, if we had two Rios we're paying it.
So if I include that it goes to 8.59% even though that's a.
Not considered necessarily city of Grand Junction debt.
But we're paying it.
So from that standpoint, we do have a policy.
It's several pages long.
And this is I'll just go just show you the.
That didn't change right.
Probably so can you adopt that policy one that you saw in there
are the financial policies.
Is that able to be shared or was it
financial policies is on the same page.
When you set up the quarterly financial report,
it was on that same.
You said, oh, that's not it.
And then you went to the next tab that I'm sharing.
OK OK.
I'll talk to it.
It's really we talk about the purpose of debt.
And again, this is a lot of internal stuff for our staff.
Amen OK.
So I did Mike did it.
Mike, it's on your computer.
Again, we don't have to go through this, but.
No, this is staff.
What are we using debt for.
The scope of this policy.
The responsibilities.
Most of this is really common sense
that any prudent municipality is going to use.
I think ultimately we can't go issue debt
without coming to council and explaining why
we're doing the debt issuance.
Our recommendation a lot of this is framed around just that.
What do we bring.
Have we done have we evaluated financing
alternatives, for instance.
The financial analysis that supports the debt.
Those kind of things are in the policy
that we're doing as staff to bring to the city council.
That makes you better decision makers
when it comes to that, including the kind of that percentage
of our total revenues.
We talk about there's an internal controls,
as I mentioned financing methods general obligation bonds.
Refunding of debt credit ratings.
How we handle the bond proceeds.
That's in the policy.
And continuing disclosure.
What we have to do from a reporting standpoint
to the MSB, who's the regulatory agency or bond issuances
and then reporting on that debt.
And that's pretty much it for the desk.
But we do have one.
It's in writing.
That's how it's framed for us to use.
Any questions on that.
Council Kennedy.
Yeah, just one quick one.
I just one of the things that and I know it's not currently
in place, but one of the things I just
wanted to be careful of because there's some conversation
around when this policy was first being talked about,
is it just going to limit the city's ability
to utilize every financing option that's available to us
out there, like certificates of participation and things
like that.
So I just if there is a time that we consider that that's
just something I think that we need to be careful of
is to make sure that we're keeping
all options on the table to keep ourselves
as agile as we can financially.
That's why we didn't make this prescriptive,
so to speak, to where you must do it this way.
We're keeping all those this is what
this does is keeps everything, all those options open.
It's very, very high level.
Any other council comments or questions.
Did you have anything to add to that.
City manager Bennett.
I would just say that in addition
to keeping the flexibility, it does provide some structure so
that when we are bringing a recommendation for taking
on debt, that there are very specific things
we cover as a whole.
We look at the total debt, not just that visually
and how we look at are we staying with under that
10% It's not keeping us there.
But we at least should be making a decision,
knowingly understanding if we were to go beyond that.
Also what the schedules are I mean, just
making sure that we are covering the full aspect of how
that particular any new debt affects the total budget
or any other debt that we have.
Everything's on a different schedule.
Sometimes new debt as well is totally
tied to a fully funded, approved, voter approved revenue
that's going to cover that versus something
like a certificate of participation,
where we're saying we're going to take existing revenue
and dedicate it to a new payment without a new source of revenue.
So being able to dissect all that
and make sure we're considering before we make those decisions
is really the basis of this and following those best practices,
so that we're making sure we're analyzing the whole and not
just one of any particular.
Well, thank you so much for listening.
I think that's great for both council and the public to hear,
considering some of the questions we have had recently.
With that being said, we will now move on to council, our city
council communications.
It's an unstructured time for council members
to discuss current matters, share ideas
for possible future consideration by council,
and provide information from board
and commission participation.
Council Member staff I just.
This isn't about Gordon or community liaison,
communication, anything.
But I was.
I have to go to the East Coast for work on the week
of September 13 13th of Sunday, so the week of September
14 and was supposed to be back.
I had a flight back for Wednesday
that would have gotten me in at Wednesday at noon.
And instead I have another thing that I have to do for work
that's going to keep me there.
And it involves an evening component.
So I'm not going to be here for the I'm not going to be here
nor be able to call in for the September 16 meeting.
I did my did everything I could to try to be here for that,
but work obligations won't allow it this time around.
Does that include the 14th workshop as well that I
haven't figured out yet that we're still
building the schedule for my time there,
and I'm not entirely sure.
We're obviously a two hour time difference,
so I'm going to do what I can to be here on the 14th.
But the 16th is definitely fully completed the whole day.
Council Member Kennedy.
Yeah, just a few things.
I just wanted to let council know that the Mesa County
commissioners appointed me as their Colorado Basin roundtable,
Mesa County municipal rep.
So I've been going to Glenwood and/or remoting
into the Colorado Basin roundtable meetings.
It's a lot of water policy discussion.
State engineer is involved.
We have conversations around Shoshone and some other things.
So it's a great thing to be involved with.
So I'll certainly be sharing some additional information
from that.
And along those lines of water as well.
I just want to mention that the annual water seminar is
coming up on September 18 for the Colorado
River district puts on.
So if any of you are interested in available on September 18,
tink.
I think Scott's been there with me the last couple of years.
But if more, if some of us are going to be there,
we might as well put that on our just agendize it so public
knows that we're there.
And then last thing I wanted to mention
is I went on a ride along last week with Sergeant Ansell
and one of his crew teams got Dearborn,
and we were in the side by side and did the riverfront area.
I'm going to share a few pictures via email
with everybody, just so they get an idea of some of the stuff
that's happening on.
We're kind of on from Watson all the way down
to the area behind the skating rink, kind of behind bananas.
So just an update for where we're at there.
I thought it was very helpful, but I have to pay my compliments
to Stan and his team.
Super respectful.
So professional.
Treat, treat people with dignity.
But also for some of the situations
that with a bunch of pitbulls off leash, where
he was just safe.
But communicated effectively and was just he was professional.
I think he represented us very well.
But I just wanted to share that with council.
So you kind of know what's going on there.
Great thank you.
Anything council member Nguyen.
Council Member balthus.
It's probably under the workshop topics,
but there continues to be conversation and concern
about flock cameras.
So I think we had requested it.
Come on up.
Yeah all right.
I've got a couple different things.
I had a DDA meeting this last week,
and some issues have come up with the terminal project
as they've been running their vibratory roller
across the site.
Some of the neighboring businesses
had started to complain about the wall
shaking and plaster falling from the ceilings, which really gave
them some concern going into the next phase
where they were going to be hammering
the pillars, pile pillars.
I think they're called into the ground
where it could cause substantial vibration throughout that site.
Because of that, they've decided that's probably
not the best route forward.
So they are going to be moving to a helical pier,
is what they call it, essentially drilling
the pier down into the ground, which should create
far less vibration on the site.
With that being said, it's going to be
about an additional $500,000, it sounds like, to the project.
So that should be coming through to council relatively soon,
I think, as a supplemental appropriation.
Then on the business incubator side, as many
of the Department of Energy is moving out to horizon drive.
It sounds like they plan on completing that move
by the end of next year.
With that happening, that kind of
creates a situation for the business incubator
where they're no longer going to be
feasible to care for that site and financially
be able to handle that site.
So they are looking at some options to move currently.
But they have asked the RTC about the possibility of RTC
signing over the land, deeding over the land to the business
incubator so that they can use that as leverage,
looking forward to their next projects.
So I think that's going to be coming to council here
before too long as they iron out some of the details with that
as well.
But I'm hugely supportive of that project.
I think the business incubator is paid for that property
time and time again in equity to our community and impact
in our community.
So I look forward to the future of the business incubator
in a more visible location, and hopefully something on that side
as well.
Beyond that, that's all I've got on council communications.
Did you have anything, council member
Ballard I don't thank you.
All right.
With that, we will move into next workshop topics
and we'll turn it back over to City manager Bennett.
All right.
At the September 14 meeting, we have
an update on the water supply element
of our comprehensive plan.
It's a requirement from the state.
We've been working on it actually doesn't ironically
doesn't take council action.
But we want to just give council an overview
of that before we finish the process with the state.
And that added piece.
So the city manager's office, working with the utility
department and community development
have been working on that.
So we'll do an overview of that.
We have our discussion on local preference
with procurement that night.
And we also will bring a discussion related
to a recommendation we want to bring to council
for a possible policy related to data
centers and potential moratorium on that type of development.
So we have those for sure.
There's a couple other items that have been mentioned earlier
that we're trying to line up if able on that night to squeeze
in there because we're going to we'll
definitely be fully focused on budget during October
and possibly that first meeting in November,
we did have a request based on what we talked about tonight
and with the first workshop on October 5,
we anticipate that there's going to be quite a bit
to walk through in that proposed budget
and likely some added discussion and added work
that we'll need to put in before we come
back to that next workshop.
And so Jay and his team have asked
that if it works for council, we would love to bump the October
19, which is the third Monday in October
workshop to the following week.
So it would be the 26, Monday the 26th.
So just rescheduling our October 19 budget
workshop to October 26, but we didn't
want to move forward with that.
If that causes if for some reason
we've got a number of council not able
to attend because we definitely want the group there.
But knowing we're probably going to need more time
in between those two with the level of discussion
we're going to be having.
Anybody have a concern over that at the moment.
Looking there's a very, very small chance
of going to a conference.
But at this point it's not confirmed.
And I'm not feeling confident that it will happen.
The other reminder is that assuming we move that to the 26,
but the October 5 and October 26, as we've done in the past,
we would start those earlier at 4:04 PM and to have more hours
in that evening to really comb through the detail that will
be presenting and discussing.
So four o'clock PM, October 5 and ninth and 26.
We'll keep the second open for any kind of last minute,
last minute or of after those two workshops,
if we have to revisit anything.
For the time being.
Otherwise, we'll start adding in some of those to be determined
or to be scheduled items that we have on the list.
So that's all I have for tonight.
That's going to be fun.
All right.
With that, let's move into other business.
Request for proclamations.
The first one being the International
Overdose Awareness day.
And that's a social proclamation.
Nation do we have a staff presentation on that
or is that just conversation amongst council.
Is everybody comfortable with that as a social proclamation
motion.
Seeing lots of head nods.
So with that, we will move to another request
for proclamation.
And that is white Cane Day, another social proclamation.
We've done this one for years, seeing lots of nods on that
as well.
So I think we're good on that front.
And then to wrap things up, we will be with the Grand Junction
housing authority interview team discussion
on recommended appointment.
That was me, Laurel.
Yes, we did the interviews last Tuesday.
We only had two applicants for one spot,
and we ultimately decided to appoint Randall based
on the input from the chair.
He basically they were both super qualified, but kind of
leans towards Randall because of the social work aspect,
because they're the other candidate had
more of a financial background.
And there's I guess based on the makeup of the board right now,
there is a lot of that.
So both Laurel and the board chair
were most comfortable with appointing Randall.
So that's what.
And just to make sure that everything's clear,
we're talking Randall.
Yeah Yeah that's great.
Any other questions or comments about that.
All right.
Check back in with city manager Bennett.
Did you have anything to add on.
All right.
With that, we are adjourned.