09-24-18 Council Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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REGULAR MEETING September 24, 2018 Harrison,Portage and Elway streetscapes and Western Avenue Phase Three(3)just to name a few. I hope that within these top eleven (11) that we've picked that we covered a lot of what you are asking for. If you want me to come back with another list on October 81h,2018,please let me know. I'm happy to review that again. Ms. Hockenhull continued, So where does our revenue come from? What is our revenue budget for 2019? As you can see (referencing a slide in the presentation), our total revenues are about $336 million. About thirty percent(30%) of that comes from charges for services. That is going to be our water, waste water and EMS fees. About a quarter(1/4) of them come from property taxes. I just want to note that we are budgeting very conservatively for property taxes. I've mentioned it before in our meetings but the State is very conservative when they give us our estimates and we have paid for a report to be done to estimate what our property taxes are going to be. Those results are pretty different so we are trying to err on the side of being more conservative. Hopefully next ygar we will be in front of you announcing a great surplus. For budgeting purposes, we want to make sure we are not over-spending and under-getting our revenue. We did also get good news back on our Local Income Taxes. They will be going up about ten percent(10%)for 2019. That is very positive news this year. Ms. Hockenhull went on,Now we have our expenditures. We are budgeting to spend about $368 million. As you can see, thirty percent (30%) of our expenditures are in the Enterprise Fund, so that does line up. Our Special Revenue Funds will include the parks, streets and sidewalks expenditures. Our General Funds is about eighteen percent(18%) of our expenditures and then we have our internal service funds and so on. That is our estimated budget for 2019. All of this detail is available online from the line item as well as summaries. We also wanted to show how we are spending the budget by each priority. We are spending about a quarter(1/4) of our budget on safe communities for everyone. Another quarter (1/4) of it is spent on a robust and well-planned infrastructure. You can't have one (1) without the other, so, really, we are trying to keep our neighborhoods and City safe by spending money appropriately. Ms. Hockenhull continued, We've talked a lot about cash reserves over the last six (6) weeks. What does it mean to have cash reserves? Why are or why aren't we spending it? I just wanted to throw a really quick slide up here to briefly talk about it. Cash reserves are cash available to meet the needs of the City's operations, specifically,unanticipated needs. So the City has a cash reserve policy for every single fund. Every year, in January, we come before the Council and give you a report that has our cash reserves and investment policies. All of that information is bundled together but every single Fund has its own cash reserves limit. As you can see, our target for the General Fund is thirty-five percent (35%). We always want to make sure that we have, at least, thirty-five percent (35%) of our annual expenditures in our account. At the end of 2019, after this budget, we anticipate to have about a fifty-six percent (56%) cash reserve level. As far as COIT and EDIT go, we will be at sixty-four percent (64%) and one hundred and three percent (103%) respectively, whereas our target is only fifty percent(50%). So while, yes, we are spending down overall,if we look at the entire bucket of money we have,we really need to focus on these General Plus Funds. So that is COIT, EDIT, General Fund and Public Safety LOIT. We are presenting you with a balanced budget in those Funds. We are having no spend-down in reserves in any of those four (4) funds and we will continue having very strong reserves in those Funds at the end of 2019 and going forward. I hope that makes a little more sense as we go through this process. We also have a Rainy Day Fund. That is our true savings Fund. We don't touch it and I believe the last time it was touched it was back in 2008. Money was taken out but put right back in in the same year. We have about$10.5 million in that Fund. Ms. Hockenhull went on, We also talked a lot about people. People make up a lot of our expenditures but they also do all the work in the City. We are budgeting for 1,145 employees for 2019. That is up about eleven (11) from 2018. We discussed this a great deal on September 19th 2018. Here is our head count summary. As you can see, about two thirds(2/3) of our workforce is under a bargaining agreement. We've got the Police, Fire and Teamsters Union which cover quite a big part of that pie. So when we talk about the salary ordinance, we are only talking about one third (1/3) of our employees, just as a reminder. We work really hard on our budget document annually and our budget process, so, I always like to point out that we did get the Distinguished Budget Presentation Award from GFOA and we've gotten that three (3) years in a row. We 9