Come in. What's that? How are you? Sonic. Okay, council, we're going to call our budget work session to order. Good morning and I will turn it over to Jay Choa. >> Good morning. Um good to see you all. This is the first work session since the presentation of the budget last week and I'm going to turn it over to Christian um who will be following up with uh budget responses. >> Good morning. Thanks for joining us this morning. It's been a good week since we presented the recommended budget. Hopefully, you've had time to some some time to digest all of that big budget. Um, the first followup that we have this morning comes in the form of budget responses to a couple of questions we received during the work session and around the work session. Um, these budget responses are they're like IR style responses, so things that maybe are easier to see in written form or don't need a full presentation. Um, so we have staff here to answer questions on any of these. The first is 26001. This is in response to a question we got from council member Bllelock on pure city tax rates. So Brady Kirk's available for any questions on this one. Uh the summary of it is that uh it just kind of compares where our proposed tax rate falls within other major cities in Texas and in the metroplex. You can see there are a number of cities proposing tax rate increases. Um there are a number of cities who are working on their over 65 and disabled exemptions for some other tax relief where maybe they can't necessarily mess with their rate this year. um trying to catch up to some of Fort Worth's good work on over 65 and disabled over the last couple years. Um but you'll see Arlington, Austin, Plano, Lebec, all proposing a tax rate increase at this stage, Denton. Uh and then the bottom of the budget response talks about the other taxing entities that that appear on uh the average resident tax bill here. So the ISDs and the county and sort of where we fall in all of that. The second budget response, 260002, is uh the one I mentioned last week during the recommended presentation when we talked briefly about fee adjustments. So, it's about a 20-page budget response that gives you all the detail on those eight different departments who are recommending fee adjustments. Um, I think a lot of the departments who charge fees are here if you have any questions on that detail. Um, but that's there for your reference. We always produce that one. That wasn't necessarily a specific request, but that's just good detail to have. Uh, and then the third budget response, 2603, um, is in response to Council Member Beck's question about alleyway maintenance and the cost to expand alleyway maintenance in the budget. Dave Lewis is here if you have questions on that. They have a little over $800,000 budgeted in the parks budget in fiscal year 26 for the half that we do now. Uh, and then to to take on the other half would be another $1.3 million in fiscal year 26. that number falls a bit in the out years because there's some initial investment like in a vehicle and the sort of getting them to the good baseline for maintenance um since they haven't been maintained thus far. >> Uh so that's the cost for that. >> That's where we're back. >> Yeah. Um given that the cost while not insignificant in comparison to our overall budget is a rounding error, I'd like to see the city go ahead and take on that additional maintenance of all of the alleyways throughout the city. I'll let Christian finish up, but that's what she was going to recommend. Okay. Probably got some recommendations on how to do that. >> So, we have some ideas, right, for how to how to do that. Um, the first is that we we were revisiting the the Northwest Far Northwest Library schedule and I think that construction is just happening or their openings maybe a little later in fiscal year 27 than we thought. So, remember that we have staff preloaded for that library. So, we can we can carve out a little bit of that. It's about 250,000 of the 1.3 million that's needed for fiscal year 26. The rest of it, I think without impacting a a specific department's budget to do that for parks, the easiest place or the recommended place maybe to take it from is non-EP departmental um in that bucket that we set aside for pay plan implementation, 2.2 million. So, we'd likely reduce that by 1 million, send that to parks for allow maintenance. And after the question, I just going to a little history that this question or this issue has come up for 30 years since I was a budget analyst in in in 1994. And originally it was funded through the grant funds in CDBGL areas only. The grant funds went away and the general fund took over those areas, but then there's always been well what about the rest of it at least almost every year. So if nothing else, I next year hopefully that question won't come up. So, >> we'll we'll definitely fix that. I appreciate that. Um I know that this is something that we have uh struggled with uh every year that I've been on council as well. And um given the the dollar amount, it I appreciate the history that makes sense why we only did half, but it makes even more sense that we do all of them. They're ours to maintain. So, >> any other questions or comments? Yeah, Council Flores, >> uh, related to this topic, and maybe this is still pending, Christian, David, wherever you are in the audience, uh, when we talked about this, uh, topic, I also asked about, um, using asphalt, you know, recycled asphalt, repurpose it for, uh, paving alleyways. So, that's part of alleyway maintenance. Where are we with that? >> Oh, here comes Dave. >> Good morning. Dave Lewis, park director. Um, where we are right now is we're looking at some of the peer cities who have done that and really figuring out how they go about the process because certainly you'd have to wait for a project for there to be some surplus and figure out do the cost to transport that and relay it and there are some some engineering that needs to be done for runoff and some other things. So, we don't quite have an answer yet, but we're still looking into that. >> Okay. Will this be something that you think Jay would be included in this budget or is this going to go beyond our budget discussions? So just from my experience, it's going to be a big number and I think it's something that we'd have to look over to see how it probably becomes a if something the council wants to do becomes more of a capital item going forward because as soon as you pick a neighborhood then every other neighborhood's going to want it, >> right? >> It's not insignificant when you start looking at it. Kind of like the the >> That's why I'd like to get a handle on it but >> Right. So it' be more of a long-term situation as you go forward. >> Got it. All right. Thank you. I'll also mention um I didn't touch on this when we went through 26002 the fee changes um two things number one at your seat with you you have one pagers from environmental services one covers solid waste and one covers the environmental services fee um and they thought that might that might be a nice reference for you as far as kind of digesting some of those more complicated um drivers behind those fees some of what it would cover to increase them um they have more detail on that if you like, but feel free to peruse those and ask staff any questions. Um, and then in the fee change IR, you're not going to see storm water rate or water rate since those are not really fees. Um, I think you all have had many presentations from storm water and water. We did a deeper dive in June on those. Um, but staff's also available to ask questions. I know water in particular had a presentation ready um that they went over with you, I think each individually about their tiered rate redesign and that kind of thing. Um but if you do need additional detail from them, we can we can arrange that. Okay, with that we're going to move on to our brief presentation for today. So the primary one of the primary themes from last week that we felt like we should bring back some detail uh was about the reduction process and how that unfolded through the budget development process. So, um, it kind of happened in two buckets and so we're going to separate those two buckets for purposes of our discussion today and Christy Lemon and I are going to tag team this discussion. So, I'm going to kick it off and then we'll hear from some department heads and then Christy will come up and talk about 3% reductions. So, that's kind of where we're going. Um, I showed this slide last week, but as a reminder of the budget process, um, we knew that we were going into a tighter fiscal year with constrained revenue. And so from the outset of the budget process, especially with Jay being our new city manager, um we made the decision to reduce general fund department's target budgets, that's the budget they have to submit to like balance to by 1% which um equated to $7.3 million. This was um the reason I say it's two buckets is because this bucket was like at the beginning and departments were able to decide how to get there, right? So it wasn't necessarily like the Fort Worth lab and the city management saying cut here, cut here, cut here. This is like you know your business, you know what you can shift around to meet this 1% target reduction. So do that in your line items as you develop your budget. And so lots of departments, you know, approach that in a a number of different ways. And one of the questions that I heard from you all last week was what do departments think about this? How did it go? So we thought it would be nice for you to hear from a couple of department heads that approached it a little differently. And so we're just going to let them make some quick comments in in a few minutes. Um so that was $7.3 million in reductions. And then as I mentioned last week, the departments then submitted reduction packages that were three more% and again this is general fund departments um public safety departments. They were responsible for a much smaller submission of reductions knowing that we didn't want to take big cuts and that so much of their budget is uh salary and benefits and we're not able to do that. And so, um, we were able to reduce an additional almost $5 million based on those 3%. So, that's the part that Christiey's going to go over. Um, but for now, what I wanted to do, which feels weird. I don't feel like I've ever done this before in a budget work session. I'm going to turn over my budget podium um to to a couple of department heads that can give you uh a little bit of insight on the way they approach that 1% target balancing. So, we're going to hear from park and recreation. You're going to get to hear from Dave again, and he's going to go first, so you can come on up. And then we'll hear from police. We wanted to include a public safety department and then property management. Uh each of these departments approached it a little differently. Some departments are lucky because I mean you'd say lucky they have another fund that's not general fund where they have some flexibility to shift. So you'll maybe hear that from police what they played with CCPD back and forth. Um but I'll let I'll let Dave kick us off and then Chief Aldridge uh and Maryland. >> Good morning again. Yeah. So, um, wanted to just briefly walk you through the our process and park and recreation. Um, first, I think the communication from Fort Worth Lab and city manager's office was really clear and transparent from upfront, which made it a lot easier for us. Why are we doing 1%? Why are we identifying another 3%? And so, that was really, really helpful. also to take into consideration for our department some of our contractual obligations that we certainly could not have a reduction on things like our management agreement with the zoo and with Botanic Garden. So those things were exempt from being included in that as well. But we knew we wanted to take an approach that obviously would be least impactful for the services that we provide to the public. And I've had this conversations with a few of you like we would love to do alleyways better and we would love to make sure all the trees are trimmed appropriately. we just don't have all the resources we need all the time. So to to hear we do uh have to identify some reductions. It's an initial like oh we don't have what we need already. But once we sort of got past that and understood you know what the exercise was we were able to just dive deeper division by division within our department and not really say everybody has a 1% reduction and to my assistant directors just come to me with what your 1% looks like. It's really having each division bring a list or a menu of things that we could choose from that we thought would be least impactful. And by doing that really deep dive, we were not only able to find some efficiencies, but really find some things in the budget. You It's $87 million budget. Sometimes there's just some things in there that can get past everybody. Number one was like our our lease at Lrron Plaza. And now that we are here at city hall, that money is still in the budget. And had we not had reductions, we would have repurposed that to try to find some other ways to do that. But we were able to find some things that would be least impactful to the services that we provide. Um, so when we look at that, we looked at making sure that we were maximizing the ability to charge grants for staff time and and admin rather than having it being charged to the general fund. We looked at some other staffing patterns such as having some people who were generally doing a lot of their work in the golf special revenue fund transferring their salary into the golf and and having less uh burden to the general fund. So when we were able to really not have an acrosstheboard reduction but to look at things in a more strategic manner, it made the process a lot easier and we were able to identify some things that uh really wouldn't impact the services that we provide to the public. Um, and then as you'll talk more, but as we go into the 3% uh reduction that we were identifying some things, it was the same philosophy really what are the things that we could do that would be uh least impactful and it really opened our eyes to a lot of things that we thought would be easy reductions that were not easy reductions and so um it helped us be really analytical and more strategic with how we looked at it. But that's the approach that we took in the park and recreation department. Happy to answer any questions. >> Any questions for Dave Council? Thank you, Dave. Appreciate it. >> Chief Aldridge on police. >> Good afternoon. So, whenever the police department was given this challenge, uh we looked at uh we were very very fortunate because of the citizens, this body to have CCPD. And so, we didn't just look at the general fund. We looked at uh anything that could help us in the CCPD world as well. um because if we reduced in CCPD then we could shift things that fit that criteria from general fund over to CCPD. So we sat down with all the um deputy chiefs and the assistant chiefs and we had them look at each one of their bureaus and said where can you cut the fat where I mean where are areas that basically we can we can make this sacrifice but yet it's not going to sacrifice the quality of service that our citizens see. And so some of the things that we we were able to identify is that we found a center um I believe it was in CCPD that had a um a fund account balance that used to be for our hostage negotiators. Well, those were not volunteer but auxiliary duties for our officers. Well, that duty has been shifted to our CIT, our crisis intervention team. So, they're our hostage negotiators. So, we had about 77 $73,000 there that we could go, you know what, we can free that up and it can be absorbed by CIT. uh we don't have to outsource for THC uh whenever we test for THC. And that's a pretty significant, you know, $125,000 that we were able to free up because historically we were we had to ship it out, but now we have the the personnel in the crime lab that can do that for us. One of the other things we did was there was an assistant district uh division manager in the crime lab that we reclassified as a uh forensic scientist. And so we needed the forensic scientist more than we needed assistant division manager. and that freed up about $50,000. So, we also looked at our uh contractual services with some of our, you know, IT stuff. And so, we know that we had a lot of different things uh in the IT world, for example, LPRs. We had two different systems that were basically dealing with LPRs. The flock system, Vigilant, and we were able to reduce one of those contracts by about $77,000. And then one of the last things that we did that was pretty large is that over the years and we learned from 2020 that uh we shouldn't be trying to buy our ammo from just one vendor. And over the course of several years, we've been able to get multiple vendors for our ammo purchases. Well, now we have a pretty good surplus of ammo. And so we're able to save about $360,000 by not ordering ammo this year. And so one of the other big things and you guys will hear it in CCPD is that the attrition rate in the academy we were able to kind of carve out some of those dollars and it's pretty significant amount. It's about $2.3 million because if we we weren't using those funds because of the attrition was higher than what we anticipated and it would just go to fund balance. And so we kind of got as close a little bit closer to what we thought was realistic on what we should be spending on our recruit classes. Again, it's not eliminating recruit classes, it's just being more realistic about what we spend. So those are kind of the high level things that we looked at whenever we went through our budget. >> Thank you, Chief Council. Any questions for Chief Aldridge? Council Peoples. >> So Chief, what is the attrition rate? Uh I just want to make sure we're not uh putting that money in the pot and and we need it. So you will hear in CCPD because we will talk about it a little bit further is that for example if our attrition um it slows down let's say it's right now let's say it's around 20% but if it goes down to five or 10% we're going to come back to the CCBD board use the fund balance to help fund those classes moving forward it's not about eliminating the classes at all honestly it's just about of using the money more responsibly and not having more money in the fund balance >> Flores thank Thank you for the presentation, Chief. Um, I guess a follow-up question, something that I've already asked of you. Uh, could you speak to um PD's vehicle replacement? >> Sure. >> How are we on that? What's your assessment? Um, I know as it's reflected in our CCPD budget, we're not doing, you know, anything different, right? We're not um, you know, uh, making an adjustment per se. Tell me what the current state of affairs is in that regard. So whenever and again you guys will hear this a little bit later on this afternoon about the vehicle replacement in the CCPD budget. We are maintaining what we did last year. Um we have a vehicle replacement schedule for all of our frontline vehicles, all of our vehicles. Um and so the one thing that we can account for is whenever uh vehicles get wrecked um whenever we have accidents. Um we can account for them with the high mileage vehicles because we know when those high mileage vehicles are going to be rotated out. However, whenever we wreck a vehicle, it usually takes us about a year to replace that. And so, um, although we may not be increasing the money for our high mileage vehicle replacement, we are maintaining what we have because our fleet is actually really good. So, I mean, it's not that we're lacking, it's not going to impact our operations at all. >> All right. Thank you, sir. >> Any other questions from council? >> Uh, yes, I have a question. >> Councelor Nettles. >> Um, and I I listen, so I I'm going ask my own question. I see that we didn't take any money from community policing initiatives or organizations. >> No. >> Okay. I have a question for uh Jay. We asked about this 3% for this budget cycle. Um is this do you predict it to be an ongoing uh request or ask uh because I think they might have to get more fancy with how they uh move money around. >> You mean the 3% reductions? >> Yes, sir. No, I mean I think the 3% reduction was when we were we were projecting that we were going to have uh a shortfall on the on the property values and so we asked that kind of as as a backs stop and as we were putting the budget together and we didn't have the actual appraisals yet. we were looking into having to take some of those 3% and you'll see as we go forward some of the 3% um pieces that we did take from the budget we were put back in once we got the dollars in. So unless next year as we go forward we see that type of activity happening. You know it might be we need back I remember the days we'd ask for 5% reduction packages for it just depends on what the what it looks like. I do like the the scenario of the 1% reduction asking departments on the front end to do that because as David mentioned and even it was mentioned by by the chief it makes a department go through and look at what are things that the budgets get so big you over it's almost the rounding error. You almost forget you had $67,000 in a lease with Grand Plaza, right? and then you find it during the year and the department repurposes it for something and it's not necessarily a policy decision from my standpoint. I'd rather have those dollars found through the budget process so that we can bring it back as part of a recommended budget that goes toward the policy decisions that the council's making and where the priorities are versus the department finding that that money is there during the year and then asking for it to be repurposed for something else. So, I like that reduction piece. It might not be 1% every year. might be half a percent but it provides that opportunity to go through and fine tooth cone to do that. So I don't see the 3% being annual annually unless it's called for by the economy. >> Thank you. And I'll ask another question to kind of uh articulate what you just said u with them presenting today the packages of what they're going to uh reduce say 6 months down the road they say well we shouldn't have reduced this maybe this. um will they come back to this body to ensure us what the changes will be because we're going to vote on a budget that's going to basically uh go off of what they're telling us today. >> Right. So, we're not what we're showing is the areas where we did take portions of the 3% or the 3% was taken. Um if you if council doesn't like that reduction, we can have that conversation now. My preference is for you to request that those changes be made the budget now. So when you approve the budget, we can go forward. If during the year, if the department finds they're short somewhere, what we typically say is where else in the budget can you can you move money if that's more of a priority and why is it a priority? And we go through a whole process on that internally, but typically we try to stick to the budget that council approves every year. So maybe specifically if as we go through today if there's an area whether it's council Nettles or Carlos whomever says I'm uncomfortable with that I don't understand it let's absolutely vet that now because to your point earlier made a good question about we don't want to reduce anything around community relations or community policing they did not make that recommendation and I chief's not a shy guy he probably would be willing to tell us today I'm really uncomfortable with this area but I've done it um willingly and I think that's important honesty and transparency that there's a difference in my mind between a 3% draconian cut that doesn't really make sense from a policy perspective versus to your point earlier Jay this is an important exercise that we really were fortunate right we thought it was going to be a full 3% but we're able to kind of back off of that all that being said each council member may see things in their districts that they really want us to prioritize differently and if it's not obvious in this budget as we go through please raise those things and then that's the time for department heads to maybe go back to the drawing board a little bit >> well and and the change in the attrition rate for instance in training that allowed the police department when we talked about the new beats to add the new eight officers, right, the neighborhood officers. And now it fit in the budget because they rearranged what the attrition rate estimate is with the training classes and they found $2 million >> which I think we could all agree is a really smart decision. >> So I we didn't have to go into fund balance to do that. It all fit now within the projections. And so those are the kind of things that it's as the chief said, lots of times you want to be able to use the money and not let it just fall on fund balance and sit and not be working, right? And so that was a a good proposition as we went forward with the new beat studies. >> Any other questions for Chief Aldridge? >> Thanks, Chief. Good morning. Marilyn Marvin, director of property management. I'm going to be a little redundant. uh just like Dave and Chief Aldridge, we took this opportunity for specifically for the 1% and the 3% to bring the leadership team together to look at what can we do that does not impact our customers, our customers, our city employees um and does not impact the services that we provide. And so what can we what can we find to uh reduce our budget by the first the 1%. And what we realized is as we've been moving people to this building, we're emptying out buildings in the downtown campus, but we were still carrying the electricity budget, the water budget. Now, we still have people in at 200 Texas Street, and so we're not impacting them, but we realized we still were carrying budgets that we don't need to carry anymore. So m most of our 1% was about reducing our budget for the downtown campus. Um our 3% we also took that same approach. Um so we looked at things again that didn't impact the service, didn't impact the quality of work life for our customers, but did allow us to tighten our budget up. The other thing that we did is we looked at our um our employees who provide services for projects and their their salaries and benefits are charged to that project and making sure that our employees were charging their times correctly. That if they weren't that we were um training them to make sure that their their time sheets reflected how much time they spent on projects versus for the general fund. And so we've also tightened that up as well. >> Any other questions for Marilyn? >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Morning. Christy Lemon, assistant director in the Fort Worth lab. Just going to go over the 3% reductions that are included in the recommended budget. Um, as I looked at in detail at all of the the recommended reductions, there were kind of a couple of different approaches that I wanted to highlight. So, several departments looked at like the last two or three years of actual spending compared to their budgets and identified places where they were over budgeting a little bit. So, we saw a lot of like small trims to other contractuals or supplies or printing, things like that. So just really good budget management and trimming where folks were able to. Um several of the departments that did that are um economic development audit um finance. So lots of departments took that approach. There were also a number of cuts related to the move to this building. So as Marilyn said they had some savings in electricity. Uh there were a number of different departments who had savings like that. So for example, someone uh one of the departments reduced the number of printers because they didn't in the current configuration here they didn't need as many printers. So again really good budget management around different location, different context and different needs. Um some other examples, excuse me, that were reduced for uh the move to this building are mileage. So PE more people are colllocated here so there's less mileage needed um less electricity. So all of those kinds of things. So we saw a lot of those cuts kind of scattered throughout um various departments. Another one is that we had a couple of departments that received new new equipment or new vehicles, big vehicles. So they were able to reduce rentals. So they've been using rentals to wait until they receive their new equipment and then that they have it. They don't need those rental budgets any question on that one. >> Oh, sure. >> Yeah. I question um in general as we go through I appreciate y'all um putting exactly what what they chose um to reduce um several of these have a reduction in memberships andor training and that seems like professional development and so I want to have a discussion about that and make sure that we're not um shortch changing our um our employees to get the development that they need to one to bring the knowledge back more importantly um for retention. >> Yeah. I I don't think there is an overall reduction in in training. I think it's more a they went through reviews and there was folks that had to have memberships to things that they really didn't go. >> Okay. >> Right. It was renewed and those kind of things. And then the fact a lot of these efficiencies from this building um occur. We have all these meeting rooms. We have we provide a lot more training in house. >> People don't have to go to city hall for a meeting. So they're like she mentioned mileage. all those kind of things. It's the efficiencies around here. I I'm not aware of any departments that eliminated training that was >> so it's not individual trainings, it's big scale training. >> Well, you know, for instance, I I did like we looked at the city manager's office and there was folks that had memberships uh multiple folks that had memberships versus city one person has membership then you get to associates. It could have just been those kind of things. Okay. Or things were reduced and the dollar get reduced. Go ahead, Christie. >> Yes. Um, very few position reductions. So, just a couple. We had an an extra ACM position in city manager's office, that was reduced. There was a position that was originally in neighborhood services, and when they combined the community centers with parks, there was one position that hadn't been filled since 2022, so they went ahead and eliminated that. So, it was really about cleanup um versus reducing things that would have an impact to the public. And then if you see the last line there for transportation public works, they did say make some reductions in payo. Um but once we got the values and saw that the values were better than expected, we were able to uh increase their payo allocation. So um they did receive an additional $2.7 million in PGO which offset that. So that was that was a helpful helpful news at the end there. All right. Questions about any of these reductions? >> Any questions, council? >> No. Okay. >> All right. And then just wanted to remind you all that we have the upcoming um public meetings. So, this is the schedule. I do understand there'll be a change in the schedule to the district 5 meeting. So, we'll be announcing that soon. I think that's a that's late breaking news. So, we'll share that when we have it. Um, and of course there are opportunities for the public to um, learn more about the budget. There's a QR code and a link there and um, also provide some input. So, just making sure council that calendar's all been checked with all each of you to make sure you're good with locations and times. Great. >> Hill and I realize right now we're limited to one meeting per district, but in different circumstances, are we able to have more than one? I mean, I know mine is extremely geographically large and I we have no way to reach out to the far west. I know Councilman Crane may have the same issue, too. >> So, um I was going to mention that we're we're happy to if you want to have a town hall and have a budget portion of that. We're happy to have staff attend that. it just wouldn't be as big and have the >> and I have the same concern and Macy knows this because she and I have uh in the past combined different meetings town halls uh because we service you know common constituents right while the north side community center is you know large and ample and it serves those inside the loop those outside the loop will not come to that just being very frank and have had ongoing discussions with those neighborhood leaders beyond 820 so I would say that you know I'm certainly my office is willing to have a town hall standalone town hall you know that is budget you know focused so that we can have that presence because I need to address that for you know my folks north the loop >> and that that would be fine to do that just having the whole coordination of like making it live streamed and all those kind of things having so many would be hard >> who should I coordinate on that >> with Christian >> or Christian okay let's do that afterward sometime thank you >> thank you council member Martinez and then council peoples and I'd really like virtual option too, so I could record it and upload it to my different platforms. >> So, every one of these meetings will be livereamed, the scheduled ones, and they'll be recorded so be available. >> Council peoples, did you have a question? >> No, I just wanted to thank uh Jay and his team for being flexible because Saturday is the funeral of our fallen firefighter and so we're going to reschedu it. Uh, I prefer that we reschedu it for September because that gives us time to really reach out to our neighborhoods and let them know about the change and then uh grateful that it's going to be recorded because if we need to do follow-up meetings, we can use a lot of that. So, thank you counc. >> Yeah, thanks and council Hill for bringing that up. Yours is pretty far north, I know, in your district, but I'll say this, you people in the west, Chapel Creek, etc. That one at Las Vegas Trail could be three and seven. I don't that it's not I'm not territorial or anybody territorial. I think anybody can attend any I'm in directing some of my folks to go. If you can't do that one, then obviously Councilwoman Beck has one at University Christian Church. There's some neighborhoods there that might make sense, but I know it's just a significant amount of staff time to put them all together. >> Thank you, Christian. >> Council. Yes. Sorry, Nles. I think uh Councilman Crane just made a good point about necessary it don't have to be territorial because it may be a day that I can make a budget and so I know that we normally send out uh our meetings through our email address. Um it may be interest it may be considerate to send it out to everybody for each meeting that's available throughout the throughout the city for work. >> Yeah. Rather than restricted by council districts. Yeah, >> sure. We're we're happy to send this full schedule to all your council district offices so you can send it to everyone in your district and we've been providing this online and and as general emailings as we go along. >> Yeah. Smart. >> Looks great. Thank you. >> Great. Looking forward um we're barreling towards September 16th. Uh we'll do public hearings tax rate and budget on the 16th and then ask you to adopt the tax rate, the budget, the CIP and the fee ordinance. Um, we we have placeholders on our calendar for more budget work sessions. Do you have other topics that you'd like to ask about at this time? We're happy to provide written responses if we don't need to get back together as a body. Um, but do let me know if >> do you mind off the top of your head when are those next few just held on our calendars? >> So, I don't know that they have a time. I think that there's like a placeholder on August 26th is 90day count sixth is I don't know if that's a word. August the August 26 90-day calendar and maybe even the following week as well. >> So it looks council like on Tuesday, August 26 at 3 p.m. there's a held or it would be immediately following but around 3 is currently held and then the 9th as well which would be at well >> actually it's part of the work session. >> It's part of the work session on the 9th >> kind of embedded there. Yeah. So, does it throw anybody off if we just leave that held for now and then over the next few days we can survey council members so that you don't I know if we take it off now it's never going to go back on because everybody gets busy. That might be the easiest thing. >> I think that's fine. >> Okay. Perfect. >> Okay, council. Go ahead. >> Thank you, mayor. Um I guess for future if there's uh two things I'd like to talk about as far as fire. I was going to ask about this during public safety but I think maybe it's more appropriate here since it's budget related. Okay. >> Um, and it was about the recruit pay. Recruit pay. Um, and if there's any room for improvement there, because while we're doing okay on staffing now, what I don't want to do is get us to a point where we are having to jump through hoops in order to, you know, uh, get recruits since that recruit pay has not increased in over a couple decades. Um, and then on the budget too, looking at the the fire the just the one pager here, the charge for services. um months ago asked for an IR related to lift services in private facilities. Um and I believe we we are not charging at the time. Um but it's certainly taking a lot of time away from fire uh for those calls in private facilities, not private residences, but in facilities. Um, and I'd ask for an IR so we could look at that because although it's not going to have a huge impact on budget, it will have a huge impact on uh the service calls and availability of those uh first responders to get to other calls. Um, other cities, they did increase their fees for that. Um, which again it did not barely move the needle on revenue, but it did move the needle on a drastic reduction in costs. So really the recruit pano is the big one on the budget. the other one more so just on the revenue side >> Councilman on the recruit pay that's part of the negotiated agreement and we're actually going to this fall start those discussions >> it's not something we adjust in the budget it's adjusted once that contract >> oh is that something they they bargain and >> part of the bargain yes >> council Martinez >> Jay I apologize since we're on PD um with FIFA coming 2026 did PD account for any potential overtime or emergency responders how does that work >> so We currently have not what we did we did put some money in non-EP departmental for FIFA but it's contingency more for other general fund uh departments like if TPW has to go to events and all those kind of things. We're waiting we're we're under the belief that there's going to be some federal funds made available for that and so we didn't want to make assumptions at this point. there might be a need once we get further along and we get more clarity on that that we come back to council to do an adjustment or look for funding to address the overtime, but I think I would rather wait till we get to that and see what kind of funding we may be available. Then we would supplement it. Um because there are there is overtime funding in both fire and police and being able to manage that and then we'd have to come back at some point to council if we're going to go over that. That's how we're handling it. >> Okay. Thank you. Any other questions for Christian or for Jay or other future budget items you may need? >> No. Okay. Thank you, Christian. >> Thank you. >> Jay, am I right? That's all. >> That's all we have from the budget side. >> Perfect. We're going to adjourn from budget work session. >> Oh. >> Oh, I'm sorry. Take that back. Deborah has something people. Go ahead. >> Is it appropriate to ask for an INR here now? >> We can do that now or we can move it to work session. Either one. Is it budget related? Well, it will be in 2027. >> Why don't you go ahead just to make sure that's fine to ask you about uh getting an iron or for the cost to add an additional sister city in 2027. >> Okay, very well. We'll make sure and add that. Thank you very much. Any others, council? Okay, now real adjournment. Okay, there we go.