05/19/2025 Council Special Meeting [42:50-47:54]

But I would be cautious with your budget for 2026, everyone's going to be cautious because there's a lot unknown still. And if you start adding recurring items to your budget that are sustainable into the future, that's not going to be a good thing. So I would say for 2026, use a lot of caution. You guys are strong. You've got some strong reserves, but if you start adding, let's say, a bunch of informally, so give some big raises or something, and that's not sustainable, and let's call the dust settles, you have larger losses than what we're showing here, that it's just not going to be a good thing. Just be very cautious. So right now, I'm saying if you want a balanced budget, we're looking at 17.3. I don't know if that's still real, just based on past expenditures, but, you know, that's what it means to be safe. Going forward, though, once that local income taxes adopted, now you're spending, now you're receiving starting in 2028, go up to 23.4 million. And we're estimating bringing in that public safety expenses on 1.32, that's only another 1.61.7 million, so you actually have a cash flow surplus at that point. So again, I think the cash flow and such good shape, that you could, if you needed to, you realize cash reserves to purchase some of those gaps, but I would only do it for not more than two years. And make sure you adopt your ripening contacts high enough that you can, you know, fully fund your budgets. You know, you're saying a lot of you're in such good shape, that is very meaningful to hear this, because we've been having an awful lot of bad news. So it's very good to hear you say that these different friends are a good shape. I work with a lot of counties on the state, and I usually see these downward trends. You know, I've seen this, which is good. That's stable. That's stability. And in some cases, this a little bit. So I can tell that there is some good financial management going on here. If I couldn't, I would tell you, because I am always to the point. But that's why I'm saying, please be cautious. Please be cautious. Not everything's, you know, going good right now, but there's a lot of changes that came out of set up for one that are scary, quite frankly. They are very scary. You know, if I come here in the next month and these things online for a way higher, then we maybe have a different discussion. Like now, you're going to have to adopt the one that has a one person. But at least you have that. I'm working with some counties where that 1.2% isn't even going to get them to where they're at right now. So you've got some good things in your back pocket. So let's go to page 23. I have another item highlighted there in 2027. And that was what we think is going to be your remaining fund balance and your public safety red fund. That you can then shift over to your general fund. So that's what we see in 2027. Again, you've got a couple of options. You can just spend it out of public safety towards gone. We can just go ahead and declare with fund one and trace whatever to general. You're ending fund balances. Again, we already kind of looked at those. But I'll bring your attention to line 62, which is the orange line that is the operating balance percentage. So again, we say, don't follow up. Follow up to 15%. And you guys have been about 30% on average, which is pretty darn good. So that's what we want to see. If you're over 50%, like I said before, usually we're like, and you probably want to start making plans to utilize those reserves. If you don't let your reserves get up to five, you're about where you need to be. But we want to keep you that way going forward. And in 2027, you see that it drops down to 7.4%. Because we assume that we're not going to make any changes to your budget. Can you dip into those cash reserves? But you don't have to do that. But I'm showing kind of worst case scenario, but then you start bouncing back up. Again, maybe a couple of years, it's a tight. But then we can get back to what we need to be. Now, I'm going to start moving a little bit quicker, unless you guys love these details. And you want me to really think of through a lot more. But I really want to spend most of my time on the journal front, obviously. But let's look at each of those funds now in page 24, regulation. So, again, there's a little bit of loss there, but we set the property tax revenue at around 150, 160,000 to keep the discursments fully funded. We're going to keep the cash reserves with our app primarily since the end of 2024.