02-24-2026 Council [51:43-56:45]

And the sooner we can get started, I'm going to help you better. Patient number nine actually tells a good story. Patient number nine is showing that yes, you are your property values are increasing, which is driving down that tax rate. Your tax rate is actually lower by 2025 percent than it was in 2022. So your tax rate in 2022 is 0.5690. It's now 24 through 6a. And that really is a result of having those increases in your tax rate. So your property values, your property values have gone 44 percent over that timeframe. So that's why we say focusing on trying to get the property values of bringing in businesses and things of that little show, commercial, even residential, that's going to help your tax rate. Patient number 10 is also a good sign, your local income tax. So it's not having an influence in settling, which is good. That means that the adjusted gross income in your county is steadily rising. And that's a good sign. I mean, if it was going down, what would be not in very good shape here? It seems to people are leaving or jobs are paying as much, but it's good that we're seeing a gradual increase. And I do expect that that would continue unless our economy takes a turn. It won't eventually, we all know that, but right now it's on an upward trend. Patient number 11 is also something we like to see. This is a comparison of what you budget to what you actually set. And we like to see, you said 90 to 100 percent of your budget. And so in 2024, you did, you said 101 percent of your budget. Since then, everything you budgeted. In 2025, you spent 93 percent of what you budgeted. And people sometimes ask, hey, what's the matter if you want to sell my money? Any person of your budget? No. Because that tells me that you're not accurately budgeted. That you have flopped. I don't see flop here. I see a very good accurate budget. And that makes it easier to make financial decisions. Because if you're only spending 80 percent of your budget, then how can we do races? I'd be like, no, it looks like you're going to spend 100 percent of that and more than half some sitting out here that will lose for races. So one of mine is sitting where between 90 to 100 percent good. That means you have accurate budget. And that's what we like to see as financial measures, because we feel like we've been doing better, helping better with your decision-making when it's accurate. And it's not full of pattern and all of that. It does make it difficult when we say you need to cut, because it's very hard to cut because I know how lean and already lose. The page 13 and 14 is really just all of the assumptions with years to go into your financial plan. I'm not going to pick every one of these. I'll hit the highlights. I mentioned this before, losing a 4 percent growth factor on your property tax. Since it has been cut for the last three years. If that changes, we can update it accordingly. The local income tax we use in the historical average of your growth so it has been largely increasing. So that's what we've included in your plan, our gradual growth. On your dispersements, we've built in an inflationary increase of 3 percent. That's pretty technical. About what we've built in. And then on your analysis, very new. We backed off of that growth. We took 75 percent of an average between 2022 and 2026 just to make it more conservative. And we saw in the gap at 6.5 percent. So we've had some good growth, but we even backed off to try to be conservative and we're so getting 6.5 percent. We'll try to get you a better estimate once we've run through. We're going to take the 2026 assessor. The amount of force that we want to announce is a measure at a better idea of your growth. Of the assessor, you're going into the future. So now for the remaining pages, I just want to go through some of your major operating funds. And this will be quick. I'd like these first because it shows you the trend of what's happening in the future of your funds. So a page 15 is a general fund. And your cash has been trending pretty suddenly in 2025. You added to your cash reserves, which doesn't surprise me, because you did under Central Budget, which is fine. So in, you heard an average cash reserve of about 32% from 2022 to 2024.