Council 7-28-2026 [56:51-60:36]

Okay, we're going to go with that one first. So, I do have copies for all the council. I don't have enough for everyone here, but I'll leave some with Lacey up here. So if anybody wants to follow along, we do have a few extras. Okay, so for anyone that I haven't met in person, my name is Scott Finley. I'm with Bakertilly. I sit on our municipal team working on long-term financial plans, like the one that we're providing for long time. We have met several times with the working group. Martha, Amy, Phil, and Rick, we've been working on this for several months now. We've got a good draft version of it. What you have in the PowerPoint is kind of a simplified modified version of it because the full report is 60 pages with a lot of cash flows. So this is a little bit condensed and a little easier to handle in the short time period that we have here today. So as I go through, if anybody has any questions, feel free to stop me. So the report that we prepared goes from 2024, so we're looking at actual 2024 and actual 2025, and then future all the way through 2031. We're going through 2031, as you all know, there's been some legislative changes over the last few years. Those will be implemented starting in this year, 2026, and they'll be finalized and fully implemented in 2031. So hopefully this report will help you see the effect of those legislative changes. So if we will skip to the third slide, this is why the plan is prepared. So why we're preparing this for the county. We've done this in years past. The first one that I was involved with, I think, was in 2024. So we wanted to evaluate the long-term financial position of the county and make sure that the financials and all of the major operating funds were sustainable long-term. Not just looking at the budget for the year that's coming in, but making sure that that budget is sustainable. We also want to make sure we're identifying any future funding gaps before they become critical. These long-term plans allow you to make more gradual changes rather than these sharp 90-degree turns when all of a sudden something pops up and you're not planning for it. It's going to assist elected officials like yourself with budget development, which I know is coming up very soon. So the revenue estimates that are prepared in here will help you understand whether your budgets are balanced, whether there's any cuts, or maybe you have some room in there to grow. And again, as I mentioned, it helps us look at those legislative impacts that have happened over the last couple of years. So next slide, slide four. The planning horizon, so as I mentioned already, this reviews the historical financial performance of 2024, 2025. We pull that data from publicly available information like the Annual Financial Report. We also work with Martha to get information from the county's internal records. DLGF reports things of that nature. We also project revenues, as I mentioned, to make sure that the budgets that you're preparing are in line with those revenue estimates. We use the historical data along with some of those DLGF reports to come up with those estimates. For expenditures, currently in this report, just want to make sure everyone's aware because the budget form ones are not ready yet. We have expenditures that are based on 3% of 2026's budgets. So we're looking at, again, the historical actuals. And then for 2026, budget plus growth is what we're looking after 2027.