 This is our second meeting since the budget presentation last week where I presented the proposed budget to the City Council and this evening we'd like to get your input and also share some information with you about the proposed budget, what's included and what's recommended, what differences there are in the budget from last year. And as we begin I want to introduce one of our Council members who is here with us this evening, Council Member Ron Nirenberg from District 8. He's here to say a few words and then we'll get right into the program about the budget this evening. Councilman? Thank you Cheryl. And first to clarify I'm not lost. It's good to be here in District 2, the heart of the east side. We're really looking forward to the process tonight. As we're having these meetings, these post-proposed budget meetings throughout the City of San Antonio, we had one last night on the south side. We're going to have one in my neck of the woods on Thursday. We have them every night. But these are the meetings that will help us get a sense of where our constituents are with the real meat and potatoes of the fiscal year 15 budget. All the things that you're going to be discussing tonight were discussed in the pre-proposed meetings. So those meetings where before we had a binder to look at, before we had the X's and those and the numbers of the budget that we're looking at right now. We had these meetings pre-proposed budget meetings to get a sense of your priorities. So everything that you're going to see today and talk about is going to be from your neighbors either in this district or the other nine districts in the community. I want to thank you on behalf of Mayor Ivy Taylor and our City Council for engaging this process. It's you folks that take time to be with us tonight and throughout the rest of the budget season that really make a difference in our budget. We have a very high performing budget. I'm sure Cheryl will talk to you about our financial management. We have a AAA bond rating and that's extremely important because part of what you're going to be looking at tonight is the capital budget. Those things that help improve our capacity, improve our infrastructure and also maintain the infrastructure within the general fund budget as well. We do have some challenges. The budget that you're going to be looking at tonight is a balanced budget. We've had to make some cuts in areas and we've also improved some areas. Again, responding to the comments that have been made throughout the rest of the pre-proposed budget cycle. Again, thank you for participating. We look forward to having your input. By the time we pass the budget on September 18th, I think it's going to be one that we can all be proud of. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman. Here is our agenda for this evening. First, I want to introduce the City staff members that are here to support the meeting. We have people designated at each table so that they can help facilitate the conversation. We have a number of staff here, so let me just ask the City staff to stand up and identify themselves. I hope we don't have you outnumbered, but perhaps we do. We have a number of department heads as well as executive staff and a lot of budget staff. I want to, Maria, wave your hand. Our budget director, Maria Villagomez, is here too. We'll be available as resources to talk. Staff, thank you all so much for being here this evening. What we'd like to do is show you about a five-minute video that summarizes the proposed budget. Our City budget as proposed is $2.4 billion. The general fund portion of that is $1 billion within the $2.4 billion budget. And it describes all of the services that we provide to the residents of the community. And you'll be happy to know that we have increased our funding for street maintenance and drainage. We've increased funding for our parks department and also libraries, animal care services. So those things that you have asked us to prioritize and include in the budget have been included. So we'll show you this short video. I'll show you a couple of slides on some other aspects of the budget. And then we'll get to work. Maria will describe what we're asking you to do at the tables this evening. So let's run the video. It's very short, but it does provide a summary of what the proposed budget includes. The City of San Antonio's fiscal year 2015 proposed budget provides recommendations for making it easier to get around, becoming healthier, more educated, and providing affordable public safety. The City's $2.4 billion proposed budget is a reflection of what is most important to the community. The proposed budget is balanced as required by law, includes no increase to the City's property tax rate for the 22nd year in a row, increases the street maintenance budget significantly, strikes a balance among the community's many priorities, and does not include layoffs for uniform or civilian employees, priorities that you shared with us during the five community budget meetings held in May. More than 400 people attended and worked in small groups to identify the cuts they would make, as well as to add funding to an existing service. Following these community meetings, the City Council held a day-long goal-setting session and together agreed on the following budget priorities. Increase funding for streets and drainage. Develop a multi-year plan to improve and acquire more parks. Enhance the City's investment in education, including more library services and adult literacy programs. Maintain and strengthen public safety without crowding out other services like streets, libraries, parks, and human services. Enhance animal care, neighborhood code enforcement, and other programs to improve neighborhoods. Keep the economic development toolbox equipped to attract new companies and jobs to San Antonio. Fund and complete a comprehensive plan for the City, including policies related to transportation, water, air quality, and public spaces. Public safety is by far the largest expense in the City's budget. Two out of every three general fund tax dollars are spent on fire and police protection. The fastest growing driver of public safety costs is the health care benefits the City provides for uniformed employees. Health care for uniformed employees costs the City nearly double what it costs for civilian employees. In the City's recent community survey conducted by an outside pollster, 70% of respondents said they want to see uniformed health care benefits brought more in alignment with civilian health care benefits. The fiscal year 2015 proposed budget makes changes to health care benefits for firefighters and police officers, saving the City millions of dollars, while still continuing to cover 100% of on-the-job injuries and offering better health care benefits than those provided to City's civilian employees and better than those offered in other Texas cities. This follows the Council's direction to ensure that public safety does not exceed more than 66% of the City's general fund budget. By maintaining affordable public safety costs, the City can invest in other priorities. The proposed budget adds an additional $21.8 million for neighborhood street maintenance and drainage projects to the current $52 million in the Infrastructure Management Program that is used for the continuous maintenance of San Antonio infrastructure. It will grow the Infrastructure Maintenance Program by nearly 30%, which will significantly increase the number of roads fixed this year. It adds funding for the maintenance and operation of a new library, two new senior centers and new parks projects approved by voters in the 2012 Bond Program. It funds the hiring of two city veterinarians to conduct spay-neuter surgeries to reduce stray animals and keep the city's live release rate of stray animals at 80%. It provides resources for a new program to regulate vacant buildings throughout our city. And finally, it funds a code enforcement case management system to close cases faster and more transparently. The fiscal year 2015 proposed budget does not include an increase to the stormwater fee. Instead, the city will review a new stormwater rate method and make recommendations to the city council and the community in a 2015 calendar year. The budget also does not include any funding for VIA's streetcar project. There are a few fee increases, including an increase in the fee for being transported by EMS and a $1 increase in the solid waste fees for garbage collection. So there you have it. The fiscal year 2015 proposed budget, balanced, no tax rate increase, addresses the community's top priorities by keeping public safety costs affordable and does not include any layoffs for uniform or civilian employees. The city budget is the most important policy document the city council will consider in any given year and before the council considers adopting it on September 18, we want to hear from you. There will be five community budget meetings held across the city and two public hearings at the city council chambers. You can learn more at the city's website, www.San Antonio.gov. Okay, we have a couple more slides for you. You've heard us talk quite a bit about overall priorities of the general fund and in May the city council hosted a goal setting session. They do this each year to talk about what's most important to see in the proposed budget and we take that direction and then prepare a financial plan that addresses the community's input as well as the city council's overall priorities. And what they told us in May after a lot of discussion and conversation about the city's priorities was that we needed to strike a balance. Today our public safety costs represent about two-thirds of the general fund budget, 66% and the council said please don't exceed that. As you prepare the proposed budget, let's make sure that we keep that percentage in check so that we have enough funds to be able to continue to fund our parks, our libraries, and our street maintenance because the number one issue we hear from the residents is we need more street maintenance. The city of San Antonio maintains 4,000 miles of streets so there's plenty of opportunity to make improvements. And even though we've had the two largest bond programs in the city's history in 2007 and in 2012, we still have more needs for ongoing street maintenance and so annually we have a street maintenance budget that is in the 50 to 55 million range. This budget includes an additional 15 million for street maintenance so we're increasing street maintenance. Let me just talk for a moment about public safety and what the council said to keep public safety at 66%. About a year ago the city council appointed a task force to take a look at pension and health care, what we refer to as legacy costs. Where are those going, what are the trend lines and the task force included representatives from labor as well as from the business community, people who are experts in health care and pension expenses. And they developed recommendations that were presented to the city council. Here is our general fund budget. What I said earlier that it represents about $1 billion and those are the services that are included in the general fund. You can see in the purple the police and fire departments representing 66%. And then the other departments that are covered in the other colors. So street maintenance is the next largest portion of the budget at 66 million in total. Parks and Recreation at 45 million. And then you see all these departments on the right that fits into that other one third. And when we talk about crowding out what that means is that as public safety expenses grow at a faster rate than our general fund revenue growth, it crowds out this other portion of the budget. We have to make cuts in that area. And over the past eight years we've recommended and the city council has approved adding 473 additional new positions for police and fire. We've added 473 police officers and firefighters in the past eight years. We've also reduced and cut from the budget 1200 civilian positions during that same timeframe. We've done that without layoffs. We've done it through attrition by looking at different ways to provide service by reprioritizing within the general fund. But now we're at a point where as those costs continue to grow it is crowding out and we have to address then do we cut libraries? Do we cut our health department? Do we reduce animal care services? What areas do we cut to control public safety costs? So the council said keep it at two thirds at the 66% so that we can address the other needs and strike a balance in the community. Here we've talked a lot about health care and this is one of the issues that the task force addressed. So among our employees we all, is there anyone in the room that doesn't contribute toward the cost of health care? We all participate and we know that the costs are going up. So on a national average employees participate in cover of the total health care bill about 43%. Our civilian employees contribute about 30%. Among our public safety personnel they contribute 9% of the total bill. So what we're trying to do is strike a balance. How do we make this more equitable? And one of the recommendations from the task force was that we more closely align public safety health care with civilian health care. Here's what the city of San Antonio spends for active health care on an annual basis per employee. And you can see San Antonio is compared to the other major cities in Texas at nearly 13,000 per uniform in the year 2013. And for our civilian employees we spend about 7,000 per employee on health care costs. And the other cities are more closely aligned. In Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston the civilian and uniform health care benefits are identical. Here's total compensation. So you might say, well how do we stack up? And you can see here in this case that we're number two to Austin. But we're still at the top of the list when you look at total compensation. Salaries, special pays, health care benefits, all of that which consumes and represents total compensation. Oops, I skipped too fast. This represents the major cities. And again here, two different here were tied for first place with Austin. So what we're trying to do is more closely align our health care expenses with the civilian employees. And it's tough and we are in negotiations with our police association. And we're hopeful that we can reach agreement with them and we're encouraging our fire union to come to the table. They have not done that yet, but we certainly encourage them to do that. People ask me, well, can't we settle this? And I said, absolutely we can. But we need for the parties to come together so that we can do that. So the budget strikes a balance. It keeps our public safety at two thirds at the 66% so that we can fund some of the other services that you're looking for. More street maintenance, more sidewalks, better drainage in the community so that we can control the flooding. Make sure that we don't cut our library hours. We're adding more branch libraries, opening a new one again this year. Continue with our efforts on animal care services as well as our health department and social services because there are so many needs, whether it's workforce development or the support of social services in the community. We have a great community with a lot of need and we need to strike a balance. So tonight we're asking for your input to identify those things that you think are most important to fund as well as things that you think we could do less with. We ask Maria Villagomas to give very specific instructions and a little timetable as to what we're asking you to do this evening. And then at the end, after we have our conversations, then we'll ask you to report back out to us. Identify someone at your table to be the spokesperson representing your conversation. Maria? Thank you, Cheryl, and good evening. As Cheryl mentioned, now that you know a little bit more about the proposed budget for 2015, we want to hear from you. The budget is scheduled to be approved by the City Council on September 18. So we have more than 30 days to go out to the community and ask for your feedback before that budget is approved. So what we're asking you to do tonight, we're asking you two questions. All the information that was provided to you today, what are perhaps up to three programs that you support in the budget and you don't want to see any changes made to. So for example, if you support the additional street maintenance that is recommended with the proposed budget, that could be an example of a program that you may say we're in support of the proposed budget and we don't want any changes made to that particular allocation. At the same token, we also want to ask you if there are programs or services that perhaps you would like to see added to the budget and they're not currently included either in the budget or at the level that you would like to see them. If you can tell us what those are. Now, as the manager mentioned, the budget is balanced. So if you propose to add more dollars, let's say, to the library, then we're going to ask you also to tell us where to reduce funding from. Perhaps another program so we can maintain a balanced budget as we go through this process. So we're asking you to come up with up to three of those areas where you would like funding added and also recommend those areas where you would like to reduce the budget again to maintain a balanced budget. So there is a facilitator at your table and that person will be taking notes and helping you through the conversation. We're going to give you 30 minutes to go through that exercise and then we're going to ask you to select a spokesperson for each of your tables to report back to the group. If there's any questions on the budget, my staff and myself are here to help you and I'll be walking around and addressing any questions you may have in the budget. So with that, let's get started. And again, you have 30 minutes for this exercise. Thank you. Okay, thank you for being here to talk to us tonight. No problem. Can you start by telling us what your job title is in the District 2 offices? Yes, my name is Rochelle Bell and I am a counselor and I also do constituent services as well as community outreach. Cool. Okay. Can you tell me a little bit about what's going on tonight and what the process is? Yes. But tonight is about civic engagement where there are constituents as well as city employees who are working together to find a way to agree on the proposed budget. Perfect. And what's the next step after this? Well, the next step is that it goes to city council on September 18th in which they will make a decision whether to accept or go back to the drawing board in essence. How can people learn more about what's happening tonight? They can go on www.sanantonio.gov in which they can find out more information there as well. No, please. Can people still put their input in even if they weren't here tonight? Yes, and that's what I was going to say next. There's going to be more meetings in other districts following this meeting tonight so they can attend those meetings even if it's not in their district. It's not closed to different districts. It just is based on convenience. We want everybody's input so you can go to any other district that's having more meetings this week. Okay, and on another note, how can people learn more about the topics that are being discussed? I would also say the internet. If you go on www.sanantonio.gov, they actually are showing a video. It's a five-minute video in which whispers in here tonight and it gives all the topics and all the proposed things for the budget. So I would just wait somebody to do that. Okay. And in your opinion, what are the most important topics? For me, I think the most important topics since I do work for District 2 are any concerns for the constituents in District 2. If it's important to them, it's important to us and no problems too big or too small and we're just here to help. Okay, thank you so much for talking with us tonight. It's so nice to meet you. It's so nice to meet you too. As we're wrapping up, does everyone, we've got six tables. Does everyone have someone identified as their spokesperson for the table? Is there a volunteer who wants to go first? Sally Scott. Oh, okay. And then you'll be second. Okay. We'll let Sally go first. Table number two. Kathy's going to help her. Could everyone? Okay. We're table. All right. Here's our table number two. Table two, we had three, really four areas that we want to keep the same. But essentially, we had some disagreement. We disagreed to disagree. And this is what we came up with. Leave the same as libraries, parks and rec, maintain no layoffs, and maintain the domestic violence unit. And the things to increase, streets and lighting, animal care, particularly spay and neuter. That's the only way we're going to get to no kill. Code enforcement will bring in revenue. We reduce delicate agencies, surplus, get rid of surplus property, reducing operating, and improve fines and fees collection. Thank you so much. Yes, a little applause for table number two. Okay. Right here. Is this, what are we? Table number three. Okay. Michelle. I've been away. Can you hear me? Okay. So we started off first with, instead of doing cuts and additions, we started off with ways to drive more revenue. So we did revenue driving ideas. We started out with contracts for public safety for the county communities. Example of working with like Alamo Heights or Kirby to police their area, but also get money for that. So that's a, it would be a partnership, city, county, corporations. And we really want to go after the collecting delinquent taxes, ie fees, no more tax abatements, as well as the transportation for, oh, the transportation for EMS instead of, you know, going after the money for the money that's already charged for the EMS, going after that more said facility, use it towards our budget, as well as streamline the vendor process as far as purchasing, ie, if you needed a pair of goggles and you work for the city, you couldn't just go buying for $5, give reimburse or anything like that. You had to go through a third party, which makes it take longer and it's more expensive. You can go on eBay and get it for a dollar instead of charging five. So we wanted to streamline that so we cut out some of the costs. And then we had an area called Other Great Ideas, which is ACS partnered with the veterinarian schools in order to help maybe not do surgeries because we know you have to be a licensed veterinarian. Thank you, Ms. Scott. But for the other small tasks, so we can get more manpower while they earn college credits. You know, anyway, we can help. The fire stations, the size and the landscaping, yes, we want the fire stations to look beautiful, but they don't have to be gorgeous. They can just be, they can put out fires, okay? As well as truancy issues currently ran by volunteers. So we just want to create more revenue rather than cut. And then for our reduction slash cut, the code enforcement case management system, instead of being three million, we would like to do 1.5 million. If we improve the case management system we already have now, and maybe work with some police, then, you know, we can cut that budget that way. As well as we're in support of the domestic violence programs, no cuts, as well as parks, street maintenance and sidewalks. That's us at table three. Thank you. Okay. Who's next? Wanda's table. Okay. Here. I'll pass this to you. Justina has it right there. Good evening. Our group at table three was very spirited about changing, or no changes to the improvements of the streets and infrastructure. No changes to domestic violence initiatives here in San Antonio. And we're happy with all the other proposals as well. We saw some things that we would like to change. We're not taking the age in Westside Development Corporation, getting increased funds from the Intercity Economic Development Insinives, pulling money out of there, and using that to further fund SAGE and the Westside Development Corporation. And we do feel that the police and the uniform personnel should pay some kind of healthcare premium, and workforce development projects need to be improved, as well in particular project quest. you. All right, Nikki, who's speaking at your table? Ferris? Hi, it's table three. Turn around this way. We've decided there were two areas we'd like to maintain as proposed in the budget. Senior citizens and the library improvements. Then we'd like to change some other things. We don't believe the EMS increase in fees will hit the people that probably need to be paying. We think that better collection is the answer to that. More code enforcements for our delinquent houses. We believe maybe more money needs to go there. We believe the uniform benefits for firearm police should stay the same and probably offset by their future pay raises because we believe they're willing to take less pay to keep the benefits. Also property, commercial property taxes. We need to go to legislation and get those increased. We do a lot of subsidies for the businesses that come into San Antonio. They're not paying their fair share. Let me change page two. Along with that, we'd like to decrease the downtown subsidies that the city gives for businesses to come downtown. Downtown is beautiful already. They should be wanting to come down there. Decrease the Hemisphere Park money a lot for that. That's a beautiful place for a very enterprising commercial entity to come in and they can pay for that and they'll make some money off of it, I guarantee you. Decrease the city attorney's funds. That's a lot of money. I forget how many millions it is, but the city has been doing too well in court. I don't think we probably need to be spending too much money there. Decrease the executive salaries. Need just to be looked at and adjusted. We believe it's a little bit high. Reduce future uniform pay increases and that'll probably offset the benefits that they're provided in any increase in the benefit cost. Maybe we need to really look at a property tax increase that would restore some of the other cuts that we have if we had the 2%. I remember all the other meetings that we had and that was a common theme on that everybody's willing to increase a little bit. Well that's table two. Table four. Okay. Next table. Who are? Okay. Art. Thank you. We're table five. So for support, we definitely wanted to start with the libraries and Mr. Nicholas is definitely helpful in filling us in on some things, but also with the adult literacy that comes with the library and giving those folks kind of a way to advance their educational status and their life with that. And also the other, the computers and also plenty, a lot of the uses that go into the library that you may not think of how many people actually use libraries. So John was instrumental in that and also of course everybody for the street funding now is a two thumbs up at our table. Luckily we had art to fill us in on a lot of that. But we definitely want to make sure and keep moving in that positive direction with the street funding. So we wanted to keep the victims advocacy. Jane and Iris were really really adamant about making sure that our victims advocacy stays in the program regardless of what goes on at the at the table. And also we definitely want to support the vacant building ordinance. We think it's a great ordinance if we could expand it and make sure that a lot of these vacant buildings are putting into the property tax system and thus making our neighborhoods better places to live. And also supporting co-compliance and make sure that they can get the things that they want. So what they got in the budget, their upgrades was a good thing, right? So we can move on to additions. Additional street lighting in our neighborhoods that are really deficient in it and the benefits that come with street lighting, fighting the drugs, fighting the prostitution, fighting the crime, and allowing our public safety to do their job efficiently when the sun goes down. It was really a big thing. Expanding the vacant building ordinance, right? We touched on it a little earlier. The pavement marking budget, we wanted to definitely increase that so we could have the pavement marking that doesn't wear out after, you know, three years and everything like that. That was, yeah, so that was Jack, you know, our table was kind of, it was pretty standard and then we got Mr. Finger who came and livened us up a little bit, right? But in tax revenues for an increase, we wanted to hook, well, we did talk about the property tax, the commercial property tax, but also for anybody that is, that does receive an abatement for these businesses. We definitely know and respect attracting businesses to the San Antonio community in San Antonio area, but to have a timeframe or to have a hook attached to those abatements so they just can't get the abatement, enjoy that tax, that tax cut and then bolt later on. So that was, and that was from Mario. So this is where Mr. Finger came in with our things that we wanted to cut. Yeah, if we had more time, I'm sure you could have found a little bit more to do. But the financial aid workshop, SA 2020 project worth and the way the hotel, motel tax, where that fund goes, where a lot of the areas that Mr. Finger pointed out that you'd like to see cut out of the budget. So that's our table, table five. All right, Paula, your table. Mr. Brown, we call where table number 11. Miss Kelly, don't throw me under the bus. Not at all. We saved the best for last. Things that we want that we looked at at our table where now, you know, we were happy with additional parks, improvements, street lighting and stuff of that nature. But we also wanted additional fun for street maintenance and lights when I am looking at street lightning, we for to add to that, we want to add an additional three million to District five and to District two, another two million, which comes out to be about $5 million. When you look at lighting, we're not just talking about, you know, the red lights in the park lights when I but we're talking about residential lights, lights in areas where it's dark at when I you wouldn't want your children walking down on dark streets and whatnot, what if you get mugged, anything of that nature. So there are areas in the city that needs to be taken care of that needs these lights or not need these residential lights. So these is one of the things that we looked at also, you know, adding to no layoff. We was happy with that with civilian and uniform and we need more uniform and we need more civilian personnel. Addition to the ACS addition added to them. Also, as soon as the budget or whatnot, you know, there's areas where you need more people were not to get the stray dogs or whatnot. So you need to add to that and also to code. You know, we are there's area, you know, the town or whatnot, you know, you call for someone to come pick up a dog when I was we talked at our table and I and it may take two or three weeks or the dog don't get picked up at all. So you need they need additional personnel in order to take care of that. You know, we don't want there to be a difference between size of town when getting animals taken care of. Moving on. And that would be more code enforcement. Things as far as reduction, we looked at reduction payment from the city attorney were not $3 million from them. Because of the fact, you know, I believe it came from one of our council person that made a statement that the city is spending X amount of dollars on attorneys were not and they haven't got anywhere. And if you spending $1,000 an hour on an attorney or not, that's 1000 employees that making $100 an hour, which majority of the employees of the city make one. So if you spending that kind of money or not, that's a big reduction that you can save to help balance the budget. Thank you. All right. Well, we appreciate all the input that we received tonight and what we obtained this evening. We share with all the council members so that they can hear from all across the city and will compile this before budget adoption so that they have your input. I'm going to turn it over to the councilman to make some closing remarks. And again, on behalf of the staff, we thank you for being here this evening. Councilman. Thank you, Cheryl. And so we have a $2.4 million billion dollar budget. We are a city of, do you have a question? We can't hear the microphone. The idea of police and firefighters paying into their screenshore. I like that. Well, we are a city of 1.4 million people by 2025 will be a city of 2.5 million people. I think what my takeaway is from tonight is that there are a lot of opinions in the room. Some of them don't always agree with each other. We know what the fever pitch battles in the budget are right now. Some of those other discussions and debates we've had already. But what I will say to you is that the things that you've said we should support and the things that you've said we should reduce are things that are in the budget. And that tells me that among our 10 districts with all those different opinions and different voices, you have a city council that's listening to you. Not all of these decisions are going to be easy. In fact, most of them aren't. But I'm proud of the work that we've accomplished at council. And I'm very grateful for the work that you've done tonight and that will continue to do throughout the week. And then come September 18. I think we'll have a budget that we can live with. It won't be the greatest, but we'll continue to make progress. And it'll be one that will keep our city one of the best cities in the country. So thank you to our public safety officials, public safety officers that are here, our city staff, Cheryl Scully, our city manager who keeps this city moving forward among a lot of our transitions. And of course on behalf of Mayor Ivy Taylor and our city council, we want to thank you, the citizens and residents of San Antonio actually make this all happen. So thank you. Have a good night. Sorry. And this is a sign off from District 8, Ron Nurenberg.