 Okay, we'll go ahead and get started. Thank you all for being here. What a turnout tonight. I think this was the first day of school for a lot of school districts and to have a crowd like this tonight is wonderful. Can everyone up top hear me? Everybody is good? Okay, great. Thank you all for being here tonight. My name is Jeff Coyle. I'm with the city's government and public affairs department. Before I hand the mic over to our mayor and councilman and city manager. I just want to set the scene a little bit so you understand where we are in the process here. So every year, we go out to the public and ask the community what your priorities are for the upcoming city budget. We did that back in the months of May and June. After we take all that input, which the mayor will talk about in a minute, the city staff goes back and spends the month of July after the council has given us their priorities as well, and puts together a proposed budget. The city manager presents that proposed budget to the city council in August, which she just did last week. Now there's about a month period between that proposed budget, basically the draft budget, and the final adoption of the budget September 15th, and the council will take the vote. So in that period of time is the opportunity for you once again to give us your feedback to make suggestions based on what has been proposed and for the city council to direct changes to be made in the proposed budget before they vote on it. So you being here tonight is really, really important to us. It's how we get to a final budget that we know the community supports and that accomplishes what you and we want done here over the next year. Very quickly, one more housekeeping note. I'm going to hand it the microphone to my colleague here, Flor Salas. Good afternoon. If you need translation services, please see auntie is back there raising her hand. If you need translation services, thank you. Thea and Laura here can help you with the translation services. We're going to run a very brief video, less than a minute video, and then I'm going to step out of the way and hand the mic to the mayor here. You spoke up and we listened. More than 5,000 of you told us what you wanted in this year's budget. First off, this budget has no city property tax increase and our public safety spending stays at less than 66% of our budget. You told us streets, sidewalks, and drainage were your top priority and we delivered. This year's budget features $79 million for street improvements and sidewalks. You told us neighborhood services were really important, so we made some cool things happen. This year's budget features $900,000 more for animal care services and $900,000 more to care for our city parks. You also told us public safety was important, so this budget features 32 new police officers, nine new parks officers, and 42 more employees to answer your 911 calls. Fire and EMS will also receive new equipment and gear for 1,200 firefighters. Aw, speak up! There's so much more included in this year's budget and you can learn all about it at saspeakup.com. Now it's time for you two. Aw, speak up! Again, fill out the survey today. Just a few of the highlights, we have a lot more to talk about and an opportunity for you to weigh in in a minute. And I'll turn the mic over to someone who really doesn't need an introduction, your former councilwoman and our mayor, Ivy Taylor. How about now? Okay, great. Are we gonna turn the lights up? Cause it's been a long day, folks might start to doze off a little bit. We turn the house lights back up, thank you. I wanna see all your lovely faces. Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for taking the time to come out and be part of this process. You know, we go through this every year, but it can't become stayed. We need you all to come out every year and be part of the process because really the adoption of our budget, it's the most important policy document that we produce on an annual basis. It's a statement of our community priorities and how we want to utilize your precious tax dollars on an annual basis. So thank you so much for being part of the process. Those of you who've already been part of providing feedback that helped to provide the basis for the proposal that the city manager will be reviewing this evening. And it doesn't stop there. This is your chance to provide additional feedback once you hear the proposal. I do think it's a great proposal. Of course, there's no property tax rate increase, which is important to us here in San Antonio and it allows us to address many of those basics that we talk about all the time in order to keep our neighborhoods strong and safe to focus on the infrastructure and then also ensuring that we have more police officers for our growing city. There are a lot of other great things in the budget that the manager will review with you. One of the things I'm excited about is the budget includes operating dollars for a project that I started long ago in collaboration with many community members who advocated for a new library in District 2. So that library is being built with bond dollars and we have to have it full of librarians and staffers to help you when you come out there. So we will include the funding for that so that it can be up and running as soon as construction is completed. So again, we appreciate you being here. I feel like I'd be remiss. I got up here and I looked out here. I don't have my glasses on, but I think that's my pastor sitting there. So I have to acknowledge him, y'all. Pastor Sparrow from Greater Corinth Baptist Church. Thank you so much for being here this evening and being part of the process. And I wanna just give a task to everyone that is here. Please tell 10 people about what you heard about tonight at the meeting because a lot of times folks don't hear, they miss some of the things that are going on. We're making a great effort to get out across the community. We will be and have several other community meetings and other parts of town. You might wanna share that information with people and let them know what you heard about tonight and help spread the word so that we can have a budget that's reflective of our collective community priorities. Now it's my pleasure to introduce to you my successor, Councilman Allen Warwick from District Two. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you all for coming out this evening. It's great to see a packed house of familiar faces but also some new faces. It was great to meet new people and know that new people are involved in the budget process and also speaking up in order to impact this current budget. Now what you're gonna see today is a presentation but again, this is not a stale document, this is a living document and until we ratify this document and make it our ordinance in September, there are gonna be changes to the budget. So if you see something up here that's missing, please talk to my staff. Derrick Roberts is right there, Millie, Natalie. They're here, my entire staff is here to take your concerns and I'll be here as well. We have a lot of things that we are working on in the district, a lot of great things that are gonna come up in this budget and in the 2017 bond election that we're gonna be working on as well. So we'll have great improvements to talk about and I look forward to sharing those improvements with you. The city manager is gonna do a great job outlining this and we'll all be around to answer any of your questions or concerns. Thank you. Am I on? Can you hear me? Okay, good evening, I'm Cheryl Scully, city manager and I'm glad to be back out in district two again this year to talk about the budget as proposed to the mayor and city council and we'll be discussing it over the next several weeks and so this is the beginning of the process where we meet with the community, talk with you and get some community feedback. Now we have a number of staff that are here tonight and you can see all the booths so that after this very short presentation you'll be able to talk with staff about those things that you're most interested in whether it be libraries or street repair or public safety and we have a number of staff here tonight to serve as resources. So I see Chief Hood, our fire chief standing right up here. Also Carlos Contreras and we have, oops, son, yep. Maria Villagomez and Lori Houston, assistant city managers that are here. So I don't know if Chief McBannis is here but we have a number of our safe officers and representatives from the San Antonio Police Department as well so many staff are here and we serve as resources to you so if you have questions please don't hesitate to ask us and we'll do our best to answer it and we don't have an answer tonight, we'll get that answer for you. So just with a short presentation, let me just describe that the budget is balanced, we're required by law to maintain a balanced budget so unlike some of the other forms of government, our budget is balanced when it's proposed to the city council, it's balanced when it's adopted and it's balanced throughout the course of the year. We in this budget will begin the implementation of essay tomorrow and I'm looking around the room and know that some of you participated in the community meetings to talk about the future growth and development of San Antonio so this budget reflects some of the goals and those things that were adopted within the essay tomorrow plan. We continue to invest in streets and sidewalks, one of the things that most residents frequently ask about, when will my sidewalks be repaired, when will my roads be fixed? We're also enhancing public safety and neighborhood quality of life issues so we're really focused to make and try to help you make the community better. We're also preparing for the 2017 bond program. You know that about every five years, at least for the past decade, we have proposed to the residents of the community a bond program that includes capital, infrastructure projects, streets and drainage, park improvements and expansions, libraries, fire stations, other city facilities to improve and support our growing community so we're preparing for the 2017 bond program and I'll talk with you about that in a moment and as the mayor said, this budget does not propose a tax rate increase. In fact, the city of San Antonio has not increased the property tax rate for 24 years and in the past decade, the mayor and council have reduced the tax rate four times. So as we conducted the speak up process before I proposed the budget to the mayor and council, we asked the community what was most important to you and the feedback we received for more than 5,000 people who participated in the process, street maintenance was number one, additional police officers and firefighters to support our growing community and to maintain our response times, neighborhood services whether they be code enforcement and animal control, those things that improve the quality of life within our neighborhoods including park development and economic development, workforce development, how do we help everyone have a job and attain the kind of financial success that will help our families and lastly, number five on the list, parks and recreation that is expanding those programs for the youth within our community. So our total city budget is $2.5 billion and it is composed of three major components, the general fund, which is 1.1 billion and the general fund are those things that you mostly consider when you think of city services and city government, police and fires, street maintenance, parks maintenance, code enforcement, animal care services, the health department, the municipal court, the general administration of the city, those things that you'd commonly think about, that's the general fund, the second major component is what we call our restricted funds and those include the operations that are supported by fees for service, solid waste, our garbage collection, we pick up the garbage at about 340,000 single family homes throughout San Antonio. So that garbage service is supported and paid for by the fees we pay as residents within the community. The airport is another restricted fund where the users of the airport and the airlines and the commercial operations at the airport pay for the operation of the airport. So those are enterprise restricted funds within our budget and they can't be used on other services. So if we make a little bit extra money at the airport, we can't use that to support our libraries or our park system. In the capital budget, this is capital construction. So each year we plan for which streets and sidewalks will be repaired, which drainage facilities. As you know, at the airport, we have a consolidated car rental facility under construction. We also are making improvements at the Alamo Dome. That comes out of our capital budget, including the projects within our bond program that every five year bond program of major projects. On the expense side of the general fund, you see police and fire represent two thirds of the general fund spending. So those two departments comprise just about 66% of the general fund, that $1.1 billion. The rest, you can see here, streets and infrastructure is the second largest category, then parks and recreation, and then all those other colors on the chart represent those departments on the right. Human services, libraries, code enforcement, animal care, health, our planning department, historic preservation, all of those other activities within the general fund compose that other small portion of the general fund budget. On the outer rim, if you could go back just for a minute. So the sources of funds for the general fund include four major categories. Property taxes, about 28%, sales tax at 24%, CPS revenue, so the city owns CPS energy and their payment in lieu of taxes and their return to the shareholders, that is, we, the residents of San Antonio, they make a payment to the city of San Antonio and that represents about 30% of our general fund revenue and then other resources. Those miscellaneous fees and franchise fees, the different other categories that we charge for some services for the use of our facilities make up the miscellaneous category. So the 2017 budget supports the work that we did for SA Tomorrow planning and for the comprehensive growth and development of the community and you'll recall in the council just adopted the SA Tomorrow plan and it includes three components, the comprehensive plan about growth and development, the transportation plan and the sustainability plan. So those were adopted and our budget reflects the direction that was given in terms of guidance for our development as a community and we're also adding some planning staff, two staff members to help us with our neighborhood plan development as we work toward the implementation of that SA Tomorrow plan. Those things that are included in the budget under FIRE and EMS, we are fully funding the 51 firefighters that were added in the 2016 budget so we'll have a full year of funding for those additional staff added last year. We're adding two more classes of firefighters and EMS personnel to replace those who are retiring and leaving the city. We're retrofitting our fire stations with exhaust removal systems. So many of our stations, as you know, we have replaced over the past decade and we've added some fire stations to our total system but we need to do some more retrofitting of the older stations so that the exhaust from the pieces of equipment, the engines and ladder equipment, that exhaust doesn't get back inside the fire station and we're adding the acquisition of additional bunker gear. That is the fire gear that our firefighters wear when they handle and support firefighters in the community. They have one set, we're ordering a second set for all 1200 of our firefighters. On the police side, we're recommending in addition to filling all the vacancies, 32 additional police officers. We have applied for a community oriented policing grant and we have the local match dollars in this budget to support 32 additional police officers that will be involved in community policing adding to the community work that our police officers do in the community, nine additional parks police officers and they patrol our growing park system. So the linear creeks, the additional parks that have been purchased and developed as a part of our bond program, those are included within the budget. 42 civilian positions are being added to support our 911 call center so that we can improve on the response time, reduce the number of calls that may be dropped or if you call and you're put on hold because it's a high volume time of the day, we're adding additional staff so that we can do the very best job possible to respond to your 911 emergency calls. We're continuing with the implementation of body cameras. The city council approved last year the implementation and acquisition of body cameras for all of our police personnel. So we're implementing that over two and a half years and we're continuing with that implementation in this budget and we have a pilot program that we're recommending this year that's patterned after a national program entitled gang violence intervention and this will enable us to work with the community and attempt in another, in a new way, how to reduce violence within the neighborhoods. In infrastructure, we have emphasized more dollars for street construction. It was one of the top things that the community has been asking for that in sidewalk construction. This, in the current fiscal year, fiscal year 2016, we were able to add more funding for street maintenance and so this budget continues that funding level at $64 million to repair our roadways. Any guesses as to how many miles of streets we repair or exist in San Antonio? Any guesses? 4,000, we have 4,000 miles of streets within the city of San Antonio so we all could pick a street that we know needs to be repaired. So the tough job for the mayor and council is to choose among those and prioritize with help from the professional staff as to what should be done in each budget year. So this budget does include 64 million for street maintenance and 15 million for the repair and construction of sidewalks. We know that we have several older neighborhoods that have never even had sidewalks and so we're focused on adding sidewalks in areas where there are schools, elementary and middle schools as well as near bus routes so that those who need to rely on public transportation have a sidewalk to walk on to get to the bus. In the 2017 Street Maintenance Project, I just wanted to list a few, this is not all of them, but just a few key projects that are included in our 2017 Street Maintenance Project and you can see here the listing, that each year the city council reviews those street needs within each district. We have a five year program so each year we identify the streets that are included for each budget year and each year the council can adjust that list as well so these are just a few of those who are here. In the sidewalk area, here are where some of the sidewalks will be added. It's not all of them, but this does give you an idea of where some of the sidewalk improvements will be in district two in the proposed budget. Street lighting, last year at the council's request we added some monies to be able to add street lighting within some neighborhoods, knowing that that does affect some of the crime situation that gives everyone a better sense of security if we know and we have better lighting in the neighborhood so this budget includes an additional $1 million to continue to add lighting in some of those neighborhoods that need to be improved. Pedestrian safety, last year we began a process after a number of accidents to improve safety around schools, so $1 million to continue adding those safe crossings near our elementary and middle schools and also $1 million for pedestrian safety and there's a program called Vision Zero and the idea is that we achieve zero at some point in terms of zero fatalities in the community where pedestrians are hit by cars as they're crossing the street so we're working to try to make some of those pedestrian crossings much safer for the community. In animal care services, we're adding to additional officers. We are also increasing the number of spay-neuter services to best manage the pet and dog population in the community and we have within this budget because the county is building their own facility for animal care. It frees up space so we can pick up more stray animals that creates capacity for about 2,000 additional dogs per year to be able to be picked up. Now ideally, this is a owner responsibility. Owners of dogs should be keeping control of their animals, keeping them in their yards, keeping them on leashes, ensuring that they're safe, that they don't harm anyone else within the community but we know that there are violators. We're making improvements. We've been able to reach a 90% live release rate that is we are returning to owner or having adopted most of the animals that we pick up in the community and yet we're continuing our public education program to encourage responsible pet ownership and picking up those strays because it makes it unsafe as we all know for neighbors to be able to walk within the community if there are lots of dogs running around. Delegate agencies, we are increasing at the direction of the mayor and council the amounts of money set aside for workforce development to continue to work with agencies that provide workforce development like the community college system, goodwill industries and the mayor had appointed a task force this past year and we created an organization called SA Works that will also be working with industry in the community to identify those jobs for which employers need additional workers and where there are shortages on certain skill sets. So this budget includes funding for continued workforce development and it includes $100,000 for a workforce center associated with East Point and I know I saw Mike ATN earlier, I think he's still here, our director of the office of East Point. We have a program that is launching as part of East Point for workforce development and center there. We're also funding all of our domestic violence programs at the 2016 level. There has been some conversation about that, that their funding might be cut but I want to assure you this proposed budget does include funding for the domestic violence prevention agencies. In the libraries, the mayor mentioned a new library for district two that will be opening later this fall and also in district six, we're also throughout all of our library system replacing computers and equipment and improving and enhancing our security systems in each of the public libraries. Our capital budget, as I mentioned earlier, 585 million, it does include some major projects. Mostly you can see here, 32% or the largest share goes into street reconstruction and street maintenance. So we're continuing our effort to really focus on basic infrastructure for the community. 2012 bond program that we as voters in the community approved back in 2012. It's a five year program, 140 projects, 92% have been completed or are under construction and the balance of those projects will be under construction in the upcoming months. So we're excited about that and proud of that. Here are some of the projects that were completed as part of the 2012 bond program or are under construction. This isn't an exhaustive list, but it does reflect and give you and a few examples of the projects that were approved for district two and to be completed or have been completed. Let me mention too, as we prepare for the 2017 bond program, the mayor has appointed tri-chairs as well as co-chairs of the five committees for the 2017 bond program preparation. The staff, our transportation and capital improvements department is preparing a list of recommendations that will be considered by the citizen bond committees and the council members are selecting their representatives to serve on five committees, streets, drainage, parks, facilities and neighborhood improvements, those five committees. And each council member is appointing three representatives from the community to each of the five committees. Those committees will begin their work in early October and then complete their recommendations to the mayor and council of those projects they would like to see included in the 2017 bond program by the end of the calendar year. The council then will consider those recommendations in January and set the election for May of 2017 by early February. So the next steps in our operating budget process are as shown here, we are conducting these five work sessions out in the community. This is the very first one that we will receive input from all of you and will answer questions you may have about the proposed budget. There will be several meetings and work sessions with the city council to discuss the departmental recommendations and on September 15th, we're asking the city council to adopt the budget. By city charter, the council must adopt the budget by mid September. We begin the fiscal year on October one. So we appreciate you being here tonight. This is a great attendance and we are now going to move into the session of the meeting. I think we're going to have some explanation as to what our next steps are, but I just want to say thank you for attending tonight. And we will all stay staff members to answer questions you have about the proposed budget. Thank you. Let's give Cheryl a round of applause. Thank you Cheryl. So I'm not sure if the mic's working but I can speak louder. I stole the copy off the front table there if you want to come through the 400 plus pages to find something specific. It's here, but we have a number of the departments that interface with the community on a regular basis here to answer questions and please above all we ask before you leave the table by the hallway there in the front has the budget surveys on there. There's some specific questions and some open ended questions for you to leave. That's the only thing.