 Hello and welcome to Tau Meeting TV's coverage of Tau Meeting Day 2024. This program is part of a series of forums we are bringing you in advance of Essex Junction's annual election on Tuesday, April 9th. Tau Meeting TV hosts forums with all candidates and covers the questions you will see on your ballot. Introducing you to community decision makers and connecting you with issues that shape your local community. You can find all of our forums at cctv.org or on our Tau Meeting TV YouTube channel where auto-generated captions are available. On tonight's program, we will be hearing from Raj Chala, City Council President and Regina Mahoney, City Manager. So thank you for joining us. Tonight we'll be hearing about the Essex Junction budget presentation. If you are tuning in live, we also welcome your questions at 802-862-3966. If you call in, we will do our best to prioritize your question, though we will screen calls to ensure that none are repeated. We also ask that you share your name, the town you live in, and direct your questions to the council. And great, so it's nice to have you here, and I'm excited to talk about the budget presentation, so please. Well, thanks for having us. We'll just get started right away. First question on the ballot this year relates to the budget. You can see the question here. Shall the voters approve an annual general fund budget in the amount of $12,04,124 for the fiscal year of July 1 to 2024 to June 30, 2025? $11,110,346 of which will be levied in taxes against the city's grand list. It's important to note that this is the second full budget for the new city of Essex Junction. About nine months into the first city budget, still wrapping our heads around this transition. Primary expense increases for this year that we dealt with are salary increases, which were expected, and a fairly large health insurance rate increase. Act 76 child care tax was added this year. We added a move to finance billing coordinator from part time to full time. We had an increase in general liability and property and casualty insurance increases in our IT services contract, and we are seeing some costs related to setting up a stormwater utility for next year. As I said, the total budget is $12,4124. It's a 5% increase from the current year, FY24. The average home value to $280,000 will see $170 municipal tax increase. The rate right now is .9199. It will go up 6.6% to .9807. The impact of that, as I mentioned, will be $170 on a home value to $280,000. This figure doesn't include the capital improvement tax, which is voted on every few years. This will be on the ballot again this year, and that adds $28 to the average home. We'll talk about that in a few minutes. Our general fund revenues, primarily 91%, come in from property tax revenues, 6% from global foundries, and 9% come in from, I'm sorry, I was rowing on that, 91% property taxes make up 91% of the revenue, excuse me. 74% come from residential properties, 11% from businesses, and 6% from global foundries property. Those pesky labels on this slide don't show up. They don't transfer when we come by. I don't know what's going on with that. We can dive in a little deeper. The largest expense in this year's general fund budget is health and human services, which includes Essex Rescue and the police contract we have with the Essex Police Department. That's about 25% of the budget. The next highest level, the next highest budget department is our streets public works department, which is 13%. Recreation, the administration budget for the recreation department is 9%, and our Browno library accounts for 8% of the budget. Apologize for the labels on this slide, but that is a breakdown, and this PowerPoint will also be available on our city's website and available when we have our annual meeting on the first. So, then we've got just a number of other articles that we've got to ask, and so this is another carryover question from separating from the town. So, the state, I'll just read it, shall the voters of the city of Essex Junction set the property tax exemption for disabled veterans at $40,000, as allowed by 32, 3802, 11C, state statute, set exemption to remain in effect for future taxable years until amended or repealed by the voters. So, essentially, when we were with the town, this was already in place. The state law allows for a minimum of $10,000 for this property tax exemption for veterans who apply for it, and cities and towns can increase that to $40,000, so the question is on there to ask folks for that, and this is a question that once it's put in place, it will remain in place until it's repealed by a different vote. So, this doesn't carry over, they have to vote on this for this to happen? Yes. Great. Yep. And so, our article three, shall the voters approve extending the one-cent capital improvement tax, also known as the Economic Development Tax, as established in 2016, to be reconsidered at the annual meeting in 2027. So, essentially, the voters have been asked for this one-cent capital improvement tax two times now, originally in 2016, again in 2021, and now it's up for renewal again. If it's approved, it'll stay for another three years into FY26. This tax has really been pretty helpful in terms of getting another number of improvements really in the core of the city for a lot of number of different things between signage, utilities, bike racks, and really what we're intending to use the fund that's built up right now for is the match for we have a congressionally delegated project for renovating our Amtrak station right in the center of Essex Junction, which will be really excellent. We also have a CERC alternative project happening right now in Essex Junction called the Crescent Connector. We are planning for that construction to be finished in the fall of this year, and there are just a very minor number of improvements like bike racks and, I think, EV chargers that are the responsibility of the city for paying for that. So, this kind of, this fund can really help us do some of those things that just don't get covered by other bigger funding sources. So, it's been really pretty helpful. Article 4, shall the voters approve holding the 2025 annual meeting on Tuesday, April 8th, 2025? So, I'm not going to read the rest of that, but essentially we have asked the voters to set the annual meeting a whole year prior. Last year we actually had the voters put some charter changes in front of the voters, which will allow the city council to set that date by January 1 each year. The governor just approved those charter changes last week, I think. So, we'll be able to do some changes next year, but for this year we still have to stick with our charter as it existed prior. This question is on in order to set that date, and I think that's it. Article 5, we've got a moderator. Again, that's a position that was changed in the charter, so next year we probably won't have to ask for that anymore, but two city council members are up for election and two library trustee seats as well. Great. So, moderator position, what is that? So, the moderator traditionally moderated the actual floor town meeting style annual meeting. We have since moved to Australian ballot, so there isn't that same, you know, hand raising on the floor. And so, the moderator, we still have for the informational meeting, and so it's still a position that's in the charter. It just doesn't need to be elected by the voters. Great, great. Yeah, so just some upcoming dates. We're going to have another coffee chat. We've been holding a few of those in preparation and putting the budget together, as well as now that it's set for the voters, so that'll be March 28th at 6 p.m. We mail out a newsletter that explains these articles and has a brief summary of the budget, and that is arriving in folks mailboxes this week, which is great. We also mail the ballots as well, so those are arriving shortly. On April 1st, we will have our informational hearing. Again, that is also online only at 6 p.m. And then on April 9th, day after the eclipse, we will be having our voting day at Champlain Valley Expo in the Blue Ribbon Pavilion. Great. And the ballots that are mailed, is that automatic? Is that something people need to request? They are mailed automatically. Great, great. We should also point out the annual report is now available on our website. Folks want to download a copy of that. Are there printed copies? There are. Yep, so folks can either come in or ask us if they'd like one mailed to them. Great. Anything you are particularly excited about, or anything you're looking forward to for the city? Oh boy. You know, we're wrapping up a strategic plan, planning process. It was one of the things we wanted to do as we transitioned to becoming a new city. We've just launched a second survey for that, which will ask residents to prioritize some larger themes. And then once that closes, hopefully in the next four to six weeks, we'll have some results from the process. And we're really looking forward to diving into those results and seeing what's next. Seeing where the community wants us to prioritize and going from there. So that's something that comes immediately to mind. Great. The strategic process was pretty interesting. We've had a lot of pressure on that as other communities have faced as well from inflation and other rising costs. There really isn't anything, no real new initiatives in this. There is an effort to explore a stormwater utility, so there will be some costs there. Those costs will hopefully be recovered when or if that utility is set up. Not a lot of new initiatives in this. The increase is largely from an increase in expenses that are mostly out of our control, unfortunately. And that survey you mentioned is that available on the website? It is. It is. This URL takes you directly to our annual meeting page. But if you go to sxjunction.org, that should be able to find it right there on the front page. We're going to have that open for a number of weeks, so it'll be great if folks can participate in that. We've got all kinds of awesome things that people want to do, so it'll be really helpful to the council to sort of figure out how to kind of focus and prioritize that as we're moving forward here in the intro years of the city. Great. Well, if that's everything, then I'll close us out. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you for tuning in to TownMeetingTV's ongoing coverage of local candidates, local budgets and ballot items. You can find this in many other forums at cctv.org slash 2024. On our TownMeetingTV YouTube channel, voting for sxjunction is the day after the eclipse, April 9th. April 9th. And where's the location again? It's at the Champlain Valley Expo Blue Ribbon Pavilion. Great, great. Thank you very much, and thank you for watching and sharing with TownMeetingTV.