 It's one of many forums we are bringing you in advance of local elections and town meeting on the first Tuesday in March, March 1st, 2022. Town meeting is traditionally where voters weigh in on local government representation, municipal budgets, school budgets, and all candidates on the ballot are invited to participate in town meeting television election forums. Town meeting television election forums introduce you to community decision makers and connect you with the issues that shape your local community. If you're watching this live, we welcome your questions at 802-862-3966. Watch town meeting television on Comcast channel 1087, Burlington telecom channel 17 and 217, as well as online at town meeting televisions YouTube page. Today we are here with the city of South Burlington, city manager Jesse Baker and deputy city manager, Andrew Bouldook, who will be reviewing the city's FY 2023 general fund and enterprise fund budgets. Andrew, why don't you go ahead? Thank you very much, Elaine. I'm gonna share screen here. Jesse and I prepared a presentation. All right, so FY 2023 budget and Jesse Baker, myself, and our finance officer, Martha Mr. Char put this presentation together, but I don't think that nearly encapsulates the number of fingerprints that are on this budget, this proposed budget that council approved in January, on January 18th. We have 140 committee members and volunteers, which I just think is an astonishing number in South Burlington. And one of the things that makes me really, really happy to both live and work here. They had the chance to provide feedback when we started this process back in September. Jesse and I met with the city leadership team and department heads to bring forward their proposals for their sections of the budget. And city council has been meeting and seeing presentations from each member of our leadership team and department head since their first meeting in December. Just a quick kind of outline overview of where we'll be going in this presentation, but specifically for the public out there. I want them to be aware that all these budget documents in full detail are available on the city's website. There's a link below. You can find it right on the city's main page at www.SouthBurlingtonVT.gov. There is also a link to the individual department presentations, which residents may also find interesting. Hello everyone, my name is Jesse Baker. I'm the city manager here in South Burlington. And thank you, Andrew, for the tremendous amount of work he and the team put into developing this budget as well as to the council for spending so much time considering it. So one of the first public steps in this budget process is the council's discussion way back in September, when it was still warm out, of the goals they had for this budget process, for the budget that would be developed for FY23, starting on July 1st, 2022. So here you see some of the highlights, some of the things they highlighted, direction they gave to us as we, as a leadership team, built this budget. So they wanted to be sure we were sensitive to the taxpayers. Of course, everyone coming out of the pandemic, going through what we've all gone through in the last couple of years, there was a lot of concern that we were paying attention to those ratepayers. We do have three collective bargaining agreements in the city that are currently expiring. We are in active negotiations now. So we wanted to conservatively plan for the settlement of those CBAs. We also wanted to return to pre-pandemic levels of service. We had several positions frozen in the FY22 budget, and therefore services not being able to be provided to our residents. So we wanted to return to those previous levels of service. And then we also were, the council was very interested in ensuring that this beautiful new building we are in now at 180 Market Street with City Hall and our new public library and senior center, that we were really maximizing the operational potential of those buildings. And you'll hear more about that in a few minutes. And then also paying attention to strategic use of ARPA funding and specifically towards one-time capital expenses that had been deferred during the pandemic. So those are the goals we had outlined for us by the council. And now we will talk about the budget we put together in response. We'll pass it back to Andrew. So before going into sort of the overall terms, back in September, I identified the council, if we changed nothing from FY22 to FY23, what sort of a short list or expectation of what our fixed liabilities would be and what those increases would look like? We came up with a total number of forecasted about 1.3 million at that time. The final number ends up being pretty close to that. The first line item, which is the biggest is our salaries. And I think you'll probably hear throughout budget presentations, this fiscal year, that cost of living increases are significant. It's a very high inflation year. When we started putting this budget together, the CPIU for Northeast in August was about four and a half. That rose all the way to in November, 6%, and in December, 5.9%. So in this budget, we've conservatively estimated, again, our collective bargaining agreements have all expired. So this is an estimate at this point, but around between COLA and STEP, a little over a 5% increase in these positions that are currently funded. The second line here, these are ARPA salaries. In FY22, the budget only increased because of pandemic uncertainties, there was a less than 1% increase. There were built into that budget, there were not, sorry, not built into that budget, were three positions that council identified in FY22 as critical needs. And they looked to ARPA funds to fund those positions immediately. As part of that plan, however, because this is one-time money, they wanted to be able to build into the general fund, those salaries in future years. So they allocated 20% of that would be funded through the general fund in FY23, 40% FY24, and so on, until it's fully folded into the city's general fund. Group health, we're looking at a relatively market rate number that number has become so much, that increase is so much flatter than we've seen in past years, so much more consistent. And that's in large part due to the efforts of Jesse and our predecessor of moving to a captive health insurance model. That model has shown incredible savings for the city ever since year one. Our pension increase, that's lower than we originally forecasted. I think it's no secret, the market has done well and that's increased our total liability there. That is both our Vemur's contribution, we have a number of employees in Vemur's as well as a number of employees in the city's now closed city pension plan. Retirement match, that's a function of salaries. Property insurance, that's the increase in our overall property insurance costs by adding to the city's inventory, so 180 Markin Street. And then there's also this last line here, which is the pennies increase. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about that now, but kind of rolled into this next slide. The pennies increase of $190,000, that is the special fund levies that the voters have previously approved in South Burlington back in 2000. The voters approved one cent on the grand list to fund the acquisition and conservation of open space in the city. That has stayed consistent since then, although there have been a couple of amendments to allow for recreation to also be purchased with those funds as well as for ongoing maintenance costs associated with the purchase of those properties. That again is a fixed levy of one cent on the tax rate. There's also a second penny, the penny for Paz, which the voters approved back in 2018. That is only a 10 year levy. Now, why does this matter? Why am I talking about this year? In prior years, that amount has been built into the city's annual budget process and into the general fund budget. In a typical year, that's no problem because that sees almost no change in the total amount of gross revenue. However, this year, because we were in a reappraisal year, we saw a 30% increase in the amount of revenue. It's perfectly aligned in the amount of grand list growth that we have this year. So what we're trying to do in this budget and what's built in is we're removing that from the general fund. It will still show up now separately in your tax bill. But in doing that, there are some other numbers I wanna highlight here. The first is the overall increase is a 6.27% to the taxpayer. And that's with the $190,000 included. There's only a 5.19% increase in the overall operational budget of the city. So if we look at the bottom number, impacted taxpayers for an average residential home, looking at an annual increase in this budget, if approved of $118.13 for the average condo, $79.13 of that number, the pennies specifically account for $20 in the average residential and $13 for the average condo. I'm gonna pause there for a second just to make sure that that makes sense. Thanks, Andrew. So for those increases, the investments the council is making into municipal operations really focused on three different buckets. One, there is increased staffing to maximize the services provided at 180 Market Street, which is the city hall and library and senior center building that includes increase in library staff time to expand the hours of operation of the library that we've heard a big demand for, as well as invest in a handy person to help maintain this building. We are also investing in technology infrastructure for a more resilient service delivery over time. That will look like increasing staff person in our IT department, but also automating some of our permitting processes moving to office 365 for staff so we can have more continuity as we're working remotely or working throughout our building, as well as finally implementing body worn cameras in our police department, which has been a priority for this community for many years. And then finally, we're investing in our capital planning strategy and ensuring that as we invest in our infrastructure, that those investments are tied to our ongoing maintenance needs. This is something we've heard a lot from our committees that Andrew talked about in the beginning, a lot of volunteers working for the city who are really committed to ensuring that as we're building out rec paths, as we're building out new streets to service new neighborhoods, that we're ensuring that we can maintain those at the same standard South Burlington residents have come to expect. So Jesse talked a little bit before about the ways we're leveraging ARPA funds to offset some of the one-time costs of deferred capital expenses from prior budgets. In the first line, I talked about it a little bit before, those are those funded salary lines. Now at 80%, those three positions council identified as a critical need. Those are separately allocated in a revenue line. We also have these other ARPA projects that are included, the dispatch consoles over at the police station at 19 Gregory Drive are well past their working life. This allocates ARPA funds to upgrade those. We have an ambulance that's, excuse me, in year 13 of a 10-year life cycle. ARPA funds allocated as well. Our Microsoft Office 365, those upgrades that Jesse talked about before, there are some one-time startup costs associated with that. It'll also enhance the city's cybersecurity. Felt that was ARPA eligible, planning and zoning software. Planning and zoning is working with a vendor will eventually go out for an RFP if this budget is approved to improve their user interface for better online access to permitting. This will also likely include GIS software. It's a really, really incredibly customer service facing software upgrade. There's also some backend improvements involved that will include our efficiency. And so though the amount of ARPA funds allocated for that are sort of the one-time startup costs. Firefighter clothing, that's also our firefighter PPE. We have a large number of deferred items from prior budgets that are all coming due at once. We also, council had a very long discussion at their last meeting about how we would fund an additional Fire EMS staff person to support our Fire and EMS services. 50,000 of that is going to be coming out of the general fund. We're looking to offset some of that impact with 50,000 out of ARPA this year. So that total amount in the budget and this proposed budget is close to $1 million in ARPA funds. That means we still have around 4.5 million which we're beginning to start the process of having a public process to identify what those priorities will be for use of those funds in the future. Some of those ideas are to fund our housing trust fund for specific projects up to a million dollars. Also, some of the CIP cuts that we saw during the pandemic that's, you know, 952,000 dollar number so that isn't immediately back into the, put on the tax taxpayers, smoothing that out in future budgets so that there's not a one-time increase. Funding to support businesses, commerce and hospitality events. We just received a great grant to be working on some of those initiatives to really see the full functionality of our new TIF district and Market Street. Stormwater and wastewater projects. There'll be a little bit more on that with council. Jesse and I will be talking with council this February to identify what that public process will look like. Jesse, if I could pop in for just a moment to say that we're watching the FY23 presentation of the budget for the city of South Burlington and we'll be taking questions from the public. If you have any questions, you can call in at 802-862-3966. Thank you. Thanks, Elaine. And certainly if folks are out there would like to ask questions, we would happily interrupt our presentation for those good questions. So you've heard a lot of numbers. Here's another way to look at those numbers. Andrew has said our total FY23 general fund budget is about $28.5 million. Here you can see how those expenditures are broken out across service area. Again, this is linked on our website at SouthBurlingtonBET.gov if folks would like to zoom in on this. The other side of that equation, of course, is the revenue side. Andrew, if you can click to the next slide. Let me thank you. So here in South Burlington about 63% of our revenues come from our property taxpayers. The rest come from other funding sources, local options, tax permit fees, program fees, ambulance billing, et cetera. This budget does contemplate returning to pre-pandemic levels of our local options tax. That's both sales tax and rooms, meals and alcohol. We've been tracking that very closely this year and believe that that is a fair projection of what we will experience this year. And if you go to the next slide, Andrew, you can see those revenues broken out across different service areas in the city and where those are collected. And again, you can zoom in on any of these numbers at our website, SouthBurlingtonBET.gov. Thanks, Jesse. So again, just to be clear on this, even another slide about these special fund line-of-ease penny for PAS and open space, this breaks out that increased revenue that I talked about before, about it's 30.7%, which directly reflects our overall grand list growth during the reappraisal. Of that overall 6.27% property tax increase, 1.08% of that is attributable to this increase. We've talked a little bit already about capital improvement plan, some of the projects that have remained funded and some increased funding. The first is the Capital Improvement Reserve for City Center. This is the city investment that we've built up over the years to build up the tax base and resources to fund City Center TIF projects like this new one beautiful building at 180 Market Street that Jesse and I are both enjoying right now. We've also increased the paving budget by 50,000, this was a community need we have heard over the years that we're not adequately funding our paving line. We've brought that up 50,000 this year and the hope to incrementally improve that. We've also heard a lot from our folks that use our recreation pass that there need to be some dedicated improvement dollars. So we have 30,000 that's been specifically dedicated for Recreation Path Maintenance. Our parks department was during the pandemic because certainly on the revenue side with programs they were hit, their capital improvement line items were reduced by 145,000 from FY21 to FY22. We can't completely refund that this year but in hopes of sort of incrementally bringing us back to that original number that our parks desperately need we've increased that line 65,000 this budget. I've talked a little bit already about this ARPA funding. Talked about the special funds of the city's overall $52 million budget. Special funds account for $12.5 million of the overall annual city budget. In stormwater we're seeing very modest, very low rate increases from FY22 to 23. Same for sewer and water is at an even 3% increase although this still remains one of the lowest rates in the state. The overall increase to a homeowner just on utility fees we're looking at $16.80. This is some historic data on the tax rate. As you can see during a reappraisal year this very much skews that number significantly. This is what's gonna be on the ballot. We have the article one of course, election of city officers and city counselors and the annual city budget line. This is the way it's been presented in years past although you will note in the section here there's an additional line added excluding previously voter approved levies. That's again what I talked about before with removing these prior voter approved levies out of the annual budget process. So the total city budget, $52.5 million. As I said before, $12.5 million of that is are the enterprise funds, penny for pass and open space, over 800,000 of that. The general fund about $28.5 million and our other special funds, $10.7 million for a total amount to be raised by taxation that the voters will be voting on is the 17,962,812 and 57 cents. So just to be real clear for the voters that language does refer to removing with the exception of the previously levy pennies for pass and pennies for open space. Those were previously approved by the voters. So very much are still being collected and will be shown on your tax bill. This budget is just not including them in the operation budget. So we are tracking some emerging issues. Again, inflation what we're experienced with the country is experiencing now the unpredictability of the cost of goods into FY23 and we'll be watching that closely as well as some of our other priorities working towards regional dispatch, launching our first ever climate action plan early in FY23 and associating costs that may come with that. And then still catching up from a very low tax rate increase last year to be very conservative as we were coming out of COVID. So we will keep our eyes on that. We're very thankful to the council that they are being so supportive of thinking about strategically how we use other investments, ARPA funds and other grants to address some of these needs and we'll look forward to talking with the community more about that in the coming months. So finally, as we wrap up, encourage our neighbors to keep their eyes out for other communication that will be coming out. We will be doing posts in the other paper regularly from now till town meeting, trying to get the word out about what's in this budget. Budget books will be available on our website on Friday and in print here at City Hall in the library in the senior center starting Monday morning along with our annual report. Of course, we hope voters and residents join us on our pre-annual town meeting on February 28th. That will be here in the auditorium at 180 Market Street and virtually, of course, and then join us to vote on March 1st. There are several ways you can do that. Ballots will be available as of February 9th. You can call the city clerk's office to have a ballot mailed to you. You can drop those off at City Hall, mail them back or bring them with you to your polling place on March 1st. And of course, you can always vote in person, my personal favorite between seven and seven on March 1st. So thank you very much for everybody's attention today and to Elaine for facilitating us and Andrew for developing the budget. We'd love to have a quick conversation about any questions that may have come in. Jesse and Andrew, thank you very much for this presentation and for your preparation of the budget for South Burlington. I'm gonna give the number out for folks to call in with questions again, 802-862-3966. And while we're waiting to see if anyone calls in, I just wanna, I have a quick question overall as a reminder, what is the net effect of your budget on the taxpayers of South Burlington? So yeah, the net impact of the budget is the number I spoke about earlier for the average residential homeowner looking at if approved about a $118 increase in their tax bill this year. And for the average condo is $79 increase. That represents a 6.27% overall increase in the tax rate this year. And again, to break that out, 5.19% is the increase in the general fund line and operations. And 1.08% of that is the impact of the increased revenue being driven by the increase in the general fund during the, sorry, in the grand list during the reappraisal and of 190,000. So those funds will see an increase and it ultimately will lead to more projects that we can do with those funds. And Andrew, when you say the average homeowner, average condo, what is an average homeowner in South Burlington and what is an average condo value in South Burlington so that folks can put themselves in context? Sure, yeah, so an average residential homeowner, make sure I have a number, right, is it's about $450,000 average residential home and average condo is a little over 350,000 South Burlington. Great, I'm gonna give the number again, 802-862-3966, if you'd like to call in and ask questions. And are there any highlights of, you did a lot of high level summaries of what you're looking forward to doing next year. Are there any particular projects that residents are super excited about or that you all are super excited about that residents can think about as part of this budget? All right, I'll throw out a few in Android. I don't know where to start, Jessie. So I think one, we got a lot of requests during the budget process for an increased focus on paving and specifically recreation path paving and the council made a very decisive policy determination to invest in those things into FY23. Additionally, body worn cameras is an investment that this community has talked about for a long time. It's really that meeting that standard of public safety that the community expects, ensuring we have transparency of service delivery that our officers are well-equipped and well-trained to best support our residents. So to me, those are two big investments. Oh, and then the third is the increase in staffing for the library to expand the hours of operation. That is, it's just such a beautiful facility and we know folks are hungry for more evening and weekend hours and with this budget, we'll be able to achieve those. That's great. Andrew, anything to add to that? Oh, I mean, I think that's, yeah, it's a long list. I would add to the increase in paving that we talked about before on recreation path maintenance, also an increase in road striping, which has also been identified as a community need, as well as some of the beautification efforts or landscaping contracts, a slight increase in FY23. I think people drive down Market Street and they love some of the things we've been able to do here and I think that has a big impact for what we've been trying to do in South Burlington for a long time and realizing with a city center is building the community identity. So I think a little bit of dollars will go a long way. That's fantastic. Thanks for your presentation, Jesse Baker, city manager, Andrew Bullduke, deputy city manager of South Burlington and thank you for tuning in to town meeting television's ongoing coverage of local community candidates, budgets and ballot items. You can find this and more forums on www.ch17.tv and don't forget to vote on or before the first Tuesday in March, town meeting day, March 1st, 2022. Early voting by mail is available by contacting your town clerk's office. Polls will also be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thank you very much for watching.