 Hi, thank you so much for joining us for the next installment of Junction City News. I'm Regina Mahoney, the City Manager from Essex Junction, and this is Raj Chala, the Council President. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. So, we are going to talk about our budget, and can you first talk about the process that we typically go through to put the budget together? So, the budget process begins with you and our Finance Director and Department Heads putting together something of a draft budget for the City Council to consider. We get together for a day in early December, meet with Department Heads, hear their proposal for the following year, and gather feedback from residents who are participating. Then we work on that budget for the next couple of months. This year, we spent at least three or four meetings adjusting it, cutting it here and there, and we will have another public hearing this Wednesday night, and the budget as approved this Wednesday will be put to voters in April. Awesome. Thank you. Okay. So, where are we now in the budget process and what has already happened? So, we are near the end of the process. As I said, we're going to hold our final public hearing this Wednesday night at 2.0 Lincoln at 6.30. We started this process in December 13th. As I said earlier, we spent several meetings finding ways to adjust it and cut it here and there. We spent a lot of time trying to whittle it down this year. We had a community meal in Open House in January at the Champlain Valley Exposition. It was a Saturday. It's the first time since COVID we've been able to have folks back for a community meal. We had a presentation much like this one. We took feedback and answered questions. We've had a couple of coffee chat sessions for folks in the past couple of months, and we have more scheduled for March. And after Wednesday, we'll warn a final budget figure, and it will be on the ballot April 9th. Great. So, there is one more chance to adjust it this week. Yes. Okay. So, as of today, where does the budget stand? The draft FY25 general fund budget, I'm going to read this because the big number is $12,157,141. That's a 6% increase over the FY24 budget. The impact of that on a person or family owning a $280,000 house is about $170. This does not include the economic development rate, which is a penny on the tax rate, we call it. That impact is $28 on a $280,000 home. There is a tax agreement for veterans, so there's a program where veterans can apply for an assessment reduction of up to $40,000 to reduce their property taxes. The city would have to make up for that portion of the uncollected education tax liability. And there will be a ballot item this year for that to, I don't have the slide in front of me, but the impact of that right now is, I don't think there is an impact right now, but we are going to be asking voters to increase that from the default, I believe, $10,000 to the full $40,000 for the future. And if I understand correctly, I believe when the village was part of the town, that assessed value was, this was already put into place for the collective town and village, and now since we're a city, we just have to ask that question again to see if, great. Okay, so this slide shows us what the main revenues are. So can you describe this a little bit? Sure. Property taxes is where we have our revenue, this is where we get our revenue. Property taxes from residential properties make up 74% of our revenue. 11% of the property tax revenue comes from businesses and 6% from the global foundry's plant. All in all, it's 91% of our budget is from property tax revenue, the rest is from miscellaneous fees from like the town clerk and community development. Okay, then on the other side, this is the expenses pie, which is a little bit confusing to see. This is a little more complicated. This just basically breaks down our 18 or so units from our budget and how they relate. So right off the bat, the largest piece of this is health and safety. That is Health and Human Services, it's Essex Rescue and the Police Department contract we have for the town. The next largest is our streets public works department, which is 13%. Recreation, the administrative side of our rec department is 9% and Brownhill Library is 8%. Those are the biggest portions of that. Awesome, and I'm just realizing here that this particular slide has lost its labels, so we'll get that corrected. Okay, so what are the big changes to the proposed FY25 budget that are different from the FY24 budget? Let's see. So, you know, just want to point out that this is the second budget for the city and we're still halfway, roughly halfway through our first city budget. So we're still trying to get our bearings on what actually, what our service levels need to be, what our actual expenses are. Obviously, we were a community prior to separating from the town, but there were a lot of consolidated services. The budget, big changes for this year are a 15.5% increase for health insurance. It's had a big impact, roughly $369,000 increase for that alone. Finance, billing, coordinators, a new position we're proposing, of which half that would be paid for by enterprise funds, which are funds that take in fees. So fees for services from water and sewer and sanitation, for instance, we'll cover that. There's a $10,000 increase in the admin budget and that is intended to help us increase community outreach throughout the year. And $10,000 to try to implement some of the programs and work on some of what we've heard from folks during our four, six months, five month strategic planning process. We're wrapping up now. So we wanted to be able to have some money to start moving on that for next year. Great. In addition, we've seen about $31,000 reduction in revenue below what we projected for the clerk's office. Roughly $11,000 increase in technology subscriptions and a lower election expense. We have fewer elections this year. So that goes up and down each year with how many elections we actually have. Right. We're proposing one of the employees in the city clerk's office to have that position reduced by eight hours, although the office remained open full time. And we're seeing an increase in insurance costs about 10%, 11% over last year. We are proposing a rental registry. So there will be, there is a higher line item for expense and community development, but that position is intended to be cost neutral. Revenues are going to pay for that as proposed. That is still in the works. We've taken $36,000 from economic development as we analyze what we've heard for the strategic planning process for the last five months. I'm going to take a pause on that and see how to implement that further in the next fiscal year. And finally, $22,000 for a stormwater consultant to help us set up or explore setting up a stormwater utility. Okay, so we've got just a few more fees here. We contract with the town of Essex for our assessing that fee from the town has gone up about $11,000. We have moved $40,000 from some building expenses into the Recreation Enterprise Fund Recreation Program Budget, which again is a budget that takes in revenue. So those costs are going to be paid for by programs that they serve. There's going to be an increase of capital of about $50,000 and we're increasing our training budget for our fire department. Right now our volunteer firefighters aren't paid during their time training and we're trying to rectify that. So that's going to increase the fire budget by about $75,000. All right, so the capital projects are another big expense that the council has to consider. What capital projects does the city have coming up and how are you planning to pay for them? So we set aside money every year and we actually increase the amount we set aside year by year. There's a slide we have that'll detail that 10 projects in no particular order that are slated for the next 10 years. These could come in at any time based on any kind of state or federal funding availability at any particular time. So these projects have been scored by our capital committee and reviewed based on a whole number of criteria, some of which again is funding. And so there are certainly more to be done in the city but these are the 10 we have that are most likely to be worked on in the next five years. Okay, great. Okay, can you talk a little bit about the lot tax? Yes, so we have implemented a local option tax that seems to be going as expected. The city council has committed that money to the capital project budget. We intended from the beginning to backfill our capital needs which are significant and use that money. 80% of that money will be going straight to the capital budget to backfill some of these projects. 20% will be used directly for sidewalk maintenance and improvements. Great. I expect about, I think it's $875,000 a year from that fund. Great. And I think, just to clarify, I think it's 25% to sidewalks. Okay, so we've moved through that already. So you've mentioned that we've reached out to residents to get feedback so far. And can residents still provide feedback on the proposed budget? Yes, it's 6.30 this Wednesday. We'll have the final public hearing. Residents can join via Zoom or in person at Two Lincoln and Essex Junction. They can email the city councilors. They can email a manager. They can reach out to us in other ways. On Wednesday though, we will warn a final figure that will be on the ballot. After that, we'll hold two more coffee chats in March where we can answer questions for people, help them understand what they're looking at. There'll be a town meeting TV session much like this on March 21st to review the budget and discuss the various ballot items that we have coming up. And on April 1st, we'll hold a virtual annual meeting where people can join us. We'll review the budget, review the capital budget and ballot items. And then voting is on Tuesday, April 9th from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the Champlain Valley Expo Blue Ribbon Pavilion. I never remember the name of that building. Okay, great. So where can folks find more information on the budget? On our website is the best way to get the latest information to stay up to date, sxjunction.org. There are links right off the homepage and on this slide. So that's usually the best way. You can also email citycouncil.sxjunction.org. Alright, excellent. Anything else you would like to add? I think it's been an interesting process. I think, you know, being the second city budget, I think a few years ago we could, with our mock budget, we could only do so much and predict so much and it's certainly been a very different near future than we anticipated with inflation and supply chain issues. But I think we're getting there and I think the next two or three years are going to be very much a conversation on the budget service level and where the city wants to land in terms of what we provide and how much that costs. But please do reach out. Please take an opportunity for participating on Wednesday night. If you have any questions or concerns, we'd love to hear them. Okay, great. Thanks so much, Raj. Thank you. And hopefully folks can continue to join us for Junction City News. It's the fourth Monday of the month at 5.25. And we'll see you next time. Thank you.